A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 1, The Eighteenth Century: v. 1 1107038030, 9781107038035

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A History of Modern Aesthetics Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle’s defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato’s famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact – precisely what Plato criticized – and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. The three volumes tell how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by both the best-known and lesser-known aestheticians of modern times, focusing on Britain, France, and Germany in the eighteenth century (Volume 1); Germany and Britain in the nineteenth (Volume 2); and Germany, Britain, and the United States in the twentieth (Volume 3). Paul Guyer is the Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Brown University. He is author of nine books and editor of six collections on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, including four focusing on Kant’s aesthetics. He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and prizes, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize. A History of Modern Aesthetics was facilitated by a Laurance Rockefeller Fellowship at the Princeton University Center for Human Values. Professor Guyer is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been president of both the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and the American Society for Aesthetics.

A History of Modern Aesthetics Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century

Paul Guyer Brown University

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107038035 © Paul Guyer 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Guyer, Paul, 1948– A history of modern aesthetics / Paul Guyer. volumes cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-03803-5 (hardback) 1. Aesthetics, Modern – History. I. Title. BH151.G89 2014 111′.850903–dc23 2013050046 978-1-107-03803-5 Volume 1 Hardback 978-1-107-03804-2 Volume 2 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-03805-9 Volume 3 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-64322-2 Three-Volume Hardback Set ISBN ISBN

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Let us have a wholesome distrust of æsthetic 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. – Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), p. 226 In so complex a phenomenon as Art, single causes can be pronounced almost a priori to be false. – Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Æsthetic Principle” (1912), in Æsthetics: Lectures and Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 108 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. – Dieter Henrich, Versuch über Kunst und Leben (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2001), pp. 63–4 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. – Irving H. Guyer (1916–2012), July 14, 2011

Contents

Acknowledgments

page ix

Introduction

1

1 Prologue: The Origins of Modern Aesthetics 1. Aesthetics of Truth I: Shaftesbury 2. Aesthetics of Truth II: Wolff 3. The Introduction of Feeling and Play: Addison, Crousaz, and Du Bos

30 33 47 63

Part One Aesthetics in Britain, 1725–1800 2 From Hutcheson to Hume: The Sense of Beauty 1. Hutcheson 2. Turnbull and Harris 3. Hume

97 98 113 124

3 Hogarth, Burke, and Gerard: Forms of Feeling 1. Hogarth 2. Burke 3. Gerard

140 141 147 157

4 From Kames to Alison and Stewart: The Final Flowering 1. Kames 2. Smith 3. Beattie 4. Reynolds 5. Reid 6. Alison 7. Stewart

176 177 194 199 204 217 226 235

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viii

Part Two French Aesthetics in Mid-Century 5 André to Rousseau 1. André 2. Batteux 3. The Encyclopedists 4. Diderot 5. Rousseau

247 248 253 261 278 289

Part Three German Aesthetics between Wolff and Kant 6 The First Generation of Wolffian Aesthetics 1. Gottsched and His Critics 2. Baumgarten and Meier

305 308 318

7 German Aesthetics at Mid-Century 1. Mendelssohn 2. Winckelmann and Lessing

341 341 363

8 Breaking with Rationalism: From Herder to Moritz 1. Herder I 2. Sulzer 3. Herz 4. Moritz

377 378 396 405 410

Part Four Kant and After 9 Kant 1. The Task for Kant’s Aesthetics 2. Kant’s Theory of Free Play and the Exclusion of Emotion 3. Kant’s Theory of Fine Art 4. The Moral Significance of the Aesthetic

421 424 431 447 452

10 After Kant 1. Heydenreich 2. Schiller 3. Goethe and Humboldt 4. Herder II: Herder's Critique of Kant 5. Herbart

459 460 466 494 509 526

Bibliography Index

533 555

Acknowledgments

I began planning this work more than fifteen years ago, and I began writing it in 2005. I have discussed it with more friends and colleagues than I can thank here. I can single out only a few, and I hope that my gratitude to others can be conveyed in some other form. I begin with thanks to my parents, the late Irving Henry Guyer and Betty Rubenstein Guyer. Their birthday gift on my seventeenth birthday, my last birthday at home before leaving for college, was a pair of tattersall shirts – for my mother still harbored hopes that I would pursue an adolescent interest in architecture, and tattersall shirts were much favored by architects then, before they dressed all in black – but also a pair of Modern Library Giants, European Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche edited by E.A. Burtt and Philosophies of Beauty from Plato to Heidegger edited by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns. The books were the prophetic gift, as I cast my lot with architectonic rather than architecture (although I still like tattersall shirts). And though those books have largely been superseded as I acquired fuller editions of most of the authors they contained, I have kept them by me, and I was happy to recall that moment from my youth in resorting to Hofstadter and Kuhns for a quotation from Plotinus even in my final revision of the Introduction to this work. My father also played a rôle, no doubt unintentional, in the emergence of my interest in aesthetics in particular. I came to that in part because when I was looking for a dissertation topic and thought that I already had some grasp on Kant’s first two critiques, I decided to write on the third, which includes Kant’s aesthetics, and that in turn led me back to Hutcheson and Hume, Baumgarten and Meier, and so on – or as the late Robert Nozick used to ask me when he’d see me in the hallway, “Gotten back to Thales yet?” But at least as important was the fact that my father had been trained as a painter and printmaker at the Art Students League ix

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and the Artists Project of the WPA in the heady days of the 1930s, and though he made his living most of his life as a commercial art director, he was also very busy painting and showing paintings when I was in college and graduate school; and every time I came home for a visit, he’d bring me down to his basement studio, show me his new work, and ask “What do you think?” Well, some I loved, some I didn’t, but mostly what I thought was, wouldn’t it be nice if I had some principles on the basis of which to answer this question? And so as a philosopher, I turned to aesthetics. Of course what you learn from a lifetime of studying aesthetics is that no philosophical principles will ever settle the question of whether a particular work is good or not, certainly not to your father’s satisfaction; but you nevertheless do learn a lot of interesting ways to think about the arts. I hope I have succeeded in describing some interesting ways of thinking about art and their relations to other features of the human condition, including our situation in nature, in this work. I have certainly found writing it a great voyage of discovery. Having mentioned Bob Nozick, who was an important example of sheer philosophical imagination and intensity for me, I would next like to thank my other teachers. Above all, Stanley Cavell, who encouraged me throughout college and graduate school and ever since, and with whom I had several very helpful conversations early in the gestation of this work; but also Morton White, Israel Scheffler, Dieter Henrich, and the late John Rawls, all of whom not only encouraged my historical interests but were examples for me of superb philosophers who were superb historians of philosophy as well. I would also like to remember the late Lewis White Beck and the late Maurice Mandelbaum, neither of whom was ever formally my teacher but both of whom I had the great good fortune to come to know early in my career and who not only provided further models of philosophico-historical excellence but were also supportive of me in many ways. Among friends and colleagues, I must single out Alexander Nehamas, with whom I have been discussing aesthetics since we met on my interview trip for my first job at the University of Pittsburgh in 1973, who has read more of the present work than anyone else, and who has finally agreed that our views are not completely antithetical after all; Rolf-Peter Horstmann, whom I first met at the late Margaret Wilson’s National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute in Early Modern Philosophy in 1974, who facilitated my summers in Berlin in 2007 and 2008 when I drafted much of the material on German aesthetics in this book, who gave me many valuable suggestions, and whose

Acknowledgments

xi

company made those summers and many other times more fun than work; Peter Jones, with whom I first talked about Kant’s aesthetics at a Hume conference in 1975, and who carefully read the material on eighteenth-century British aesthetics in this work; Ted Cohen, with whom, at Stanley Cavell’s instigation, I co-edited Essays in Kantian Aesthetics three decades ago and with whom I have argued about the value of Kant’s aesthetics ever since; Rachel Zuckert, with whom I co-directed an NEH Summer Seminar on “The Aesthetics of the Scottish Enlightment and Its Influence in Germany” in 2007, for enlightening discussions during that seminar, before, and since, as well as for her own brilliant work on the aesthetics of Kant and Herder; and Elisabeth Camp, my colleague at the University of Pennsylvania from 2006 to 2012 – the seminar on “Art and the Emotions” that we co-taught in 2009 was not only the best experience I ever had in the classroom, but was also crucial for the final form of my argument in this work. I would also like to thank my dear friends in the informal Philadelphia area faculty discussion group in aesthetics of which I had the good fortune to be a part throughout the time I was writing this work, not only Camp, but also Philip Alperson; Noël Carroll, my student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, even though he is two weeks older than me, when he came back to finish his second Ph.D. in 1980, and my friend ever since; Richard Eldridge; Susan Feagin; Kristin Gjesdal, who has invited me to several workshops on Herder in Norway and is responsible for his playing a larger – but entirely well-deserved – part in this book than he otherwise would have; and Espen Hammer. Many of the discussions we had were helpful to me in writing this book, whether they knew it or not, and I thank them all. I would like to thank many colleagues in the American Society for Aesthetics for valuable conversations over the years, especially Timothy Gould, Jenefer Robinson, and Curtis Carter. And thanks, in no particular order, to Robinson, Peter Kivy, Jerrold Levinson, Michael Kelley, Tom Baldwin, Gary Hagberg, Heiner Klemme, Allen Wood, James A. Harris, Paul Russell, Alex Neill and Chris Janaway, and François Calori for invitations to contribute articles to various conferences, encyclopedias, histories, and anthologies that became preliminary studies for various parts of this work. I would also like to thank Dina Emundts and Andrea Lailach for many helpful conversations during my summers in Berlin; the participants in the NEH Summer Seminar in 2007, especially Samuel Fleishacker, Andrew Chignell, Timothy Costelloe, and Emily Brady; and many of my students at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard for their stimulating contributions to my seminars on this material in the last several years,

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especially Uygar Abacı, Adrian Daub, Jennifer Dobe, Thomas Hilgers, Henry Rich, Steven Jauss, Jeppe von Platz, Thomas Teufel, Nick Theis, and Reed Winegar. I especially thank my wife Pamela Foa, not only for her forbearance in the face of the constant inflow of books into our house on the pretense that I had to own them in order to produce this one, but also for her endless support for the project and her wise advice, and our daughter Nora for her unflagging enthusiasm for this and all my work. Finally, I would like to thank the following institutions for their support: the Princeton University Center for Human Values, for a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellowship in 2005–6, during which time I started writing this book; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany, for the Research Prize that made my stays in Berlin in 2007 and 2008 possible and for their continuing support past that period; the Institut für Philosophie of the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, especially Rolf-Peter Horstmann and his secretary, Sabine Hassel, for their hospitality, and the members of Horstmann’s colloquium for their interest; the University of Pennsylvania, for sabbatical leave in 2005–6, and its School of Arts and Sciences, especially Dean Rebecca Bushnell, for teaching relief in the spring semester of 2010, when I almost completed the first draft of the entire work, and for my chair and friend Susan Sauvé Meyer for agreeing to spare me that semester as well as for many conversations about Plato and the Stoics over the years. I am also grateful to the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania for its rich collections, and for the help of librarians in securing works it did not own, and to the fine collection and hospitable staff of the library of the Institut für Philosophie at the Humboldt. The interest in this work of many at Brown University, both within and outside the Department of Philosophy, led to my move to Brown as I was completing the project, and I look forward to discussing it with new colleagues in the coming years. This project began as a gleam in the eye of Terence Moore, whose untimely death in 2004 prevented him from even seeing it properly started. I am very grateful to his successor Beatrice Rehl, for her continued support of the work. Providence, Rhode Island July 2012

Introduction

This work offers a history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. In the eighteenth century, I examine developments in Britain, France, and the German-speaking lands, not yet a unified country. At the end of the eighteenth century, the field of aesthetics was intensively cultivated in Germany, and throughout the nineteenth century that land retained its prominence in the discipline. This is reflected in the prominence of German aesthetics in my account of this period, although I consider British developments as well, and the emergence of the first serious American aesthetic theory at the very end of the century; I touch only fleetingly on some moments in French aesthetics in this period. I continue the story of German aesthetics into the twentieth century, indeed to the start of the twenty-first, but give much more space to American as well as British aesthetics in the last century (with one indispensable Italian adopted into British aesthetics). I do not discuss twentieth-century French aesthetics at all, although that subject would dominate many a discussion of twentieth-century aesthetics, especially if written by a literary theorist instead of by a philosopher, in part because I want to give adequate space to the rediscovery of many first-rate British and American aestheticians in the first part of the century who have been unjustly neglected since the enormous impact of Ludwig Wittgenstein on British and American philosophy, and in part because I believe that the emphasis on linguistic models and textuality that have dominated French aesthetics in the period of structuralism and poststructuralism has distracted attention from what I take to be the core subject matter of the discipline of aesthetics since its inception in the eighteenth century, namely, the study of the nature and value of aspects of the human experience of art and (sometimes) nature. Some 1

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of the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century German philosophers who will be discussed here have also received little attention in recent years, and I want to give them room to breathe as well. That I do include some unusual figures as well as exclude some of the usual suspects is part of why I call this work, large as it is, only a, not the history of modern aesthetics. That said, this opening sketch still raises all sorts of questions. What do I mean by philosophical aesthetics – is that a contrast to some other kind, or is it just redundant? What do I mean by dividing the field up into three different national traditions, although different ones in the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries? And for that matter, what do I mean by dividing the work up into volumes on three centuries – aren’t the years on the calendar that end with “00” utterly arbitrary dividing lines? I can suggest answers to some of these questions immediately. As for my second and third questions, I can say that sometimes there have been separate national traditions and sometimes there have not been – for example, eighteenth-century German aesthetics fully absorbed what was happening in France and Britain, but the reverse was not the case, and while in the first part of the twentieth century there was not much interaction between British and American aesthetics, in the second part there was, and some of the leading figures even divided their careers between the two countries. So sometimes my national boundaries are important, sometimes not. And this intersects with the question of the calendar – sometimes major changes in the field have come closer to a year ending in “00” in one place than in another. We will deal with these questions in due course. The harder question is what I mean by “philosophical aesthetics.” In one way, the answer to this question is relatively clear: By philosophical aesthetics, I mean works and discussions that are in some way continuous with the topics of aesthetics as it is currently pursued in philosophy departments, whether written by people who in their own lifetimes taught philosophy or otherwise conceived of themselves as philosophers or not. Some figures whom we would more readily identify as critics or art theorists or even practicing artists, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the eighteenth century, John Ruskin in the nineteenth, and Walter Benjamin in the twentieth, come into my story when they either reflected recent developments in philosophy or triggered them, but in general my history of philosophical aesthetics

Introduction

3

is not a history of art or literary criticism or theory.1 However, I would hardly pretend that the dividing line between philosophical aesthetics and criticism is always clear, and there are surely critics whom I could have included in my narrative but have not. They or their shades may take comfort in the fact that there are also philosophers I could have included in my account but have not. But even with this caveat, I have not really given much of an answer to our question, for philosophers themselves have not always been clear about what the subject of aesthetics is, and even those who have attempted to be clear have not always agreed with each other, that is, with other philosophers at the same time or at different times. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, German philosophers used the term “aesthetics” and British and French writers did not, although they were practicing the same subject; and in the nineteenth century Germans and others using the term did not always mean the same by it as those who used it in the eighteenth century had. Some of the later philosophers equated aesthetics with the philosophy of art while some of the earlier philosophers had conceived the field more broadly, as dealing with a kind of experience we can have of nature as well as art – as a few philosophers have again begun to do. As I suggested a moment ago, I do think the core of the subject is a concern with a certain kind of experience, and that an exclusive focus on a special kind of language or discourse is too narrow a conception of the field – that is not only part of the reason I do not discuss recent French aesthetics, but, as I argue in Volume III, such a conception of the field was also a problem with the initial influence of Wittgenstein in Anglo-American aesthetics. But beyond this, I think there is little value in attempting to stipulate a clear definition of the field in advance: How philosophers have conceived of the boundaries of the field has been part of its history, and we will simply have to see how that history goes. The history will have to define the field for us rather than the other way around. I might even suggest that this situation is not unusual in philosophy: While certain approaches to philosophy, such as those of Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, or the eighteenth-century German rationalists led by Christian Wolff, might raise the expectation that works of philosophy above all should be able to begin with a clear statement of 1

Such as René Wellek’s classical History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, 7 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955–92) or the multiauthored volumes of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism from antiquity to the present (nine volumes thus far, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989–).

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their subject matter and central issues, other philosophers, such as the young Kant, have argued that in philosophy definitions come not at the beginning but at the end, if at all. In any case, the proper subject matter of aesthetics and the proper questions for it to ask have themselves been problematic and contested issues since the very word “aesthetics” was first introduced. For example, since the 1820s, when Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel gave influential lectures in Berlin on the “Philosophy of Art or Aesthetics,”2 many have assumed that the term “aesthetics” just means the philosophy of art or, more specifically, fine art; and if it is assumed that art is a distinctive and cohesive set of human practices and products including imaginative literature such as poetry, fiction, and drama, the sister arts of music and dance; and the visual arts such as painting, sculpture, architecture and possibly garden design and landscape architecture as well, then it would seem to follow that the topic of the field of aesthetics as the philosophy of art would also be well defined. So even if it were true that in antiquity or the Middle Ages there was no conception of any essential connection between, say, literature and the visual arts, thus that the idea of the unity of these various pursuits is itself a modern invention, as some have argued,3 it would still be the case that for much of the period to be covered here, that is, for most of the nineteenth and all of the twentieth centuries, the topic of aesthetics would be clear: the philosophy of art. But this restriction of aesthetics to the philosophy of fine art has also been contested. In the eighteenth century, many philosophers, whether they used the name “aesthetics” yet or not, held that aesthetics deals not only with philosophical problems about the fine arts, including what 2

3

See, for example, Philosophie der Kunst oder Ästhetik. Nach Hegel. Im Sommer 1826, Mitschrift Friedrich Carl Hermann Victor von Kehler, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Seifert and Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004). Until recently, Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics were known in the form of a posthumous compilation edited by Heinrich Gustav Hotho and first published in 1835, four years after Hegel’s death, then revised in 1842. Hotho’s version was the basis for the standard English version, G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). See Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951): 496–527 and 13 (1952): 17–46, reprinted in his Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 163–227, and Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). But for criticism of Kristeller’s claim, see James I. Porter, “Is Art Modern? Kristeller’s ‘Modern System of the Arts’ Reconsidered,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (2009): 1–24, and Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 26–40.

Introduction

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differentiates them from other characteristic human practices and products and also what unites them into a distinctive class, but also with certain responses we may have to nature as well, paradigmatically, to borrow a common way of putting it, our “ideas” or “feeling of the beautiful and the sublime.”4 Indeed, when he first coined the name of the discipline in his 1735 master’s thesis, Philosophical Meditations concerning some Matters pertaining to Poetry, the twenty-one-year-old German Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten had used his new term to connote a novel field of inquiry, parallel to ordinary logic, that would have as its subject not pure ideas (νοητα) but sensory objects (αισθητα) in general, including both things present to the senses (sensualibus) and things imagined in the absence of present sensation (phantasmata), and which would “direct the inferior faculty of cognition” as a “science of how something is to be sensitively cognized.”5 This definition does not contain any explicit reference to art at all or to a distinctive kind of experience that we might have in response to nature as well as art, but instead suggests that aesthetics concerns the contribution of sensory experience to knowledge in general. Yet the inclusion of this definition at the end of a book about poetry makes it clear the intended discipline includes at least this particular fine art, and in the definition that Baumgarten provided fifteen years later, in his massive although incomplete Aesthetica, the first work on aesthetics to be entitled simply “Aesthetics,” he does make explicit reference to art. In this work, he writes that aesthetics, although it is still the “the science of sensory cognition” in general, is also the “theory of the liberal arts, the logic of the inferior faculty of cognition, the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogue of reason.”6 What Baumgarten meant by “the logic of the inferior faculty of cognition” and “the art of 4

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See Edmund Burke’s famous work of 1757, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and Sublime; modern edition ed. J.T. Boulton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), and Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. Paul Guyer, in Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 18–62, and in Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 11–62. The latter edition includes Kant’s extensive notes in his own copy of the Observations. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus/Philosophische Betrachtungen über einige Bedingungen des Gedichtes, ed. Heinz Paetzold (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983), §§CXV, CXVII. Baumgarten, Aesthetica (1750–58), §1; in Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Ästhetik als Philosophie der sinnlichen Erkenntnis: Eine Interpretation der ‘Aesthetica’ A.G. Baumgartens mit teilweiser Wiedergabe des lateinischen Textes und deutscher Übersetzung (Basel and Stutgart: Schwabe & Co., 1973), pp. 106–7.

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the analogue of reason” may still go well beyond our present-day conception of aesthetics, but his expressions “the theory of the liberal arts” and the “art of thinking beautifully” certainly point toward our present conception, for by the term “liberal arts” he would have meant, in medieval fashion, at least the arts of grammar and rhetoric, pointing toward what we call literature, and music, if not the arts that centrally involve physical media and the techniques to work them, such as painting, sculpture, and architecture.7 But the point to be drawn for now from Baumgarten’s own indeterminacy about the proper subject of his new discipline is just that whether or not the concept of the fine arts is a modern construct, the question of the proper subject matter of the philosophical discipline of aesthetics has itself been contested during the past three centuries and is therefore a question that can be addressed only over the course of the following narrative rather than one that can be settled at the outset. The present work began as part of an attempt to answer the question of how philosophy got from the situation that John Locke described at the end of his Essay concerning Human Understanding in 1690, when all knowledge could be divided into physics or natural philosophy, ethics, and semiotics or logic, the “doctrine of signs,”8 to the contemporary practice of philosophy, where we recognize as distinct subfields of philosophy not just ethics and logic, but philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history, and so on, in some quarters even philosophy of sport, of love, of sex, and, of course, philosophy of art.9 But my narrative does not begin in 1690 or any other date in the late seventeenth century, because, although there were earlier rumblings, notably the French “Quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,”10 the debate that I present as central to the modern discipline 7

8

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See H.M. Klinkenberg, “Artes liberales/artes mechanicae,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, edited by Joachim Ritter, 13 vols. (Basel: Schwaber & Co., 1971–2007), vol. 1, pp. 531–3, and Wolfgang Ullrich, “Kunst/Künste/System der Künste,” in Karlheinz Barck, Martin Frontius, Dieter Schlenstedt, Burkhart Steinwachs, and Friedrich Wolfzettel, editors, Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, 7 vols. (Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2000– 5), vol. 3, pp. 556–616, at p. 571. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Bk. IV, ch. xxi, §§1–4, p. 720. That is, the present work was originally intended to be one volume in the Cambridge series The Evolution of Modern Philosophy, edited by Gary Hatfield and myself. As a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, so perhaps does an editor who edits himself. See Rémy G. Saisselin, The Rule of Reason and the Ruses of the Heart: A Philosophical Dictionary of Classical French Criticism, Critics, and Aesthetic Issues (Cleveland: The Press of

Introduction

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of aesthetics did not really begin until after 1700.11 Yet neither does the narrative begin with Baumgarten’s baptism of the discipline in 1735, because that was an adult baptism. By the time Baumgarten coined that name the field of aesthetics was already a thriving subject in academia and indeed a thriving business in the republic of letters at large, not only in Germany but in France and Britain as well, with numerous and extensive contributions from academic philosophers but also from other men of letters, focusing on the question that I do regard as being at the heart of modern aesthetics: whether aesthetic experience, whether unique to art or common to both art and nature, is best considered a distinctive form of knowledge, an emotional experience, or an exercise of the imagination that is more like play than it is like knowledge or emotion – or whether it can only be understood through a combination of all three of these approaches. As already suggested by my epigraphs, my own conclusion from my study of the history of aesthetics is that a pluralistic approach will provide us with more insight into the nature and value of our experience of art and nature and with a more satisfying basis for our engagement with the works of art and nature than any reductionist or monistic approach can do.

11

Case Western Reserve University, 1970), “Ancients and Moderns,” pp. 5–14. The classical work by Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England, 2nd ed., (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1961), as its title suggests, concerns debates in natural science and touches upon the debate about the arts only in passing (e.g., pp. 33–4). For a general work that does address late seventeenth-century aesthetics more extensively, see Richard Scholar, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Thus the present history begins precisely where the History of Aesthetics by Władysław Tatarkiewicz ends; the only overlap between his history and mine is in the discussion of three early eighteenth-century French and Swiss writers: Du Bos, Crousaz, and André. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vol. 3, Modern Aesthetics, ed. D. Petsch, trans. Chester A. Kisiel and John F. Besemeres (Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1974; reprinted Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999), pp. 429–37. Apart from the basic fact that by “modern” Tartakiewicz meant the Renaissance through the end of the seventeenth century while I mean by the same term the eighteenth century to the present, there are differences in approach between his work and mine as well: He discusses art theory and criticism more than what I call philosophical aesthetics; his work is divided between brief commentary and extracts from his authors, while although I will let my authors speak in their own voices as much as possible, my quotations will be woven into my interpretations; and precisely because he ends his history at the beginning of the eighteenth century, aesthetics in English and German, which blossomed in that century, are not heavily represented in his work. The aesthetic theories of the German- and English-speaking lands from the beginning of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century will be the heart of the present work.

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I argue that this debate emerged in the second decade of the eighteenth century, the years from 1709 to 1720 (the decade straddling the birth of Baumgarten himself in 1714), with seminal contributions being made during this decade by the English nobleman Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, whose education had been overseen by none other than John Locke, who during his variegated career had been the secretary, political adviser, and personal physician of the great Whig magnate the first Earl of Shaftesbury, the philosopher’s grandfather; by the English parliamentarian, playwright, and essayist Joseph Addison; by the French diplomat, historian, antiquarian, and critic the Abbé JeanBaptiste Du Bos;12 and by the German philosophy professor Christian Wolff. Shaftesbury first published his treatise The Moralists, which contains an influential discussion of the relation between beauty and value in general (and which also rejects much of the philosophy of his onetime mentor), in 1709, and included it in his collection Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times in 1711; in 1712 he wrote A Letter concerning the Art, or Science of Design and a treatise entitled Plastics or the Original Progress and Power of Designatory Art. In June and July of 1712, Addison published a series of essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” in the widely read periodical The Spectator that he co-edited with Richard Steele, although these essays were solely his. In 1719, Du Bos published his Critical Reflections on Painting, Poetry, and Music, a work that was read throughout Europe including Britain well before its English translation in 1748. In 1720, Wolff included some remarks about pleasure and beauty in his Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man, his “German Metaphysics,” that would found the school of German thought from which Baumgarten and others whom we will consider emerged, and although Wolff subsequently devoted much of his own boundless energy to the philosophy of natural science and to moral and political philosophy, his voluminous works even include a treatise on architecture as part of his textbook on mathematics. For purposes of this book, the modern discipline of aesthetics is regarded as having commenced with these works of the second decade of the eighteenth century, and as having continued unabated since that time, although certainly with upheavals from time to time. 12

The name of this writer is often printed as “Dubos,” but I follow the form used on the title page of the 1748 English translation of his work, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music, 3 vols. trans. Thomas Nugent (London: John Nourse, 1748), and used by such a modern authority as Baldine Saint Girons, in Esthétiques du XVIIIe siècle: Le Modèle Français (Paris: Philippe Sers éditeur, 1990), pp. 17–42.

Introduction

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But despite this burst of activity, or Baumgarten’s baptism of the field a decade and a half later, or the definition of the “fine arts” as a group by Charles Batteux another dozen years on, it nevertheless would be misleading to suggest that the discipline of aesthetics commenced ab novo at any point in modernity. Aesthetics has always been part of philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of philosophy could be regarded as a series of “footnotes to Plato.”13 This may be an exaggeration when it comes to some areas of modern philosophy, but it could be said about aesthetics with much justice. The discipline of aesthetics can be thought of as the collective response to Plato’s criticisms of many forms of art in his Republic as worthless for the purposes of knowledge and dangerous to morality because of their uncontrolled effect on our emotions. The response to these criticisms began with Aristotle, perhaps even with other works of Plato himself. In any case, it is the central claim of this book that aesthetics since the beginning of the eighteenth century has also been in the business of responding to Plato, often tacitly although sometimes explicitly, sometimes defending the cognitive value of aesthetic experience and with that its moral value, but sometimes replacing the assumption that aesthetic experience must have cognitive value with two new ideas – the idea that a full range of emotional responses to art or nature is a good thing, not a bad thing, whether it has any immediate moral value or not, and the idea that the free exercise of our human capacities of mind and even of body is an intrinsically pleasurable and for that reason good thing, without regard to further cognitive or moral utility at all. As we will see, each of these ideas – of the cognitive value of aesthetic experience, of the emotional impact of aesthetic experience, of the free play of our distinctively human capacities – has taken many different forms, and they have sometimes entered into different combinations with each other, sometimes not. Tracing out the different forms and combinations of these ideas – and suggesting that greater value lies in their synthesis than in their separation – is the task of this work. That I have organized my narrative around these three ideas is another reason this work is called only a history of modern aesthetics – there are no doubt other ways to do it.14 13

14

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), corrected edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 39. I have discussed some other approaches to the history of modern aesthetics in “History of Modern Aesthetics,” in Jerrold Levinson, The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 25–60 (an article that might better have been called

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Since these ideas have taken so many different forms, it would be as hopeless to begin by attempting precise definitions of any of them as I argued it would be hopeless to begin with a precise definition of aesthetics itself. Instead I introduce the history of modern aesthetics with a brief look at Plato’s criticism of the arts and some of the traditional responses to it, and then say something more about the varieties of response to Plato that entered into aesthetics at the beginning of the eighteenth century and have been developed in many ways since then. The classicist James Porter has argued that Plato’s philosophy, which finds value in art only to the limited extent that some art can be seen as leading to knowledge of the eternal forms that are for Plato the ultimate reality, is itself a response to earlier ways of thinking about art that emphasized the sensory experience of matter or the physical, such as paint, stone, and sound.15 Porter’s argument is powerful and richly detailed, and restoring the importance of our sensory experience of the physical world, something already hinted at by Baumgarten’s emphasis on the sensory, became a

15

“Historiography of Modern Aesthetics”). In particular, I discussed there the approaches of three works: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Luc Ferry, Home aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, trans. Steven Randall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). I will not repeat my arguments from that article here, nor will I in general engage in overt polemics with other scholars in this work; there is too much ground to be covered to allow that indulgence. It will have to suffice to say here that I find Ferry’s argument that the development of modern aesthetics, especially with its emphasis on the universal validity of taste, went hand in hand with the developing idea of an open and democratic public sphere far more convincing than Eagleton’s contention that aesthetic theory was just one more instrument for domination by elites, while I agree with Schaeffer that the turn to a “speculative theory of art” in post-Kantian figures such as Hegel and Martin Heidegger was problematic, but my argument will be that the problem was as much with the reductionist as with the metaphysical character of this turn. Here I might also mention the great work by Francis Sparshott, The Theory of the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), who divides the history of aesthetics into the “classical” line, which includes both “arts of disengaged communication,” which in turn subsumes “imaginative play,” and “arts of beauty,” and the “expressive line” (pp. xi–xii); this division certainly makes room for the complexity of approaches to aesthetics but does not in my view recognize the dominance of the cognitivist approach to aesthetics throughout its history, and suggests that expression is an alternative concept to beauty, when, as we shall see, for many it has been meant as an explanation of beauty. Finally, I would also mention Einführung in die Ästhetik by the Hegel scholar Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995), who distinguishes between two paradigms in aesthetics, those of “intuitable truth” and “beautiful action” (p. 9); this division comes close to my division between the aesthetic theories of truth and play, but it does not recognize the aesthetics of emotional impact as a distinct line of thought that may or may not be combined with one or both of the others. See Porter, The Origins of Aesthetics in Ancient Greece, chs. 2 and 3, pp. 70–176.

Introduction

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central aim of the early twentieth-century response to the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, who with regard to this issue may be regarded as a modern Plato or Neo-Platonist, one who believes, like the secondcentury CE philosopher Plotinus, that “the wellspring of Beauty . . . and all the race of Beauty” arises only from the “Soul . . . cleansed . . . wholly free of body.”16 But before this issue was fully engaged, the response of modern aesthetics to Plato’s challenge to the arts explored three other possibilities: that the value of aesthetic experience should be, as Plato supposed, essentially cognitive, but that such aesthetic experience has more cognitive value than he recognized; that the arousal of emotions by the experience of art should not be feared and constrained, as Plato supposed, but has its own value; and third, that there is an intrinsic value to the playful exercise of imagination or indeed of all of our powers in aesthetic experience that does not depend on either its cognitive significance or its emotional impact. But the most powerful aesthetic theories of modernity have ultimately been those that deploy all three of these ideas in response to Plato’s challenge, for they are not incompatible with one another, nor with the reemphasis on the pleasure of sensuous experience of the physical realm as such that characterized so many of the responses to Croce in the first part of the twentieth century, indeed up through the work of Richard Wollheim into the 1980s. Whether or not other Greeks may have had a unified conception corresponding to the modern concept of the fine arts, in the Republic Plato specifically considered the place of poetry – primarily epic and drama – and music in the education of those who would be the guardians in his ideal polity, some of whom would ultimately become the trained philosophers who should rule such a polity. He by no means excluded all forms of poetry and music from the education of his guardians, but he did severely criticize the rôle of these arts in contemporary Greek educational practices. First, he – or more precisely, the character of Socrates whom he used as his spokesman in this and many of his other early and middle dialogues17 – argued that the poets’ stories about the gods falsely represented the gods engaging in bad behavior that would-be guardians 16

17

Plotinus, Ennead I, Sixth Tractate, 6; cited from Albert Hoftstadter and Richard Kuhns, eds. Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (New York: Random House Modern Library, 1964), p. 147. On the rôle of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, see Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Alexander Nehamas, Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), chs. 1–5.

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should not emulate, and that their stories about the heroes of Greek legend may well have truly represented those heroes engaging in weak or bad behavior, but still behavior that the guardians should not emulate. Thus, Plato argued, “if we want the guardians of our city to think that it’s shameful to be easily provoked into hating one another, we mustn’t allow any stories about gods warring, fighting, or plotting against one another, for they aren’t true. The battles of gods and giants, and all the various stories of the gods hating their families and friends, should neither be told nor even woven in embroideries.”18 Contrary to so much traditional poetry, the gods are necessarily good, and only true stories about the gods should be told – for “to be false to one’s soul about the things that are, to be ignorant and to have and hold falsehood there, is what everyone would least of all accept, for everyone hates a falsehood in that place most of all”19 – and, even more important, only true stories about the good behavior of the gods should be emulated. Likewise, Plato argued, even though heroes may well be guilty of ill or evil conduct, the educators of the guardians should “delete the lamentations of famous men, leaving them to women (and not even to good women, either) and to cowardly men, so that those we say are training to guard our city will disdain to act like that.”20 This leads to a proposal for broad censorship of literature – much of “what poets and prose-writers tell us about the most important matters concerning human beings is bad. They say that many unjust people are happy and many just ones wretched, that injustice is profitable if it escapes detection, and that justice is another’s good but one’s own loss. I think we’ll prohibit these stories and order the poets to compose the opposite kind of poetry and tell the opposite kind of tales”21 – although in considering Plato’s advocacy of censorship, it must be kept in mind that he is not considering the experience of art in the abstract, but is specifically considering the use of certain kinds of literature in the early education of the future guardians of his ideal state. Thus Plato further argues, quite specifically, that learning to declaim poetry and perform tragedies should not be part of the education of the guardians, and this for two reasons. First, because “each individual would do a fine job of one occupation, not of many, and . . . if he tried the latter and dabbled in many things, he’d surely fail to achieve distinction in 18

19 20 21

Plato, Republic, Book II, 378b–c; trans. G.M.A. Grube in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), p. 1017. Plato, Republic, Book II, 382b; Complete Works, p. 1021. Plato, Republic, Book III, 387e–388a; Complete Works, p. 1025. Plato, Republic, Book III, 392a–b; Complete Works, p. 1030.

Introduction

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any of them”;22 thus the guardians should not practice the arts of performance simply because that will distract them from their task of mastering the principles of statecraft and war. And second, the guardians “mustn’t be clever at doing or imitating shameful actions, lest from enjoying the imitation, they come to enjoy the reality. Or haven’t you noticed that imitations practiced from youth become part of nature and settle into habits of gesture, voice, and thought?”23 The guardians must not learn to imitate male or female slaves, cowards, drunks, and madmen, “for though they must know about mad and vicious men and women, they must neither do nor imitate anything they do.”24 More generally, the guardians must not “imitate” persons engaging in shameful actions or even undergoing shameful emotions, because there is no firm boundary between imitative performance and reality: Imitating shameful actions will lead to doing shameful actions, imitating shameful emotions will lead to having shameful emotions, and imitation will thereby undermine the rational self-control that the guardians must learn above all else.25 The second main part of Plato’s critique of the arts comes in the final book of the Republic, where he attacks the pretensions of the poets to be experts in and therefore qualified teachers of the sciences – “arts” (τεχναι) in the sense of skilled practices or technologies, not fine arts – and virtues that the guardians need to know. This is the context in which Plato offers his famous analysis that imitations or mimetic representations – literary representations of objects – are at a “third remove” from reality. Plato uses the analogy of painting to criticize the poets’ claim to expertise, although the art of painting as such is not his target, since that held no special place in the Greek educational practice to which Plato is offering an alternative. His argument is that a bed made by a carpenter is already at one remove from the true “form” or “idea” of a bed, which is a perfect and unchanging universal rather than an imperfect and transient particular, and that an image of a bed made by a painter or a poet is only a copy of the carpenter’s bed, which is itself already merely a copy of the only “real” bed, the form of the bed or “bedness.” It might seem as if Plato

22 23 24 25

Plato, Republic, Book III, 394e; Complete Works, p. 1032. Plato, Republic, Book III, 395c–d; Complete Works, p. 1033. Plato, Republic, Book III, 395e–396a; Complete Works, p. 1033. On the specifically educational context of Plato’s criticism of imitation (as performance), see Alexander Nehamas, “Plato on Imitation and Poetry in Republic X,” in Virtues of Authenticity, chapter 12, pp. 251–78, and Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), Part I, pp. 39–147.

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has demonstrated only that the painted image of a bed is at two removes from the real bed, not three, but it can be argued either that the Greeks counted inclusively, not serially, or else that what Plato actually means is that the artist’s image of an object is only a copy of how the carpenter’s bed, which is already at one remove from reality, looks from a particular point of view, which is thus at a second remove from reality, with the copy of that thus indeed being at a third remove from reality.26 However precisely this famous phrase should be understood, Plato uses his larger analysis specifically to denigrate claims to expertise in all arts and sciences made by the poets or on behalf of them by their interpreters: We must consider tragedy and its leader, Homer. . . . We hear some people say that poets know all crafts, all human affairs concerned with virtue and vice, and all about the gods as well. They say that if a good poet produces fine poetry, he must have knowledge of the things he writes about, or else he wouldn’t be able to produce it at all. Hence, we have to look to see whether those who tell us this have encountered these imitators and have been so deceived by them that they don’t realize that their works are at the third remove from that which is and are easily produced without knowledge of the truth (since they are only images, not things that are).27

Because they traffic in mere images, poets cannot possibly have the expertise they or their supporters claim they have and therefore should not have a central rôle in the education of the guardians. Indeed, with a final twist of the knife Plato asks, “Do you think that someone who could make both the thing imitated and its image would allow himself to be serious about making images and put this at the forefront of his life as the best thing to do?” If the poets really were experts at statecraft or war, they would certainly choose to be statesmen or generals, not poets. Since they are mere poets, who indeed cannot even give a scientific account of what might be expected to be their own special expertise, such as versification,28 they should be kept out of education, and that should be left to the philosophers.

26

27 28

I owe these alternative interpretations of Plato’s famous remark to Alexander Nehamas and Susan Sauvé Meyer, respectively. Plato, Republic, Book X, 598d–599a; Complete Works, p. 1203. On this point, see Plato’s dialogue Ion, in which Socrates lampoons the poets and the rhapsodes who perform their works by arguing that they cannot do better than to attribute their success to divine inspiration rather than to any genuine knowledge and technique. In the eighteenth century, as we will see, the idea of artistic inspiration would be defended, under the name of “genius,” by even as sober a philosopher as Immanuel Kant.

Introduction

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Or at least Plato argues that the poets should be excluded from education in the ideal republic as long as they engage in mere inexpert imitation. Plato does not actually exclude all forms of art from his ideal educational scheme; after all, he allows “stories whenever they are fine or beautiful,”29 and he allows certain forms of music, which he considers as a representational or imitative art rather than, as it has generally been considered in modernity, a nonrepresentational form of art, namely, when it is in a “mode that would suitably imitate the tone and rhythm of a courageous person who is active in battle or . . . fighting off his fate steadily and with self-control,” or in the mode “of someone engaged in a peaceful, unforced, voluntary action . . . modes which will best imitate the . . . tones of voice of those who are moderate and courageous”30 and thereby inculcate the virtuous habits of moderation and courage of those who are exposed to them. In one sense, Plato has a very high regard for the arts – that is, he attributes a very powerful influence of the arts on human behavior – and it is precisely for that reason that the arts must be so strictly regulated in his ideal republic, above all in its educational system. One continuing challenge for modern defenders of the educational value of the arts is to exploit their formative potential while avoiding excessive censorship. The philosophical discipline of aesthetics arose long before it got its name, because most philosophers and indeed most other human beings have loved the arts too well to accept Plato’s critique without demur. This may have included the historical Socrates and even Plato himself in another mood than in the Republic, for in the Symposium, also a “middleperiod” work but perhaps written even slightly before the Republic,31 the character of Socrates reports a conversation he claims once to have had with a woman named Diotima of Mantinea – here Plato may be placing himself at a “third remove” from the opinions voiced by his characters – about the nature of beauty, although not about art or any specific art. As Socrates recreates his conversation with Diotima, she begins by describing the sexual love that can lead to reproduction as a quest for something that we see as supremely good, namely, immortality, which is triggered by the beauty of a prospective partner because we take beauty as a sign of goodness. She then introduces the idea of a perfect beauty – a beauty that “always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor 29 30 31

Plato, Republic, Book II, 377b; Complete Works, p. 1016. Plato, Republic, Book III, 399a–c; Complete Works, p. 1036. See Plato, Complete Works, pp. xii–xviii.

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wanes. . . is not beautiful this way and ugly that way, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in relation to one thing and ugly in relation to another,” but is always and only beautiful – in other words, a Platonic pure form of beauty. She takes it as obvious that we desire to be acquainted with such a form of beauty, and then argues that we can be led from acquaintance with ordinary beautiful things and persons to acquaintance with this pure form of beauty: “one goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful.”32 Here Plato presents two ideas which, whether or not he himself intended to reject them in the Republic, have ever since offered at least one possibility for a response to the attack upon the arts launched in the Republic : first, that the beauty of perceivable things, especially the human body (though Plato does not seem to be thinking particularly of the artistic description or representation of this constant subject for art), can lead to the recognition of some higher form of beauty, and second, that through the appreciation of such objects we are led to knowledge about such higher beauty, or knowledge of some vital truth about the real nature of beauty. This is the path that Plotinus took in our earlier quote, although we will subsequently see that modern Neo-Platonists have not in fact taken the same approach. Like Plotinus, many of those who have followed Plato in finding the value of beauty whether in art or in nature in some heightened form of knowledge of truth have shied away from the suggestion that we become acquainted with a higher form of truth about beauty through our experience of bodies that are beautiful in the specific sense of being sexually attractive, although we will see that at least one influential writer in the eighteenth century – Edmund Burke – was willing to put sexual attractiveness at the heart of his theory of beauty. Instead, Diotima’s claim that beautiful bodies lead to knowledge about beauty as such has typically been transmuted into the suggestion that through the experience of beauty (or, especially in the eighteenth century, the experience of a second aesthetic category, namely, sublimity) in objects of nature 32

Plato, Symposium, 211a–d; trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff in Complete Works, p. 493.

Introduction

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and/or works of art we gain insight into fundamental truths, not about beauty itself – not knowledge of the form of beauty – but about something else, perhaps the metaphysical nature of existence in general,33 perhaps the moral, political, or emotional conditions for human existence in particular, that we could not readily get in any other way.34 Plato’s student but subsequent antagonist Aristotle famously formulated this response to his master’s critique of the arts in his own Poetics: The poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse . . . it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence 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 singulars. By a universal statement I mean one as to what such or such a kind of man will probably or necessarily say or do – which is the aim of poetry, though it affixes proper names to the characters.35

Aristotle’s justification of poetry is that it presents to us the general possibilities for human motivation, action, and response to action, although it presents such general ideas to us in the form of imitation, which is a natural means by which we learn but is also something that we enjoy in its own right.36 Of course, this is an incomplete argument against Plato’s 33

34

35

36

This is what Jean-Marie Schaeffer called in the book previously mentioned the “speculative theory of art.” Thus Frederick C. Beiser’s claim that Plato recognized an essentially erotic aspect in aesthetic experience that was in turn recognized by “Diotima’s children” and true heirs, the German “rationalist” aestheticians from Leibniz to Lessing – see Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 21–2 – must be treated cautiously, since the lesson of her advice to Socrates is that just as we should suppress our attraction to the materiality of works of art themselves in order to appreciate something higher, so we should suppress our attraction to the materiality of the human bodies typically depicted or described by art in order to appreciate something higher – and it seems strange to continue to call the kind of love that we will have for that something higher “erotic” even if it is natural to call by that name the love of the physical from which our ascent to love of that something higher begins. We will see later that one of Beiser’s heroes, and mine, Moses Mendelssohn, did recognize the bodily dimension of aesthetic experience, although he did not emphasize its specifically sexual dimension; but he was unusual among “Diotima’s children” in doing so. Aristotle, Poetics 9, 1451a37–1451b10; trans. I. Bywater in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, pp. 2322–3. Aristotle, Poetics 4, 1448a5–23; Complete Works, p. 2318.

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recommendation to exclude portrayals of many sorts of human motivation and action from the poems to which the guardians should be exposed in their formative years: To complete the argument, Aristotle would have to add the premise that anyone who is to act successfully needs to know the full range of human possibilities rather than to be blind to all but the most desirable forms of human motivation and action or to suppress all but those, as Plato seems to suppose is possible. Further, Aristotle would also have to address Plato’s claim that the arousal of strong emotions in the performance of art in the course of the education of the guardians is a powerful mark against the value of art. Aristotle does not explicitly argue for either of these premises in the brief and truncated text of the Poetics, although his famous claim that the purpose of tragedy is to arouse the emotions of pity and fear in order to effect their katharsis or purgation might be considered to be meant as an alternative to Plato’s position that the arousal of such emotions is simply inappropriate in the education of future guardians.37 Further, the premise of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is precisely that one must have a deep acquaintance with the full range of human emotions, motivations, and actions, both good and evil, that is, “the various types of human character, in relation to the emotions, states of character, ages and fortune,”38 in order to persuade others of one’s own views or, more generally, to interact successfully with other human beings; and throughout the Rhetoric Aristotle quotes from Greek poetry to illustrate and confirm his claims about “the various types of human character” and “emotions.” He clearly holds that poetry, for him the paradigmatic form of representational art, is an indispensable reservoir of truths about human nature and character. Equally important, he does not seem to worry that we are automatically disposed to imitate whatever behavior is depicted to us, as Plato does, so his celebration of the instructive value of the depiction of the full range of human feelings and conduct in art is not constrained by the fear that art can be deleterious to our morality. By reconceiving our response to art as knowing rather than imitating, Aristotle undercuts Plato’s objections to vast swathes of art. But he still 37

38

See Aristotle, Poetics 6, 1449b21–30; Complete Works, p. 2320. For alternative interpretations of Aristotle’s famous but obscure conception of katharsis, see Jonathan Lear, “Katharsis,” and Alexander Nehamas, “Pity and Fear in the Rhetoric and the Poetics,” both in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed. Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 315–40 and 291–314. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, ch. 12, 188b33–4; trans. W. Rhys Roberts in Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 2213.

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works within a primarily cognitivist framework: The value of art is that it offers us knowledge, both about human possibilities in general and about the nature of human emotions in their own right, and there is no suggestion that the arousal of the emotions is valuable in its own right, let alone that the exercise of the imagination is pleasurable and therefore valuable in its own right. That art and sometimes even other objects of aesthetic experience are an indispensable means of access to crucial truths is one thesis that recurs throughout the history of aesthetics, including throughout the modern period. A second dimension of response to Plato is added by the Roman poet Horace in his verse Art of Poetry (ca. 20 BCE): “The aim of the poet is either to benefit, or to amuse, or to make his words at once please and give lessons of life.”39 On the one hand, this continues Aristotle’s theme that art may teach us fundamental truths about the human condition and character – “lessons of life.” But on the other, it recognizes sheer pleasure as an independently valuable aim of poetry, something that seems to be lacking from Plato’s account and perhaps from Aristotle’s as well. Of course, simple arithmetic suggests that poetry (or other art) that can combine instruction with pleasure may be the most valuable sort of all. This bit of arithmetic leads to what was the standard response to Plato, whether in theories about art or in the use of art for religious and political purposes, for centuries: Art is valuable because it can present important truths about human nature and conduct in engaging and therefore moving ways. This view is clearly presented in one of the most famous and beloved works on art of the late Renaissance, Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry (ca. 1581, first published 1595). Sidney takes up the idea of Aristotle (whose name he has mentioned a page before) and of Horace (whose name he mentions a few pages later) when he describes the “first and most noble sort” of poets as “they which most properly do imitate to teach and delight; and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.” Such poets “imitate both to delight and teach,” he continues, because they must delight in order “to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger,” while they must teach

39

Horace, The Art of Poetry, trans. E.C. Wickham (1903), cited from Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 73.

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“to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved.”40 In fact, Sidney presents himself as a champion not just of poetry but of Plato himself – “whose authority,” he says, “I had much rather justly construe than unjustly resist”41 – and combines with his AristotelianHoratian position what we might regard as a version of Diotima’s thesis from the Symposium, thereby preserving what James Porter has identified as the antimaterial animus of Plato’s aesthetics: He praises all forms of knowledge that can “lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying [of] his own divine essence.”42 To the extent that poetry can do this, it is of course valuable. But, he claims, “the ending end of all earthly learning being virtuous action, those skills that most serve to bring forth that have a most just title to be princes over all the rest,”43 and he then argues that poetry best deserves that title. The moral philosopher approaches us with “sullen gravity” and promulgates his rules of conduct in form “so hard of utterance and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest.” “On the other side, the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truths of things and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine.”44 Only the poet “coupleth the general notion with the particular example” in a way that can “strike, pierce, [and] possess the soul.”45 The poet excels both the philosopher and the historian “not only in furnishing the mind with knowledge, but in setting it forward to that which deserveth to be called and accounted good: which setting forward, and moving to well-doing, indeed setteth the laurel crown upon the poets as victorious.”46 The idea that poetry, and perhaps other arts, can represent the full range of possibilities for human emotion, motivation, and action, and do so with such force as to move us toward the good and away from what is evil, whether that is seen as a critique of Plato, as in Aristotle, or a defense of Plato, as it might have been intended by Sidney, was the

40

41 42 43 44 45 46

[Sir Philip] Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. J.A. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 26–7. Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, p. 59. Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, p. 28. Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, p. 29. Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, p. 29, pp. 31–2. Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, p. 32. Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, p. 38.

Introduction

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core of Western thinking about art for centuries before the formation of a specialized discipline of aesthetics in the eighteenth century. Then why did such a specialized discipline become necessary at precisely that time? What came to be seen as inadequate in the traditional defense of the arts? This question can be answered historically and sociologically. For centuries, the moving power of literature, visual arts, architecture, and music had been used throughout Europe to communicate the fundamental truths of Christianity and to move people in their behalf. But in some phases of the Protestant reform of Christianity, such as British Puritanism in the seventeenth century and German Pietism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the use of the beauties of art to move the soul toward God came to be seen not as an aid but as an obstacle to true religiosity, and in those phases there was not just hostility to art but actual iconoclasm – the statues in many English cathedrals and churches are still missing their heads due to the physical destruction of the period of the English Civil War and Puritan Commonwealth, and for the German Pietists even Lutheran churches, let alone the lavishly decorated baroque churches of the Catholic Counterreformation, were abhorrent. As the grip of both the most austere forms of Protestanism and the most flamboyant forms of Counter-Reformation began to wane, the former after the Stuart Restoration in Britain (1660) and after the turn of the eighteenth century in some German Protestant states, and the latter in the eighteenth century in Catholic lands, people may well have felt the need for a philosophical rather than a religious justification of their love of art in many forms. In the eighteenth century in particular, as the agriculturally based wealth of the nobility recovered from the demands placed upon it by religious wars of the previous century and the burgeoning bourgeoisie found new wealth in trade and manufacturing, both groups spent more and more money on art and may likewise have felt the need for a justification for their expenditures. But in this narrative I leave aside speculation about such historical and sociological causes for the rise of modern aesthetics and instead suggest that the discipline flourished because of the power of novel ideas, or novel relations between new and older ideas.47 47

For discussions of the sociological contexts of the origins of modern aesthetics, see such works as Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Prebend Mortonsen, Art in the Social Order: The Making of the Modern Conception of Art (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art, chs. 5 and 6, pp. 75–129; and Paul Mattick, Art in Its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2003).

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One fundamentally new idea that emerged early in the eighteenth century is that the arousal of emotion by the arts is not something intrinsically dangerous and even contemptible but rather something that is, at least within limits, enjoyable and for that reason intrinsically valuable – that is, valuable for its own sake and not just for whatever useful instruction it might offer us for managing ourselves and others (where Aristotle located its value in the Rhetoric). As we see in Volume I, this idea appears in a number of writers in the eighteenth century, many of them influenced by one of our opening quartet of figures, namely, the Abbé Du Bos. This author wrote that one of our most deadly enemies is boredom or “weariness of mind” and that the arousal of passions is one of the most effective means to dispel boredom,48 although the arousal of passions or “great emotions”49 by some ordinary means, such as gambling, is also accompanied by great risks and costs, and it is the great merit of art that it can “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.”50 (We consider subsequently precisely what Du Bos means by calling the emotions aroused by art “artificial.”) Another influential author who explored our immediate pleasure in the arousal of passion or emotion is Edmund Burke, already mentioned, who, more than a century before Sigmund Freud, founded the two main categories of the aesthetic, the beautiful and the sublime, in our two fundamental drives, the drive for society and especially sexual congress on the one hand and our fear of death on the other, arguing that what we enjoy in beauty is the qualities we find sexually most attractive while without necessarily going on to actual sex, while what we find sublime is precisely that which is ordinarily most threatening to our own safety when it is not in fact so threatening – in both cases, what we enjoy is the arousal of our most powerful emotions without the normally attendant risks or costs. Yet another central figure in eighteenth-century aesthetics, the Scottish jurist and man of letters Henry Home, Lord Kames, identified the “elements of criticism” in his great work of that name (read in American colleges well into the nineteenth century) with the different ways in which works of art or some aspects of nature can arouse our emotions – his central subject is “the connection of the emotions and passions with the fine arts, which . . . are 48 49 50

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, Part I, ch. I, vol. 1, pp. 8–9. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, Part I, ch. II, vol. 1, p. 10. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, Part I, ch. III, vol. 1, p. 21.

Introduction

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all of them calculated to give pleasure to the eye or to the ear.”51 The many chapters of Kames’s lengthy work are devoted to showing in detail how the typical forms as well as contents of different arts as well as some aspects of nature arouse our emotions, something that Kames takes to be self-evidently pleasurable and as such in no need of apology. But by no means every aesthetician in the eighteenth century thought that the arousal of emotions was the obvious alternative to a cognitivist explanation of the value of aesthetic experience. One of the greatest of all eighteenth-century aestheticians, namely, Immanuel Kant, certainly wanted to exclude what he calls “charm and emotion” (Reiz und Rührung), although not pleasure as such, from the proper experience of “objects of taste.”52 But that by no means implies that Kant reverted to a purely cognitivist approach to art. For a second fundamentally new idea that emerged early in the eighteenth century is that our enjoyment of art and nature does not have to be justified as leading to knowledge of any truth at all but can be understood as the natural and intrinsically valuable result of the free play of our mental powers with the appearance of objects offered to us by nature or created for us by artists – although, as we will see when we come to Kant’s actual theory of fine art, this may also not be incompatible with cognitive value in art but may rather combine with and enhance the latter. While different philosophers understand this idea in different ways, one form it takes is the celebration of the imagination as a power of both invention and response that is not completely restricted by the ordinary constraints of cognition and conduct, that is, by the demands of knowledge on the one hand and morality on the other. Before Kant, this idea was developed in Britain, especially in Scotland, and indeed may already have been anticipated by Sir Francis Bacon at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when he wrote thus in his Advancement of Learning: POESIE is a part of Learning in measure of words for the most part restrained: but in all other points extreamely licensed: and doth truly referee to the Imagination: which being not tyed to the Laws of Matter; may at pleasure ioyne that which Nature hath seuered: & seuer that which Nature hath ioyned, and so make vnlawfull Matches & diuorses of things. . . . [it] is

51

52

Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (6th ed., 1785), ed. Peter Jones, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), ch. II, vol. 1, p. 32. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §13, 5:223. (Abbreviated throughout this work as CPJ.)

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nothing else but FAINED HISTORY, which may be stiled as well in Prose as in Verse. The vse of this FAINED HISTORY, hath been to giue some shadowe of satisfaction to the minde of Man in those points, wherein the Nature of things doth denie it, the world being in proportion inferiour to the soule: by reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of Man, a more ample Greatnesse, a more exact Goodnesse; and a more absolute varietie then can be found in the Nature of things. Therefore, because the Acts or Euents of true Historie haue not that Magnitude, which satisfieth the minde of Man, Poesie faineth Acts and Euents Greater and more Heroicall. . . . So it appeareth that Poesie seueth and conferreth to Magnanimitie, Moralitie, and to Delectation.53

The last sentence of this quote makes it clear that Bacon has by no means left behind the Horatian assumption that poetry or art more generally serves to both benefit and delight. But he has subtly challenged the Aristotelian assumption that poetry is superior to history because it deals with universal types rather than particular individuals; instead, he has proposed that poetry deals with invented possibilities. To be sure, on his account these inventions typically have a moral goal: We imagine possibilities for human conduct that are morally better than what we actually observe, presumably in order to spur ourselves on to realize such better possibilities. We will see that not every champion of the free play of the imagination as the foundation of aesthetic experience assigns it such a moral goal, or at least assigns it such a goal so directly. Some thinkers whom we consider, such as Friedrich Schiller toward the end of the eighteenth century, clearly do look to the liberation of the imagination through aesthetic experience as a crucial part of moral education. Others, such as George Santayana at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, entirely invert the traditional assumption that aesthetic experience should have a moral benefit by instead looking to morality to create the conditions in which we can freely enjoy the pleasures of aesthetic experience, especially the play of the imagination. But we will see that the idea of the free play of the imagination has drawn opposition as well as support in the history of modern aesthetics. The introduction of the novel idea of the free play of imagination as an intrinsically valuable aspect of aesthetic experience does not mean that the idea of such experience as offering access to a higher form of truth or a special mode of access to truth, the idea that we can see as having been prefigured at the start of philosophy in Plato’s Symposium, has 53

Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kieran, The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. IV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 73.

Introduction

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simply been left behind. On the contrary, we will see that this continues to be a major theme of modern aesthetics as well. Sometimes it appears in quite traditional form. In our first chapter, we will see that the English philosopher Shaftesbury and the German philosopher Wolff both held that the experience of beauty in both nature and art is a sensory revelation of the truth about the underlying order and perfection of the world. Half a century after these two figures, the German aesthetician Johann Georg Sulzer, while working within the framework of Wolff’s metaphysics and psychology, reminds us of Sidney’s defense of poetry by arguing that art does not serve to discover truths, especially moral truths to us, but serves to make those obvious truths alive and moving to us. The core of Kant’s account of fine art – as opposed to his initial analysis of what he calls “pure” aesthetic judgment, most typically triggered by simple cases of natural beauty – is nothing less than the combination of the traditional cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience with the new theory of free play in his conception of “aesthetic ideas” as the “spirit” of fine art,54 ideas of the utmost importance, like Plato’s own forms, with which the imagination yet plays. Following Kant’s synthesis of the theory of aesthetic experience as cognition of truth and the theory of the free play of imagination but his attempt to exclude emotional impact from the value of art, it might seem that the next step in aesthetic theory would have been to create a threeway synthesis by combining the emotional impact of art with the other aspects of aesthetic experience. That is not in fact what happened. Three decades after Kant published the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Hegel held that art “is simply one way of bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive interests of the spirit,” and that for that very reason, “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past,” because philosophy, in his view, has now become, although it was not always, a better way of bringing to our minds and expressing the deep truths that art has previously expressed.55 As we will see, other German philosophers in the group that dominated aesthetic theorizing for much of the first half of the nineteenth century, such as Friedrich Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer, also rejected the importance of the Scottish and Kantian idea of free play and promulgated one form or another of an essentially cognitivist approach to art. But finding a way to combine all three 54 55

See Kant, CPJ, §49. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, pp. 7, 9.

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approaches to aesthetic experience – the cognitivist approach, the recognition of emotional impact, and the theory of free play – became the central project for at least one contemporary of these philosophers, namely, Friedrich Schleiermacher, for several of the leading aestheticians of the late nineteenth century, such as Wilhelm Dilthey and George Santayana, and for some of the most interesting aestheticians of the twentieth century as well, such as Richard Wollheim, already mentioned, but also, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Herbert Marcuse, both students who rebelled against their teacher Martin Heidegger, who had no taste for such a synthesis. Even among those who did not synthesize all three of the central approaches of modern aesthetics, one particularly characteristic turn that the traditional idea of aesthetic experience as an intimation of truth takes in the modern period is the view that the purpose of art is not to reveal fundamental scientific, metaphysical, or moral truths at all, a task which is, as Hegel supposes, better left to science and philosophy, but that it serves to clarify and thereby reveal the truth about human emotions. We will see that this was the central idea of the German philosophers who considered themselves “Neo-Kantians” at the end of the nineteenth century and several at the very end of the twentieth as well, such as Noël Carroll and Berys Gaut, and that it was also the key idea of the greatest British aesthetician of the twentieth century, R.G. Collingwood – although we will see that Collingwood also understood “a work of art proper” as “a total activity which the person enjoying it apprehends, or is conscious of, by the use of his imagination” that is like that which the artist “enjoyed when painting” or otherwise creating it,56 so Collingwood too combined in his own distinctive way the idea that art reveals a certain kind of truth with the actual experience of emotions as well with the free play of the imagination. Beyond the view that art plays a central rôle in clarifying the nature of human emotions, we also find the view developed in the twentieth century that art plays a special rôle in revealing the conditions under which human emotion takes place and human action is possible. We find this idea in one form in Marxist theorists such as Georg Lukács and Theodor W. Adorno, but also in a distinctive form in an American aesthetician of the end of the twentieth and the turn of the twenty-first century, Stanley Cavell, who shows both in his philosophical texts and in his reflections on drama and cinema that art often gives us our deepest insight into the fact that we always act without complete insight into our 56

R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. 150–1.

Introduction

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own emotions and motivations and those of others, and that we have a chance at success in the pursuit of happiness only if we acknowledge this fact about the human condition to ourselves.57 A great deal of the history of modern aesthetics, then, can be captured by following the intertwining trails of the three ideas that aesthetic experience is an experience of key truths, of the most fundamental emotions of human experience, and of the free play of the imagination. I do not attempt here to anticipate all the forms these ideas will take or all the thinkers in which they will occur – that would be to replace the introduction to this book with the book itself. But I will be arguing that the most interesting figures in the evolution of modern aesthetics are those who do synthesize all three approaches in their own ways. I might make this point another way. In modern times, “Neo-Platonism,” the conception of which may have more to do with Shaftesbury than with Plotinus, has been marked by the idea that the true, the good, and the beautiful are just one thing, seen from different perspectives or in different contexts. It may be no accident that there seem to be just these three terms, the true, the good, the beautiful – many philosophies have been based on the assumption that there are three fundamental mental capacities – the capacities involved in cognition, the capacity for moral reasoning and the moral sentiments that might involve, and the imagination or ability to find pleasure in mental activities and feelings connected with neither of the former. Moses Mendelssohn, for example, divided the “faculties of the soul” into the “faculty of knowledge,” the “faculty of desire,” and “between knowing and desiring . . . the approving, the approbation, the satisfaction of the soul, that is still genuinely far removed from desire.”58 Modern aesthetics can be considered a struggle between those who think aesthetic experience engages all our faculties and those who think it engages a distinctive one; a struggle between those who oppose the unity of the Neo-Platonic triad, and who thus think that beauty, or other aesthetic qualities, must be something distinct from the true and the good, and our experience of the beautiful as something quite different from our cognition of what is true and what is good or right, on the one hand, and, on the other, those who are in some broad sense the heirs of Neo-Platonism, who think that what is distinctive about aesthetic experience and its intentional vehicle, art, is the way 57

58

I here borrow the title of Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). Moses Mendelssohn, Morning Hours: Lectures on God’s Existence (1785), trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom and Corey Dyck (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), pp. 42–3.

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that in it our knowledge of what is true and our feelings about as well as our knowledge of what is good and evil are expressed and presented in imaginative and entrancing ways, for which the term “beautiful” may be used as shorthand. From the one point of view, aesthetic experience and therefore art must be rigidly separated from the spheres of the theoretical knowledge and practical principles, while from the other aesthetic experience and art are at their best when they most fully engage our cognitive and practical faculties as well as our capacity for pleasure in the exercise of our senses and imagination. It will be the argument of this work that the most interesting aestheticians of modernity have been Neo-Platonists in this broad sense, opposed to the pure intellectualism of Plotinus himself. Summing up my argument in this way allows me to make another point that might help orient readers in what follows. I alluded earlier to the thesis of Paul Oskar Kristeller, first published in 1951, that the very concept of fine art, and therefore the possibility of a discipline of aesthetics, is an invention of the eighteenth century. Fifty years after the publication of Kristeller’s original argument, Larry Shiner defended it in his wellinformed book, The Invention of Art, drawing on a much wider range of materials than Kristeller had done. Shiner argues that in the course of the eighteenth century, the new concept of fine art was constituted by a new conception of the arts as contrasted to crafts and other technologies, a new conception of the artist as a creative genius as contrasted to the artisan working in well-established practices to produce “something useful or entertaining,” and a new distinction between aesthetic experience as “a special, refined pleasure appropriate to the fine arts” and “the ordinary pleasures that we can take in the useful or entertaining.”59 Shiner’s book focuses on the works and statements of artists and critics while eschewing detailed analysis of philosophical claims about art or aesthetic experience, while this work does the opposite; but he does find the notions of “disinterested contemplation” and “the autonomy of aesthetic experience” epitomized above all in Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller to be paradigmatic of the new way of thinking summed up in the modern conception of fine art,60 while finding only a few thinkers, such as William Hogarth and especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who held out against the new consensus about the separation between art and other forms of human activity and between aesthetic and other forms 59 60

Shiner, Invention of Art, pp. 5–6. Shiner, Invention of Art, pp. 144–5, 156–1.

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of experience. I will dispute that there is anything like a modern consensus about the separation between aesthetic experience and art and all other forms of human experience and production. I argued some time ago that the concept of the disinterestedness of aesthetic experience introduced by Francis Hutcheson and revived more than half a century later by Kant was hardly widely accepted by eighteenth-century thinkers, but was instead rejected by many;61 the argument of this work is, to borrow a phrase, that the concepts of aesthetic experience as well as of art have been “essentially contested concepts”62 throughout the modern period, with no consensus that the concept of aesthetic experience must be rigidly separated from those of other forms of experience and art rigidly separated from other forms of human activity and production, as the Kristeller-Shiner thesis presupposes – although, again, I argue that the most interesting and enriching philosophical theories of aesthetic experience and art have been those that analyze their complexity rather than simplifying and separating. Thus the mottoes I have selected for this work.

61

62

See Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chs. 2–3, pp. 48–130. See W.B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956): 167–98, and “Art as an Essentially Contested Concept,” Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1956): 97–114.

1 Prologue The Origins of Modern Aesthetics

The idea of the disinterestedness of pleasure in the beautiful, analogous to the disinterestedness of moral sentiment, was introduced by the Earl of Shaftesbury in his dialogue The Moralists. Many have held the idea of disinterestedness to be the defining idea or at least one of the central ideas of modern aesthetics.1 I do not share the judgment that the disinterestedness of pleasure in beauty or of the contemplation that produces it was the most important concept of the aesthetics of the eighteenth century, or even widely accepted, but I will nevertheless take Shaftesbury’s work, first published in 1709 and then republished in his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times in 1711, as the starting point for eighteenth-century aesthetics; the tremendous influence of this work throughout the century, not only in Britain, but also in France and Germany, justifies its assignment to this position, even if the disinterestedness of aesthetic response and judgment was by no means the lesson that all its readers drew from it. The greatest contribution of the work was rather its recognition of the importance of feeling or sentiment in human consciousness and conduct, the basis for its seminal role in eighteenth-century moral theory as well as aesthetics. But Shaftesbury by no means simply opposed sentiment to reason, as later “moral sense” theorists such as David Hume did. On the contrary, Shaftesbury linked the sentiment of pleasure in beauty to apprehension of the rational order 1

See again Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” in Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 163–227, and Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 6, 130–51. See also Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (1961): 131–43, and “On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,” Philosophical Quarterly 11 (1961): 97–113.

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of creation and the reason of its ultimate creator. In treating aesthetic sentiment as ultimately an apprehension of rational order, Shaftesbury thus took a fundamentally cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience in spite of his emphasis on sentiment as foremost in the phenomenology of such experience. Shaftesbury was most deeply influenced by the group of thinkers in the preceding generation known as the “Cambridge Platonists,” led by Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Benjamin Whichcote, and it is no surprise that he linked the feeling of beauty to recognition of the order of the universe and its goodness.2 The leading figure in German academic philosophy for much of the eighteenth century, Christian Wolff, would not have conceived of himself as a Neo-Platonist, although he was strongly influenced by Germany’s greatest intellectual of the late seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who did number Plato and NeoPlatonism among the many influences on his thought, and who indeed recognized the affinity of his own thought with that of Shaftesbury.3 But Wolff, who in his metaphysics first published in 1720 reduced all human mental capacities to the capacity for representation or cognition, also analyzed the feeling of pleasure as our response to the perception, specifically the sensory perception, of perfection, whether the perfection of the world in general or of particular things in it; and although he did not develop any extensive aesthetic theory, when he used the example of a fine art, specifically the art of painting, to illustrate his general approach to the perception of perfection, he treated the goal of painting as representation and our pleasure in it as our response to successful representation, and thereby also suggested an essentially cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience: For Wolff such experience is a form of knowledge. So these two seminal figures who bracketed the second decade of the eighteenth century, the one the inspiration for much British thought throughout the rest of the century and the other the master of most German philosophy until the publication of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – in good part really a critique of the rationalist ambitions of Wolffian philosophy – in 1781, essentially carried on the great

2

3

On Shaftesbury and Neo-Platonism, see James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 22–32. See “Remarks on the three Volumes Entitled Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times” (1712), in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, trans. and ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), pp. 629–35.

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cognitivist tradition of Western aesthetics since Plato’s Symposium and Aristotle’s Poetics. But the other two great ideas of modern aesthetics were also introduced in the decade bracketed by Shaftesbury and Wolff: The idea that our pleasure in beauty and perhaps in other aesthetic qualities as well is a response to the free play of our mental capacities in general and our imagination in particular, and the idea that one of the sources of our great pleasure especially in art is the way in which it touches our deepest emotions. Just a year after Shaftesbury published the Characteristicks, the English man of letters Joseph Addison published a series of essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” which by its very title emphasized the importance of the playful faculty of imagination in our aesthetic response, and also made a seminal division of the pleasures of the imagination into pleasures in novelty, grandeur, and beauty; and while our pleasure in novelty may on Addison’s account be due to discovery and thus to cognition, elements of both mental play and emotional arousal certainly figured in Addison’s descriptions of our pleasures in grandeur and beauty. In the middle of the decade, the Swiss Jean-Pierre Crousaz also considered the mind’s play with variety as the key to the relation between object and approbation that constitutes beauty. And toward the end of this seminal decade, just a year before Wolff published his metaphysics, the French diplomat, historian, and critic Jean-Baptiste Du Bos published his Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, in which he did not discuss the cognitive potential of aesthetic experience at all, but instead emphasized the pleasurable stimulation of our passions by the playful fictions of art. Addison, Crousaz, and Du Bos can therefore be regarded as recognizing as central elements of aesthetic response both the free play of all our mental faculties and of the stimulation of our emotions in particular. The challenge for eighteenth-century and indeed for all of modern aesthetics would then become how to acknowledge the presence of all these elements – truth, feeling, and play – in our aesthetic responses and how to understand the complex relations among them. The present chapter will examine the introduction of these three ideas in the foundational decade of eighteenth-century aesthetics, the period from 1709 to 1720, first examining the different but both essentially cognitivist aesthetics of Shaftesbury and Wolff and then turning to the new ideas of feeling and play introduced by Addison, Crousaz, and Du Bos. In the remainder of this volume, we will examine how these ideas played themselves out in the three great national – although deeply interrelated – schools of eighteenth-century aesthetics, the British, French, and

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German debates initiated by Shaftesbury and Addison, Crousaz and Du Bos, and Wolff.

1. Aesthetics of Truth I: Shaftesbury Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), was one of the most influential writers of the eighteenth century. Unlike many others, he did not come from a modest or even humble background, but from the highest levels of British society. His grandfather and guardian, the first earl, was the leader of the Whig faction in the post-Stuart restoration parliament, but died, when his grandson was twelve, while leading resistance to the accession of the Catholic James II. The first earl employed the Oxford philosopher and physician John Locke (1632–1704) initially as his doctor, then as his secretary and political adviser, whose duties included supervising the education of the earl’s grandson. (Our Shaftesbury’s father, the second earl, does not seem to have had much of a voice in his son’s upbringing.) However, Locke’s empiricism was not as great an influence upon his student as was the form of Neo-Platonism developed at Cambridge under the leadership of Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, and Benjamin Whichcote, the so-called Cambridge Platonists. (Shaftesbury himself attended neither Oxford nor Cambridge, being privately educated.) Indeed, Shaftesbury’s first publication, in 1698, was an edition of sermons by Whichcote. From 1695 to 1698, Shaftesbury served in Parliament, but his political career was cut short by the severe asthma that would also end his life itself a few weeks before his forty-second birthday. After retiring from Parliament, Shaftesbury spent some time in Holland, enjoying connections established there by Locke during his exile before the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and, in hopes of restoring his health, Shaftesbury spent the last years of his life in Naples. His first major work, An Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit, was published in an unauthorized edition in 1699 by John Toland, another member of Locke’s circle; this work can be considered the foundational work of the “moral sense” school of moral philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain, and introduces the illustration of the moral sense as the source of moral judgments by means of the “common and natural Sense of a SUBLIME and BEAUTIFUL in things”4 4

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Philip Ayres (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), An Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit, Book I, Part II, section iii, p. 203.

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that would be the basis for the interest in aesthetics of his most prominent successors in the moral sense school, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, who would similarly appeal to aesthetic experience as a model of and evidence for the existence of the moral sense. Shaftesbury’s second main work in moral philosophy, the complex dialogue The Moralists, first published on its own in 1709, developed Shaftesbury’s ideas about beauty and our response to it more fully. These two works and three others, A Letter concerning Enthusiasm (1708), Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), and Soliloquy: or Advice to an Author (1710), as well as “Miscellaneous Reflections” on all five treatises, were published together in 1711 as Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times. In his final years, spent in Naples in another vain effort to restore his health, Shaftesbury was working on an intended volume of Second Characters, and two of the explicitly aesthetic essays that he wrote for this, A Letter concerning the Art or Science of Design and the Judgment of Hercules, were published in French in 1712, in English in 1713, and then included in the posthumous second edition of the Characteristicks in 1714. Along with the Pictures of Cebes and Plastics they were finally published, as originally intended, as Second Characters or the Language of Form in 1914.5 Although none of the first-generation Cambridge Platonists themselves wrote on matters of taste and criticism, we can regard Shaftesbury’s aesthetics – developed partly in passing, in illustration of central ideas of his main concern, moral philosophy, and partly in its own right – as the aesthetics of Cambridge Platonism. Neo-Platonism in all its forms is always distinguished by the idea that the triad “the true, the beautiful, and the good” are three ways of apprehending the same thing, the underlying order of creation and the intelligence of its creator, and Shaftesbury’s aesthetics is firmly in the grip of this Platonic and therefore cognitivist vision: For all of their immediacy, which is what assimilates them to the sensory, the experiences of the beautiful and sublime are forms of knowledge of cosmic order, which assimilates them to reason. With Shaftesbury, modern aesthetics thus begins on a decidedly cognitivist note, and the challenge of finding space for the emotional impact and free play of imagination in aesthetic experience lies ahead.6 5

6

Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Second Characters or the Language of Forms, ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914). The standard biography of Shaftesbury is Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1984). Important works on Shaftesbury’s thought as a whole are Stanley Grean, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion

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In his “rhapsody” The Moralists, as suggested his chief work in aesthetics, Shaftesbury has his spokesman Theocles speak thus to his interlocutor Philocles: Imagine, then, good PHILOCLES, if being taken with the Beauty of the Ocean which you see yonder at a distance, it shou’d come into your head, to seek how to command it; and like some mighty Admiral, ride Master of the Sea; wou’d not the Fancy be a little absurd? Absurd enough, in conscience. The next thing I shou’d do, ’tis likely, upon this Frenzy, wou’d be to hire some Bark, and go in Nuptial Ceremony, VENETIAN-like, to wed the Gulf, which I might call perhaps as properly my own. LET who will call it theirs, reply’d THEOCLES, you will own the Enjoyment of this kind to be different from that which shou’d naturally follow from the Contemplation of the Ocean’s Beauty. The Bridegroom-Doge, who in his stately Bucentaur floats on the Bosom of his THETIS, has less Possession than the poor Shepherd, who from a hanging Rock, or Point of some high Promontory, stretch’d at his ease, forgets his feeding Flocks, while he admires her Beauty. – But to come nearer home, and make the Question still more familiar. Suppose (my PHILOCLES) that, viewing such a Tract of Country, as this delicious Vale we see beneath us, you shou’d for the Enjoyment of the Prospect, require the Property or Possession of the Land. The Covetous Fancy, reply’d [PHILOCLES], wou’d be as absurd altogether, as that other Ambitious one. O PHILOCLES! said he’ May I bring this yet a little nearer? And will you follow me once more? Suppose that being charm’d. as you seem to be, with the Beauty of these Trees, under whose shade we rest, you shou’d long for nothing so much as to taste some delicious Fruit of theirs; and having obtain’d of Nature some certain relish by which these Acorns or Berrys of the wood becomes as palatable as the Figs or Peaches of the Garden, you shou’d afterwards, as oft as you revisited these Groves, seek hence the Enjoyment of them, by satiating yourself in these new Delights.

and Ethics (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1967); Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780, vol. II, Shaftesbury to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Valuable work on Shaftesbury’s aesthetics includes Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (1961): 131–43, and “On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,” Philosophical Quarterly 11 (1961): 97–113; Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics (New York: Burt Franklin, 1976; 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 1; Dabney Townsend, “Shaftesbury’s Aesthetic Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41 (1982): 205–13; and Richard Glauser, “Aesthetic Experience in Shaftesbury,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 76 (2002): 25–54.

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THE Fancy of this kind, reply’d [PHILOCLES], wou’d be as sordidly luxurious; and as absurd, in my opinion, as either of the former. Can you not then, on this occasion, said [THEOCLES], call to mind some other Forms of a fair kind among us, where the Admiration of Beauty is apt to lead to as irregular a Consequence? I FEAR’D, said [PHILOCLES], where this wou’d end, and was apprehensive that you wou’d force me at least to think of certain powerful FORMS in Human Kind, which draw after ‘em a set of eager Desires, Wishes and Hopes; no-way sutable, I must confess, to your rational and refin’d Contemplation of Beauty.7

This passage is readily interpreted as introducing the idea of the disinterestedness of judgments of beauty as the basis for a solution to the problem of taste, the problem of how an interpersonally valid form of judgment can be grounded on something so personal as the pleasure felt in the experience of a particular object as beautiful, which has been widely seen as the central issue of eighteenth-century aesthetics.8 Shaftesbury suggests here, as a matter of common sense, that our pleasure in and judgment of genuine beauty is disinterested, because it is obviously independent of any ordinary desire for possession, which would in turn be the necessary condition for the use or consumption of an object; the task for aesthetic theory would then seem to be to explain the “refin’d Contemplation” that must be the source of such a pleasure not depending upon interest in use and consumption, and beyond that to demonstrate that such contemplation is a possibility for all, the shepherd as well as the noble, so that the pleasure of the response to genuine beauty, or to other aesthetic properties that will be introduced in due course, such as sublimity, will be available to all, so judgments about beauty and other aesthetic properties will in turn be valid for all. Some of the best-known eighteenth-century writers in aesthetics, including Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, certainly did organize some of their key writings in aesthetics around the problem of taste so understood, and many others, for example, Edmund Burke and Lord Kames, felt obligated to preface or conclude their writings with a discussion of taste. There can be no doubt that such writers felt it obligatory to explain how an interpersonally valid form of judgment can be based on a highly personal experience. But it would not 7 8

Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, The Moralists, III.ii, vol. II, pp. 102–3. This assumption is reflected in the title of George Dickie’s work The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). However, Dickie commences his history with Hutcheson, not Shaftesbury.

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only restrict our conception of the concerns of eighteenth-century aesthetics and artificially isolate it from the aesthetics of the next two centuries to think of it as focused exclusively on this problem; it would also be seriously misleading to think that all eighteenth-century authors would agree that the aesthetic responses and judgments are disinterested at all if that were to be taken to mean that such judgments must be grounded in a kind of contemplation that has nothing to do with the rest of human desires and interests, and that the task of aesthetic theory is only to explain the possibility and justify the universal validity of a form of experience unconnected to humankind’s most fundamental emotions and interests, including our interest in knowledge as such.9 It would be particularly misleading to think of Shaftesbury as beginning from a commonsense recognition of the disinterestedness of our pleasure in beauty and inferring from this that our response to beauty is a special kind of contemplation that is detached from all our other fundamental interests as human beings. For as already suggested, Shaftesbury is a Neo-Platonist who holds that at the deepest level the true, the good, and the beautiful are identical, all manifesting the underlying order of the universe and even beyond that the order of the mind that is the source of the universe; and while the pleasure of contemplating that order must be, as his character Philocles so readily admits, independent of any self-interested desire for personal use and possession, that does not mean that our pleasure in beauty is not connected to other human interests at all. On the contrary, in Shaftesbury’s view, our pleasure in beauty is directly connected with our deepest intellectual and moral interests. Shaftesbury does not actually use the term “disinterestedness” in the passage with which we began, but the way he uses the term in expounding his moral philosophy makes it clear that by disinterestedness he does not mean the detachment of a pleasure from fundamental human concerns and interests, but only detachment from a strictly self-regarding concern for reward, that is, for a benefit extrinsically attached to virtue as if virtue were a mere means to such a reward. In the passage in “Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour” in which he introduces the term, Shaftesbury uses it to oppose those who “have made Virtue so mercenary a thing, and have talk’d so much of its Rewards, that one can hardly tell what there is in it, after all, which can be worth rewarding. For 9

For my extended critique of the idea that all the leading figures of eighteenth-century aesthetics shared such a conception of disinterestedness, see Kant and the Experience of Freedom, chs. 2 and 3, pp. 48–130.

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to be brib’d only or terrify’d into an honest Practice, bespeaks little of real Honesty or Worth.” Virtue is disinterested, according to Shaftesbury, when it is perceived to be “a good and right Inclination” “of it-self,” when it is recognized to have “the Intrinsick Worth or Value of the Thing it-self,” for “if Virtue be not really estimable in-itself, I can see nothing estimable in following it for the sake of a Bargain.” Being virtuous for the sake of an extrinsic reward is what would leave “no room” for “Disinterestedness.”10 What Shaftesbury is arguing when he claims that one’s pleasure in the perception of something beautiful has nothing to do with a promise of personal use and consumption, then, is only that it is just like virtue in this regard. Indeed, his view is more than that our pleasure in beauty and our satisfaction in virtue are alike in being disinterested in the sense of being free of any merely personal interest; in principle, our pleasure in beauty and our satisfaction in virtue are allied responses to the underlying order of the universe, and in practice the central case of beauty for aesthetics to which Shaftesbury turns in Second Characters – namely, the beauty of mimetic art, for example, paintings such as that of Hercules confronted with the choice between virtue and vice – is nothing but the depiction of virtue. Several times in The Moralists, Shaftesbury’s spokesman explicitly asserts “That Beauty and Good are still the same.”11 What underlies this assertion is a conception of the universe as fundamentally harmonious, where that harmony is the product of a rational cause of the universe and is the fundamental object of our own thought, and where truth lies in the intellectual recognition of universal order and its ultimate cause, virtue in the recognition of the necessity of contributing to that order by our own actions, and beauty in the sensory recognition of that same order. Here is a statement of Shaftesbury’s fundamental premise: All things in this World are united. For as the Branch is united with the Tree, so is the Tree as immediately with the Earth, Air, and Water, which feed it. As much as the fertile Mould is fitted to the Tree, as much as the strong and upright Trunk of the Oak or Elm is fitted to the twining Branches of the Vine or Ivy; so much are the very Leaves, the Seeds, and Fruits of these Trees fitted to the various Animals: These again to one another, and to the Elements in which they live, and to which they are, as Appendices, in a manner fitted and join’d. . . . Thus in contemplating all on Earth, we must of necessity view 10

11

Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Sensus Communis, II.iii; vol. I, pp. 55–6. In The Moralists, Shaftesbury characterizes disinterestedness as “the Love of God or Virtue for GOD or VIRTUE’s sake”; The Moralists, II.iii, vol. II, p. 45. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, The Moralists, III.ii; vol. II, p. 112; see also vol. II, p. 104.

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All in One, as holding to one common Stock. Thus too in the System of the bigger World. See there the mutual Dependency of Things! the Relation of one to another, of the Sun to this inhabited Earth, and of the Earth and other Planets to the Sun! the Order, Union, and Coherence of the Whole!12

This “Order, Union, and Coherence” of the universe is both product and proof of the existence of a divine, rational mind: “NOW having recogniz’d this uniform consistent Fabrick, and own’d the Universal System, we must of consequence acknowledge a Universal MIND, which no ingenious Man can be tempted to disown, except thro the Imagination of Disorder in the Universe; its Seat.” Shaftesbury supports this inference with the premise that the kinds of orderly artifacts with which we are most familiar are always assumed to be the product of design: “For can it be suppos’d of any-one in the World, that being in some Desart far from Men, and hearing there a perfect Symphony of Musick, or seeing an exact Pile of regular Architecture arising gradually from the Earth in all its Orders and Proportions, he shou’d be persuaded that at the bottom there was no Design accompanying this, no secret Spring of Thought, no active Mind? Wou’d he, because he saw no Hand, deny the Handy-Work?”13 He then supposes that it is the most fundamental fact about our own minds that we respond to the perception of the order of the universe with our deepest satisfaction: “NOTHING surely is more strongly imprinted on our Minds, or more closely interwoven with our Souls, than the Idea or Sense of Order and Proportion, Hence all the Force of Numbers, and those powerful Arts founded on their Management and Use. What a difference there is between Harmony and Discord!”14 In particular, Shaftesbury supposes, the difference between harmony and its opposite “is immediately perceiv’d by a plain Internal Sensation,”15 and thus our response of satisfaction in the perception of order is likewise immediate. For Shaftesbury our pleasure in beauty is essentially a response to our immediate knowledge, by means of the senses, of the order of the universe and its origin in a supreme intelligence – a distinctive form of knowledge of the greatest truth of all. Shaftesbury goes on to identify harmony as the essence of both truth and utility as well as of beauty, thereby evincing his commitment to the Neo-Platonic identification of the true, the good, and the beautiful. His clearest statement of this identity comes in the Miscellaneous Reflections, 12 13 14 15

Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, The Moralists, II.iv. vol. II, pp. 52–3. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, The Moralists, II.iv, vol. II, p. 54. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, The Moralists, II.iv, vol. II, p. 51. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, The Moralists, II.iv, vol. II, p. 52.

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the concluding volume of the Characteristicks that comments on and amplifies all that has gone before. This passage is so crucial to the rest of the eighteenth century that it must be quoted at length: WHOEVER has any Impression of what we call Gentility or Politness, is already so acquainted with the DECORUM, and GRACE of things, that he will readily confess a Pleasure and Enjoyment in the very Survey and Contemplation of this kind. Now if in the way of polite Pleasure, the Study and Love of BEAUTY be essential; the Study and Love of SYMMETRY and ORDER, on which Beauty depends, must also be essential, in the same respect. ’Tis impossible we can advance the least in any Relish or Taste of outward Symmetry and Order; without acknowledging that the proportionate and regular State, is the truly prosperous and natural in every Subject. The same Features which make Deformity, create Incommodiousness and Disease. And the same Shapes and Proportions which make Beauty, afford Advantage, by adapting to Activity and Use. Even in the imitative or designing Arts (to which our Author so often refers) the Truth or Beauty of every Figure or Statue is measur’d from the Perfection of Nature, in her just adapting of every Limb and Proportion to the Activity, Strength, Dexterity, Life and vigour of the particular Species or Animal design’d. THUS Beauty and Truth are plainly join’d with the Notion of Utility and Convenience, even in the Apprehension of every ingenious Artist, the Architect, the Statuary, or the Painter. ’Tis the same in the Physician’s way. Natural Health is the just Proportion, Truth, and regular Course of things, in a Constitution. ’Tis the inward Beauty of the BODY. And when the Harmony and just Measures of the rising Pulses, the circulating Humours, and the moving Airs or Spirits are disturb’d or lost, Deformity enters, and with it, Calamity and Ruin.16

More briefly, Shaftesbury writes the following in Sensus Communis: AND thus, after all, the most natural Beauty in the World is Honesty, and Moral Truth. For all Beauty is TRUTH. True Features make the Beauty of a Face; and true Proportions the Beauty of Architecture; as true Measures that of Harmony and Musick. In Poetry, which is all Fable, Truth still is the Perfection. And whoever is scholar enough to read the antient Philosopher, or his modern Copists, upon the nature of a Dramatick and Epick Poem, will easily understand this account of Truth.17

The connection between beauty and utility that Shaftesbury has in mind may seem obvious enough – we often call what is well adapted to its intended task beautiful – although subsequent writers such as Hutcheson and Berkeley, Hume and Kant will argue over whether utility is either 16 17

Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Miscellaneous Reflections, III.ii; vol. II, p. 215. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Sensus Communis, IV.iii; vol. I, p. 77.

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a necessary or sufficient condition for beauty, whether it is actual or merely apparent utility that is required for beauty, whether the beauty of utility is a pure case of beauty, and so on. That either beauty or utility can be identified with symmetry may be less obvious, although certainly where we expect symmetry, as in higher animals, its absence is felt as ugly, and many useful things also depend on symmetry to work properly, such as carriages and ships, which characteristically require bilateral symmetry like animals in order to function properly. So there is a certain plausibility to Shaftesbury’s identification of beauty and utility, and the identification of both with symmetry. The connection with truth is less immediately intelligible. In the cases of music and architecture, “truth” may not be anything more than another name for proportion and order. But if we think not of truth in the logical sense of correspondence between a proposition and a reality but rather of truth in the sense in which something is “true to form,” we may better understand what Shaftesbury has in mind in other cases: Something is both beautiful and useful in virtue of being true to form, or fully possessing the properties that something of its kind ought to, and in that sense beauty, goodness, and truth all have the same basis. In the case of “moral truth” in particular, truth may be the full realization of the moral goal of human beings. In order to understand the aesthetics of truth in Shaftesbury and all his followers through modernity, we have to be prepared to understand the notion of truth broadly and flexibly. Does this mean that our pleasure in beauty is in fact just pleasure in the usefulness of an object – not necessarily its usefulness to oneself in particular, to be sure, but its usefulness to our kind in general – or, in the case of “moral truth,” simply pleasure in virtue? If anything, Shaftesbury’s idea seems to be the opposite: Our pleasure in usefulness and virtue is a consequence of our more general pleasure in symmetry, which might be more directly expressed in our sense of beauty and truth as truth to form. At least he puts his assertion that we naturally find “Pleasure and Enjoyment in the very Survey and Contemplation” of “DECORUM, and GRACE” ahead of his assertion that the “proportionate and regular state, is the truly prosperous and Natural in every Subject.” His claim is not that we take pleasure in symmetry and order and displeasure in deformity because the former is useful and the latter dysfunctional, but rather that we take pleasure in usefulness and displeasure in disutility because we take pleasure in symmetry and harmony and displeasure in disorder. This will at least save him from the objection that there are many beautiful things that have no special usefulness, at least not to us, for he can

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claim that usefulness is only a special case of beauty. (This will not save him, however, from the later objection of Edmund Burke that there are many useful things that are downright ugly, again at least to us.)18 There is, however, a further dimension to Shaftesbury’s theory of beauty. While the sort of passage we have just considered suggests the view that symmetry and order, like disinterested virtue, are just intrinsically satisfying, and thus that everything that can be identified with symmetry and order, namely, beauty, utility, and truth in Shaftesbury’s special sense, is likewise intrinsically satisfying, Shaftesbury also suggests that there is an ulterior source of our pleasure in these things. In a crucial passage in The Moralists Shaftesbury argues that the real object of our pleasure in any perception of order and harmony is the mind that is its ultimate source, thus not our own mind as responding to such order but the divine mind that is its cause: “‘The Beautiful, the Fair, the Comely were never in the Matter, but in the Art and Design, never in Body it-self, but in the Form or Forming Power.’ Does not the beautiful Form confess this, and speak the Beauty of the Design, whene’er it strikes you? What is it but the Design which strikes? What is it you admire but MIND, or the Effect of Mind?”19 This then leads to “Three Degrees, or Orders of Beauty”: first, “the Dead Forms . . . which bear a Fashion, and are form’d, whether by Man, or Nature, but have no forming Power, no Action, or Intelligence”; “the second kind, the Forms which Form; that is, which have Intelligence, Action, and Operation,” and which thus clearly include the human artists who are the source of such things as symphonies of music and architectural piles mentioned earlier; and finally “that third Order of Beauty, which forms not only such as we call mere Forms, but even the Forms which Form,” and thus forms even ourselves as artists. “For we our-selves are notable Architects in Matter, and can shew lifeless Bodys brought into Form, and fashion’d by our own hands: but that which fashions even Minds themselves, contains in it-self all the Beautys fashion’d by those Minds; and is consequently, the Principle, Source, and Fountain of all Beauty.”20 The perception of man-made beauty naturally leads our thoughts from the “dead forms” of art to human artists, but from there our thought must continue on to the divine artist who is the source of the second, while in the case of what we ordinarily call “natural” beauty, that is, beauty not intentionally produced by human artists, our thought 18

19 20

See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime, ed. J.T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 1958), Part III, section vi, pp. 104–7. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, The Moralists, III.ii, vol. II, p. 106. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, The Moralists, III.ii, vol. II, pp. 107–8.

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travels directly from the “dead forms” to the natural forces that might have created those forms to the divine artist who is the source of those forces as well. And, it seems, that divine mind is what we ultimately know and admire in all perception of beauty, that with which our own mind harmonizes. Indeed, Shaftesbury finds a spark of divinity in our capacity to appreciate beauty, which is itself the product of divinity: IF BRUTES, therefore . . ., be incapable of knowing and enjoying Beauty, as being Brutes, and having SENSE only (the brutish part) for their own share; it follows, “That neither can MAN by the same Sense or brutish Part, conceive or enjoy Beauty: But all the Beauty and Good he enjoys, is in a nobler way, and by the help of what is noblest, his MIND and REASON.” Here lies his Dignity and highest Interest . . . it shou’d appear from our strict Search, that there is nothing so divine as BEAUTY: which belonging not to Body, nor having any Principle or Existence except in MIND and REASON, is alone discover’d and acquir’d by this diviner Part, when it inspects It-self, the only Object worthy of it-self. . . . ’Tis thus the improving MIND, slightly surveying other Objects, and passing over Bodys and the common Forms (where only a Shadow of Beauty rests) ambitiously presses onward to Its Source, and views the Original of Form and Order in that which is Intelligent.21

If what we ultimately respond to in responding to beauty is divine, then so is our capacity to respond to it. And note, before we continue, that in this passage Shaftesbury has no compunction against identifying the capacity to enjoy beauty with man’s “highest interest”; again, that aesthetic response is disinterested in the sense of being independent of self-interest does not mean that it is not inextricably connected with the deepest human interests in general. Actually, Shaftesbury goes on to argue that while humanly produced works of art must ultimately be regarded as the product of a mind beyond our own, for whom we are as it were an intermediary, there is a kind of beauty for which we ourselves are wholly responsible, namely, the beauty of our “Sentiments, [our] Resolutions, Principles, Determinations, Actions; whatsoever is handsom and noble in the kind; whatever flows from [our] good Understanding, Sense, Knowledg and Will; whatever is ingender’d in [our] Heart.”22 So although both beauty and virtue are forms of order, and our pleasure in each is our fundamental pleasure in order, there is also a difference between them: While we must think of the beauty of art as only in part our own product, the beauty of virtue must be fully our own product. Of course the possibility of human responsibility in the face of 21 22

Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, The Moralists, III.ii; vol. II, pp. 116–17. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, The Moralists, III.ii, vol. II, p. 108.

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divine omnipotence has been an insoluble problem throughout the history of philosophy after the rise of Christianity, but this is not the place to pursue that issue. For our purposes we can attribute to Shaftesbury the view that the truth about the universe is that it is fundamentally orderly, that virtue consists in orderliness in our own sentiments through which we can make our contribution to the order of the universe, that the perception of beauty lies in the perception of the order of the universe, and that the creation of beauty, in those cases where we ourselves are at least the intermediate source of beauty, consists in the creation of things like symphonies and buildings which are also characterized by order and harmony. And in many cases virtue and beauty are even more closely connected than this suggests, for in the mimetic arts, above all literature, beauty lies in the depiction of virtue itself. Before we turn to any further details of Shaftesbury’s specific views about art, however, we should note that he does have something to say about the problem of taste. Shaftesbury assumes that all human minds have a natural affinity for order. This manifests itself even in infancy: “even an Infant [is] pleas’d with the first View of [the] Proportions” of such regular figures as “a round Ball, a Cube, or Dye,” “the Sphere or Globe, the Cylinder and Obelisk,” while “irregular Figures” are “rejected and despis’d.” This leads to the conclusion that “there is in certain Figures a natural Beauty, which the Eye finds as soon as the Object is presented to it,” and that is of particular importance to Shaftesbury because he wants to argue that if there is “a natural Beauty of Figures” there is just as “natural a one of ACTIONS”: No sooner the Eye opens upon Figures, the Ear to Sounds, than straight the Beautiful results, and Grace and Harmony are known and acknowledg’d. No sooner are ACTIONS view’d, no sooner the human Affections and Passions discern’d . . . than straight an inward EYE distinguishes, and sees the Fair and Shapely, the Amiable and Admirable, apart from the Deform’d, the Foul, the Odious, or the Despicable. How is it possible therefore not to own, “That as these Distinctions have their Foundation in Nature, the Discernment it-self is natural, and from NATURE alone?”23

Shaftesbury’s strategy here, a strategy to be repeated by Hutcheson and Hume, is to move from the noncontroversial thesis that even infants demonstrate a natural preference for beauty of physical objects to the perhaps more controversial claim that we have an equally natural moral sense, an inherent recognition of what is right and wrong. But he 23

Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, The Moralists, III.ii, vol. II, p. 111.

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recognizes that once we get past simple cases of beauty like that of balls and cubes, there may be variations in taste, and this would endanger his thesis that there is also a natural unanimity in the perception of right and wrong. He tries to defuse such an objection by arguing that even if there can be disagreements about particular instances of our general values, there is agreement about the general values themselves, and by further intimating that clarity about the underlying source of all our values, moral and aesthetic alike, will avert disagreement in particulars. Thus, although “we found perpetual Variance among Mankind . . . ‘The one affirming, the other denying that this, or that was fit or decent,’” Even by this . . . it appears there is Fitness and Decency in Actions; since the Fit and Decent is in this Controversy ever pre-suppos’d: And whilst Men are at odds about the Subjects, the Thing it-self is universally agreed, for neither is there Agreement in Judgments about other Beautys. ’Tis controverted “Which is the finest Pile, the loveliest Shape or Face:” But without controversy, ’tis allow’d “There is a BEAUTY of each kind.” This no-one goes about to teach: nor is it learnt by any; but confess’d by All. All own the Standard, Rule, and Measure: But in applying it to Things, Disorder arises, Ignorance prevails, Interest and Passion breed Disturbance. Nor can it otherwise happen in the Affairs of Life, whilst those which interests and engages men as Good, is thought different from that which they admire and praise as Honest. – But with us . . . ’tis better settled; since for our parts, we have already decreed “That Beauty and Good are still the same.”24

Just how the identity of beauty and goodness will solve the problem of variation in taste is not spelled out. Clearly Shaftesbury thinks that moral disagreements arise because even though everyone would admit the intrinsic merit of a virtue like honesty, if they confuse virtue with selfinterest they will still end up at loggerheads; a clear understanding of the difference between disinterested virtue and mere self-interest will avert such conflicts. Perhaps he similarly thinks that a clear recognition of the distinction between the disinterested perception of beauty and mere self-interest in the use or consumption of objects will also avert disagreements about beauty, which arise from conflicts among self-interests. In either case, his confidence that there must be a way to avoid conflicts is rooted in his conviction of the ultimate orderliness of the universe, and his confidence that disagreements in taste can always be resolved may be further grounded in his conviction that beauty is not just analogous to virtue but in its paradigmatic cases is the sensible manifestation of virtue.

24

Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, The Moralists, III.ii, vol. II, pp. 111–12.

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If that is so, then the possibility of agreement about the latter should guarantee the possibility of agreement about the former. Let us turn at last to Shaftesbury’s view of the arts, and of the central place of the depiction of virtue in the arts. To be sure, Shaftesbury does not regard all arts as mimetic or representational. We have already come across references to nonrepresentational arts such as symphonic music and architecture where Shaftesbury directly invokes the general properties of order and symmetry to explain our pleasure in them, at least at the first level, before our thought and admiration turn to their human artificers and then beyond that to the divine artificer of those human artificers themselves, the “form that forms.” In the case of representational arts, however, such as painting and literature, Shaftesbury assumes that they paradigmatically represent the human mind in action, and preferably, the orderly and therefore virtuous human mind in action. In the “Letter concerning the Art, or Science of Design” included in Second Characters, he asserts this directly about painting: And when our humour turns us to cultivate these designing arts, our genius, I am persuaded, will naturally carry us over the slighter amusements, and lead us to that higher, more serious, and noble part of imitation, which relates to history, human nature, and the chief degree or order of beauty; I mean that of the rational life, distinct from the merely vegetable and sensible, as in animals, or plants; according to those several degrees or orders of painting.25

In Soliloquy: Or Advice to an Author, the 1710 essay that originally occupied the bulk of volume I of the Characteristicks, Shaftesbury makes the point for the case of literature by first asserting that literature deals with the portrayal of human action and then inferring that the successful author must have a deep knowledge of human mores and virtues. This passage sums up much of Shaftesbury’s thought and then makes this specific point: COU’D we once convince our-selves of what is in it-self so evident; “That in the very nature of Things there must of necessity be the Foundation of a right and wrong TASTE, as well in respect of inward Characters and Features, as of outward Person, Behaviour, and Action;” we shou’d be far more asham’d of Ignorance and wrong Judgment in the former, than in the latter of these Subjects. Even in the Arts, which are mere Imitations of that outward Grace and beauty, we not only confess a Taste; but make it a part of refin’d Breeding, to discover, amidst the many false manners and ill Stiles, 25

Shaftesbury, Second Characters or the Language of Form, ed. Benjamin Rand (1914), reprinted by Thoemmes Press (Bristol, 1999), pp. 20–1.

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the true and natural one, which represents the real Beauty and VENUS of the kind. ’Tis like the moral GRACE, and VENUS, which discovering it-self in the Turns of Character, and the variety of human Affection, is copy’d by the writing Artist. If he knows not this VENUS, these GRACES, nor was ever struck with the Beauty, the Decorum of this inward kind, he can neither paint advantageously after the Life, nor in a feign’d Subject, where he has full scope. For never can he, on these Terms, represent Merit and Virtue, or mark Deformity and Blemish. . . . And thus the Sense of inward Numbers, the Knowledg and Practice of the social Virtues, and the Familiarity and Favour of the moral GRACES are essential to the Character of a deserving Artist, and just Favourite of the MUSES. Thus are the Arts and Virtues mutually Friends.26

In the end, Shaftesbury’s conception of both natural and artistic beauty is based on manifold iterations of a flexible conception of truth: Formal properties of beauty such as symmetry as well as properties such as utility and virtue are all forms of truth; the artist must know the truth about such things in order to create or recreate them; the audience must have a true taste in order to appreciate them; and ultimately any of these forms of truth will lead to a recognition of the even deeper truth that they all have their origin in an even greater mind than our own. It is hard to imagine an aesthetic theory more thoroughly committed to the value of truth than is Shaftesbury’s, a form of Neo-Platonism that thoroughly rejects the idea of Plato’s Republic that the arts cannot give us the most adequate access to even the highest or deepest truths, but that may carry out the promise of Plato’s own Symposium.

2. Aesthetics of Truth II: Wolff The philosopher who established the framework for German thought for the central part of the eighteenth century, just as Shaftesbury did in Britain, was Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Wolff never devoted a whole work to aesthetics, but many of the ideas that would influence subsequent aesthetic theory are contained in his Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man, his “German Metaphysics,” first published in 1720. Although Wolff was not an overt Neo-Platonist but an eclectic philosopher most strongly influenced by the himself eclectic Leibniz, his approach to aesthetics shares much with that of Shaftesbury, above all its interpretation of our pleasure in beauty as an awareness and thus a form of cognition of order which is itself the essence of perfection. 26

Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Soliloquy, III.iii; vol. I, pp. 173–4.

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Wolff was a remarkable intellectual force, a one-man Enlightenment. Originally trained in mathematics and the sciences as well as in philosophy and first appointed to teach mathematics at the Prussian-owned and Pietist-dominated university in Halle, he was inspired by both the mathematical and philosophical genius of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646– 1716), but published a vast systematic statement of a philosophy that was constructed partly although by no means wholly on Leibnizian lines in a way that Leibniz himself never did. Wolff held his position at Halle until 1723, when he was banished by the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm I for his doctrine of determinism, which the king was persuaded would excuse the desertion of soldiers as inevitable; Wolff was then welcomed at the more liberal Hessian university of Marburg, where he remained until 1740, when the new Prussian king, the “enlightened” Friedrich II (“Frederick the Great”), persuaded him to return to Halle, where he was welcomed with open arms and taught for the remainder of his life. Wolff’s collected works include over thirty stout volumes in German, including German versions of his logic, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, and teleology as well as a four-volume encyclopedia of mathematical subjects, much of which was composed during his first period at Halle, and then, beginning with his move to Marburg, where he sought a more international audience, forty volumes in Latin, with expanded versions of the logic, the components of metaphysics including ontology, rational cosmology, empirical psychology, rational psychology, and natural psychology, as well as another four-volume mathematical compendium, seven volumes on ethics, and no fewer than twelve volumes on political philosophy and economics. In all of this vast output, the only thing that might look like a work specifically in aesthetics is a treatise on architecture included in his encyclopedia of mathematics. That very placement indicates that Wolff regarded the discussion of architecture as part of the theory of science rather than art; and in the Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General that prefaces the Latin logic that is in turn the first volume of his Latin restatement of his system, Wolff states more generally that a “philosophy of the arts” is possible, but as part of “technics or technology,” “the science of the arts and of the works of art.”27 Here Wolff uses the term “art” (ars) in the ancient sense of τεχνη, which means any form of craft requiring both aptitude and training, 27

Christian Wolff, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, tran. Richard J. Blackwell (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), §71, p. 38. This is one of the very few of Wolff’s works ever to have been translated into English.

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rather than in the specifically modern sense of “fine art.” In his German works, Wolff uses the word Kunst in the same broad way. Even with regard to something closer to the fine arts, however, he says that “There could also be a philosophy of the liberal arts, if they were reduced to the form of a science. . . . one might talk about rhetorical philosophy, poetical philosophy, etc.”28 Wolff certainly does not have the idea of the fine arts as a domain of human production and response that differs in some essential way from all other forms of human production and response, thus he does not have the idea of aesthetics as a discipline that will focus on what distinguishes the fine arts and our response to them from everything else. Nevertheless, in the course of his works he introduces some ideas about both the fine arts and our response to them that will be seminal for the next half-century of German thought.29 Although Wolff by no means simply systematized the more scattered philosophy of Leibniz, in the areas of his thought that we can with the benefit of hindsight characterize as aesthetics he did begin from some Leibnizian notions. In particular, Wolff adopted Leibniz’s conception of cognition: While for Leibniz, at least in his final works, such as the Monadology of 1714, there were two fundamental properties of mental substances (and all substances were ultimately mental “monads”), namely, “perception” and “appetition,”30 for Wolff there was only one, namely, perception or “representation,” with appetition or will being reduced to a kind of representation (namely, the representation of something as good that leads to action), but he nevertheless adopted Leibniz’s conception of cognition in general and sensory perception in particular. The two key ideas that Wolff takes from Leibniz’s conception of cognition are the characterization of sensory perception as a clear but confused rather than distinct perception of things that could at least in principle be known both clearly and distinctly by the intellect, and the characterization of pleasure as the sensory, and thus clear but confused, perception of the perfection of things. While much of Leibniz’s work was unpublished during his lifetime and long after, his conception of sensory perception was presented, long before his development of the full-blown monadology, in a paper entitled “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas” that was published in the widely read Acta Eruditorum in 1684. Here Leibniz stated that “Knowledge is clear . . . when it makes 28 29

30

Wolff, Preliminary Discourse, §72, p. 39. The only extensive discussion in English of Wolff’s contribution to aesthetics is Beiser, Diotima’s Children, ch. 2, pp. 45–71, Leibniz, Monadology, §§14–16; Philosophical Papers and Letters, p. 644.

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it possible for me to recognize the thing represented,” but that it is “confused when I cannot enumerate one by one the marks which are sufficient to distinguish the thing from others, even though the thing may in truth have such marks and constituents into which its concept can be resolved.” Conversely, knowledge is both clear and distinct when one can not only clearly distinguish its object from other objects but can also enumerate the “marks” or properties of the object on which that distinction is based. Leibniz then says that sensory perception is clear but indistinct or confused knowledge: “Thus, we know colors, odors, flavors, and other particular objects of the senses clearly enough and discern them from each other but only by the simple evidence of the senses and not by marks that can be expressed.” He then illustrates his general thesis about sense perception with a remark about the perception and judgment of art: “Likewise we sometimes see painters and other artists correctly judge what has been done well or badly; yet they are often unable to give a reason for their judgment but tell the inquirer that the work which displeases them lacks ‘something, I know not what.’”31 This illustration would be decisive for Wolff and all of those whom he in turn influenced.32 The second idea that Wolff took over from Leibniz is that pleasure is itself the sensory perception of the perfection existing in an object. For Leibniz and his followers, there is one sense in which all of the properties of actually existing objects can be regarded as perfections, since they held that the actual world is the one selected to exist by God from among all possible worlds precisely because it is the most perfect of all possible worlds, and thus each object in the actual world and all of its properties must in some way at least contribute to the maximal perfection of the actual world. But they also used the concept of perfection in a more ordinary way, in which some actual objects have specific perfections that others do not, and it is this sense of perfection that Leibniz employed when he stated that Pleasure is the feeling of a perfection or an excellence, whether in ourselves or in something else. For the perfection of other beings is also agreeable, such as understanding, courage, and especially beauty in another human being, or in an animal or even in a lifeless creation, a painting or a work of craftsmanship, as well. 31

32

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas,” in Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, p. 291. On Leibniz’s analysis of sense perception and his use of the traditional “je ne sais quoi” formulation, see also Beiser, Diotima’s Children, ch. 1, especially pp. 37–41.

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Leibniz also holds that the perfection that we perceive in other objects is in some sense communicated to ourselves, although he does not say that our pleasure in the perception of perfection is actually directed at the self-perfection that is thereby caused: “For the image of such perfection in others, impressed upon us, causes some of this perfection to be implanted and aroused within ourselves. There is thus no doubt that he who consorts much with excellent people or things becomes himself more excellent.”33 But there is certainly a nascent view here that the perception of beauty in art, although not only in art, is both intrinsically pleasurable and also instrumentally valuable because it leads to self-improvement. In the very first paragraph of his Theodicy of 1710, the only complete book that Leibniz published in his lifetime and a very well-known work among his contemporaries, Leibniz characterizes love rather than pleasure in similar terms: Love is that mental state which makes us take pleasure in the perfections of the object of our love, and there is nothing more perfect than God, nor any greater delight than in him. The perfections of God are those of our souls, but he possesses them in boundless measure . . . there is in us some power, some knowledge, some goodness, but in God they are all in their entirety. Order, proportion, harmony delight us; painting and music are samples of these: God is all order; he always keeps truth of proportions, he makes universal harmony; all beauty is an effusion of his rays.34

Leibniz here espouses a position quite close to Shaftesbury’s: We respond with deep pleasure to the appearance of order and harmony in external objects, but even more so to the capacity of thinking beings such as ourselves to produce forms with order and harmony, and most of all to the divine giver of form who is the source of all else. Indeed, Leibniz closely studied Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks when they appeared in the year following his own Theodicy, and wrote of it that “The turn of the discourse, its style, the dialogue, the new Platonism, ravished me and brought me to a state of ecstasy. . . . From the first I found in it almost all of my Theodicy. . . . The universe all of one piece, its beauty, its universal harmony, the disappearance of real evil, especially in relation to the whole, the unity of true substances, and the great unity of the supreme substance of which

33

34

Both quotations from Leibniz, “On Wisdom” (1690s), in Philosophical Papers and Letters, p. 425. Leibniz, Theodicy, ed. and abridged [from the 1893 translation by E.M. Huggard] Diogenes Allen (Indianapolis, Ind: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), Preface, p. 1.

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all other things are merely emanations and imitations are here put in the most beautiful daylight.”35 This is the background from which Wolff’s own hints toward aesthetics emerged, although he does not make the theological implications of his aesthetics as explicit as Leibniz does. Wolff introduces the central concepts and principles of his ontology in the second chapter of his German metaphysics, which deals with “The first grounds of our cognition and all things in general.”36 After expounding the formal principles that are the basis of all truth, namely, the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, Wolff introduces the concept that is the substantive basis of his ontology, namely, the concept of perfection. He defines perfection as the “harmony” or “concordance” (Zusammenstimmung) of a manifold or multiplicity of objects or parts of objects – or as he says in Latin, perfectio est consensus in varietate37 – and illustrates this abstract definition with the example of a work of technology: “E.g., one judges the perfection of a clock from its correctly displaying the hours and their parts. It is however composed of many parts, and these and their composition are aimed at the hands displaying correctly the hours and their parts. Thus in a clock one finds manifold things, that are all in concordance with one another.”38 Here Wolff defines perfection in both formal and substantive terms: formally, simply as the order or harmony of the parts in a whole; but substantively, as the suitability of that order or harmony of parts for achieving the aim that is intended for the whole, such as accurately telling time in the case of a clock. When we turn shortly to Wolff’s conceptions of the perfections of the particular forms of art in the subsequent sense of fine art that he mentions, we will see that he always has in mind both formal and substantive perfections for any particular art. We should also note here that Wolff identifies order in things with truth. He says that “Since everything has its sufficient ground why it is, there 35

36

37

38

Leibniz, “Remarks on the three volumes entitled Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times” (1712), in Philosophical Papers and Letters, p. 633. Christian Wolff, Metafisica Tedesca, con le Annotazione alla Metafisica Tedesca, ed. Raffaele Ciafardone (Milan: Bompiani, 2003), p. 66. This edition presents Wolff’s German and an Italian translation on facing pages; the Italian translation may not help many readers of the present book, but this is the only edition of Wolff’s original text that is newly set in modern type rather than photographically reproducing the eighteenth-century Fraktur in which his German works were set. Since I refer only to the German text, however, I cite this edition as German Metaphysics. Wolff, Philosophia Prima sive Ontologia, new edition (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Renger, 1736), reprint ed. Jean Ecole (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1962), §503, p. 390. Wolff, German Metaphysics, §152, p. 152.

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must also always be a sufficient ground for why in simple things the alterations succeed one another just so and not otherwise, and why in composite things their parts are juxtaposed just thus and not otherwise, and also their alterations succeed one another just so and not otherwise.” He contrasts this order with the disorder that reigns in dreams, and then says that “Accordingly truth is nothing other than order in the alterations of things while the dream is disorder in the alteration of things.”39 In a 1729 lecture on “The enjoyment that one can derive from the cognition of truth,” Wolff similarly says that “the general truth that one ascribes to things themselves is nothing other than the order that is to be found in the manifoldness of those things that exist simultaneously or successively.”40 So Wolff does not in the first instance define truth in the usual modern ways, that is, semantically, as a correspondence between a linguistic representation and the object that is represented, or, epistemically, as a relation between a mental representation and an external reality; he defines it as an objective property consisting in coherence within things themselves, which is precisely what perfection consists in as well. Thus, his position that pleasure is a response to truth might seem cognitivist only in a very loose sense, in which a response to “truth” is really just an awareness of order. But, as we shall see when we come to Wolff’s treatment of at least one fine art, when he treats the substantive perfection of painting as veridical representation, there is also a more specifically cognitivist cast to Wolff’s aesthetics. But we are not ready to turn to Wolff’s account of painting yet; we must instead continue with his basic account of cognition and perception. Still following Leibniz, Wolff next defines clarity and distinctness and indistinctness in cognition. Thoughts are clear “when we know well what we think, and can distinguish that from other things”; they are obscure if we cannot even distinguish the objects of our thoughts from other objects.41 Clear thoughts are also distinct if we not only know what objects we are thinking of but if “our thoughts are also clear with respect to their parts or the manifold that is to be found in them,”42 and are otherwise indistinct or confused. Wolff then defines sensations (Empfindungen) as those thoughts “which have their ground in the alterations of the members 39 40

41 42

Wolff, German Metaphysics, §142, pp. 146–8. Wolff, “On the enjoyment that one can derive from the cognition of truth,” Kleine Philosophische Schriften (Halle: Renger, 1740; modern reprint Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1981), vol. 5, §3, p. 220. Wolff, German Metaphysics, §§198–9, p. 188. Wolff, German Metaphysics, §207, p. 194.

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of our body and which are occasioned by corporeal things outside us,” and the “capacity for having sensations as the senses.”43 He then adopts Leibniz’s view that sensations or sensory perceptions are typically clear but indistinct or confused: “E.g., if I see red color, than I know well to distinguish it from green, yellow, and other colors, and accordingly the thought that I have of it is clear. But I cannot determine the difference, and hence cannot say if someone asks me wherein the red color differs from the green or another. Thus my thought of it is indistinct.”44 Noticing something that Leibniz had not mentioned, Wolff observes that sensations come in differing degrees of clarity,45 but they are nevertheless all indistinct to some degree. This means that at least in principle a purely intellectual or conceptual representation is always a better source of knowledge of its object than is a sensory representation of it. This in turn means that an aesthetic perception of a perfection is always a less than optimal cognition of that perfection, for having described sense perception or sensory cognition as clear but indistinct or confused, Wolff next defines pleasure as the sensory or “intuitive” cognition of perfection. In his German metaphysics, he writes that “Insofar as we intuit perfection, pleasure arises in us, thus pleasure is nothing other than an intuition of perfection, as Descartes already remarked.”46 In the Latin Psychologia Empirica, which greatly expands his description of the functions of the human mind given in the German metaphysics, he writes “Pleasure is the intuition or intuitive cognition of any kind of perfection, whether true or apparent.”47 In this work he also reminds us of his equation of sensory with clear but confused cognition with this restatement: “Pleasure and displeasure originate in the confused perception of perfection and imperfection.”48 Wolff’s successors would struggle to avoid the limitations on the cognitive significance of aesthetic response that follow from his definition of pleasure as a kind of sense perception and the limits he places on the cognitive significance of sense perception. While Wolff’s basic account of pleasure is problematic, he does provide a straightforward account of beauty. Wolff defines beauty as the perfection of an object insofar as it can in fact be perceived by us with and 43 44 45 46 47

48

Wolff, German Metaphysics, §220, p. 202. Wolff, German Metaphyics, §214, p. 198. Wolff, German Metaphysics, §224, p. 206. Wolff, German Metaphysics, §404, p. 344. Wolff, Psychologia Empirica, new edition (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Renger, 1738; modern reprint Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), §511, p. 389. Wolff, Psychologia Empirica, §536, pp. 414–15.

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through the feeling of pleasure: “Beauty consists in the perfection of a thing, insofar as it is suitable for producing pleasure in us.”49 This definition enunciates a clear position on the ontological status of beauty, which will often be vexed in the eighteenth century: Beauty is an objective property, founded in the perfection of things, but it is also a relational rather than intrinsic property, for it is attributed to perfection only insofar as there are subjects like us who can perceive it sensorily; given perceivers like us, beauty is coextensive with or emergent from perfection, but in a universe without such perceivers perfection would not be equivalent to beauty.50 Thus far we have considered only Wolff’s most abstract definition of perfection and therefore of beauty, namely, that it is unity in variety or the coherence of a manifold insofar as we can perceive that through the sensation of pleasure. When he mentions or discusses specific arts, however, Wolff invokes more specific conceptions of perfection and thus provides more concrete accounts of the beauties of those arts. In the case of the visual arts of painting and sculpture, Wolff locates their perfection in imitation or veridical representation, while other arts, some of which might be considered technologies rather than fine arts under the “modern conception of the arts,” find their perfections in the fulfillment of intended uses. He uses the examples of painting, horology, and architecture in the German metaphysics to illustrate his claim that pleasure arises from the intuition of perfection: If I see a painting that is similar to the object that it is supposed to represent, and contemplate its similarity, I take pleasure in this. Now the perfection of a painting consists in its similarity. For since a painting is nothing other than a representation of a given object on a tablet or flat surface, everything in it is harmonious if nothing can be discerned in it that one does not also perceive in the thing itself. If it is so made, then it is perfect; thus it is also similar. Thus the similarity is the perfection of the painting; and since the pleasure arises from the intuition of the similarity, thus it arises from the intuition of the perfection. I have previously shown that the perfection of a clock arises from the correct indication of the hour and its

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Wolff, Psychologia Empirica, §544, p. 420. See also Beiser’s remark that on Wolff’s theory “there is both a subjective and objective element in beauty,” the objective element being the perfection of the object and the subjective element the feeling of pleasure with which subjects like us perceive perfection (Diotima’s Children, p. 63). Beiser more generally opposes the “objectivism” of beauty in what he calls the “rationalist” tradition and the “subjectivism” of it in the “empiricist” tradition, but in fact the recognition of the essentially relational character of beauty, which Beiser acknowledges in his account of Wolff, is common to both traditions.

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parts. Whoever sees a clock that indicates the time precisely takes pleasure in that. And thus the pleasure consists here too in an intuitive cognition of perfection. Likewise, if a connoisseur of architecture contemplates a building that has been constructed in accordance with the rules of architecture, he thereby cognizes its perfection. But now since experience confirms that he has pleasure in that, it is clear again that pleasure consists in the intuition of perfection.51

Wolff frequently reiterates that the perfection of painting or sculpture consists in accurate representation without further amplification;52 he is simply using what he takes to be a noncontroversial fact about painting to confirm his connection of pleasure with the intuition of perfection. He thus sees a cognitivist interpretation of the specific perfection of the visual arts as something that needs no special explanation or defense. In his extended discussion of architecture, however, he reveals a more subtle conception of the perfections and thus the “rules” of architecture than is evident in this passage. Wolff’s discussion of architecture makes it clear that in order for us to perceive it as beautiful, a building must display both the formal perfection of unity amid variety and the substantive perfection of being suitable, indeed comfortable for its intended use. Wolff does not suggest that our pleasure in architecture is cognitive in the specific sense of being a response to veridical representation; it is cognitive only in the more general sense of being an awareness of perfection. And that perfection itself can be twofold: the formal perfection of unity in multiplicity, and the material perfection of suitability to a specific function. Wolff begins his treatise, Foundations of Architecture, with the claim that “architecture is a science for constructing a building so that it is in complete correspondence with the intentions of the architect.”53 This locates the harmony or agreement in which perfection always consists in the relation between the intentions of the architect and the building that results from his plans and supervision. However, as he proceeds, Wolff makes it clear that the intention of an architect is always to produce a structure that is both formally beautiful and useful and comfortable, so the perfection that subsists in the relation between intention and

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53

Wolff, German Metaphysics, §404, p. 344. See “On the enjoyment that can be derived from the cognition of truth,” §7, p. 257, and Psychologia Empirica, §512, pp. 389–90, and §544, pp. 420–1. Wolff, Anfangsgründe der Baukunst (The Foundations of Architecture), in Anfangsgründe aller mathematischen Wissenschaften, new edition (Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Halle: Renger, 1750–7, reprint Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1999), vols. 12–15, §1, p. 305.

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outcome in turn consists in the perfection of both form and utility in the building itself. Thus, Wolff argues on the one hand that “A building is space that is enclosed by art in order that certain functions can proceed there securely and unhindered,”54 and that “A building is comfortable if all necessary functions can proceed within it without hindrance and vexation.”55 These definitions form the basis for a requirement of perfection in the utility of a building. On the other hand, however, Wolff also introduces his standard definition of beauty, namely, “Beauty is perfection or the necessary appearance thereof, insofar as the former or the latter is perceived, and causes a pleasure in us,”56 and then asserts that “A building must be constructed beautifully and decoratively.”57 This is the basis for the requirement of formal rather than utilitarian perfection in a building. Through the remainder of the treatise, both conceptions of perfection are at work. Thus, Wolff argues that the parts of buildings should exemplify certain proportions simply because they are pleasing to the eye,58 and gives a lengthy analysis of the proportions of the five canonical orders of columns which is based throughout on the assumption that certain proportions simply appear more harmonious to us than others – this is indeed the rationale for Wolff’s inclusion of this treatise in his mathematical compendium. But Wolff gives equal time to considerations of utility, beginning with a discussion of the sturdiness of building materials, continuing through discussions of structural matters, such as that lower stories of columns must be heavier than higher ones because they carry more weight and that the pitch of roofs must be determined by balancing the need to shed rain and snow (which points toward a steeper pitch) with the weight of the roof itself (which would argue for less pitch), and concluding with discussions of such matters as the proper sizing of windows for both illumination and the human pleasure of looking out on the passing scene, the location of staircases for proper circulation, and the construction of privies with proper ventilation and seats that can remain clean. Our overall response to a building will thus be a response to both its formal and material perfection, and, perhaps one could add, to the harmony between those forms of perfection as itself another layer of perfection.59 54 55 56 57 58 59

Wolff, Foundations of Architecture, §4, p. 306. Wolff, Foundations of Architecture, §7, p. 307. Wolff, Foundations of Architecture, §8, p. 307. Wolff, Foundations of Architecture, §18, p. 309. Wolff, Foundations of Architecture, §§20–1, pp. 310–11. Wolff thus adheres to the traditional treatment of architecture as aiming at both beauty and utility that we find in the earliest surviving treatise on architecture, the Ten Books of

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Wolff does not explicitly extend this complex analysis of perfection to other arts, although it is not difficult to imagine how that extension might go: In painting we might respond to formal features of composition as well as to the accuracy of depiction, in sculpture we might respond to the material beauty of the marble or bronze and the formal beauty of the composition as well as to the accuracy of depiction, and so on. One more point about Wolff’s treatment of architecture that could be extended to other arts as well is his location of formal beauty in the appearance of the parts of a structure and their relation. We saw earlier that in his general definition of beauty in his Ontologia Wolff states that beauty consists in the true or apparent perfection of an object. However, in his lecture on the enjoyment of the cognition of truth, Wolff argues that our greatest pleasure consists in the cognition of truth and, conversely, our greatest displeasure in deception: “No enjoyment can be compared with that which one obtains from the cognition of truth,”60 so likewise no displeasure can be compared to that which arises from deception about the truth. Thus Wolff cannot mean that a genuine pleasure can arise from a merely apparent perfection that is not actually a perfection at all. Instead, he must mean that pleasure arises from genuine perfection that appears to us in a way that is adapted to our manner of perception, or from something that both is and appears to us to be a perfection. This is a further way in which the concept of truth functions in Wolff’s aesthetics: We must at some level be aware that the perfection to which we respond is true rather than merely apparent perfection.61 Wolff illustrates this idea in the treatise on architecture with his discussion of the height of columns, where he recommends departure from the normal rules of proportion so that columns seen from below will look proportional and in that regard perfect: “The upper columns must be made higher than they should be if one were to see them up close. Thus in the Colosseum in Rome the upmost columns are higher than those

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Vitruvius. For a brief account of Vitruvius’s theory, see Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present, trans. Ronald Taylor, Elsie Callander, and Antony Wood (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), ch. 1, pp. 21–9. For my account of the Vitruvian character of philosophers’ views of architecture prior to Kant, see my “Kant and the Philosophy of Architecture,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2011): 7–19, on Wolff specifically pp. 8–9. Wolff, “On the enjoyment that can be derived from the cognition of truth,” §1, p. 213. The essay on the cognition of truth thus provides evidence against the view that Beiser attributes to Wolff on the basis of the Psychologia empirica, that we can take pleasure in apparent as well as genuine perfection (Diotima’s Children, p. 61).

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that stand below because from a distance they appear smaller.”62 Here the look of proportionality is to be maintained, but there is no real deception involved; on the contrary, the departure from the ordinary rules is required to compensate the tendency of our senses to misjudge the size of remote objects in the first place. More generally, Wolff argues that the parts of a structure should be disposed so as “to be helpful to the soul in distinctly grasping the form of the building without effort,” since “that pleases us which we can readily grasp” and accessibility to our manner of perception is therefore a genuine part of the perfection of an object.63 Several further implications of Wolff’s position that the cognition of truth is the greatest source of human enjoyment should be noted here. The first is that Wolff’s position puts him at odds with his contemporary Du Bos. The latter, as we see in the next section, recommends aesthetic experience as an alternative to difficult inquiry that can become boring. Wolff, by contrast, argues that “even if my mind has become exhausted from other exercises, I can in turn seek my enjoyment in learning, and thereby cheer myself up, indeed even liberate myself from the vexation that I might have.” Indeed, Wolff explains that it is precisely his pleasure in cognition that has led him to seek the most orderly possible presentation of the proofs in his Latin geometry.64 Second, Wolff’s association of pleasure with the cognition of perfection implies that in all cases of beauty what we take pleasure in is cognition of the perfection, or knowledge that the object has a certain perfection, not in the direct use or experience of the perfection. Thus, even where the perfection consists in the suitability of an object for its intended function, we take our primary pleasure in the knowledge that the object is suitable for its function, not in the actual use of the object itself. This attitude is reflected throughout Wolff’s treatise on architecture, where the emphasis is on the pleasure in knowing that a building or a component of one is suited to its function, not simply on enjoying its functionality. This can seem counterintuitive. Finally, Wolff’s thesis that the greatest enjoyment comes from cognition of truth suggests that the more distinctly truth is known, the greater pleasure there will be. But this suggests that ultimately the pleasure in the intuitive perception of beauty, which is clear but confused or indistinct, will pale beside the pleasure of scientific knowledge that is both clear and distinct. This is a conclusion that many subsequent aestheticians 62 63 64

Wolff, Foundations of Architecture, §213, p. 415. Wolff, Foundations of Architecture, §39, p. 314. Wolff, “On the enjoyment that can be derived from the cognition of truth,” §6, p. 254.

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will resist, and they will therefore seek alternatives to Wolff’s cognitivist account of pleasure in beauty. One great exception to this tendency will be the German Idealists of a century later, especially G.W.F. Hegel, who in his lectures on aesthetics given from 1819 to 1828 accepts Wolff’s essentially cognitivist approach to aesthetics and precisely for that reason argues that art must ultimately give way to philosophy, or “absolute knowing.” As we will see in the next volume, Hegel thus firmly grasps the implications of an aesthetics of truth. The aesthetics of play has no such implication, and thus many writers in the eighteenth century who were interested in defending the significance of the aesthetic experience of both nature and art developed the aesthetics of play rather than truth. We will shortly consider how writers in Britain, France, and Germany developed the aesthetics of play or at least combined the aesthetics of truth with the aesthetics of play in order to avoid the implication that Hegel would make explicit a century after Wolff laid the grounds for it. Before leaving Wolff, however, we must ask about the moral and religious implications of Wolff’s contributions to aesthetics. As we have seen, Wolff equates perfection, which is the object of pleasure in all contexts including those subsequently labeled aesthetic, with an objective sense of truth. However, and in this regard most unlike the German aestheticians of the next several generations who are so strongly influenced by him in other regards, he has nothing to say about the arts that are typically paradigmatic for those who ground their aesthetics on the notions of truth and/or emotional impact rather than that of play, namely, literature, especially poetry and drama. Thus he does not consider the paradox of tragedy, which raises powerful feelings of both attraction and aversion, and which arises for every eighteenthcentury writer who thinks about literature, nor does he emphasize the moral benefits of uplifting literature, as so many others do. Indeed, he has nothing explicit to say about the moral benefits of aesthetic experience, nor does he directly consider the religious significance of such experience in any of his discussions of it. Nevertheless, it is clear that aesthetic experience does have religious significance for Wolff. For Wolff’s philosophy culminates in a religious teleology. For Wolff, the most perfect and therefore most orderly of all possible worlds exists for a reason, namely, to mirror the perfection of God, and sentient and cognizant beings such as ourselves exist for a reason, namely, to recognize and admire the perfection of God that is mirrored in the perfection of things in the world and of the world as a whole. The perfection that is added to the natural world through human artistry is also part of the perfection

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of the world that emanates from and mirrors the perfection of God, so in admiring the perfection of art we are performing part of our larger function in the world, namely, admiring the perfection of God. In this regard, Wolff’s position on the significance of beauty is quite close to that of Shaftesbury, although his language is Leibnizian rather than NeoPlatonic (although, as we saw, Leibniz explicitly associated himself with Shaftesbury’s “new Platonism”). Wolff states the premise of his teleology quite clearly in a work devoted entirely to that subject, the Rational Thoughts on the Aims of Natural Things, or “German teleology.” There he declares that “The chief aim of the world is this, that we should cognize the perfection of God from it. Now if God would attain this aim, he also had to arrange the world in such a way that a rational being could extract from the contemplation of it grounds that would allow him to infer with certainty the properties of God and what can be known about him.”65 Several sections later, he uses the metaphor of the mirror to describe the relation between God, the world, and we who look at the mirror: “Now if the world is to be a mirror of the wisdom of God, then we must encounter divine aims in it and perceive the means by which he attains these aims. . . . And accordingly the connection of things in the world with one another makes it into a mirror of [God’s] wisdom.”66 Wolff writes as a spokesman for the Enlightenment, and he is emphatic that God reveals his wisdom and power not by intervening in the course of the world by means of miracles, but rather by designing everything in the world as if it were all smoothly running machines that can achieve his goals without further intervention.67 This might seem to leave no room at all for the human creation of art, which subsequent eighteenth-century writers such as Kant will conceive of as a production of genius that is the complete opposite of anything mechanical. But for Wolff our ability to produce works of art is another manifestation of the perfection of the world – of which we are a part – and in turn of God. This becomes clear in a passage in his lecture on the enjoyment of knowledge in which Wolff argues that in the final analysis we find our greatest enjoyment in the knowledge of perfection of things in the world because that is a reflection of the perfection of God, and treats his familiar examples of works of human artistry as cases of perfection like 65

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Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken über die Absichten der natürlichen Dinge, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1726; modern reprint Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1980), §8, p. 6. Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedanckan, §14, pp. 18–19. See also German Metaphysics, §1045, p. 802. See German Metaphysics, §1037, p. 796.

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any others. This passage is worth quoting at length, because it sums up so much about Wolff’s philosophy and the place of art in it: The ancients have long known that every thing is perfect, and from the concept of perfection I have thoroughly demonstrated in what way a perfection can be ascribed to things. Now the cognition of the perfection in things also belongs to the cognition of truth. . . . Hence, since an enjoyment arises from the intuition of perfection, the mind that cognizes it must be transported into the greatest enjoyment if only it directs its attention to perfection. The perfection of things is judged in accordance with their aims. And thus it comes about that the science of aims (Teleologia) or the treatment of the final ends of things arouse so much enjoyment. . . . Entirely common examples demonstrate that the cognition of the perfection of things is connected with an enjoyment. It is in this way that one who understands art enjoys the similarity of a painting with the object that it represents. . . . Now everyone knows that the perfection of a painting consists in this similarity. Likewise a connoisseur of astronomy enjoys a clock if it is in harmony with the diurnal motion of the heavens to such an extent that over several days it hardly loses a second. But who does not know that the perfection of a clock consists in its indicating the time accurately?. . . . I have provided a concept of perfection which I have found to be fruitful in natural theology, in the doctrine of the soul, in the doctrine of morals and statecraft, indeed even in the doctrine of nature and the science of art (Technologia), which I have counted among the sciences that belong to philosophy.68

In this passage, Wolff draws no distinction between the works of human art that are the subject of the “science of art” and the works of nature, nor for that matter any distinction between the works of human art that are the subject of the “science of art” and those human creations that are the subjects of the “doctrine of morals and statecraft”: They are all forms of perfection which, in a teleological natural theology, ultimately mirror the perfection of God and which we can come to recognize as doing so. And no doubt Wolff hardly thought it necessary to spell out the moral benefits of such a recognition. As we will subsequently see, the philosophers who followed Wolff in Germany would develop positive implications for aesthetic experience from his conception of sense perception, undermine the notion that the fine arts can be understood as part of “technology,” pay far more attention than he did to literature (and in some cases correspondingly less attention to the visual arts and especially to applied arts such as architecture and horology), and substitute a discourse on the moral benefits 68

Wolff, “On the enjoyment that can be derived from the cognition of truth,” §7, pp. 256–8.

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of aesthetic experience for Wolff’s theological teleology. Only gradually, however, would they make room for a recognition of the emotional impact of art, which has been completely lacking from Wolff’s account, and even more gradually make room for the recognition of mental play as well as truth and feeling as a fundamental source of our pleasure in the aesthetic. As we will now see, these themes were being introduced in the decade of the 1710s by the Englishman Joseph Addison; the Swiss Pierre Crousaz, writing in French; and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Du Bos.

3. The Introduction of Feeling and Play: Addison, Crousaz, and Du Bos Addison From June 21 to July 3, 1712, the English politician and man of letters Joseph Addison (1672–1719) published a series of eleven essays “On the Pleasures of the Imagination”69 in the Spectator, the immensely popular magazine or newsletter on politics, arts, and manners that he co-edited (and pretty much co-authored) with Richard Steele from March 1711 to November 1714. Addison, who was educated in the classics at Queen’s College, Oxford, and was then a Fellow at Magdalen College, during which period he published a translation of Virgil’s Georgics, before entering a diplomatic and parliamentary career, was even less of a professional philosopher than his almost exact contemporary Shaftesbury and is rather remembered primarily for his journalism as well as one very popular play: In addition to producing, with or without Steele, five other series of popular essays (the Tatler, 1709–11; the Whig Examiner, 1710; the Guardian, 1713; the Freeholder, 1715–16; and The Old Whig, 1718), Addison wrote Cato: A Tragedy, which would be popular throughout the eighteenth century;70 Evidences of the Christian Religion; Discourse on Antient and Modern Learning, and a vast array of other forms of literature, including an account of his travels in Italy from 1701 to 1703, poetry, translations, and even an opera. But in spite of his lack of any specifically philosophical training, he made a huge contribution to philosophical 69

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According to the editor of the standard modern edition of The Spectator, the eleven essays were originally drafted as a single piece; see The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. III, p. 535 n. 1. A modern edition of Cato, which was important for eighteenth-century moral and political thought, has been edited by Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004).

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aesthetics. His brief and elegant essays introduced a new idea of fundamental importance for eighteenth-century and indeed much of modern aesthetics: The idea that aesthetic response is grounded in a free play of our mental powers, a play that is intrinsically pleasurable just because it is free and freedom itself is a deep source of satisfaction for us, although this play also may have further cognitive and moral benefits. Further, Addison introduced a division of the objects of aesthetic response into the grand, the novel, and the beautiful that would become paradigmatic for much of the next century; although eventually the idea of novelty would become absorbed into the explanation of our pleasures in beauty and sublimity rather than remaining an independent aesthetic category, Addison’s transformation of the concept of grandeur from a concept of poetic style, as it had been in the famous On the Sublime (περι ‘υψους) by the first- or second-century writer known as Pseudo-Longinus,71 into one of the fundamental categories of the aesthetic experience of nature as well as art remained paradigmatic for the entire century.72 Meanwhile, any notion of truth as a fundamental object of aesthetic response disappeared completely from Addison’s account of the pleasures of the imagination. Thus, within a year of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks, Addison inaugurated a completely new and alternative conception of the sources of aesthetic pleasure, although one that would over the next three centuries then become intertwined in all sorts of ways with the traditional idea that aesthetic experience is a distinctive experience of truth. Addison begins his essays with a description of the pleasures of sight, characterizes the imagination or “fancy” as dealing in the first instance with ideas that “arise from visible Objects, either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their Ideas into our Minds by Paintings, Statues, Descriptions, or any the like Occasion,”73 and classifies all pleasures of the imagination that do not derive directly from ideas of sight but from indirect associations with such ideas as “secondary.” The central idea of Addison’s aesthetics is evident at once: “Our Sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our Senses. It fills the Mind 71

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The Greek text of the work became available in the sixteenth century and was repeatedly published during the seventeenth century. There was an influential French translation by Nicolas Despreaux Boileau in 1674. An English translation was published at Oxford in 1698 before the better known version by William Smith was published in 1739. On Addison’s role in establishing the centrality of the sublime as an aesthetic category in the eighteenth century, see Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (originally 1935), with a new preface by the author (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), pp. 56–60. The Spectator, 411, Saturday, June 21, 1712; vol. III, pp. 536–7.

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with the largest Variety of Ideas, converses with its Objects at the greatest Distance, and continues the longest in Action without being tired or satiated with its proper Enjoyments.”74 What we enjoy in sight is the activity of our own mind, facilitated by the variety of ideas that an object of sight or imagination affords us – in other words, free play with the ideas of sight and imagination. This theme is amplified in Addison’s discussion of the trichotomy “Greatness, Novelty, or Beauty.”75 Contrary to some subsequent accounts – for example, that of Kant, which would begin with the beautiful and give it more attention than the sublime – Addison gives more extensive descriptions of our pleasure in greatness, his term for the sublime, and novelty, and only a brief account of beauty. On his account of the sublime, “Our Imagination loves to be filled with an Object, or to grasp at any thing that is too big for its Capacity” – even though we might think it would be frustrating rather than pleasant to try to comprehend something that exceeds our capacity – because 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, and shortned on every side by the Neighbourhood of Walls or Mountains. 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.76

Addison’s aesthetics is based on the psychological premise that we enjoy unhindered activity and hate the restriction of our activity. We especially enjoy the opportunity for the play of ideas in imagination, his ensuing account of the pleasure of novelty implies, because in other aspects of our lives, namely, our ordinary employments, there necessarily is much constraint: Every thing that is new or uncommon raises a Pleasure in the Imagination, because it fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise, gratifies its Curiosity, and gives it an Idea of which it was not before possest. We are, indeed, so often conversant with one Sett of Objects, and tired out with so many repeated Shows of the same Things, that whatever is new or uncommon contributes a little to vary Human Life, and to divert our Minds, for a while, with the Strangeness of its Appearance: It serves for a kind of Refreshment,

74 75 76

The Spectator, 411, Saturday, June 21, 1712; vol. III, pp. 535–6. The Spectator, 412, Monday, June 23, 1712; vol. III, p. 540. The Spectator, 412, Monday, June 23, 1712; vol. III, pp. 540–1.

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and takes off from that Satiety we are apt to complain of in our usual and ordinary Entertainments.77

New, or, as Addison continues, ever-changing objects, such as “Rivers, Jetteaus, or Falls of Water,”78 prevent the mind from becoming trapped and tired, and instead offer it the opportunity for play and motion, which is refreshing. The last examples are particularly revealing, because they make it clear that what we enjoy in the case of novelty is not the acquisition of new information or knowledge, but simply new mental activity, regardless of its content. It would certainly be possible to offer a cognitivist interpretation of our pleasure in novelty, but Addison does not provide such an account. When he turns to beauty, Addison seems to assume that we all know what that is, and starts his discussion with the bold assertion that “there is nothing that makes its way more directly to the Soul than Beauty, which immediately diffuses a secret Satisfaction and Complacency thro’ the Imagination.” He then introduces several ideas that will become commonplaces throughout the century. First, he expresses the idea that beauty is not a property, like shape or size, that inheres in objects regardless of the response of perceivers of those objects, but rather a property that depends upon the response of perceivers and that can therefore be expected to vary among perceivers, or at least species of perceivers: “There is not perhaps any real Beauty or Deformity more in one piece of Matter than another, because we might have been so made, that whatsoever now appears loathsom to us, might have shewn itself agreeable”; at the same time, this is not something we need much to worry about in our interactions with our own kind, because “we find by Experience, that there are several Modifications of Matter which the Mind, without any previous consideration, pronounces at first sight Beautiful or Deformed.”79 Without using philosophical terminology, Addison expresses his conviction that the relational character of beauty does not entail that the response to it varies arbitrarily or idiosyncratically among individuals; defending this assumption would become a major project for more philosophically inclined later writers, in the form of the problem of taste. Second, Addison distinguishes two kinds of beauty: the beauty that creatures find in other members of their own species, particularly those of the opposite sex, which can often reside in something otherwise 77 78 79

The Spectator, 412, Monday, June 23, 1712; vol. III, p. 541. The Spectator, 412, Monday, June 23, 1712; vol. III, p. 542. The Spectator, 412, Monday, June 23, 1712; vol. III, p. 542.

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quite trivial, such as “the single Charm or Tincture of a Feather,” which nevertheless serves as a trigger of sexual desire;80 and “a second kind of Beauty that we find in the several products of Art and Nature” other than objects of sexual desire within our own species. What is important for us is the account that Addison gives of the latter: “This consists either in the Gaiety or Variety of Colours, in the Symmetry and Proportion of Parts, in the Arrangement and Disposition of Bodies, or in a just Mixture and Concurrence of all together.”81 The second and third items in this list would not, of course, be out of place in Shaftesbury’s account; but that Addison begins his list with “Gaiety and Variety” and concludes it with “Mixture and Concurrence” suggests that for him what underlies our pleasure in beauty, just as in the case of the sublime and the novel, is the opportunity for the free and unhindered play of the imagination with the materials that are furnished to it, in the first instance by sight. Addison emphasizes that “Among these several kinds of Beauty the Eye takes most delight in Colours” – precisely because they afford the imagination the most opportunity for play. Thus “We no where meet with a more glorious or pleasing Show in Nature, than what appears in the Heavens at the rising and setting of the Sun, which is wholly made up of those different Stains of Light that shew themselves in Clouds of a different Situation.”82 On Addison’s account, sunrises and sunsets do not offer us any truth or insight into the nature of the creation, just glorious opportunities for the free play of the imagination. And that, we may now add, is why Addison completes the first sentence I quoted in this paragraph, which I left incomplete, by saying that beauty “gives a Finishing to any thing that is Great or Uncommon”:83 The underlying explanation of our pleasure in grandeur, novelty, and beauty is the same – the pleasure that the mind takes in the free play with its ideas – and beauty just adds further opportunities for free play to those already afforded by greatness and novelty. Let us now turn to what Addison calls the “secondary pleasures” of the imagination. Strictly speaking, he means by this any pleasures that do not “arise from Objects that are actually before our Eyes,”84 but since 80

81 82 83 84

The Spectator, 412, Monday, June 23, 1712; vol. III, p. 543. There is a huge literature by psychologists and evolutionary biologists on the connection between beauty and the triggers of sexual desire; for a recent discussion, see Winfried Menninghaus, Das Versprechen der Schönheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). The Spectator, 412, Monday, June 23, 1712; vol. III, p. 544. The Spectator, 412, Monday, June 23, 1712; vol. III, p. 544. The Spectator, 412, Monday, June 23, 1712; vol. III, p. 542. The Spectator, 416, Friday, June 27, 1712; vol. III, p. 558.

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there is no difference in his explanation of the pleasure that we get from currently seeing something and subsequently recalling seeing it, we can confine our attention to the case to which he actually gives the most attention, namely, “those Pleasures of the Imagination which proceed from Ideas raised by Words” or other signs that are not themselves literally reproductions of previously experienced ideas of sight but rather call up such ideas by some process of association. Addison first observes that words may actually give us livelier ideas of objects and their pleasing properties than the current and direct perception of the objects themselves: “a Description often gives us more lively Ideas than the Sight of Things themselves. The Reader finds a Scene drawn in strong Colours, and painted more to the Life in his Imagination, by the help of Words, than by an actual Survey of the Scene which they describe.”85 However, the heart of his account of the secondary pleasures of the imagination is that they are based on “a new Principle of Pleasure, which is nothing else but the Action of the Mind, which compares the Ideas that arise from Words, with the Ideas that arise from the Objects themselves.”86 The key thought here is that comparison is an action of the mind, thus something we enjoy as a form of activity or play – and the more scope for the unhindered activity of comparison, and then subsequently of invention,87 enlargement of thought,88 the discovery of new ways of describing objects through allusion, metaphor and the like,89 in general through “bestow[ing] a kind of Existence, and draw[ing] up to the Reader’s View, several objects which are not to be found in Nature, . . . giv[ing] a greater variety to God’s Works,”90 the more pleasure there is to be had. By all of these means – or their analogues in other media, for Addison intends his account of the mental activity and play that is the basis of the secondary pleasures of imagination to apply to media of depiction such as painting and statuary as well as to media of description – “the Poet gives us as free a View” of his object “as he pleases,”91 and presumably incites or excites a free play of ideas in his audience as well as in himself. Again, the crucial point is that Addison does not locate our pleasure in the acquisition of

85 86 87 88 89 90 91

The Spectator, 416, Friday, June 27, 1712; vol. III, p. 560. The Spectator, 418, Monday, June 30, 1712; vol. III, p. 566. The Spectator, 419, Tuesday, July 1, 172; vol. III, p. 570. The Spectator, 420, Wednesday, July 2, 1712; vol. III, p. 575. The Spectator, 421, Thursday, July 3, 1712; vol. III, p. 578. The Spectator, 421, Thursday, July 3, 1712; vol. III, p. 579. The Spectator, 416; vol. III, p. 561.

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knowledge through veridical representation but locates it rather in the activity of comparison as such. The conception of the pleasure in the free play of our mental powers thus underlies Addison’s account of both the primary and secondary pleasures of the imagination. We can now observe a number of points that Addison adds to this basic account. One point to note is that Addison uses his basic account to argue for the superiority of natural over artistic beauty. Nature simply gives the mind more room to play than art: If we consider the works of Nature and Art, as they are qualified to entertain the Imagination, we shall find the last very defective, in Comparison to the former; for though they may sometimes appear as Beautiful or Strange, they can have nothing in them of that Vastness and Immensity, which afford so great an Entertainment to the Mind of the Beholder. . . . The Beauties of the most stately Garden or Palace lie in a narrow Compass, the Imagination immediately runs them over, and requires something else to gratifie her; but, in the wide Fields of Nature, the Sight wanders up and down without Confinement, and is fed with an infinite variety of Images, without any certain Stint or Number.92

Addison adds that when we can see nature as resembling art, we can get a “double” pleasure: pleasure in the free play of the eye and mind as such, and pleasure from the specifically artistic principle of comparison or “Similitude” as a source of mental play.93 For Addison, our pleasure in art can amplify our pleasure in nature, but the latter, because of its infinite variety, remains our primary source for the pleasure of the imagination. He could have argued that the possibility of imagining alternatives to actual nature that is inherent only in art could offer even greater pleasure than the play of the eye and mind over the immensity of actual nature; and as we will subsequently see, some early eighteenth-century aestheticians, especially in Germany, did find the pleasure of using art to imagine alternatives to nature as it actually exists a fundamental source of aesthetic pleasure, while in the nineteenth century Hegel would argue against the importance of natural beauty altogether and redefine aesthetics exclusively as the philosophy of art. But whether or not we agree with Addison’s assessment of the potential for free play offered by various objects of aesthetic response, what is important here is just that Addison ranks sources of aesthetic pleasure on the basis of the degree of opportunity for free play that they offer.

92 93

The Spectator, 414, Wednesday, June 25, 1712; vol. III, p. 548. The Spectator, 414, Wednesday, June 25, 1712; vol. III, pp. 449–50.

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A second point to note is that Addison by no means completely disconnects the enjoyment of the free play of the mind with nature and art from all conceptions of utility as well as from all thoughts of divinity, but he makes the connection indirect. Addison supposes that “it is impossible for us to assign the necessary Cause of this Pleasure, because we know neither the Nature of an Idea, nor the Substance of a Human Soul.”94 Nevertheless, he thinks that we can reasonably speculate about the “final cause” of our capacity for the pleasures of the imagination. Specifically, he thinks that we can assume that “The Supreme Author of our Being has so formed the Soul of Man, that nothing but himself can be its last, adequate, and proper happiness. Because, therefore, a great Part of our Happiness must arise from the Contemplation of his Being,” it is entirely reasonable for God to have made us take pleasure “in the Apprehension of what is Great or Unlimited,” in “the Idea of any thing that is new or uncommon,” and in the beauty of our own species and of nature in general. Because of the first of these pleasures, we “will improve into the highest pitch of Astonishment and Devotion when we contemplate his Nature”; by the second, we will be encouraged in the “search into the Wonders of his Creation”; by the third, “all Creatures might be tempted to multiply their Kind”; and by the fourth, God has simply rendered “the whole Creation more gay and delightful” to us.95 Here Addison comes closer to the cognitivist interpretation of our appreciation of the beauty of nature as a form of awareness of its perfection and that of its creator that we found in Shaftesbury a year before Addison wrote and in Wolff a few years later; unlike Shaftesbury, however, Addison does not make the Neo-Platonic supposition that our minds are consciously led from the particular objects of aesthetic response to ideas of their final causes and the idea of God, nor does he suppose that the thought of God is actually the ultimate object of our pleasure in the various aesthetic phenomena. These considerations are rather possible although of course for him entirely plausible explanations of our capacity for aesthetic pleasures, not analyses of the contents of aesthetic experience. We do not need to be aware of these final causes in order to experience the pleasures of the imagination, although no doubt the philosophically minded who reflect upon them will take additional pleasure in the existence of their capacity for aesthetic pleasure and the existence of objects, whether natural or man-made, that can stimulate this capacity. 94 95

The Spectator, 413, Tuesday, June 24, 1712; vol. III, pp. 544–5. The Spectator, 413, Tuesday, June 24, 1712; vol. III, pp. 545–6.

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Apart from this account of the utility of aesthetic experience, Addison takes no account of the possible utility of aesthetic objects in an entirely ordinary sense. He devotes a whole essay to architecture, but unlike Wolff he does not suggest the traditional, Vitruvian position that our pleasure in architecture has anything to do with a harmony between our sense of beauty and the demands of utility, or with a harmony between form and function. He analyzes our response to architecture only in terms of his account of the pleasures of greatness and beauty: Some works of architecture thrill us by their sheer grandeur of size and manner, while others please us by the fineness of their structural and decorative elements and the harmony among them.96 In other words, even in the case of a medium where we may think that its functionality is a necessary condition of our satisfaction in an object and a harmony between form and function a paradigmatic source of satisfaction, Addison looks solely for the free play of the imagination. Yet although Addison shares Shaftesbury’s assumption that genuine aesthetic pleasure is independent of the promise of personal use and consumption, no more than Shaftesbury does he infer that this means that aesthetic pleasure must be described independently of the language of interest altogether. On the contrary, he argues that the capacity for the pleasures of the imagination actually extends our interest in the world: A Man of a Polite Imagination, is let into a great many Pleasures that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving. He can converse with a Picture, and find an agreeable Companion in a Statue. He meets with a secret Refreshment in a Description, and often feels a greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of Fields and Meadows, than another does in the Possession. It gives him, indeed, a kind of Property in every thing he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his Pleasures.97

A developed capacity for the pleasures of the imagination is not so much disinterested as it heightens our interest in the world. Finally, let us briefly consider Addison’s solution to the “paradox of tragedy,” the question that Plato and Aristotle first raised about why we take pleasure in the depiction of events that would in actuality be painful.98 This issue fascinated eighteenth-century aestheticians, with almost every one proposing a solution, and we will often recur to it as a way

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The Spectator, 415, Thursday, June 26, 1712; vol. III, pp. 553–8. The Spectator, 411, vol. III, p. 538. For a recent discussion, see Eva M. Dadlez, What Is Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

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of illuminating the particular character of the aesthetic theories we will subsequently consider. Addison uses his explanation of the secondary pleasures of the imagination for his solution, specifically the idea of our pleasure in the activity of comparison. In fact, he explains the pleasure that we take in the depiction of unpleasant events by a twofold use of the concept of comparison. First, he finds room for pleasure of the imagination in the comparison between the depiction and the thing depicted: Here, therefore, we must enquire after a new Principle of Pleasure, which is nothing else but the Action of the Mind, which compares the Ideas that arise from Words, with the Ideas that arise from the Objects themselves; and why this Operation of the Mind is attended with so much Pleasure, we have before considered. For this Reason, therefore, the Description of a Dunghill is pleasing to the Imagination, if the image be represented to our Mind by suitable Expressions . . .,99

even though, of course, the dung-hill itself or the direct sight of it is not pleasing. Likewise, for this reason, the depiction, whether in words, paint, or stone, of tragic events can be pleasing, even though the events themselves are not. But there is a second kind of comparison involved in our enjoyment of tragedy, namely, a comparison between our own condition and circumstances and that of the depicted characters: when we read of Torments, Wounds, Deaths, and the like dismal Accidents, our Pleasure does not flow so properly from the Grief which such melancholy Descriptions give us, as from the secret Comparison which we make between our selves and the Person who suffers. Such Representations teach us to set a just Value upon our own Condition, and make us prize our good Fortune which exempts us from the like Calamities.100

Of course, as Addison observes, this comparison works best when we are comparing our own condition of well-being to that of remote or imaginary characters; “when we see a Person actually lying under the Tortures that we meet with in a Description . . . the Object presses too close upon our Senses, and bears so hard upon us, that it does not give us time or leisure to reflect on our selves.”101 In other words, because of our natural empathy with the suffering of other real and close-by human beings, we have no room for a free comparison of our condition and theirs; the imagination is not powerful enough to overcome the effects 99 100 101

The Spectator, 418, Monday, June 30, 1712; vol. III, pp. 566–7. The Spectator, 418, Monday, June 30, 1712; vol. III, p. 568. The Spectator, 418, Monday, June 30, 1712; vol. III, pp. 568–9.

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of empathy. Thus, although Addison does say that a description is recommended to us “if it represents to us such Objects as are apt to raise a secret Ferment in the Mind of the Reader, and to work, with Violence, upon his Passions,” whereby “we are at once warmed and enlightned,”102 on his account what we really enjoy in the delectation of tragic and awful events is our own freedom from the dire emotions that such events would induce if they were really before us. When we look upon such hideous Objects, we are not a little pleased to think we are in no Danger of them. We consider them at the same time, as Dreadful and Harmless; so that the more frightful appearance they make, the greater is the Pleasure we receive from the Sense of our own Safety. . . . It is for the same Reason that we are delighted with the reflecting upon Dangers that are past, or in looking on a Precipice at a Distance, which would fill us with a different kind of Horrour, if we saw it hanging over our Heads.103

On Addison’s account, what the imagination has to offer us is pleasures, not pains, and the play among ideas which is the basis of the pleasures of imagination does not include a play with the full range of human emotions. It allows in ideas of painful emotions only to assure us by means of comparison that we ourselves are free of them. There is thus no suggestion in Addison that the solution to the paradox of tragedy might lie in the fact that we enjoy the arousal of emotions as such, even when in some ways those emotions might be painful. The introduction of this idea in response to the paradox of tragedy will await the work of Du Bos, seven years after Addison’s essays on the pleasures of the imagination. And thus Addison introduces the second but not the third great idea of modern aesthetics.

Crousaz Before we turn to Du Bos, however, let us take a brief look at another writer who may also be regarded as an early proponent of the idea that the primary source of aesthetic pleasure is the free play of our mental powers. Shortly after Addison published his essays on the pleasures of the imagination, the Swiss scholar Jean-Pierre de Crousaz (1663–1750) published a treatise on beauty, Traité du Beau,104 in which he argued 102 103 104

The Spectator, 418, Monday, June 30, 1712; vol. III, p. 567. The Spectator, 418, Monday, June 30, 1712; vol. III, p. 568. Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Traité de Beau (Amsterdam: 1715, 1724), modern edition (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1985).

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that mental activity stimulated by variety but prevented from becoming fatiguing by an appropriate degree of unity is the basis for our pleasure in beauty. Crousaz did not use words for either play or freedom in his exposition of this account, but he can nevertheless be regarded as one of the founders of the theory of the free play of the imagination as a crucial component of aesthetic experience. In his development of this idea, however, Crousaz focused primarily on the activity of our intellectual rather than emotional faculties. Thus his position is closer to that of Addison than to that which Du Bos would shortly develop.105 Crousaz was the second son in a Swiss noble family; destined for a military career by his father, he nevertheless devoted himself to an academic career. After studies at Lausanne, Leiden, and Paris, during which he came into contact with leading intellectual figures such as Pierre Bayle and Nicolas Malebranche, Crousaz taught mathematics and philosophy at the Academy of Lausanne from 1685 to 1724, then taught at the University of Groningen, tutored the prince of Hesse-Kassel, and served in the Swedish diplomatic corps before returning to Lausanne in 1738 for the remainder of his career. In addition to the Traité du Beau, his many other works included a logic or New Treatise of the Art of Thinking, the only one of his works to be translated into English;106 a work on skepticism, Examen du Pyrrhonisme ancient et moderne (1733); and numerous works on mathematics and theology. But of all these, the Traité du Beau was to have the most enduring influence. It opens with a thought that was often repeated – for example, later in the eighteenth century by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid – that “It is beyond doubt that there are very few terms that men use more often than that of beauty, yet none that is less determinate in its signification, none more vague than this idea.”107 And it follows this with the thought with which David Hume was to begin his essay “Of the Standard of Taste” in 1757, four decades after Crousaz’s book, and which it is hard to imagine he did not adopt 105

106

107

Crousaz is briefly discussed by Samuel Monk in The Sublime, pp. 59–60. See also Baldine Saint Girons, Esthétiques due XVIII siècle: Le Modèle Français, dictionnaires des sources (Paris: Philippe Sers, 1990), pp. 51–66, and Annie Becq, Genèse de l’esthétique française moderne 1680–1814 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), pp. 403–8. Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, La logique ou système de réflexions (Amsterdam, 1712); A New Treatise of the Art of Thinking, or a Complete System of Reflections (London, 1724). Crousaz, Traité du Beau, p. 19. See Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), ed. Derek R. Brookes (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), Essay VIII, ch. IV, p. 591: “Beauty is found in things so various, and so very different in nature, that it is difficult to say wherein it consists, or what there can be common to all the objects in which it is found.”

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from Crousaz, namely, that “however opposed men are in their application of terms” such as “beauty,” “they nevertheless agree in their general idea.”108 These two instances suffice to show the enduring importance of Crousaz’s book for aesthetics in the eighteenth century. But while Hume, as we shall later see, took the lesson from the indeterminacy of the application of the term “beauty” to be that he should not devote his energy to trying to define it or formulate principles for its application and should instead focus on the criteria for qualified judges of beauty, Crousaz did not shy away from defining beauty and hoped to make up for the abstractness of its general definition by a sufficiently concrete account of the terms used in that definition. His general definition is simply that beauty is a relation: “the term beauty is not absolute, but expresses the rapport between the objects that we call beautiful with our ideas, or with our sentiments, with our insights [lumieres] or with our heart”; this is to be sure abstract, but Crousaz added that “to fix the idea of beauty, it is necessary to determine . . . in detail the relations to which one attaches this name,”109 and he was confident that he could do this. Crousaz also put his definition by saying that the expression “this is beautiful” expresses “a certain rapport of an object with agreeable sentiments, or with the ideas of approbation,”110 and his strategy was to spell out the grounds for the approbation of objects that would give rise to our agreeable sentiments in response to them. Crousaz based his project on the premise that we have two kinds of “perceptions,” namely, “ideas” and “sentiments,” the former of which occupy our “spirit” or intellect and the latter of which interest our “heart” or emotions. He writes: Ideas occupy the spirit, sentiments interest the heart, ideas amuse us, they exercise our attention, and sometimes fatigue it, according to how they are more or less composed and more or less combined with each other; but the sentiments are something more, they dominate us, they decide our mood and render us happy or unhappy, according to whether they are sweet or vexacious, agreeable or disagreeable.111

In spite of this statement that the effect of objects on our emotions is more important to their beauty than their effect on our intellect, however, 108

109 110 111

Crousaz, Traité du Beau, p. 23. See David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1987), p. 227. Crousaz, Traité du Beau, p. 22. Crousaz, Traité du Beau, p. 24. Crousaz, Traité du Beau, p. 25

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Crousaz’s subsequent exposition devotes much more attention to the stimulation and gratification of our intellect as a source of beauty and emphasizes the emotional impact of beauty only in his penultimate illustration of his theory, in his chapter titled “The Beauty of Eloquence.”112 Until then, Crousaz’s emphasis remains on aesthetic activity as a form of mental play rather than emotional impact. The core of Crousaz’s account of the “Characters real and natural of beauty” (the title of his chapter 3), is that “the human spirit loves variety in its ideas, because it is born to advance without end and cessation in knowledge. . . . [I]t is made for variety, which animates it and prevents it from falling into boredom [ennui]”; however, to prevent the opposite fate, that is, to prevent variety from simply becoming exhausting, beautiful objects must also possess “unity.”113 Since the varieties of variety are endless, there is nothing more that can or needs to be said about variety itself, but Crousaz analyzes the sources of the unity in variety that will stimulate us to just the right degree of intellectual activity as “regularity, order, and proportion, three things that necessarily please the human spirit and effectively merit its love.”114 Crousaz understands “regularity” as similarity or equality among the parts of an object, as among the sides of an equilateral triangle; order as sequential connection, as when “one passes from one thing to a second, led from the first [to the second] by some sort of resemblance”; and proportion as arising from satisfying comparison among a greater multiplicity of objects, as, for example, when one “perceives that proper precaution has been taken in a house against the cold of winter as well as for the heat of summer.”115 As this last remark suggests, the kind of proportion with which Crousaz is particularly concerned is proportion or proper fit between the characteristics of an object and its intended end or purpose; thus he is not concerned primarily with what Immanuel Kant, for example,would later call “free” beauty but rather with “adherent” beauty, or what David Hume would call the beauty of “convenience and utility.”116 This is confirmed by Crousaz’s choice of the beauty of “buildings” or architecture as one of his very first illustrations of his analysis of beauty in his chapter 4 “Examples.” Here he writes, 112 113 114 115 116

Crousaz, Traité du Beau, ch. 11, pp. 288–341. Crousaz, Traité du Beau, p. 29. Crousaz, Traité du Beau, p. 30. Crousaz, Traité du Beau, p. 31. See Kant, CPJ, §16, 5:229; David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Book II, Part I, chapter 7, p. 195.

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The general rules of architecture ordain that we pay attention when we build to the difference in climates, the choice of an agreeable site, to cleanliness and sufficient spaciousness, and to building in a way that will be agreeable in every season without being exposed to what would make for discomfort – are not these rules for the dependence of the beauty of buildings on their rapport with the utility [les utilités] that is their purpose [destinés]?117

Crousaz’s theory is that what stimulates the activity of the mind and prevents boredom is not simply the exploration of the formal features of buildings or other artifacts as such, nor the simple fact of their utility or the direct use of them, but rather the contemplation and exploration of the harmony between their formal features and their intended purposes. In the case of architecture, Crousaz remains firmly within the Vitruvian tradition. Crousaz’s next illustration of beauty is not one drawn from what we ordinarily regard as the subject matter of aesthetics at all, namely, the beauty of “manners” and customs, though here too he focuses on harmony or proportion between form and purpose in, for example, political constitutions. He returns to a more customary topic in aesthetics in his next example, the beauty of the human body,118 which he treats at length. In this treatment he discusses the beauty of coloring, of figure, of eyes, of movement, and more, but treats all of these on the premise that “The human body is made to live, to live in health, to act, and to execute the orders of the soul.”119 When it comes to coloring, to movement, and to all the rest, we find these aspects of the human body beautiful when they are harmonious with the ends of human life: again, it is not forms by themselves that we find beautiful nor the actual execution of purposes (although of course that is the source of its own satisfaction), but the endless engagement of the human mind with the harmony between human form and human purposes. Only in a passing remark at the end of his chapter of examples does Crousaz mention that “The beauty of music rests on its proportions and admirable variety of temperaments, and on the return to unity”120 without reference to any other purpose with which we find the forms of musical compositions in harmony. And most of Crousaz’s remaining chapters do not concern the characteristic subject matter of modern aesthetics at all, instead concerning the “beauty of the sciences” (chapter 9), of 117 118 119 120

Crousaz, Traité du Beau, p. 35. Crousaz, Traité du Beau, pp. 56–71. Crousaz, Traité du Beau, p. 57. Crousaz, Traité du Beau, p. 71.

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“virtue” (chapter 10), and of “religion” (chapter 12). Only his chapter, “The Beauty of Eloquence” (chapter 11), concerns what would standardly be regarded as a topic in aesthetics, and only here does Crousaz return to his original idea that the stimulation of our emotions might be even more important for our enjoyment of beauty than the stimulation of our intellect. Crousaz begins this chapter with an enumeration and discussion of many features of eloquence or oratory that do stimulate our intellect, such as the beauty of figures of speech, of synonyms, of citations, of clarity and brevity, and so on, but finally comes to the statement that the beauty of eloquence is also connected to “its purpose of moving the passions.”121 However, all he has to say on this subject is that comparisons, exclamations, even hyperbole and exaggeration should be used in a way that stimulates our passions without undermining our basic attraction to truth.122 Crousaz may recognize that art stimulates our emotions as well as our intellect, but this hardly counts as a full discussion of the ways in which art can do the former.

Du Bos Rather, the idea of play with the full range of human emotions enjoys a greater rôle in the aesthetic theory of the French diplomat, historian, and man of letters, the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (1670–1742), who published his enormously influential Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music in 1719 – the book went through no fewer than seventeen French editions in the eighteenth century, and was translated into English in 1748 and German in 1760–1, although it was widely read in both Britain and Germany before it was translated. That we look to art in order to play with the full range of human emotions is in fact Du Bos’s central idea, on which his treatment of many of what would become the standard issues of eighteenth-century aesthetics – the paradox of tragedy, the comparison among the arts, the validity of taste, and the nature of genius – is based. Du Bos thus fully recognizes the emotional impact of art but employs a conception of the free play of the imagination to explain our enjoyment of emotions that in nonartistic contexts would be displeasing, thereby proposing a solution for the paradox of tragedy that he did so much to bring to the forefront of eighteenth-century aesthetics.123 121 122 123

Crousaz, Traité du Beau, pp. 336–7. Crousaz, Traité du Beau, p. 337. For discussions of Du Bos, see Saint Girons, Esthétiques du XVIII siécle, pp. 17–42; Annie Becq, Genèse de lesthétique française moderne 1680–1814 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994),

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Du Bos was educated at the Sorbonne and was early in contact with many of the leading French intellectuals of his day. But his diplomatic activities took him to Britain while he was still a young man, and his aesthetic theory, which would later have great influence on Britons such as David Hume,124 was itself influenced by the empiricism of John Locke in both method and substance. His commitment to empiricist methodology becomes explicit late in the Critical Reflections, when he writes, for example, that “The public assent to philosophical reasonings cannot go further [than probable sentiment]; for mankind . . . place always a great difference between the certainty of natural truths, known by means of the senses, and the certainty of such as are known only by the way of reasoning. The latter appear to them as mere probabilities. ’Tis necessary to place at least some essential circumstance within the reach of their senses, in order to convince them fully of these truths.”125 But the substantive influence of Locke is the starting point of the work. In the famous chapter titled “Power” in the second and subsequent editions of his Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke had maintained that the fundamental motivation of voluntary human action is not the thought of some “greater good” at which an agent might aim, but rather “some (and for the most part the most pressing) uneasiness a Man is at present under,” where “uneasiness” includes “All pain of the body of what sort soever, and disquiet of the mind.”126 Du Bos’s theory is that our pleasure in art comes above all from its alleviation of one of our most common disquiets of the mind, namely, ennui or boredom. He writes that The soul hath its wants no less than the body; and one of the greatest wants of man is to have his mind incessantly occupied. The heaviness which quickly attends the inactivity of the mind, is a situation so very disagreeable

124 125

126

pp. 243–65; Katherine Everett Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1953), pp. 274–9; and Peter Jones, Hume’s Sentiments: Their Ciceronian and French Context (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), pp. 93–106. See Jones, Hume’s Sentiments, ch. 3. Abbé Jean-Baptise 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), vol. II, p. 343. Nugent’s translation was based on the definitive fourth French edition of 1740, in which Du Bos rationalized the organization of his work by moving the digression on the theatrical entertainments of the ancients to a separate volume, the third in Nugent’s edition. Nugent himself describes his translation as somewhat loose (vol. I, p. iv), but it gives us a good sense of how Du Bos’s work was received in eighteenth-century Britain. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. xxi, §31, pp. 250–1.

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to man, that he frequently chuses to expose himself to the most painful exercises, rather than to be troubled with it.127

The mind can be occupied in two different ways, Du Bos then claims, either by being “affected by external objects, which is what we call, a sensible impression” or by “the speculation of useful or curious subjects, which is properly to reflect and meditate.”128 But the latter, in addition to being available only to educated and leisured people, itself can quickly become taxing and wearisome, so “The first of the abovementioned [sic] methods of occupying one’s self, which is that of yielding to the impression of external objects, is much the easiest. . . . The changes of toil and pleasure set the spirits, that begin to grow heavy, in motion, and seem to restore fresh vigor to the exhausted imagination.”129 The key to avoiding the “heaviness” of boredom is to set and keep the mind in motion, but apart from any aim that could itself require potentially tiresome concentration and exertion – in other words, to keep the mind at play rather than either at rest or at work. However, the most effective way to keep the mind active rather than at boring rest or irksome work is by engaging the passions: In fact, the hurry and agitation, in which our passions keep us, even in solitude, is of so brisk a nature, that any other situation is languid and heavy, when compared to this motion. Thus we are led by instinct, in pursuit of objects capable of exciting our passions, notwithstanding those objects make impressions on us, which are frequently attended with nights and days of pain and calamity: but man in general would be exposed to greater misery, were he exempt from passions, than the very passions themselves can make him suffer.130

Because mental activity is so important to us, we are willing to seek out even amusements that carry high costs for others, such as spectacles such as bull-fighting or even gladiatoral combats, or high costs for ourselves, such as gambling: “There are several who expose daily a considerable part of their substance to the mercy of cards and dice, notwithstanding their being perfectly sensible of the unhappy consequences of high gaming.”131 But it would obviously be preferable if we could keep the mind in

127 128 129 130 131

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. I, vol. I, p. 5. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. I, vol. I, p. 5. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. I, vol. I, pp. 7–8. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. I, vol. I, p. 9. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. II, vol. I, p. 19.

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pleasant motion and play without such high costs to ourselves or others. That is precisely what art allows us to do: 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? Is it not in the power of art to create, as it were, beings of a new nature? 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 afflictions? An attempt of so delicate a nature was reserved for poetry and painting.132

The gist of Du Bos’s account of painting and poetry (and ultimately, though within limits, of music as well), is that they “raise those artificial passions within us, by presenting us with the imitations of objects capable of exciting real passions.”133 Du Bos thus introduces both the idea of play and that of the emotional impact of art and inextricably intertwines them, so that on his account the play that is the essence of aesthetic experience is the free play of our emotional rather than more purely perceptual or intellectual capacities. Du Bos calls the passions raised by artistic representations of objects – primarily, of course, acting and suffering human beings – “artificial” both because they are aroused by copies rather than real people and real actions, and also because “the impression made by the imitation is not so deep as that which the object itself would have made” nor so long-lasting. For these reasons, he also refers to the “superficial impression, made by imitation.”134 He also supposes that unless we are out of our senses, we are never under the illusion that the events represented in, for example, the theater are really happening. “The spectator preserves . . . his understanding, notwithstanding the liveliest emotion.”135 Nevertheless, he does not claim that what we get from observing artistic imitations or representations are themselves mere representations of passions – they are real passions, for a successful work of art “makes almost as great an impression on the spectators, as the event itself could possibly have produced.”136 The passions produced by a work of art are artificial only in 132 133 134 135 136

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. III, vol. I, p. 21. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. III, vol. I, p. 22. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. III, vol. I, pp. 22–3. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XLIII, vol. I, pp. 349–50. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XLIII, vol. I, p. 351.

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the sense that they are not caused by real events, and therefore are not “attended with those disagreeable consequences that arise from the serious emotions caused by the object itself.”137 Nor do these passions last so long that they themselves become wearisome. We are pleased with the enjoyment of our emotion, without being under any apprehension of its too long continuance. This piece of Racine138 draws tears from us, though we are touched with no real sorrow: for the grief that appears is only, as it were, on the surface of our heart, and we are sensible, that our tears will finish with the representation of the ingenious fiction that gave them birth.139

The passions aroused by artistic representations thus give us the best of all combinations: They really stimulate the mind and set it into enjoyable emotion, yet without coming with the negative external costs of something like gambling or with the negative internal costs of the intense emotions that would be caused by tragic events really happening to ourselves or others around us and without leaving the long-lived or even permanent pains that such events do leave behind. But for all that, in art we really do experience emotions, even within limits. Even if the actors on stage are merely pretending to experience emotions, we, the audience, do not merely pretend or make believe that we are experiencing emotions. That would not afford sufficient relief from the otherwise looming threat of ennui.140 But Du Bos does stress that it is tragedy rather than comedy that most engages us: “the terror and pity, which the picture of tragical events excites in our souls, engages us much more than all the laughter and contempt excited by the several incidents of comedies.”141 This brings us to what Du Bos himself calls the “paradox” that we are so deeply pleased by the depiction of tragical events that in real life would be deeply displeasing. His theory that we enjoy the stimulation of any passions as long as they relieve us from boredom is only part of his resolution of this paradox; the other part is his recognition that the passions that are aroused in us by the depiction of tragical events are not the same passions that the 137 138 139 140

141

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. III, vol. I, p. 24. Du Bos refers to Jean Racine’s drama Phaedra (1677). Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. III, vol. I, p. 25. Thus Du Bos’s theory must be distinguished from that offered by Kendall L. Walton nearly three centuries later, in Mimesis and Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). For discussion of Walton’s view, see the Epilogue. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. VII, vol. I, p. 51.

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participants and especially victims of a real tragedy would be suffering, but the different passions that sympathetic observers of such events would have: We do not experience, even in attenuated form, Medea’s passion for revenge, but rather the different feelings of the sympathetic observers of her deeds and their consequences, thus horror at her feelings of revenge and pity for the suffering of her children. “Tragedy pretends indeed, that the passions it represents, should move us; but it does not intend that our emotion should be the same as that of a person tortured by his passions, or that we should espouse his sentiments. Its aim most frequently is to excite opposite sentiments to those, which it lends to the personages.”142 And such sentiments, Du Bos must suppose, are by no means entirely unpleasant, although even they would become so if they were too deep or too prolonged. This point then leads Du Bos to a complex response to Aristotle’s famous statement that the purpose of tragedy is to present “incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to effect the catharsis of such emotions.”143 Du Bos’s theory is that by drawing “an exact and true picture of the passions, without exaggerating the vexations, or misfortunes that attend them,” the tragedy will “strike us with horror” about such emotions as, for example, vengeance, thereby inducing “us to determine resolutely to avoid them,”144 and in that sense “purging” us of them, while at the same time also encouraging in us sympathetic emotions, which are valuable. On Du Bos’s noncognitivist approach to aesthetic experience, katharsis is not a matter of insight, into either the nature of emotions or the actual plot of a play,145 but is rather a direct impact on our emotions and our resolve to avoid some emotions while allowing others. That we respond to tragedy not by experiencing the feelings the depicted characters themselves are represented as having but rather with controlled versions of the natural human responses to such characters is central to the only justification that Du Bos thinks necessary to offer for our interests in the art beyond the pleasurable mental activity that they directly produce. Du Bos nowhere espouses an explicit moral theory, but he demonstrates himself to be as much of a moral sense theorist as Shaftesbury, without any of Shaftesbury’s metaphysics. His assumption 142 143

144 145

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XLIV, vol. I, p. 358. Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 6, 1449b28–9; trans. I. Bywater in Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. II, p. 2320. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XLIV, vol. I, p. 355. For these approaches to the much vexed topic of katharsis, see Jonathan Lear, “Katharsis,” and Alexander Nehamas, “Pity and Fear in the Rhetoric and Poetics.”

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is that the possibility of society is based not on abstract principles but on sympathetic emotions among its members, and that besides simply keeping our minds pleasantly occupied, the arts also promote such emotions: When we give ourselves time to reflect on the natural sensibility of the heart of man, on his proclivity to be moved by the several objects, which poets and painters make the subjects of their imitations, we find it very far from being surprizing, that even verses and pictures have the power of moving him. Nature has thought proper to implant this quick and easy sensibility in man as the very basis of society. Self-love degenerates into an immoderate fondness of one’s own person. . . . It was therefore necessary, that man should be easily drawn out of this situation. Nature, for this reason, has thought proper to form us in such a manner, as the agitation of whatever approaches us should have the power of impelling us, to the end, that those, who have need of our indulgence or succour, may, with greater facility, persuade us. Thus their emotion alone is sufficient to persuade us. . . . We are moved by the tears of a stranger, even before we are apprized of the subject of his weeping. . . . A person that accosts us with joy painted on his countenance, excites in us a like sentiment of his joy.146

This thought leads Du Bos to an explicit reply to Plato’s critique of the arts. He does not seek to counter Plato by claiming that the arts do teach us important truths after all: “Men will always be fonder of books that move them, than of those that instruct them. As heaviness is more burthensome and disagreeable to them than ignorance, they prefer therefore the pleasure of being moved, to that of being instructed.”147 Rather, he counters Plato in the first instance by arguing that the result of the presentation of imitations of problematic actions and feelings is not the imitation of those same actions and feelings, but rather the generation of responses that are valuable to society, namely, aversion to wrong feelings and deeds and attraction toward right ones. Of course, any “necessary, or useful art” can be “perverted to bad purposes by those that are acquainted with its pernicious uses,” but this does not mean that those arts themselves cannot have an acceptable or good use: Plato himself “does not forbid the planting of vines on the little hills of his republic, notwithstanding the abuse of wine is frequently the cause of great disorders.”148 But in the right hands and with the right intentions, a work of art “warms the soul, elevates it in some measure above itself, and excites

146 147 148

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. IV, pp. 32–3. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. IX, vol. I, p. 56. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. V, vol. I, pp. 39–40.

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the most laudable passions within us, such as the love of our country, and the thirst of glory. The habit of those passions enables us to make several efforts of courage and virtue, which reason alone could never induce us to attempt.”149 Du Bos’s view that the aim of art is to arouse a wide range of passions, although within the limits that he indicates by calling the passions aroused by the arts “artificial,” is the basis for his comparisons of the arts and his accounts of taste and genius. Successful works of arts are those that choose subjects that can, given the constraints of the particular media of those, be most moving. Great painters, for example, have “thought proper to people” their landscapes “by introducing into their pieces a subject composed of several personages, whereof the action might be capable of moving, and consequently of engaging us.” ’Tis thus that Poussin, Rubens, and several other great masters, have employed their art. They are not satisfied with giving a place in their landskips to the picture of a man going alone the high road, or of a woman carrying fruit to market; they commonly present us with figures that think, in order to make us think; they paint men hurried with passions, to the end that ours may also be raised, and our attention fixed by this very agitation: In fact, the figures of those pieces are much more talked of than the trees or terasses.150

Different media, however, present their significant subjects in different ways, and thus move us in different ways. Unlike Addison, Du Bos does not assume that the very term “beauty” is somehow directly linked to vision, but he does hold that the sight of objects and actions has a more powerful impact on our emotions than any other representation of them – “The sight has a much greater empire over the soul than any of the other senses” – and thus he advances the “opinion, that the effect which painting produces on men, surpasses that of poetry.”151 Indeed, he supports this opinion with two reasons: first, the already mentioned power of sight; and second, the fact that “Painting makes use of natural signs, the energy of which does not depend on education,” rather than “arbitrary, or instituted,” that is, merely conventional and acquired signs, “such as words employed in poetry.”152 Nevertheless, this expression of opinion simplifies Du Bos’s fuller comparison between painting and poetry. The imagery of painting may be more powerfully 149 150 151 152

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. V, vol. I, p. 40. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. VI, vol. I, pp. 44–5. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XL, vol. I, p. 321. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XL, vol. I, p. 322.

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moving than that of poetry because it is (he assumes) natural (although of course the “naturalistic” style of post-Renaissance European painting can be argued to be no more natural than the very different styles of Chinese or Japanese painting in various periods) and employs the emotionally powerful modality of sight. At the same time, the images that paintings can capture cannot always capture precise “thoughts and sentiments . . . by reason of their not being attended with any proper motion, particularly marked in our attitude, or precisely characterized in our countenance.”153 So in order to depict particular actions and thereby produce particular emotions in response, painters must often rely upon our identification of their images with characters whose identities, actions, thoughts, and sentiments are known to us through literature, or sometimes even resort to the “odd precaution” of the “Gothic painters, rude and coarse as they were,” of drawing “their figures with rolls coming out of their mouths, whereon they wrote whatever they would have these heavy inactive figures express; which was really making them speak.”154 Further, a painting can only depict a single moment of action – again, Du Bos is taking for granted the conventions of post-Renaissance European painting, ignoring for example those medieval paintings where several stages of a well-known religious narrative – for example, annunciation, virgin birth, crucifixion, and resurrection – might be depicted from left to right across a single panel or a multipaneled altarpiece – and while such a single moment of action might be powerfully affecting, there are also limits on what can be expressed through such a single moment. Thus, As the picture, which represents an action, shews only an instance of its duration, it is impossible for the painter to express the sublime, which those things, that are previous to its present situation, throw sometimes into an ordinary sentiment. Poetry, on the contrary, describes all the remarkable incidents of the action it treats of, and that which precedes reflects frequently the marvellous upon a very ordinary thing, which is said or done in the sequel.155

Further, the poet has the opportunity to use “several strokes” in depicting his characters, and of thus assembling them together in order to form “the best drawn character, and the most accomplished portrait,” while “The case is quite different with a painter, who draws each personage but once, and can only make use of a single touch in the expressing of a 153 154 155

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XIII, vol. I, p. 69. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XIII, vol. I, p. 74. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XIII, vol. I, pp. 71–2.

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passion on each feature of the countenance.”156 The different media of painting and poetry thus offer different opportunities for depiction and emotional response, and while an image of a single moment of action may offer the potential for a greater emotional impact (or a greater failure, if the painter does not choose his moment just right),157 the poet can describe a multitude of moments of action and thought, and thereby potentially cumulatively achieve a powerful emotional impact as well. Then whether the emotional impact of the depiction of a single moment of action by means of the natural signs of sight in a painting is greater or less than the emotional impact of an accumulation of artificial or conventional signs in a poem will depend very much on the merits of the particular paintings and poems being compared; no overall comparison of the potential impact of the media in general will be possible. It may be, as Du Bos says, “easier to make men apprehend, what we are desirous of conveying to their imagination or understanding, by means of the eye, than by the help of the ear,”158 but that hardly guarantees that every painting will have more emotional impact than every poem. Du Bos also assumes that because a “tragedy represented on the stage, produces its effect by the means of the eye,” seeing the performance of a play will have a more powerful emotional impact than merely reading it; “Tragedies that we read in private, very seldom make us weep.”159 That may often be true, but presumably people differ enough in the imaginative intensity of their response to reading printed words, and of course productions of plays differ sufficiently in their effectiveness, that there is no room for the generalization that staged plays are always more powerful than merely printed ones for everyone. The argument about the differing impacts of painting and poetry that Du Bos started would be taken up by many writers later in the century, including Henry Home, Lord Kames, Moses Mendelssohn and Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, and Johann Friedrich Herder, to all of whom we will return in due course. Du Bos’s view that the purpose of art is to alleviate boredom by moving our emotions led him to a decisive approach toward the problem of taste that would also be influential throughout the century, although its edges would be softened. The problem of taste is the question of to what extent and how interpersonally or intersubjectively valid judgments about what is good and bad in art can be made by 156 157 158 159

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XIII, vol. I, pp. 75–6. See Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XIII, vol. I, p. 75. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XL, vol. I, p. 324. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, ch. XL, vol. I, p. 328.

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individuals on the basis of their own feelings in response to a work. The traditional view of the Renaissance and early modernity was that an individual would have to pass his feelings through an elaborate filter of rules, or at least pass them by a canon of exemplary models, typically from antiquity, in order to base valid judgments of taste on his own feelings.160 Du Bos’s view, however, is that since the point of art is simply to move the emotions, and everyone can judge whether his or her own emotions have indeed been moved, individuals are naturally suited to make sound judgments of taste without any special rules – although some practice and experience, as well as the sheer passage of time, may be necessary to see whether a work that arouses a flurry of emotions when it is novel will continue to do so once it has become familiar. But none of the practice that an individual might need in order to become a reliable judge of taste amounts to reasoning with the assistance of determinate and explicit rules. In due course, this conclusion would be almost universally accepted by eighteenth-century writers; we will see, for example, that it is a centerpiece of not only Hume’s but also Kant’s analysis of judgments of taste, published seventy years after Du Bos’s work. The basis of Du Bos’s position is straightforward: “As the chief aim of poetry and painting is to move and please us, every man who is not absolutely stupid, must feel the effect of good verses, and fine pictures. All men ought to be in possession of a right of giving their suffrage, when the question to be decided is, whether poems or pictures produce their proper effect.”161 Of course, we perceive a work of art through our senses, and to that extent any judgment of a work depends upon our immediate sensory response to it; but further, being moved by an object is also something that we immediately sense, so the capacity for sense is not merely a necessary but also a sufficient condition for making a sound judgment about the success of a work, in other words, a sound judgment of taste. Du Bos writes: We have a sense, which judges of the merit of works, that consist in the imitation of objects of a moving nature. This is the very sense, which would have judged of the object, that the painter, poet, or musician has imitated. ’Tis the eye, when we are to judge of the coloring of a picture. ’Tis the ear, when 160

161

In Diotima’s Children (passim), Beiser argues that a commitment to both the possibility and necessity of rules for taste is central to “aesthetic rationalism,” and moreover attempts to defend this commitment. We will consider later whether figures whom Beiser identifies as rationalists, such as Baumgarten and Mendelssohn, were really committed to this assumption. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XXII, pp. 247–8.

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we are to decide, whether the accents of a recitative be moving, whether they agree with the words, and whether the music be melodious. If we are to determine, whether the imitation we are entertained with in a poem or in the composition of a picture, be capable of exciting our pity, and of moving us; the sense whose province is to judge thereof, is the very sense which would have been moved, and have judged of the object imitated. ’Tis that sixth sense we have within us, without feeling its organs. ’Tis a portion of ourselves, which judges from what it feels, and which, to express myself in Plato’s words, determines, without consulting either rule or compass. This is, in fine, what is commonly called sense or sensitive perception.162

Du Bos’s claim that our aesthetic responses are not merely dependent upon information furnished by the five normal senses with their dedicated sense-organs but are themselves like sensory responses although without any dedicated sense-organ would be profoundly influential. From this premise he derives the further conclusion that although reason can come in to analyze how particular objects produce their particular emotional effects, it is not necessary for an individual to perform any such analysis in order to feel the effect or to make a sound judgment about the object on the basis of feeling its effect. “The heart is agitated of itself, by a motion previous to all deliberation, when the object presented is really affecting; whether this object has received its being from nature, or from an imitation made by art. Our heart is made and organized for this very purpose: Its operation therefore runs before our reasoning, as the action of the eye and ear precedes it in their sensations.”163 Since the object does not produce its effect through the medium of reasoning, reasoning is thus not necessary in order to make a reliable judgment about the object: If the chief merit of poems and pictures were to consist in being conformable to written rules, one might then say that the best method of judging of their excellency, as also of the degree of esteem they ought to hold in the minds of men, would be certainly that of discussion and analysis. But the principal merit of poems and pictures is to please us. That is the chief end which painters and poets aim at, when they take so much pains to conform to the rules of their art. We are therefore able to judge whether they have succeeded, when we know whether their performance is affecting or no. One may say indeed, that a work, in which the essential rules are violated, cannot be pleasing. But this is better known, by judging from the impression made by that work, than by forming a judgment of it from the dissertation of critics, who very seldom agree with respect to the importance of

162 163

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XXII, p. 239. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XXII, pp. 239–40.

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each rule. Wherefore the public is capable of judging right with relation to verses and pictures, without being acquainted with the rules of poetry and painting.164

There may well be rules about how certain effects are best achieved, even emotional effects, and artists may well have to know those rules, and perhaps have learned them from qualified critics; but knowledge of those rules plays no rôle in experiencing the intended effects. And as Du Bos will subsequently add, the artists’ knowledge of purported rules for their art cannot supersede the judgments of audiences, based directly on their feelings, whether the intended effects have in fact been achieved.165 Du Bos sums up his position in a famous passage that would later be echoed by Hume and Kant: Do we ever reason, in order to know whether a ragoo be good or bad; and has it ever entered into any body’s head, after having settled the geometrical principles of taste, and defined the qualities of each ingredient that enters into the composition of those messes, to examine into the proportion observed in their mixture, in order to decide whether the ragoo be good or bad? No, this is never practised. We have a sense given to us by nature to distinguish whether the cook acted according to the rules of his art. People taste the ragoo, and tho’ unacquainted with those rules, they are able to tell, whether it be good or no. The same may be said in some respect of the productions of the mind, and of pictures made to move and please us.166

However, although Du Bos insists that no reasoning is necessary in order to make sound judgments of taste, thus that the public that is ignorant of the professional rules of either artists or critics can make such judgments, he does not mean to argue that no qualifications whatever are necessary to make such judgments. He says that “I do not mean the lower class of people by the public capable of passing judgment on poems or pictures, and of deciding the measure of their excellence. The word public is applicable here to such persons only, as having acquired some lights, either by reading or by being conversant with the world.”167 In particular, reliable judges are found only in that part of the public that has developed the “Taste of Comparison,” by means of extensive reading and exposure to works of art on their own and through discussion with others. Further, it is not the initial response of even this public to a work that determines 164 165 166 167

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XXII, pp. 242–3. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XXV–XXVI. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XXI, pp. 238–9. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XXI, p. 245.

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its true value, for “the public does not finish in one day the trial of works that have real merit.”168 It takes time to make a sound assessment of a work, even though that assessment is based on feelings alone, because it takes time for feelings about a work to settle down into a stable pattern. Part of the reason this takes time is because even the members of a discerning public need time to compare their responses, not to the rules of artists and critics, but to the responses of their peers, in order to decide how sustainable their responses are.169 Given experience and time, however, Du Bos is confident that “all that judge by sense, agree at last with respect to the effect and merit of a work.”170 But the like-minded “public” that Du Bos has in mind seems to be one that is limited in time and space, and he does not attempt to argue that a qualified public at any one time and place can make judgments of taste valid for all times and places. He does not just mean that some temporally and spatially situated publics can make better judgments than others, although that is sometimes true – pictures exhibited in Rome can be better judged than those exhibited in London or Paris, because “The inhabitants of Rome are almost all of them born with a very great sensibility for painting, and their natural taste has likewise frequent occasions of improving and perfecting itself by the help of those excellent works, which they meet with in their churches, palaces, and almost every house they enter.”171 More than that, he at least suggests that manners and mores differ over time and place, so that what is genuinely moving for a qualified public at one time and place may not be so for another. Thus he asks whether “a geometrical estimation of the merit of Arisosto made by a Frenchman in our days, be of any weight with the Italians of the sixteenth century?”172 This remark occurs in the course of Du Bos’s argument that judgments of taste are based on feeling, not reasoning, so its direct point is that the Frenchman’s calculations cannot gainsay the actual emotional responses of the Italians. But beyond that, it also at least hints that because of cultural differences between eighteenth-century France and sixteenth-century Italians, eighteenth-century Frenchmen may simply not have the same emotional responses to works that so moved sixteenth-century Italians, but that does not detract from the soundness of

168 169 170 171 172

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XXI, p. 247. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XXVII, p. 283. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XXIII, p. 258. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XXIX, p. 288. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XXIII, p. 257.

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the judgments of the latter about works for which they were the original and intended audience. Du Bos explicitly argues that different times and places give rise to different sorts of genius. He treats genius as an unusual aptitude at any kind of pursuit, “received from nature to perform well and easily, that which others can do but indifferently”;173 thus, “The administration of great concerns, the art of putting people to those employments for which they are naturally formed, the study of physic, and even gaming itself, all require a genius.”174 Different pursuits have different ends and different skills, however, so what makes somebody a genius at one pursuit is not the same as what makes someone a genius at another. Since the end of art is to move the emotions of the audience for art, the genius of artists is an unusual aptitude to move the emotions through the medium within which they work: For example, “Genius is the fire which elevates painters above themselves, and enables them to infuse a soul into their figures, and motion into their compositions.”175 Much of Du Bos’s lengthy discussion of genius is devoted to the remarkable argument that genius is such a natural force that it almost inevitably expresses itself. Every normal person learns to speak, so there is almost nothing that can prevent a person with a genius for poetry from becoming a poet. Painters need to learn special techniques in order to practice their art, but even those with the most unpromising backgrounds – those whose fathers are shoemakers as well as those whose fathers are themselves painters – can usually find someone to teach them the technical side of their art. However, what can limit the expression of genius is the nature of a culture or an “age,” whether it devotes its resources to war-making, for example, or strives to produce the material surplus that will allow artists to work and produce an audience able and willing to pay for their work.176 That seems reasonable enough. The single longest chapter in Du Bos’s entire work, however, is devoted to the thesis “That physical causes have probably also had a share in the surprizing progress of arts and sciences.”177 By this Du Bos means that different countries are more or less hospitable to different arts, particularly because of their climates;178 that the trajectory of artistic progress is not gradual, but that “there are particular times, in 173 174 175 176 177 178

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. I, p. 5. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. I, p. 7. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. II, p. 13. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XII. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XIII, p. 107. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XIII, p. 110.

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which men attain in very few years to a surprizing pitch of perfection in those very arts and professions, which they cultivated almost ineffectually before for a long succession of ages”;179 and, most remarkably, that great moments in a particular art are almost always great moments in other arts and sciences: “The great painters of the several schools have not only lived at the same time, but have likewise been contemporaries with the most famous poets of their own countries. The ages in which the arts flourished, have been also fertile of men eminent in all sciences, virtues, and professions.”180 These claims are certainly debatable, perhaps especially the claim that moments in which the arts flourish are also moments in which the virtues flourish. Du Bos’s geographical, anthropological, and historical account of the uneven distribution of genius had some influence later in the rest of eighteenth-century criticism, such as in the art history of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, to which we will return, and even more influence on other aspects of eighteenth-century thought, such as on the political philosophy of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and the historiography of the Scottish Enlightnment, represented by such works as Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man of 1774, but this will not be one of the major themes of this book. Rather, what was of more importance within aesthetics was the recognition that Du Bos’s analysis of genius as a natural aptitude for doing easily what others can do only with difficulty, but apparently can learn to do, leaves out an element that might well be expected to be found in an analysis of artistic creativity, namely, the idea of imagination as an ability to invent something unique that no one else could come up with at all. Doing justice to this point would become more important in subsequent accounts of genius than Du Bos’s geographical determinism. In this chapter, we have seen how the founders of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain and France, Shaftesbury and Wolff, carried into this century the cognitivist approach to aesthetics, the aesthetics of truth, that had been dominant since antiquity. Addison, Crousaz, and Du Bos introduced the new idea of the free play of mental powers in aesthetic experience and, at least in the case of the last, defended the emotional impact of art against Plato’s ancient critique. We will next consider the development of aesthetics in Britain after Shaftesbury and Addison, and will then see how the legacy of Du Bos was both developed and contested in France. Since aesthetics in Germany after Wolff was heavily influenced 179 180

Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XIII, p. 128. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. II, ch. XIII, p. 164.

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by British and French sources as well as by Wolff himself, these chapters are not only important in their own right but will also be necessary detours if we are to understand the subsequent development of aesthetics in Germany. In the next three parts of this volume, we will thus examine British, French, and German aesthetics in the eighteenth century, in that order – even though it was only in the last of these schools, the German, that the term “aesthetics” itself was used in the eighteenth century.

Part One

AESTHETICS IN BRITAIN, 1725–1800

2 From Hutcheson to Hume The Sense of Beauty

In the seminal second decade of the eighteenth century, as we have just seen, responses to Plato’s challenge to the value of aesthetic experience included both the traditional response that such experience does give us access to the true character of reality as well as the new response that aesthetic experience consists in an intrinsically pleasurable and therefore valuable play of the mental powers that is not vulnerable to Plato’s criticism of the cognitive value of the arts, although this play may also have indirect cognitive and moral benefits. Against Plato’s critique of the emotional impact of mimetic art, Du Bos also defended the importance of the experience of the emotions raised by art while distinguishing not the reality but the circumstances of such emotions from those of emotions in real life. In Britain, the traditional cognitivist response to Plato was represented by the Neo-Platonist Shaftesbury, while the idea of aesthetic experience as a form of mental activity enjoyable because of its freedom was introduced by Addison. In the vast literature on aesthetics that was produced in Britain beginning throughout the eighteenth century (even though the German name for the discipline was not nativized until the nineteenth century) the theory that aesthetic experience is an intrinsically pleasurable play of our mental powers accompanied with indirect cognitive and moral benefits predominated, although there were certainly some authors who defended the more traditional emphasis on the cognitive value of aesthetic experience, for example, the Aberdonians George Turnbull and Thomas Reid. The development of this approach to aesthetics went hand in hand with the development of the “moral sense” school of moral philosophy, especially by Francis Hutcheson; David Hume; Henry Home, Lord Kames; and Adam Smith. In particular, the characteristic theory of the second half of the century that aesthetic experience consists essentially in a 97

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pleasurable association of ideas, expounded in its mature form in The Elements of Criticism (1762) of Kames, and the Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) of Archibald Alison, can be understood as a development of the conception of aesthetic experience as a free play of our mental powers. But at the same time, Kames in particular also emphasized the emotional impact of artistic representations – a natural interest for a philosopher of “moral sense” – and indeed what he meant by “elements of criticism” is primarily a catalogue of the ways in which arts in different media, although above all literature, can produce emotions of various kinds. So Kames can be regarded as synthesizing two of the three main approaches to aesthetics: the theory of aesthetic experience as free mental play or activity and the recognition of the emotional impact of art. The success of Kames’s synthesis of these two elements might well explain the influence his work enjoyed until well into the nineteenth century.

1. Hutcheson Although it would not receive its name until ten years later in Germany, and that name would not be adopted in Britain for another century, the history of what we now call aesthetics as a specialty within academic philosophy began in Britain with the Treatise Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design by Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), the first part of his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue of 1725. Hutcheson was a Scots-Irish Presbyterian from Ulster, the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers (“dissenting” ministers in Northern Ireland, since the established church there, unike Scotland, was Anglican). There was no Presbyterian university in Ireland, and Hutcheson entered the University of Glasgow in 1711, where he studied both the arts and theology, and was licensed as a preacher in Ulster in 1719. He founded a “dissenting” academy in Dublin soon thereafter and was its head for the next ten years. During this period, Hutcheson suffered a trial by ecclesiastical authorities for teaching that human beings can know what is good and evil independently of recognizing divine existence and divine commands. Unlike Christian Wolff, however, who suffered a similar condemnation in Prussia, Hutcheson was not banished or deprived of his position. Nevertheless, he completed his career in Scotland rather than in Ireland. In 1730, he was elected professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, where he taught until his death in 1746. He developed his moral philosophy in the two treatises of 1725 and in a second two-part

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volume of 1728, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, in a Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (published in Latin in 1742 and in English in 1747), and in a posthumously published System of Moral Philosophy (1755). His influence on Scottish philosophy was enormous – Adam Smith studied with him at Glasgow, and while David Hume did not, his moral philosophy is in many ways a development of Hutcheson’s, indeed some of his arguments are directly appropriated from Hutcheson. And since British philosophy in the eighteenth century was largely produced by Scots (with the exceptions of the non-Scots Irishmen George Berkeley and Edmund Burke), Hutcheson in many ways determined the character of British philosophy in his century.1 Hutcheson’s work is itself often seen as a systematization of the thought of Shaftesbury, and indeed on the title page of the first edition of the 1725 Inquiry Hutcheson stated that in it “The Principles of the Late Earl of SHAFTSBURY are explain’d and defended, against the Author of the Fable of the Bees,” that is, the Dutch-British physician Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), who had notoriously defended the thesis that “private vices are public benefits.”2 Hutcheson certainly defended the thesis that human beings have a natural sentiment of approbation toward 1

2

There has not been a monograph on Hutcheson’s life and work since William Robert Scott, Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900). But important treatments of his moral philosophy can be found in Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 207–43; J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 333–42; Michael B. Gill, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 135–97; and Terence Irwin, The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study, vol. II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 421–38. There is an important monograph on Hutcheson’s aesthetics, namely, Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics (originally 1976), revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). For a briefer treatment, see Walter John Hipple, Jr., The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), pp. 25–36. The title page of the first edition of the Inquiry is reproduced in the edition of the first treatise edited by Peter Kivy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 3. Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) was a Dutch physician who settled in London and started a literary career by translating the Fables of La Fontaine. In 1705 he published a verse pamphlet The Grumbling-Hive: or, Knaves Turned Honest; he republished this with extensive prose commentary in 1714 as The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (a modern version was edited by Phillip Harth [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970). For commentary, see M.M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville’s Social and Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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benevolent actions in which they have no personal interest that he found in Shaftesbury, and like Shaftesbury he used the idea that we have a natural sense for beauty, which he thought would be non-controversial, to prepare the way for his argument that our approbation of benevolence is both natural and more like a sentiment than a principle or inference of reason: This is why he prefaced the treatise Concerning Moral Good and Evil with the treatise Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design in his first major publication. Referring to himself, he states in the preface to the whole volume: All he is solicitous about is to shew, “That there is some Sense of Beauty natural to Men; that we find as great an agreement of Men in their Relishes of Forms, as in their external Senses which all agree to be natural; and that Pleasure or Pain, Delight or Aversion, are naturally join’d to their Perceptions.” If the Reader be convinc’d [of such Determinations of the Mind to be pleased with Forms, Proportions, Resemblances, Theorems], it will be no difficult matter to apprehend another superior Sense, natural also to Men, determining them to be pleas’d with Actions, Characters, Affections. This is the moral Sense.3

But although Hutcheson took over from Shaftesbury the idea that our response to beauty is a naturally occurring sentiment, he departed from Shaftesbury’s assumption that this response is a form of cognition of the true ontological and moral structure of the universe, and instead at least pointed toward the idea that this response is a form of free mental play that has only indirect cognitive and moral benefits. In fact, Hutcheson, brought up far from Neo-Platonism, adapted Shaftesbury’s language to make a more drastic separation between perceptual and intellectual responses than the Neo-Platonist Shaftesbury had ever intended. Perhaps it was for this reason that he dropped the reference to Shaftesbury beginning with the second edition of the Inquiry, published the very next year (an indication of the work’s immediate popularity). In any case, Hutcheson’s work was influenced as much by Addison as by Shaftesbury, even adopting Addison’s designation of “the Pleasant Perceptions arising from regular, harmonious, uniform Objects” as “the Pleasures of the Imagination,” although he explicitly restricts his concern to beauty rather than to grandeur and novelty because establishing that we have a natural 3

Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), Preface, p. 10. I will give the pagination of this edition, as it is now the most easily available edition of Hutcheson’s work. But I will use the orthography and typography (capitalization and italicization) of the fourth edition of Hutcheson’s work (London: D. Midwinter et al., 1738). The bracketed words in this quotation were replaced with the word “this” in the fourth edition.

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sense of beauty is all he needs to prepare the way for his thesis that we have a natural approbation of benevolence.4 Hutcheson seems to be following Shaftesbury in arguing that our response to beauty is like a sense-perception and for that reason disinterested, but he actually contrasts the perceptual character of our response to beauty to a rational and intellectual interpretation of the experience in a way that Shaftesbury did not. He says that “Many of our sensitive Perceptions are pleasant, and many painful, immediately, and that without any knowledge of the Cause of this Pleasure or Pain, or how the Objects excite it, or are the Occasions of it; or without seeing to what further Advantage or Detriment the Use of such Objects might tend: Nor would the most accurate Knowledge of these things vary either the Pleasure or Pain of the Perception, however it might give a rational Pleasure distinct from the sensible,”5 and then argues that our pleasure in beauty is a feeling of pleasure that supervenes on our ordinary sensory perceptions of certain objects, and which for that reason can be attributed to an “Internal Sense” that responds to our “External Senses.”6 Hutcheson stresses that This superior Power of Perception is justly called a Sense, because of its Affinity to the other Senses in this, that the Pleasure does not arise from any Knowledge of Principles, Proportions, Causes, or of the Usefulness of the Object; but strikes us at first with the Idea of Beauty; nor does the most accurate Knowledge increase this Pleasure of Beauty, however it may superadd a distinct rational Pleasure from prospects of Advantage, or from the Increase of Knowledge.7

Our ideas of beauty supervene on ordinary perceptions of the external senses because they are responses to certain features of those perceptions, but they are themselves also like sense-perceptions because they are immediate and necessary responses to those perceptions, and do not in Hutcheson’s view depend on any process of reflection or thought

4

5 6 7

The quotation is from Hutcheson, The Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), Treatise I, section I, p. 17. See also Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Treatise I, section VI, paragraph XIII, p. 69. Here Hutcheson refers the reader to Spectator 412 for discussion of grandeur and novelty, discussion of which he omits as unnecessary for his own purposes. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section I, paragraph VI, pp. 20–1. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section I, paragraph XII, p. 24. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section I, paragraph XII, p. 25.

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about those perceptions.8 And because whatever mental process leads to such pleasure in what we perceive does not depend upon any reflection, a fortiori it does not depend upon reflection on any potential use or other value of what is perceived: And farther, the Ideas of Beauty and Harmony, like other sensible Ideas, are necessarily pleasant to us, as well as immediately so; neither can any Resolution of our Own, nor any Prospect of Advantage or Disadvantage, vary the Beauty or Deformity of an Object: For as in the external Sensations, no View of Interest will make an Object grateful, nor View of Detriment, distinct from immediate Pain in the Perception, make it disagreeable to the Sense.9

In the Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, Hutcheson makes independence of the will and thus of interest part of the definition of a sense: “we may call every Determination of our Minds to receive Ideas independently on our Will, and to have Perceptions of Pleasure and Pain, A SENSE.”10 Indeed, for Hutcheson the possibility of any determination of the will depends upon the existence of an antecedent sense of pleasure or pain. Thus on Hutcheson’s account, our pleasure in beauty is disinterested in the specific sense that it occurs independently of any reflection upon our interests, whether merely practical or moral, and is not directly affected by any reflection on such interests. For the same reason, this pleasure is noncognitive, for although it is stimulated by the perception of external objects, it is not a product of any form of reflection upon those perceptions. In this regard, Hutcheson clearly separates his position from one like that of Shaftesbury (or Wolff), which holds that our sentiment of

8

9

10

In his 1745 Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria (A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy), Hutcheson calls both the moral sense and the “wonderful and ingenious Relish or Sense, by which we receive subtiler pleasures; in material forms gracefulness, beauty and proportion; in sounds concord and harmony; and are highly delighted with observing exact Imitation in the works of the more ingenious arts, Painting, Statuary and Sculpture,” “reflex or subsequent senses,” “sensus . . . reflexos aut subsequentes”; but by this he does not mean that these feelings are the product of any rational or intellectual reflection, but rather that by means of the moral sense and the aesthetic sense “certain new forms or perceptions are received, in consequence of others previously observed by our external or internal senses” – in other words, reflex senses are perceptual responses to other perceptions. See Hutcheson, Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria with A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, ed. Luigi Turco (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), Book I, “The Elements of Ethicks,” ch. I, “Of Human Nature,” section VIII, pp. 31–2. Hutcheson, Philosophiae Moralis, Book I, “The Elements of Ethicks,” ch. I, “ Of Human Nature,” section I, paragraph XIV, p. 25. Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, Treatise I, section I, p. 17.

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beauty is an intuitive cognition of the perfection of its object, whether that be a particular object, like a painting or a building, or the world as a whole, a response that is natural and immediate, like sensation, but that also depends upon intellectual recognition of a certain content, like cognition. In stressing the sensory rather than reflective nature of aesthetic response, Hutcheson goes so far as to claim that the term “beauty” properly denotes our feeling of pleasure itself rather than anything in objects that might induce it: “in the following Papers, the Word Beauty is taken for the Idea rais’d in us, and a Sense of Beauty for our Power of receiving this Idea. Harmony also denotes our pleasant Ideas arising from Composition of Sounds.”11 Many in the eighteenth century would follow Hutcheson in treating not just our feeling of pleasure in response to beauty as subjective, which in one, ontological sense is trivially true, but in treating beauty itself as subjective, a property of the subject rather than the object; and many have subsequently excoriated eighteenth-century aestheticians for this “subjectivization” of beauty or other aesthetic properties.12 However, Hutcheson’s real point, perhaps clumsily expressed by later standards, is only that beauty is what we would now call a relational or dispositional property, that is, a property of objects that is defined by the fact that it characteristically causes a certain kind of response in a certain kind of responder: “Beauty has always relation to the Sense of some Mind; and when we afterwards shew how generally the Objects which occur to us, are beautiful, we mean that such Objects are agreeable to the Sense of Men.”13 Having characterized our response to beauty as an immediate and necessary pleasure in the perception of objects, Hutcheson then offers an account of the property in objects the perception of which causes the feeling or idea of beauty, which we would nowadays (were we to accept Hutcheson’s theory, of course) identify with the dispositional property of beauty. Hutcheson does not consider the sense of beauty a form of cognition of properties of objects, but that does not mean that our feelings of beauty cannot be explained as the effect of certain characteristic properties of objects – there can be a theory of beauty even if the sense of beauty is not itself a form of cognition. So let us now turn to 11 12

13

Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section I, paragraph IX, p. 23. See especially Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd, rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 1989), although Gadamer blames Kant rather than Hutcheson for this tendency (Part I, ch. 2). Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph I, p. 28.

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the “objective” side of Hutcheson’s theory of beauty, that is, his account of the properties of objects that trigger the sense of beauty in human beings. Hutcheson begins by dividing all instances of beauty into two kinds: “Beauty is either Original or Comparative; or, if any like the Terms better, Absolute or Relative.” But since he also claims that all beauty depends upon a relation between objects and a certain kind of perceiver (ourselves), he realizes that he has to explain this distinction: “by Absolute or Original Beauty, is not understood any Quality suppos’d to be in the object, which should of itself be beautiful, without relation to any Mind which perceives it.” That is, “absolute” does not mean nonrelational. Rather, by “Absolute Beauty” Hutcheson means “only that Beauty, which we perceive in Objects without Comparison to any” other “thing external, of which the Object is suppos’d an Imitation, or Picture; such as that Beauty perceiv’d from the Works of Nature, artificial Forms, Figures, Theorems,” while “Comparative or Relative Beauty is that which we perceive in Objects, commonly considered as Imitations or Resemblances of something else.”14 Yet underlying this distinction – which we have already seen anticipated in Addison and which will be adopted or adapted by many later writers – is a common basis, for what Hutcheson argues is that all responses to beauty are responses to the perception of “Uniformity amidst Variety,” which can be found either in the form or properties of some object perceived by itself (the case of original or absolute beauty) or in an object perceived as an imitation or representation of some other object (the case of comparative or relative beauty). Several points need to be made about Hutcheson’s thesis. First, Hutcheson offers his explanation of the cause of the sense of beauty as an empirical claim, not as a conceptual truth or any other sort of a priori claim: He says the claim will be “plain from Examples,”15 and indeed he supports it by various examples of what both children and adults find pleasurable in objects. But second, Hutcheson is not modifying his noncognitivist theory of beauty: His claim is not that the ordinary percipient of beauty consciously recognizes that an object possesses some suitable degree of uniformity amid variety and from that infers that it is beautiful, but rather that the philosopher investigating the sense of beauty (in himself and others) will discover that it is always some form of uniformity 14

15

Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section I, paragraph XVI, p. 27. The word “Theorems” was omitted from the fourth edition. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph III, p. 29.

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amid variety in an object that causes people to respond to it immediately with the pleasurable sentiment that Hutcheson identifies with the idea of beauty. This is supposed to hold even when the pleasure must presuppose some cognition, as when one recognizes that an object is an imitation of another. Hutcheson emphasizes that our pleasurable response to the perception of uniformity amid variety is not a cognition of that uniformity amid variety, or anything else: But in all these Instances of Beauty let it be observ’d, That the Pleasure is communicated to those who never reflected on this general Foundation; and that all here alleg’d is this, “That the pleasant Sensation arises only from Objects, in which there is Uniformity amid Variety”: We may have the Sensation without knowing what is the Occasion of it; as a Man’s Taste may suggest Ideas of Sweets, Acids, Bitters, tho’ he be ignorant of the Forms of the small Bodys, or their Motions, which excite these Perceptions in him.16

This comparison makes it clear that the model for Hutcheson’s account of beauty is Locke’s conception of secondary qualities, and that any confusion on his part about whether the term “beauty” should be used to denote the dispositional property of objects that causes the feeling of beauty in us or reserved for that subjective feeling itself mirrors Locke’s own confusion about whether the secondary qualities such as colors and tastes should be identified with our ideas of them or the dispositions that cause those ideas.17 That detail aside, it is because Hutcheson is so emphatic that our response to beauty causally depends upon the perception of external objects but is not itself cognition of their properties or perfections that I say he opens the way for the alternative that this response is or depends upon a free play of our mental powers with our perception of the object. But at least at first Hutcheson refrains from saying much more about the causation of our feeling of beauty than what sort of property in external objects triggers it. However, he does offer an extensive account of the various forms of uniformity amid variety that can be found to trigger our idea of beauty in works of both nature and art. Hutcheson had a fondness for mathematical imagery. This is evident in his ethics in his formulation of “a universal Canon to compare the Morality of any Actions,” an early version of utilitarianism that measures the “Moral Importance” of any action as the product of its beneficial

16 17

Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph XIV, p. 35. See Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. VIII.

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effects and the ability of the agent, or difficulty of performing it.18 And this mathematical penchant is also evident in his aesthetics in his statement that greater beauty can be produced either by greater variety when uniformity is constant or greater uniformity when variety is constant.19 These two versions of the beauty of uniformity amid variety can easily be discerned in the three kinds of absolute beauty that Hutcheson identifies: the beauty of nature, the beauty of theorems, and the beauty of what we can now call nonrepresentational art. The beauty of nature obtains when we perceive either kind of uniformity amid variety in such things as geometrical figures,20 the figures and motions of “the great Bodys” of the “Universe,”21 the colors and “various Degrees of Light and Shade” in “Mountains, Valleys, Hills, and open Plains,”22 the structures and actions of organisms, such as “the almost infinite multitude of Leaves, Fruit, Seed, Flowers”23 and “an almost infinite diversity of Motions” such as “walking, running, flying, swimming,”24 the proportions among the various parts of animals, “which still pleases the Sense of Spectators, tho’ they cannot calculate it with the accuracy of a Statuary,”25 the “great Variety of Feathers” in “Fowls,”26 and the infinitely varying motions of fluids.27 Here Hutcheson also includes the beauty of harmony in music, “because Harmony is not usually conceiv’d as an Imitation of any thing else”: “the Foundation of this Pleasure” too “is known to be a sort of Uniformity,” in which “the several Vibrations of one Note regularly coincide with the Vibrations of another.” Here again Hutcheson stresses the noncognitive character of his position, that is, that uniformity amid variety causes our pleasure in beauty but not through any knowledge of it: “Harmony often raises Pleasure in those who know not what is the Occasion of it.”28 Hutcheson devotes a whole section to the beauty of theorems, but even here, where theorems themselves might be considered objects of 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise II, section III, paragraph XI, p. 128. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph III, p. 29. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph III, p. 29. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph V, p. 30. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph VI, p. 31. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph VII, p. 32. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph VIII, p. 32. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph X, p. 33. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph XI, p. 34. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph XII, p. 34; recall here Addison’s inclusion of the beauty of “jetteaus.” Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section II, paragraph XIII, pp. 34–5.

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knowledge, he stresses the noncognitive character of our pleasure in them. Our sense of the beauty of theorems is triggered by the way in which a single proposition may ground or occasion “many Infinitys of particular Truths,”29 or “a vast Multitude of Corollarys easily deducible from it.”30 But our pleasure in the perception of such a form of uniformity amid variety is nevertheless distinct from any thought of the truth and of the value of the knowledge of such theorems, as is demonstrated by the fact that our pleasure has a distinct phenomenology from our knowledge: This Delight which accompanys Sciences, or universal Theorems, may really be call’d a kind of Sensation; since it necessarily accompanys the Discovery of any Proposition, and is distinct from bare Knowledge it self, being most violent at first, whereas the Knowledge is uniformly the same. And however Knowledge inlarges the Mind, and makes us more capable of comprehensive Views and Projects in some kinds of Business, whence Advantage may also arise to us; yet we may leave it in the Breast of every Student to determine, whether he has not often felt this Pleasure without any such prospect of Advantage from the Discovery of his Theorem. All which can thence be inferr’d is only this, that as in our external Senses, so in our internal ones, the pleasant Sensations generally arise from those Objects which calm Reason would have recommended, had we understood their Use, and which might have engag’d our pursuits from Self-interest.31

Hutcheson does not deny that there is pleasure in knowledge or in the recognition of the utility of knowledge; he denies only that our pleasure in beauty is identical to our pleasure in knowledge or utility. A fortiori, our pleasure in beauty is not pleasure in the intuitive cognition of truth or perfection or of the utility thereof. At the same time, Hutcheson’s position allows room for the recognition that our pleasure in any particular object may be complex: If we do understand the cognitive or practical significance of an object, we can take pleasure in that as well as in the sheer perception of the object. But the latter aspect of our pleasure, since it is not a pleasure in any “Business,” can instead be considered as pleasure in the play of our mental powers in or with the perception of an object. Hutcheson applies the same analysis to absolute beauty in what we would call nonrepresentational arts, although he does not initially delimit the kind of art he is talking about: 29 30 31

Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section III, paragraph IV, p. 37. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section III, paragraph V, p. 38. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section III, paragraph VI, p. 40.

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As to the Works of ART, were we to run thro’ the various Artificial Contrivances or Structures, we should constantly find the Foundation of the Beauty which appears in them, to be some kind of Uniformity, or Unity of Proportion among the Parts, and of each Part to the Whole. As there is a great Diversity of Proportions possible, and different Kinds of Uniformity, so there is room enough for that Diversity of Fancys observable in Architecture, Gardening, and such-like Arts in different Nations.32

Thus, Hutcheson argues, even though Chinese and Persian architecture do not use the same structural and decorative elements as Greek, Roman, and modern European architecture, they still seek relations of uniformity amid variety among their preferred elements.33 And there is no suggestion that our pleasure in such uniformity amid variety has anything to do with the fact or the knowledge of its utility, as there is in Wolff’s Vitruvian treatment of architecture, although of course Hutcheson’s recognition of the multilayered character of our pleasure in theorems should also allow that our pleasure in architecture may be complex, including pleasure at its utility as well as pleasure in the sheer perception of it. Turning from nonrepresentational to representational arts, Hutcheson locates our pleasure in the mimetic works of the “Statuary, Painter, or Poet” in the fact that “Imitation” or representation, which is the basis of “Relative or Comparative” rather than “Original or Absolute” beauty, is itself “a Conformity, or a kind of Unity between the Original and the Copy,” where the original “may be either some Object in Nature, or some establish’d Idea.”34 The potential complexity of our pleasures in works of art is here acknowledged by the recognition that our pleasure in the relative beauty of a representation, either a pictorial image or verbal description, to its original is independent of our pleasure in the absolute beauty of that which is represented; although if the original is itself beautiful, that may add to our pleasure in the representation, it is not a necessary condition of our pleasure in the representation that what it represents be beautiful. Thus, “to obtain comparative Beauty alone, it is not necessary that there be any Beauty in the Original; the Imitation of absolute Beauty may indeed in the whole make a more lovely Piece, and yet an exact Imitation shall still be beautiful, though the Original were intirely void of it: Thus the Deformitys of 32 33 34

Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section III, paragraph VIII, p. 41. See also Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section VI, paragraph V, p. 65. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section IV, paragraph I, p. 42.

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old Age in a Picture, the rudest Rocks or Mountains in a Landskip, if well presented, shall have abundant Beauty.”35 And “The same Observation holds true in the Descriptions of the Poets either of natural Objects or Persons. . . . By the Moratæ Fabulæ, or ηθη of ARISTOTLE, we are not to understand virtuous Manners in a moral Sense, but a just Representation of Manners or Characters as they are in Nature.”36 Thus, although he does not explicitly mention it, Hutcheson’s resolution of Du Bos’s paradox of tragedy must be simply that we can take pleasure in the accurate representation of the tragic events, quite apart from our attitude or feelings toward those events themselves. In such a solution, however, there is no hint that we might actually enjoy an emotional response to the depicted characters and events themselves. This brief analysis of our pleasure in imitation is the heart of Hutcheson’s theory of representational arts. But in spite of the brevity of his treatment, Hutcheson either raises or makes a number of other interesting points. First, he does not mean to limit the objects of artistic representation to things that actually exist in nature; his remark that the original of an artistic representation can be either “some object in nature” or an “establish’d idea” makes that clear. But the apparent limitation of ideas that may be imitated to ones that are “established” would seem to place a drastic limitation on the potential for artistic imagination and creativity, the recognition of which would ordinarily be thought to be central to any theory that the essence of both artistic production and the reception of art lies in the free play of our mental powers. However, Hutcheson quickly introduces a dimension of play into his account when he says that “We may here observe a strange Proneness in our Minds to make perpetual Comparisons of all things which occur to our Observation, even of those which are very different from each other,” because such remote comparisons may more deeply “entertain our Fancy” than obvious ones. It is indeed our pleasure in remote comparisons that is the real basis for the relative beauty of representational art: In short, every thing in Nature, by our strange Inclination to Resemblance, shall be brought to represent other things, even the most remote, especially the Passions and Circumstances of human Nature in which we are more nearly concern’d; and to confirm this, and furnish Instances of it, one need only look into HOMER or VIRGIL. A fruitful Fancy would find in a Grove or

35 36

Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section IV, paragraph I, p. 42. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section IV, paragraph II, pp. 42–3.

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a Wood, an Emblem of every Character in a Commonwealth, and every Turn or Temper, or Station in Life.37

This passage is important not only because it shows that Hutcheson does after all locate our pleasure in representational art in its potential for the play of the imagination with “remote” or novel resemblances, but also because it shows his equal commitment to the view that the art we enjoy most deeply is that which engages our “concern” for “the passions and circumstances of human nature.” However, he does not suggest that any part of our pleasure in representational art consists in the actual experience of passions, whether the passions of the depicted characters or different passions of our own in response to those. An at least incipient recognition of the fact that we can take a pleasure in the appearance of an object that is distinct from our other pleasures in it, say, our pleasure in its utility, is also evidenced by Hutcheson’s passing remark about entasis, or the tapering of columns so that they will appear straight when seen from below: “This may be the Reason too, why Columns or Pillars look best when made a little taper from the middle or a third from the bottom, that they may not seem top-heavy, and in danger of falling.”38 It is of course important to us that columns not be top-heavy and in danger of falling, but also important to us that they not look like they are, which requires a slight variation of the shape that is required by utility alone. This comment comes in Hutcheson’s discussion of a third point, which is that we take a pleasure in the perception of a thing as a successful execution of an intention. This can also be considered as a kind of correspondence or uniformity, namely, that between the intention and the achieved object. CONCERNING that kind of comparative Beauty, which has a necessary relation to some establish’d Idea, we may observe, that some Works of Art acquire a distinct Beauty by their Correspondence to some universally suppos’d Intention in the Artificer, or the Persons who employ’d him: And to obtain this Beauty, sometimes they do not form their Works so as to attain the highest Perfection of original Beauty separately consider’d; because a Composition of this relative Beauty, along with some Degree of the original Kind, may give more Pleasure, than a more perfect original Beauty separately.

Hutcheson illustrates this point with a remark about what we would initially have thought is a nonrepresentational art, namely, gardening 37 38

Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section IV, paragraph IV, pp. 43–4. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section IV, paragraph V, p. 45.

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or landscape architecture: “strict Regularity in laying out of Gardens in Parterres, Vistas, parallel Walks, is often neglected, to obtain an Imitation of Nature even in some of its Wildnesses.”39 Perhaps because of our penchant for remote comparisons, we are not in fact limited in our ability to create or perceive representation, and so in a work like a garden there are actually many possibilities for pleasure: pleasure in the perception of absolute order and harmony, pleasure in the recognition of representation, and pleasure in the recognition of successful accomplishment. As we have already seen, in spite of Hutcheson’s strict separation of the pleasure of beauty from the pleasure of cognition, he is not committed to a view that our pleasure in any particular object must be simple. We will later see that a number of aestheticians later in the century who were certainly well aware of Hutcheson’s aesthetics, such as Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant, also recognized the potentially multilayered character of our pleasure in art in particular. In his reference to our strange proneness for remote comparisons, Hutcheson touches upon a theme that will be of great importance to all of his British successors, namely, the association of ideas. The other place in his aesthetics where this concept plays an important role is in Hutcheson’s defense of the universality of taste, or the “Universality of the Sense of Beauty among Men.” Hutcheson’s discussion of this topic – already raised by Du Bos, as we have seen – would make it a standard topic for his successors, but he does not himself explain why it is so important to establish the universality of taste. We can only conjecture that because Hutcheson intends his theory of the sense of beauty to prepare the way for his theory of the moral sense, and it is obviously important that there be uniformity in the moral sense of different human beings, so that the moral principles founded upon the moral sense will be universally valid, Hutcheson thinks it crucial to show that the sense of beauty is also universal. But for all that may be riding upon it, Hutcheson’s argument for the universality of the sense of beauty is quite simple: He thinks that “Experience” will show that “all Men are better pleas’d with Uniformity in the simpler Instances than the contrary, even where there is no Advantage observ’d attending it, and likewise . . . all Men, according as their Capacity inlarges, so as to receive and compare more complex Ideas, have a greater delight in Uniformity, and are pleas’d with its more complex Kinds, both Original and Relative.”40 Hutcheson 39 40

Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section IV, paragraph V, p. 44. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section VI, paragraph IV, p. 63.

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supposes that empirical evidence shows that all people prefer more uniformity amid variety to less, although both their ability to recognize uniformity amid variety and their expectation of finding it can be affected by differences in their education and upbringing; thus a “Goth” is not mistaken in liking his architecture because it contains some uniformity amid variety, but “is mistaken, when from Education he imagines the Architecture of his country to be the most perfect.”41 And a further source of diversity in actual tastes in spite of the universality of the underlying principle of taste is nothing other than the “Association of Ideas,” “one great Cause of the apparent Diversity of Fancys in the Sense of Beauty, as well as in the external Senses.” The association of ideas “often makes Men have an Aversion to Objects of Beauty, and a Liking to others void of it, but under different conceptions than those of Beauty or Deformity.”42 By this Hutcheson means that the association of ideas, that is, an idiosyncratic, typically negative association with an object due to some past personal experience of it, can sometimes prevent people from perceiving the real beauty of objects or deformity even though they are, like all others, basically predisposed to prefer uniformity amid variety to its opposite, or to prefer more of it to less. But that is compatible with the universality of the underlying principle. Moreover, since the factors that interfere with the complete universality of actual tastes are due to contingencies of education and individual experience, presumably they can also be corrected by further education and new experiences, should it seem important that there be uniformity in taste.43 In this argument, Hutcheson invokes the association of ideas only to explain departures from the universality of taste. As we earlier saw, however, something very much like the association of ideas is also at least a part of Hutcheson’s explanation of our enjoyment of relative beauty in the case of representational arts. Can he have it both ways? He does not address this question; one issue to be considered later is whether subsequent associationists do, and if so whether they do so successfully. One final point before we leave Hutcheson is that while he does not make recognition of the cognitive value of uniformity amid variety the basis for our pleasure in its beauty, he does recognize that it is of course valuable for “Beings of limited Understanding, and Power,” such

41 42 43

Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section VI, paragraph V, p. 64. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section VI, paragraph XI, p. 67. On the “Power of Custom, Education, and Example, as to our internal Senses,” see also Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section VII.

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as ourselves, to be able “to operate by the simplest Means, to invent general Theorems, and to study regular Objects, if they be as useful as irregular ones.”44 It is thus valuable for us to have an independent attraction to uniformity amid variety, because we will thereby naturally be led to exercise and develop our capacity for recognizing it and producing it. There is thus an indirect benefit to our capacity for knowledge from our sense of beauty that is additional to our intrinsic pleasure in beauty. Further, Hutcheson, after all originally a minister, argues that it is twofold evidence of the benevolence of God that he has given us a world that is replete with objects that both gratify our sense of beauty and lead us to develop our mental powers in a way that is to our advantage in nonaesthetic contexts.45 Unlike Shaftesbury, Hutcheson does not argue that in appreciating beauty we are in fact ultimately appreciating God as the source of both natural beauty and the human capacity to create beauty, that is, that God is the ultimate object of our aesthetic experience. His conception of the relation of our aesthetic experience to God is causal rather than cognitive. But once having established that we have an appreciation of beauty that can be explained in entirely natural terms, he is willing to allow that it is a reflection of the “Goodness” of “the Great ARCHITECT” that he has adorned “this stupendous Theatre in a manner agreeable to the Spectators, and that Part which is expos’d to the Observations of Men, so as to be pleasant to them . . . for thus he has given them greater Evidences, thro’ the whole Earth, of his Art, Wisdom, Design, and Bounty.”46 The existence of beauty does not need a religious justification, because it is intrinsically pleasurable, and pleasure itself is a good for human beings; nor do we need to know the divine source of beauty in order to enjoy it; but the existence of beauty is evidence of the existence of a wise and benevolent deity.

2. Turnbull and Harris Hutcheson may have taken a step toward recognizing the importance of the free play of the imagination in aesthetic experience, and a step that would soon be influential, but his lead was by no means immediately followed by everyone. For example, his very near contemporary,

44 45 46

Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section VIII, paragraph II, part 3, p. 79. See Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section VIII, paragraph II, part 5, p. 80. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise I, section VIII, paragraph III, p. 81.

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the Aberdeen teacher and later cleric George Turnbull, the author of A Treatise on Ancient Painting (1740) and Observations upon Liberal Education (1742),47 played down the importance of the exercise of the imagination as a central source of the value of aesthetic experience and remained much closer to Shaftesbury in insisting that beauty is the sensible manifestation of the true order of the universe that we know in science and strive to emulate in morality. On the basis of this commitment to the traditional view that the essence of aesthetic experience is the apprehension of the most important truth that humans can know, Turnbull argued for the centrality of instruction in the arts in liberal education, not because familiarity with the arts can add a dimension of pleasure or self-expression to life but because the arts offer direct access to indispensable truths of science and morality, which in turn have a direct and beneficial impact on our sentiments or emotions. Another Shaftesburian who emphasized the emotional impact of a cognitive response to art, but who also recognized an immediate emotional impact without the intervention of knowledge in the case of at least one art, namely, music, was Shaftesbury’s own nephew, James Harris. We will briefly consider these two figures before turning to Hutcheson’s great heir, David Hume.

Turnbull George Turnbull (1698–1748) was educated at Edinburgh, but was a regent at Marischal College in Aberdeen from 1721 until 1727. Such regents led their classes through the entire curriculum rather than instructing them in specialized subjects. Turnbull’s best-known student at Marischal was Thomas Reid, who graduated in 1726, and who as we will subsequently see revived Turnbull’s Shaftesburian aesthetics much later in the century. After resigning from his post at Marischal, Turnbull took further degrees in law from Aberdeen (1731) and Edinburgh (1732) and afterward a degree in canon law at Oxford (1733), but then spent several years conducting the scions of wealthy Scottish families on the Grand Tour, an occupation that ultimately led to the Treatise of Ancient Painting. Turnbull subsequently entered the Anglican church and finally became a chaplain to Frederick, Prince of Wales. A prolific (and prolix) writer, his works included numerous volumes of Christian apologetics, 47

A modern edition of this work is available: George Turnbull, Observations upon Liberal Education, in All Its Branches, ed. Terrence O. Moore, Jr. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003).

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various translations, and Principles of Moral Philosophy (1740) as well as the works more relevant to the history of aesthetics already mentioned. Turnbull distances himself from the emerging aesthetics of play (although not from the fashionable methodology of empiricism) and reveals his own preference for a more traditional didactic and moralistic conception of the value of art – one that may be regarded as emphasizing the emotional impact of art, but putting it in a didactic and moralistic framework – in the following passage: Some have said, that Works of Genius and Fancy please us, because they employ the Mind, which naturally delights in Exercise; and this is undoubtedly truth: But ’tis not merely because they employ us, that they please us; for tho’ the human Mind be naturally active, and made for Exercise, yet all kinds of Exercise do not equally please and delight. If we attend to our own Feelings, it will evidently be perceived, that of all Exercises the social and affectionate, or the Operations of the social Affections, are the most satisfactory and lasting. . . . And a little Reflexion upon the Fictions or Representations which affect us most agreeably, or give us the greatest pleasure, will shew us, that it is those which excite our social Affections, and call forth generous Sentiments, that yield us the highest and most satisfactory and lasting Entertainment.48

Turnbull does not deny that the arts offer entertainment, but he insists that the most substantial and enduring form of entertainment requires the stimulation of our moral sentiments. And art achieves that by conveying morally significant truths, the emotional impact of art thus depending upon its cognitive content. Turnbull emphasizes that art is a vehicle for truth by characterizing all art as a form of language, and it is on that thesis that his argument for the centrality of the arts in liberal education is founded: The didactick Style, Oratory, Poetry, and likewise all the Arts of Design, Painting, Statuary and Sculpture, fall properly under the Idea of Language. And therefore if right Education ought to teach and instruct in Truths, and in the various good Methods or Arts of conveying Truths into the Mind, no sooner is one led into the Discovery of any Truth, than he ought to be imployed in comparing and examining several different ways by which it may be unfolded, proved, embellished, and enforced by Oratory, Poetry, 48

George Turnbull, A Treatise of Ancient Painting, containing Observations on the Rise, Progress, and Decline of that Art amongst the Greeks and Romans; the High Opinion which the Great Men of Antiquity had of it; its Connexion with Poetry and Philosophy; and the Use that may be made of it in Education (London: A. Millar, 1740); modern facsimile with introduction by Vincent M. Bevilacqua (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1971), p. 141. See also Observations upon Liberal Education, pp. 338–9.

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or Painting. For to apply this general Observation to Painting, which is commonly reckoned so remote from Philosophy; nothing is more evident than, that Pictures which neither convey into the Mind Ideas of sensible Laws, and their Effects and Appearances, nor Moral Truths, that is, moral Sentiments, and corresponding Affections, have no meaning at all: They convey nothing, because there is nothing else to be conveyed. But, on the other hand, such Pictures as answer any of these Ends, must for that reason speak a Language, the Correctness, Strength, Purity and Beauty of which it must be well worth while to understand as a Language: More especially since there is indeed no other way of trying the Propriety, Force and Beauty of a poetical Image, but by considering the Picture it forms in the Imagination, as a Picture.49

For Turnbull, a work of art is not an occasion for the free play of imagination with the unity amid variety in the perceivable form of the object nor with the relation between the object and its content considered as another instance of unity amid variety, but is rather an occasion for the contemplation of the truths conveyed by the work, regardless of its medium, as a form of language, and for the experience of the “moral sentiments” that are produced in us by those truths. The cornerstone of Turnbull’s edifice, as already suggested, is the Shaftesburian conviction that truth, goodness, and beauty are all manifestations of the order of the universe, and that the human capacities for the comprehension of the laws of nature, for the recognition of and adherence to the laws of morality by means of moral sentiments, and for the creation of art and the appreciation of all forms of beauty are at bottom identical or intimately related. This is the central thesis of his chapter of “Observations on the Sameness of good Taste in all the Arts, and in Life and Manners; on the Sources and Foundations of rational Pleasures in our Natures, and the Usefulness of the fine Arts in a Liberal Education.”50 Here Turnbull begins with the Platonic premise that “The Pleasures of the Mind are far superiour to those of the Body,” so that “Our highest Pleasures are those which accompany, or result from the Exercises of our moral Powers; the Pleasures of Imagination, Understanding, Virtue, and a Moral Sense”: The faculties of imagination, understanding, and moral sense do not need to be distinguished, but are essentially the same. For this reason they have a common object,

49

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Turnbull, Treatise of Ancient Painting, “An Epistle to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Lonsdale, Upon Education, and the Design of this Essay on Painting, &c.,” p. ix. This passage is repeated, nearly verbatim, in Observations upon Liberal Education, p. 382. Turnbull, Treatise of Ancient Painting, ch. VII, p. 129.

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and strengthening any one of these powers automatically strengthens the others: What are the Objects adapted to these Faculties, or how do they employ themselves about them? What is it the Understanding delights to know; Fancy to describe, or Art to imitate? Is it not Nature? And what is it that Virtue emulates? Is it not likewise the Benevolence, the Beauty, and Harmony of Nature? Nature being therefore the sole Object of Knowledge, and of Imitation whether in Arts or Life; all our greatest Pleasures and Enjoyments, all our noblest and worthiest Exercises must be very nearly allied. It is the same Stock of Powers and Faculties that capacitates us for them all: They have the same Object, Rule, measure and End: And consequently good Taste in Science, in Arts, and in Life, must be the same; that is, it must be founded on the same Principles; lead to the same Conclusions; and be improveable in the same manner.51

The core of Turnbull’s educational program is then that the arts convey the same truths and the same sentiments as do science and morality, but convey them in an especially effective way, so that the arts deserve an especially prominent rôle in education. For Turnbull, both poetry and the visual arts are especially effective because they present examples of natural laws and moral truths rather than general principles, and the young both better understand and are more readily moved by concrete images than by abstractions. Young minds need to be stocked with proper examples especially of right and wrong conduct, and this can be done through works of history,52 but even history is best taught through or at least with “such clear representations of customs” as “coins, pictures, statues, bas-reliefs, &c.”53 Well-designed fictions, whether presented in poetry or in pictures, can convey the truths of morality even more effectively than the graphic representation of actual history. “For as truth in imitation pleases as such, so likewise do all the passions, all the emotions of the mind, give pleasure by their exercises, when they are worked up by proper objects within certain bounds, especially by fiction”;54 and pictures have the power “to represent characters and actions, and thereby move the affections of spectators in a very beneficial and agreeable manner . . . by presenting good pieces of the moral kind to them.”55 All in all,

51 52 53 54 55

Turnbull, Treatise of Ancient Painting, p. 129. Turnbull, Observations upon Liberal Education, pp. 348. Turnbull, Observations upon Liberal Education, p. 372. Turnbull, Observations upon Liberal Education, p. 392. Turnbull, Observations upon Liberal Education, p. 400.

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The whole of what belongs to the discipline, improvement or culture of the imagination, is reducible to what may simply be called a just virtue of truth, proportion and harmony, and is nearly allied to virtue: For a fine correct imagination is a fancy able to entertain itself with true and just images of beautiful or great objects, or able to draw to itself fine pictures worthy of contemplation, as well as to comprehend and relish good images or pictures, when set before it by an Author of taste, or an intelligent artist. . . . The chief businesses of imagination are to bring ideas seemingly very remote from a subject, which dart an agreeable but surprizing uncommon light upon it; to be able to cloath intellectual or moral ideas with proper material forms and dresses; and to know how to bedeck or attire every truth in the garb most suited to it and best becoming to it, or that sets it off to best advantage.56

The rôle of the imagination is not to entertain us through its free play but to set truth off to its best and most moving advantage. Present correct ideas to us in the “proper material forms and dresses,” and the proper sentiments will follow. Turnbull often expounds at great length what Shaftesbury was more willing just to imply, but on one point Turnbull helpfully clarifies Shaftesbury’s philosophy. In Shaftesbury, it can sometimes seem as if the universe is already so orderly that it is unclear what mankind needs to do on its own in order to play its moral part, but Turnbull makes it clear that our rôle is to imitate the orderliness of nature in the sphere of our own affections and actions, where the existence of order is not automatically guaranteed; and then he argues that in art we are to emulate both the orderliness of nature that is given to us and the order in our own affairs that we are to institute through our virtuous conduct. Thus, “Man is impelled to imitate Nature in the Regulation of his Affections and Actions, and fitted for it by his Sense of Beauty and Regularity; his publick Sense, or Delight in publick Good, and in the Affections and Actions that pursue it; and his Magnamity, or Sense of Greatness”; but also “Nature may be imitated two ways, by ingenious Arts; and in Life and Manners. And Man will be found fitted for both these kinds of Imitation by the same Powers, Faculties, and Senses that render him capable of contemplating and understanding Nature.”57 As it turns out, art may require either a single or a double act of imitation: Insofar as art depicts nature, its own order imitates the order of nature; but insofar as art depicts human conduct, it should be an imitation of an order in our

56 57

Turnbull, Observations upon Liberal Education, pp. 402–3. Turnbull, Treatise of Ancient Painting, p. 134.

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actions and affections that is itself an imitation of the order of nature as such. That art is always imitative, sometimes of the order of nature itself but sometimes of the order that we create in morality which itself emulates the order of nature, is the key to Turnbull’s account of the value of cultivating the capacity for the creation and appreciation of art: Man is not only capable of imitating Nature in Life and Manners, but likewise by several Arts. All Arts are Imitations of Nature, or Applications of its known Laws to the Uses and Purposes of human Life. . . . But the Arts that are properly called imitative, are those of Fancy and Genius, such as Poetry, Painting and Sculpture. Now ’tis the same Senses, Dispositions, Instincts and Powers, that render us capable of contemplating Nature, and of imitating its Order, Beauty, and Greatness in Life and Manners; that likewise fit and qualify us for the Imitation of Nature by those ingenious Arts.

Turnbull continues, “There is implanted in our Minds not only a strong desire of understanding Nature’s Methods of Operation, and all its various Appearances; but also a very strong Disposition to imitate Nature, emulate it, and vie with it; and thus to become as it were Creators ourselves.”58 But this works two ways: We desire not only to produce images that imitate nature, but also actions that emulate it, and images that imitate those emulations of nature. And because not only art but also morality involve the imitation of the order of nature, and imitation is as it were a two-way street, we not only need to understand nature and morality in order to create or appreciate art but can also learn to understand nature and morality through art. Turnbull’s distinction between the imitation of nature in scientific knowledge and the emulation of nature in morality, each of which can in turn be represented in art, is reflected in his treatment of the painting of nature on the one hand and the depiction of human action in “historical or moral Pictures on the other.” “Pictures of natural Beauties are exact Copies of some Particular Parts of Nature, or done after them, as they really happened in Nature,”59 and afford us the enjoyment of accurate comparisons but also lead us “to the accurate and careful Observance of Nature’s Beauties.” Indeed, Turnbull argues, and here he seems to be original, fully understanding the way in which artistic representations work leads us to a fuller comprehension of the laws of nature because artistic imitation depends upon laws of nature: “Pictures which represent visible Beauties, or the Effects of 58 59

Turnbull, Treatise of Ancient Painting, p. 136. Turnbull, Treatise of Ancient Painting, p. 145.

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Nature in the visible World, by the different Modifications of Light and Colours, in Consequence of the Laws which relate to Light, are Samples of what these Laws do or may produce. And therefore they are as proper Samples and Experiments to help us in the Study of the Laws of Gravity, Elasticity, or of any other Quality in the natural World. They are then Samples or Experiments in natural Philosophy.”60 “Historical or moral Pictures,” by contrast, are “proper Samples and Experiments in teaching human Nature and moral Philosophy.” Such pictures are “Imitations of parts of human Life, Representations of Characters and Manners.” “And are not such Representations,” Turnbull asks, “Samples or Specimens in moral Philosophy, by which any Part of human Nature, or of the moral World, may be brought near to our View, and fixed before us, till it is fully compared with Nature itself, and is found to be a true Image, and consequently to point out some moral Conclusion with complete Force of Evidence?”61 There can be no doubt how he intends this rhetorical question to be answered. Turnbull’s account of imitation in art thus differs radically from Hutcheson’s. While Hutcheson had argued that our pleasure in uniformity amid variety is only contingently connected with its cognitive importance and had introduced his sense of beauty only as an analogue for the moral sense, not a prerequisite or preparation for it, Turnbull insisted that the primary value of art is imitative in a dual sense: Art offers cognitively valuable imitations of reality, both the reality of nature and the reality of human action, but art is also a product of our tendency to emulate the order of nature, which is in turn the basis of morality. So art both informs us about the truths of morality and strengthens the very tendency that we need for moral success. This straightforward connection between the experience of art and for that matter of natural beauty as well would not be accepted by many of Turnbull’s successors, although, as suggested, elements of his Shaftesburian view were passed on to his student Thomas Reid and would blossom many decades later.

Harris Slightly younger than Turnbull, James Harris (1709–1780) was even more intimately connected to Shaftesbury than either Hutcheson or Turnbull, being the son of the third Earl’s sister. His father was a wealthy man in 60 61

Turnbull, Treatise of Ancient Painting, p. 146. Turnbull, Treatise of Ancient Painting, pp. 146–7.

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Salisbury, and after being educated at Wadham College, Oxford, and reading law at Lincoln’s Inn, London, the son, independently wealthy at twenty-four, returned to Salisbury, where he devoted himself to the study of the classics for fifteen years, apparently not much distracted by his duties as a magistrate.62 In 1744, Harris published a volume of Three Treatises, containing A Dialogue concerning Art, A Discourse on Music, Painting, and Poetry, and a further dialogue Concerning Happiness. His other main work was Hermes, or a Philosophical Inquiry concerning Universal Grammar, published in 1751. In 1761, at the relatively advanced age of fifty-two, Harris became a member of Parliament, and then held a number of important positions in the British government, including Lord of the Admiralty, Lord of the Treasury, and Secretary and Comptroller to the Queen. His spells of government service still allowed him time to compose the further works in philosophy and philology that fill the second volume of the collected works published by his son. Harris’s son mentions his father’s appreciation of Aristotle, whose philosophy had widely been thought to have “been deservedly superseded by that of Mr. Locke,”63 and Harris’s Dialogue concerning Art indeed reads like an exercise in Aristotelian classification and definition. In the course of this piece Harris defines art as “an habitual Power in Man, of becoming the Cause of some Effect, according to a System of Various and well-approved Precepts,” which operates “On a contingent [material], which is within the reach of Human Powers to influence, . . . For the sake of some absent Good, relative to Human Life,” and which “ends” or results “Either in some Energy, or in some Work.”64 But this is a definition of art in a general sense that includes not only such arts as music, painting, and poetry but also such arts as medicine and agriculture,65 thus not a definition of fine art. In the Discourse concerning Music, Painting, and Poetry, however, Turnbull begins by distinguishing between the arts that contribute to the “Necessities” of human life, such as medicine and agriculture, and those that contribute “to its Elegance,” such “as Music, Painting, and Poetry.”66 Here Harris demarcates the fine arts from other kinds of art. He then states that these arts, the fine arts, “exhibit to the Mind Imitations, and imitate either 62

63 64 65 66

This biographical information about Harris comes from the “Memoirs” prefaced to the edition of Harris’s work published by his son, the Earl of Malmesbury: The Works of James Harris, Esq., in 2 vols. (London: F. Wingrave, 1801), vol. I, pp. ix–xxvii. Harris, Works, vol. I, pp. xii–xiii. Harris, Works, vol. I, p. 29. Harris, Works, vol. I, p. 8. Harris, Works, vol. I, p. 33.

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Parts or Affections of [the] natural World, or else the Passions, Energies, and other Affections of Minds.67 Harris’s definition of the fine arts as those that contribute to the elegance rather than the necessity of life might have suggested that his emphasis would be on the pleasure inherent in the experience of works of art, but his ensuing comparison of the objects that the different fine arts imitate and of the ways in which they do this emphasize the informational content of works of art. Harris thereby reveals his underlying assumption that the arts are valuable primarily for the knowledge that they convey. Harris premises that the fine arts “agree, by being all MIMETIC, or IMITATIVE,” but argues that they “differ, as they imitate by different Media,”68 and that because of their difference in media they are suited to imitate different kinds of objects. Because painting employs the media of figure and color, paintings are suited to represent external objects, “Things, and INCIDENTS, as are peculiarly characterised by FIGURE and COLOUR,” while because the medium of music is sound, it is eminently suited to represent sounds and by means of sound also motions, which may be the motions of outer objects, such as water and wind, but also, in the case of humans, those sounds “which are expressive of Grief and Anguish.”69 In other words, music is suited to imitate not only motions but also emotions. In the course of his comparison between painting and music, Harris makes a point that Du Bos before him had already made in comparing painting and poetry, and that Mendelssohn and Lessing would make in the next two decades in comparing the same arts, namely, that “of necessity every PICTURE is a Punctum Temporis or INSTANT,”70 and that in its case “the Spectator’s Memory” (or imagination) must “supply the previous and the subsequent,”71 while music can represent temporally extended actions as well as emotions. His main point, however, is that “POETIC IMITATION includes everything in it, which is performed either by PICTURE-IMITATION or MUSICAL; for its Materials are Words, and Words are Symbols by Compact of all Ideas.”72 Poetry is given the palm over both painting and music because while painting and music are confined to natural signs, signs that themselves resemble their objects, and are therefore limited to representing what their natural signs resemble, 67 68 69 70 71 72

Harris, Works, vol. I, p. 34. Harris, Works, vol. I, pp. 35–6. Harris, Works, vol. I, pp. 37, 39–40. Harris, Works, vol. I, p. 38n(e). Harris, Works, vol. I, p. 39n(h). Harris, Works, vol. I, p. 42.

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the unlimited power of words to acquire meaning by convention – “compact” – means that poetry can imitate anything, and therefore give us knowledge of anything. Harris’s ranking of the arts depends on the premise that their primary value is cognitive, thus the more knowledge an art can provide in virtue of its medium, the more valuable it is. Harris does allow that “Natural Operations must needs be more affecting, than Artificial” ones,73 and he also recognizes that music may “derive its Efficacy from another Source, than Imitation” altogether, or that it has the power to raise “various Affections” directly rather than going through a cognitive interpretation of an imitation. “There are Sounds to make us feel chearful, or sad; martial, or tender; and so of almost every other Affection, which we feel.”74 Thus some arts, in virtue of their media, can have a direct impact on our emotions, independent of any knowledge of what they represent, and are not without value because of that – on the contrary, “the genuine Charm of Music, and the Wonders which it works,”75 come from its immediate impact on our emotions rather than from its representation of emotions. So Harris recognizes that we can value works of art for their emotional impact as well as for their cognitive import. Nevertheless, he adds, the affections raised by music “soon languish and decay, if not maintained and fed by the nutritive Images of Poetry,” and the “Utility, as well as Dignity” of poetry are “by far the more considerable” than that of music alone.76 In other words, the cognitive content of poetry is more important than the emotional impact of music. While he recognizes the potential for direct emotional impact in at least one art, music, Harris clearly regards the cognition afforded by imitation as more important than such emotional impact, and, unlike Turnbull, he does not even bother to acknowledge that the knowledge afforded by imitation might itself have emotional impact. And there is no mention of play in his account of our experience of the arts of painting, music, and poetry at all. The works of Turnbull and Harris that have here been discussed were published at the same time as or even slightly later than David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature and Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. But Hume’s outlook and sensibility, already resistant to convention during his own years as a student in Edinburgh rather than Glasgow or Aberdeen and then certainly leavened in France, where he lived while he wrote 73 74 75 76

Harris, Works, vol. I, p. 46. Harris, Works, vol. I, p. 56. Harris, Works, vol. I, p. 58. Harris, Works, vol. I, p. 60.

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the Treatise, was very different from those of Turnbull and Harris. We can turn to Hume now to see how aesthetic theory in Britain began to move past Hutcheson and to leave behind the more traditional views of Turnbull and Harris, at least for a while.

3. Hume David Hume (1711–1776), philosopher, historian, and essayist, gave the imagination a central role in his account of our beliefs in external objects, causation, and our own enduring selves, and gave the imaginative capacity for sympathy a central role in his moral philosophy. With one exception, his famous essay “Of the Standard of Taste” of 1757, he dealt with issues in aesthetics only in passing. But when he did touch upon aesthetic issues, there too he emphasized the rôle of the imagination, and in so doing he made important contributions to the development of the theory of aesthetic response as a free play of our mental powers – although that is not terminology that he himself ever used.77 Hume was the second son of a minor Scottish landowner and inherited no great wealth.78 He went up to the University of Edinburgh, with his older brother, before he was twelve years old, young even for those days, and finished the course of study there by fourteen. He then returned 77

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Hume is one of the most intensively studied figures in the history of modern philosophy, but none of the many important monographs on his general philosophy have much if anything to say about his aesthetics. A rare exception is Claudia W. Schmidt, David Hume: Reason in History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); see ch. 11, pp. 315–38. However, a number of important monographs are devoted specifically to his aesthetics. These include Teddy Brunius, David Hume on Criticism (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1952); Peter Jones, Hume’s Sentiments: Their Ciceronian and French Context (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982); Astrid von der Lühe, David Humes ästhetische Kritik (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1996); Dabney Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory: Taste and Sentiment (London: Routledge, 2001); and Timothy M. Costelloe, Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume (London: Routledge, 2007). See also Costelloe’s survey of recent research on Hume’s aesthetics, “Hume’s Aesthetics: The Literature and Directions for Research,” Hume Studies 30 (2004): 87–126. There are chapters on Hume’s aesthetics in Hipple, Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque, pp. 37–53, and George Dickie, The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 123–41. For my own systematic account of Hume’s aesthetics, see “The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,’” in Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam, editors, Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993), pp. 37–66, reprinted in my Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 37–74. The standard biography remains Ernest C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1954).

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home to continue reading on his own. He was originally intended (or was intended) to study law, but he disliked it and devoted himself to literature and philosophy. His youthful Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), written while living at La Flêche in France, where Descartes had studied and Malebranche later taught, although it was destined to become one of the enduring masterpieces of modern philosophy, was originally a commercial failure. Moreover, what were perceived as Hume’s skeptical positions on religion and morality in the Treatise doomed his applications for professorships, first at Edinburgh and later at Glasgow, although in most respects his moral philosophy remained close to that of Hutcheson, who had been well accepted at Glasgow. For literary success, Hume then turned to more popular Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (first published in 1741) and to more essayistic versions of his main philosophical ideas in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). These did well, and the Essays Moral, Political, and Literary went through increasingly expanded editions during Hume’s life, although his finances became secure only after his service as secretary to an important British general and diplomat (also a distant cousin) in the late 1740s. In the 1750s, with a position as Keeper of the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh that afforded him a steady income, leisure, and access to research materials, Hume wrote his History of England (1754–62), a work that not only brought him fame and wealth but which is also, along with Edward Gibbon’s contemporaneous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a central document in the Enlightenment critique of religion and its rôle in politics.79 His last major philosophical work was the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, a devastating critique of both a priori and empirical arguments for the existence of God, which he first drafted in 1751 but which was published, only after his death, in 1779. The last philosophical work that he published during his lifetime was the 1757 collection Four Dissertations, which included two substantial pieces, A Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion, as well as the two essays “Of Tragedy” and “Of the Standard of Taste,” the latter of which was written in 1756 specifically for this volume. The two essays were incorporated into the Essays Moral, Political, and Literary in 1758 and the whole volume was translated

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A modern edition is David Hume, The History of England, ed. William B. Todd, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983). For a study of Hume’s history, see Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), Part III, pp. 233–326; see also Schmidt, David Hume, ch. 13, pp. 377–413.

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into German as early as 1759,80 so “Of the Standard of Taste” became known quickly and widely and has long been received as Hume’s definitive work on aesthetics. However, it treats only one issue, although a central one in eighteenth-century aesthetics, and for many other aspects of Hume’s aesthetics we must turn back to his original Treatise of Human Nature as well as to other essays. “Of the Standard of Taste” comes at the problem of taste from a different angle than Hutcheson had and might be considered a tacit critique of Hutcheson’s approach to this problem. While Hutcheson had tried to argue that all humans share a common general sense of beauty, even though their circumstances may make them sensitive to varying degrees of beauty, Hume asks whether human beings can access determinate principles for their judgments of beauty or other aesthetic properties and by their means come to “unanimity” in their judgments about particular objects of taste, or “a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.”81 This is a pressing question, Hume holds, because while we take it to be a matter of common sense that “All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it” and likewise that “Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” but “exists merely in the mind which contemplates them,”82 at the same time we also hold that “Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between OGILBY and MILTON, or BUNYAN and ADDISON, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as TENNERIFE, or a pond as extensive as the ocean,” and “The principle of the natural equality of tastes is then totally forgot.”83 But although we may defend the latter position, Hume argues,84 we must also recognize that “none of the rules of composition are fixed a priori, 80

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82 83

84

David Hume, Vier Abhandlungen, trans. Friedrich Gabriel Resewitz (Quedlinburg and Leipzig: Andreas Franz Biesterfeld, 1759), reprinted with introduction by Heiner F. Klemme (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001). David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 227, 229. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. 230. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” pp. 230–1. Hume contrasts John Milton to John Ogilby (1600–76), a translator of Home, Virgil, and Aesop, and John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress, to Joseph Addison (see ch. 1, part 2). Ironically, history may agree to the superiority of Milton over Ogilby, but perhaps not to that of Addison over Bunyan. Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, is the seat of Mt. Teide, a volcanic peak of 12, 200 feet. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. 233.

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or can be esteemed abstract conclusions of the understanding”:85 No objective description of the properties of any object can ever entail that it will be found beautiful, or elegant, or to possess any other particular aesthetic property. Hume elsewhere puts this point by saying that EUCLID has fully explained every quality of the circle, but has not, in any proposition, said a word of its beauty. The reason is evident. Beauty is not a quality of the circle. It lies not in any part of the line whose parts are all equally distant from a common center. It is only the effect, which that figure produces upon a mind, whose particular fabric or structure renders it susceptible of such sentiments. In vain would you look for it in the circle, or seek it, either by your senses, or by mathematical reasonings, in all the properties of that figure.86

Hume’s ontology of beauty here is the same as Hutcheson’s, but it leads him to a different approach to the problem of taste. Faced with the impossibility of discovering determinate rules for taste, Hume does not directly appeal to a common human nature. He indeed presupposes such a thing, but universally valid human preferences will be revealed only by the judgments of qualified critics. Hume’s strategy is thus to locate the standard of taste in a canon of exemplary objects that have been found to be in good taste over the centuries by a body of competent critics, whose qualifications for that rôle can be indisputably determined. Hume premises that “Some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, and others to displease,” but also that “Those finer emotions of the mind are of a very tender and delicate nature, and require the concurrence of many favourable circumstances to make them play with facility and exactness, according to their general and established principles,” such as “a perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object.”87 The qualified critics whose selection of exemplary objects of taste should constitute a canon or standard for the rest of us are precisely those who have enjoyed the favorable circumstances that allow the “small springs” of their minds and emotions to play with facility and exactness.

85 86

87

Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. 231. David Hume, “The Sceptic,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, p. 165. Hume repeats this passage verbatim in the first appendix to An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals; in the edition by Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 87. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” pp. 232–3.

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Specifically, Hume, much influenced by Du Bos,88 argues that the critics whose judgments are competent to establish a standard of taste are those who possess “that delicacy of imagination, which is requisite to convey a sensibility of those finer emotions”;89 who have had much “practice in a particular art,” and thus been able to make “frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of art” as well as to make repeated surveys of the “very individual performance” they are to judge;90 who have been able to make “comparisons between the several species and degrees of excellence”;91 and who have the “good sense” necessary both to check the influence of “prejudice” on their judgments as well as to judge a work of art not in light of their own idiosyncrasies but rather in light of the “certain end or purpose, for which it is calculated” and in light of which it “is to be deemed more or less perfect, as it is more or less fitted to attain this end.”92 Hume’s specification of the qualifications of competent critics has sometimes been charged with circularity. The claim is that we could not determine what counts as delicacy of imagination, good sense, and appropriate and adequate practice and comparison unless we already had a standard of taste by which to determine exemplary works of art with which the critics should practice and make their comparisons, and against our evaluation of which their own claims to delicacy and good sense can be tested.93 But if a critic’s delicacy of imagination and good sense could be established in other, nonaesthetic contexts, as seems perfectly plausible, then we would not already have to possess the standard of taste in order to test for those qualities; and if the competent critic does not have to compare and practice only with works of art already determined to be good, then there is no threat of circularity there either. One might object that practice and comparison with bad art would 88 89 90 91 92 93

See Jones, Hume’s Sentiments, pp. 106–13. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. 234. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. 237. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. 238. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” pp. 239–40. See the classical discussion of this issue by Harold Osborne, “Hume’s Standard and the Diversity of Aesthetic Taste,” and Peter Kivy, “Hume’s Standard of Taste: Breaking the Circle,” British Journal of Aesthetics 7 (1967): 50–6 and 57–66. The position to be defended here is similar to that of Kivy. There are many other essays on “Of the Standard of Taste”; a few of the most important are Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Hume and the Foundations of Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35 (1976): 201–15; Noël Carroll, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1984): 181–94; and James R. Shelley, “Hume and the Nature of Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 29–38. See also my “The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society.’”

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corrupt rather than improve the taste of a critic; but surely Hume must be assuming, what is also not implausible, that even though the human mind is malleable and to some extent molded by the models to which it is exposed, nevertheless insofar as there is some natural and common basis for our aesthetic preferences, practice and comparison with a sufficiently wide range of works of art, both good and bad, will strengthen the natural tendency to prefer the good over the bad. In other words, the cream will naturally rise to the top. So if there is a problem with “Of the Standard of Taste,” it is not that its argument is circular. Rather, the problem is that it actually says so little about what the “small springs” of the mind by which the arts produce the “finer emotions” and the “certain ends or purposes” for which the arts in general or particular media, genres, and works of art are “calculated” actually are. In other words, although Hume does say that for the proper appreciation of art the mind must be able to “play with facility” with its finer emotions,94 thereby revealing his inclination toward the new idea that aesthetic response is a free play of the mental powers, his solution to the problem of taste is offered without much of a theory either of aesthetic response or of art. However, Hume’s other works, above all his original Treatise of Human Nature, offer a much fuller account of our responses to art and of the rôle of the imagination in such responses, and in so doing contribute to the development of the theory of aesthetic response as mental play. The Treatise includes one section specifically devoted to the topic “Of beauty and deformity,” but this is a brief section in the midst of Hume’s extended discussion of pride, in which he argues that the beauty of one’s own body or of one’s possession can be an object of pride, along with one’s moral character and other objects of pride, through a double satisfaction in the object and in the fact that it is one’s own. But Hume brings up the topic of beauty and other issues at a number of other points in the Treatise, especially to provide illustrations of his theory of sympathy, which is the basis of his moral philosophy. So the Treatise offers a more extensive and more systematic aesthetic theory than initially meets the eye. In the chapter “Of beauty and deformity,” Hume begins with the statement that If we consider all the hypotheses, which have been form’d either by philosophy or common reason, to explain the difference betwixt beauty and deformity, we shall find that all of them resolve into this, that beauty is such an 94

Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. 232.

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order and construction of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. This is the distinguishing character of beauty, and forms all the difference between it and deformity, whose natural tendency is to produce uneasiness. Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence.95

However, Hume immediately undercuts the suggestion that we respond only to purely formal features of the “order and construction of parts,” such as Hutcheson’s “uniformity amidst variety,” with examples that suggest that we respond with pleasure and pain to a range of associations that we make with those formal features, or interpretations that we place upon them. Thus he continues, And indeed, if we consider, that a great part of the beauty, which we admire either in animals or in other objects, is deriv’d from the idea of convenience and utility, we shall make no scruple to assent to this opinion. That shape, which produces strength, is beautiful in one animal; and that which is a sign of agility in another. The order and convenience of a palace are no less essential to its beauty, than its mere figure and appearance. In like manner the rules of architecture require, that the top of a pillar shou’d be more slender than its base, and that because such a figure conveys to us the idea of security, which is pleasant; whereas the contrary form gives us the apprehension of danger, which is uneasy. From innumerable instances of this kind, as well as from considering that beauty, like wit, cannot be defin’d, but is discern’d only by a taste or sensation, we may conclude, that beauty is nothing but a form, which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of parts, which conveys pain.96

We may conclude that our judgments of beauty and deformity are based on pleasures or pains that are ultimately caused by structures of parts, but Hume’s examples make it clear that such pleasure and pain do not always arise from a simple response of our perceptual and cognitive powers to those structures. Instead, we sometimes, as in the case of animals, interpret those structures as signs of properties, such as strength and agility, to which we have an independent emotional response, or associate those structures with ideas of such properties. And, as in the case of architecture – about which Hume’s comments sound as if they could have been lifted from Wolff’s treatise, although Hume was certainly drawing on the common background of Vitruvius and not on an awareness of Wolff’s work – we respond to properties that engage our cognitive powers such

95 96

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Part I, section 8, p. 195. Hume, Treatise, Part 1, section 8, pp. 195–6.

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as “figure and appearance” as well as those that engage our practical concerns such as “order and convenience,” and even more complexly to the appearance of convenience, as when “a figure conveys to us the idea [my emphasis] of security.” These examples suggest that the imagination plays a central rôle in aesthetic response, as the source of associations and appearances that cannot be directly equated with the mere order and structure of the parts of the objects. In this case it is not just the element of pleasure or pain in our response to beauty and deformity that is essentially subjective, as Hutcheson argued, but there is a whole range of ideas that mediate between the objective structure of objects and our pleasure and pain in them that are essential to aesthetic response. Thus Hume says in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, his subsequent restatement of the Treatise’s moral philosophy, that “It is on the proportion, relation, and position of parts, that all natural beauty depends; but it would be absurd thence to infer, that the perception of beauty, like that of truth in geometrical problems, consists wholly in the perception of relations, and was performed entirely by the understanding or intellectual faculties.”97 The association of ideas is not just the explanation of disagreements in judgments of taste but is a central element in many aesthetic experiences. And this in turn means that on Hume’s account aesthetic response often depends upon the possibility of the free play of the imagination with the materials that are most directly offered by our perceptions of objects. Hume makes this clear later in the Treatise. Expanding upon his remark that a “great part of the beauty, which we admire either in animals or in other objects, is deriv’d from the idea of convenience and utility,” he writes the following in his subsequent discussion of the place of sympathy in morals: Thus the beauty of all visible objects causes a pleasure pretty much the same, tho’ it be sometimes deriv’d from the mere species and appearance of the objects; sometimes from sympathy, and an idea of their utility. In like manner, whenever we survey the actions and characters of men, without any particular interest in them, the pleasure, or pain, which arises from the survey (with some minute differences) is, in the main, of the same kind, tho’ perhaps there be a great diversity of the causes, from which it is deriv’d. On the other hand, a convenient house, and a virtuous character, cause not the same feeling of approbation; even tho’ the source of our approbation be the same, and flow from sympathy and an idea of their utility. There is

97

Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Appendix I, section 3, p. 87.

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something very inexplicable in this variation of our feelings; but ’tis what we have experience of with regard to all our passions and sentiments.98

Here Hume follows in the tradition of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson by arguing that moral as well as aesthetic judgments depend upon the pleasure and displeasure that we feel toward objects and conduct when we regard them from a disinterested point of view, that is, from a point of view that is not dominated by an interest in the immediate benefits of those objects for ourselves. Unlike his predecessors, however, Hume insists that there is some kind of qualitative or phenomenological difference between the pleasures and pains we experience in the moral case and those we experience in the aesthetic case – as he says in the section of the Treatise in which he argues that “Moral distinctions [are] deriv’d from a moral sense,” Under the term pleasure, we comprehend sensations, which are very different from each other, and which bear only such a distant resemblance, as is requisite to make them be express’d by the same abstract term. A good composition of music and a bottle of good wine equally produce pleasure; and what is more, their goodness is determin’d merely by the pleasure. But shall we say upon that account, that the wine is harmonious, or the music of a good flavor? In like manner an inanimate object, and the character or sentiments of any person may, both of them, give satisfaction; but as the satisfaction is different, this keeps our sentiments concerning them from being confounded.99

Thus, although moral approbation and aesthetic judgment are both based on feelings of pleasure, those feelings are not identical, nor does the fact that sympathy is involved in both make them the same. Further, not even all pleasures in what we may regard as objects of taste are identical – at least that is what Hume’s contrast between the pleasures of music and of good wine may suggest. Hume’s inclusion of wine within the domain of the aesthetic is controversial; Kant, for example, specifically excludes our judgments of the taste of wine (“Canary wine”) from the domain of pure judgments of beauty. But even leaving this case aside, Hume makes it clear that uncontested responses to beauty arise from a multitude of sources and that at least some of the ways they arise depend upon the operations of sympathy and of the imagination, of which sympathy itself is one product. This is the meaning of Hume’s claim that the pleasure of the beauty of visible objects is sometimes derived from 98 99

Hume, Treatise, Book III, Part 3, section 5, p. 393. Hume, Treatise, Book III, Part I, section 2, p. 303.

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their “mere species and appearance” and sometimes from “sympathy, and an idea of their utility.” By the word “species” Hume does not mean the classification of an object, and he is not suggesting that our pleasure in beauty derives from the judgment that an object is representative or exemplary of its kind. Rather, as his italics indicate, he is using the word in its original Latin sense of “something presented to view,” or its “visual appearance, look, aspect.”100 In this case, his view seems to be that our pleasure in beauty is a direct response to the appearance of an object mediated only by the inner and unknown workings of our cognitive faculties. In other cases – in fact, as Hume says in another important passage, in the case of “most kinds of beauty” – our pleasure arises from the imagination’s play with the appearance of utility in objects, itself not a purely formal property of their structure. Hume indicates at least three different ways in which sympathy and imagination can play with the appearance of utility and thereby give rise to a feeling of pleasure and beauty. The first case is that in which an object actually is useful to someone who is in the position to use it (its rightful owner), but the rest of us can share in the pleasure that the owner takes in his use of the object by means of sympathy, through which the feelings of one human being are communicated to others. As Hume writes in his discussion of “Our esteem for the rich and powerful,” part of his treatment “Of love and hatred,” The force of sympathy is very remarkable. Most kinds of beauty are deriv’d from this origin; and tho’ our first object be some senseless inanimate piece of matter, ’tis seldom we rest there, and carry not our view to its influence on sensible and rational creatures. A man, who shows us any house or building, takes particular care among other things, to point out the convenience of the apartments, the advantages of their situation, and the little room lost in the stairs, anti-chambers, and passages; and indeed ’tis evident, the chief part of the beauty consists in these particulars. The observation of convenience gives pleasure, since convenience is a beauty. But after what manner does it give pleasure? ’Tis certain our own interest is not in the least concern’d; and as this is a beauty of interest, not of form, so to speak, it must delight us merely by communication, and by our sympathizing with the proprietor of the lodging. We enter into his interest by the force of imagination, and feel the same satisfaction, that the objects naturally occasion in him.

100

See P.G.W. Glare, ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary, combined and corrected edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 1799.

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This observation extends to tables, chairs, scritoires, chimneys, coaches, saddles, ploughs, and indeed to every work of art.101

Here Hume makes clear that while aesthetic judgments are disinterested in the sense of being independent of one’s own interest, they are not disconnected from ordinary human interests altogether; on the contrary, many of them are connected to our ordinary interest in utility, but connected by the “force of imagination” through which the pleasures of one person are communicated to others. Indeed, the pleasure that is communicated to human beings through the imagination, which is the source of sympathy, does not even need to be the pleasure of another human being: “one considerable source of beauty in all animals is the advantage which they reap from the particular structures of their limbs and members, suitably to the particular manner of life, to which they are by nature destined. . . . Ideas of utility and its contrary, though they do not entirely determine what is handsome or deformed, are evidently the source of a considerable part of approbation or dislike.”102 Here the imagination has the power to put us in the position of creatures with whom we usually cannot directly communicate in any ordinary way and thereby sympathetically enjoy what is advantageous to them though not directly to ourselves (although our attribution to them of pleasure in their own advantage may itself be an act of our imagination, since we may not know what their mental life, if any, is really like). The second kind of case that Hume notes is that in which the imagination fills in missing circumstances so that we can take pleasure in something that would be useful under other conditions even though it is not useful in the actual circumstances: Where any object, in all its parts, is fitted to attain any agreeable end, it naturally gives us pleasure, and is esteem’ed beautiful, even tho’ some external circumstances be wanting to render it altogether effectual. ’Tis sufficient that everything be compleat in the object itself. A house, that is contriv’d with great judgment for all the commodities of life, pleases us upon that account tho’ perhaps we are sensible, that no one will ever dwell in it. A fertile soil, and a happy climate, delight us by a reflection on the happiness which they wou’d afford the inhabitants, tho’ at present the country be desart and uninhabited. A man, whose limbs and shape promise strength and activity, is esteem’d handsome, tho’ condemn’d to perpetual imprisonment. The imagination has a set of passions belonging to it, upon which our sentiments of beauty much depend. These passions are mov’d by 101 102

Hume, Treatise, Book II, Part 2, section 5, p. 235 Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 6, Part 2, pp. 54–5.

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degrees of liveliness and strength, which are inferior to belief, and independent of the real existence of their objects.103

As in the case of pleasure by sympathy, Hume makes it clear that the present function of the imagination works on products of both nature (fertile soil and happy climates) and art (houses). And his final sentence is his way of indicating that although on his own theory the imagination is central to matters of belief and knowledge, here the imagination is not concerned with cognition – in other words, it is at play. The third case that Hume mentions is one where the imagination does not fill in missing conditions that would be necessary for the enjoyment of properties that objects actually have, but works entirely by the association of ideas: There is no rule in painting more reasonable than that of ballancing the figures, and placing them with the greatest exactness on their proper centers of gravity. A figure, which is not justly ballanc’d, is disagreeable; and that because it conveys the ideas of its fall, of harm, and of pain: Which ideas are painful, when by sympathy they acquire any degree of force and vivacity.104

In a painting of an unbalanced figure, there is no one who is actually going to fall down and be hurt, whose pain we would share by sympathy. But the imagination can nevertheless associate a forceful feeling of pain with a mere image of someone who looks likely to fall, and conversely it can associate a forceful feeling of pleasure with a mere image of someone who looks secure. Of course this mechanism of association need not be restricted to visual imagery alone; as we will shortly see, many of Hume’s contemporaries and successors, beginning with Edmund Burke, make the association of ideas the basis of our response to literature as well as to the visual arts. Thus Hume instances a variety of ways in which the imagination can operate with the appearance of objects and their properties that are directly presented to our senses, and since in these operations the imagination is not contributing to the work of cognition or to our immediate practical interests, it seems fair to describe Hume as identifying forms of the free play of the imagination. That sympathy is one of the products 103 104

Hume, Treatise, Book III, Part 3, section 1, p. 373. Hume, Treatise, Book II, Part 2, section5, p. 235; see also Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 6, part 2, p. 55: “There is no rule in painting or statuary more indispensable than that of balancing the figures, and placing them with the greatest degree of accuracy on their proper center of gravity. A figure, which is not justly balanced, is ugly; because it conveys the disagreeable ideas of fall, harm, and pain.”

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or mechanisms of imagination can now bring us back to Hume’s treatment of the standard of taste. In our initial discussion of Hume’s famous essay, I argued that Hume’s position was not circular, and that the criteria for identifying competent critics whose preferences could not reveal abstract principles of taste but could constitute a canon of exemplary objects of good taste could be applied without presupposing antecedent recognition of that canon. But two questions remain about Hume’s strategy for discovering a standard of good taste by identifying a body of competent critics. First, why should the qualities and accomplishments that Hume specifies for the competent critics not simply be ideals for everyone; that is, why do we need to go through the detour of the preferences of the competent critics rather than simply cultivating good taste in ourselves? And, second, why should anyone who does not already share the preferences of Hume’s critics, at least to some degree, care about what they like? Perhaps if one already likes opera, for example, one might be interested in what qualified opera critics over the years have judged to be the best operas, but maybe one is content to love the operas one already does, even if the critics regard them as hackneyed. And if one does not even like opera at all, but prefers Broadway musicals or rhythm and blues, why should one care whether even the most competent critics agree that some particular operas are great? The answer to the first of these questions is easy: The practice and comparisons required of Hume’s critics are time-consuming, and only a tiny fraction of a society can enjoy the leisure necessary for their acquisition. Further, although Hume does not mention this, the works of art of which the critics must have extensive experience come in many languages and styles, and the acquisition of the necessary languages and other technical knowledge necessary for making sound judgments about many works of art is also time-consuming and expensive, and thus available only to a few members of any society. Finally, native abilities like delicacy of imagination and perhaps even good sense are not distributed equally throughout the human population, and perhaps only a small fraction of a society will have those native abilities to the degree that is necessary to make sound judgments about works of art. But while the first two of these points are indubitable, the third only exacerbates the second problem I raised: Why should anyone care about the aesthetic preferences of others, even of undisputed experts? Here Hume has two important things to say, although he does not say them in “Of the Standard of Taste.” First, it is a matter of fact that humans enjoying sharing their feelings, including their pleasures, or at least can take a

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pleasure in the fact of sharing experiences and preferences that is additional to the pleasure of those experiences when enjoyed in isolation; so there is an opportunity for pleasure in having a shared canon of taste, which competent critics may help a culture develop, that is lost if individuals simply ignore the preferences of others. Hume makes this point in several striking passages. He states the underlying premise thus: In all creatures, that prey not upon others, and are not agitated with violent passions, there appears a remarkable desire of company, which associates them together, without any advantages they can ever propose to reap from their union. This is still more conspicuous in man, as being the creature of the universe, who has the most ardent desire of society, and is fitted for it by the most advantages. We can form no wish, which has not a reference to society. A perfect solitude is, perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer. Every pleasure languishes when enjoy’d apart from company, and every pain becomes more cruel and intolerable. . . . [Give someone everything he could want]: He will still be miserable, till you give him some one person at least, with whom he may share his happiness, and whose esteem and friendship he may enjoy.105

And he draws the conclusion from this premise thus: A man, who enters the theatre, is immediately struck with the view of so great a multitude, participating of one common amusement; and experiences, from their very aspect, a superior sensibility or disposition of being affected with every sentiment, which he shares with his fellow-creatures. He observes the actors to be animated by the appearance of a full audience, and raised to a degree of enthusiasm, which they cannot command in any solitary or calm moment.106

The value of having a standard or canon of taste, then, is that it allows us to have shared sources of pleasure, the sharing of which noticeably intensifies the pleasure we could take in objects when alone, or if our preferences always differed from those of others. Of course, this principle does not apply only to the enjoyment of works of art: Even if one does not think that the enjoyment of spectator sports falls within the domain of the aesthetic, one is still likely to find it more fun to watch the World Series, Super Bowl, or one’s favorite college football game with a group of friends or at a sports bar than alone. However, Hume’s allusion to “calm” in the last quotation brings up another point, and one that may differentiate the enjoyment of works

105 106

Hume, Treatise, Book II, Part 2, section 5, pp. 234–5. Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, section 5, part 2, p. 39.

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of art from that of sporting events or (to go back to an example from Du Bos) bullfights or gladiatoral combats. This is that the finest works of art – which we might not otherwise discover for ourselves, but to which good critics can lead us – can have the beneficial effect of inducing calm passions, which are both intrinsically satisfactory and can have a good influence on our character and conduct in general. Although this is another point that Hume does not make explicit in “Of the Standard of Taste,” it is sufficiently important to him that he starts the whole collection of his Essays Moral, Political, and Literary with the essay “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” in which he makes it. Here he writes that while excessive delicacy or sensitivity to the vagaries of fortune that are beyond our control can open us up to misery as well as happiness, we can calm our passions through the arts: Nothing is so improving to the temper as the study of the beauties, either of poetry, eloquence, music, or painting. They give a certain elegance of sentiment to which the rest of mankind are strangers. The emotions which they excite are soft and tender. They draw off the mind from the hurry of business and interest; cherish reflection; dispose to tranquillity; and produce an agreeable melancholy, which, of all dispositions of the mind, is best suited to love and friendship.107

At least in part because the appreciation of beauty is independent of our personal interests in the possession and use of objects, beauty affords us calm rather than violent passions, which we can enjoy for their own sake; but the calmness of passion induced by the experience of beauty also makes us better suited for the development of “love and friendship,” that is, for morally valuable relationships to other human beings. Hume never says that the enjoyment of beauty is the only way to become moral, but as long as it is even one way to develop a morally helpful frame of mind, then it is instrumentally as well as intrinsically valuable. And if we assume that the experience of better works of art leads to the cultivation of calm passions more effectively than does the enjoyment of lesser ones, then we have another reason for regarding the considered judgments of competent critics over the ages about what the best works of art are. Hume thus identifies a number of ways in which the imagination brings us pleasures from both nature and art that go beyond the enjoyment of mere form, and he points toward a way in which the pleasures of the imagination are instrumentally as well as intrinsically valuable. 107

Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passions,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, pp. 6–7.

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So Hume has suggested that while one source of our pleasure in beautiful objects is something like the free play of the imagination with their forms, he has recognized that there are other sources for our pleasure in beautiful objects as well. At the same time, although Hume has stressed that the pleasure that we take in sharing our feelings with others through sympathy is an essential part of our pleasure in the experience of art, he has not suggested that we share with each other more than our pleasure in mere form or our pleasure in real or apparent utility. He seems to have avoided mentioning a wide range of other emotions that we might take to be central to our experience of art, and indeed which, as we have seen, Du Bos himself, to whom Hume was otherwise so indebted, had stressed. The impression that Hume was actively avoiding recognizing the emotional impact of art is strengthened by his essay “Of Tragedy,” which, like “Of the Standard of Taste,” he also added at the last minute to the Four Dissertations of 1757. In this essay, which is explicitly presented as an alternative to Du Bos’s theory that in art we enjoy the stimulation of our emotions although within limits,108 Hume argues that we do not take pleasure directly in the “melancholy passions” that tragedy raises. His position is that we take pleasure in the imitation of tragic events because imitation itself is “always agreeable,” and that the energy of the “large stock of spirit and vehemence” that is aroused by the imitation of tragic events is displaced into our pleasure in the imitation and intensifies it. “By this means, the uneasiness of the melancholy passions is not only overpowered and effaced by something stronger of an opposite kind; but the whole impulse of those passions is converted into pleasure, and swells the delight” which the imitation and its artistic merits, such as its eloquence, “raises in us.”109 Thus Hume is far from recognizing the arousal of emotions as an immediate object of our pleasure in art. In the next chapter, we will turn to several other important works also published in the 1750s, the decade of Hume’s essay on taste. In these works, by William Hogarth, Edmund Burke, and Alexander Gerard, we will see how Hume’s conception of the imagination and its association of ideas was developed in several different directions, but also how the emotional impact of art that was so important for Du Bos, but as we have just seen suppressed by Hume, was reintroduced into British aesthetic theory.

108 109

See Hume, “Of Tragedy,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, pp. 216–25, at p. 217. Hume, “Of Tragedy,” p. 220.

3 Hogarth, Burke, and Gerard Forms of Feeling

William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty, written in 1753 and published in 1754, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, first published in 1757 and then reissued with a new “Introduction on Taste” in 1759, and Alexander Gerard’s An Essay on Taste, awarded a gold medal by the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and Agriculture in 1756 but first published in 1759, all develop the idea that our aesthetic responses are a free and pleasurable play of our mental powers. They nevertheless also differ from one another in key ways. First, while Hogarth follows in the tradition of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume by treating beauty as the central category of aesthetics, Burke and Gerard return to the model of Addison and recognize a diversity of aesthetic qualities: Burke, obviously, the two mentioned in his title, and Gerard even more, including in addition to beauty and grandeur novelty, imitation, harmony, and “oddity and ridicule” as distinct objects of aesthetic response. Second, while Hogarth follows Hutcheson in emphasizing the play of our cognitive powers only in aesthetic response, Burke follows the lead of Du Bos in making the play of our emotional capacities the basis for our pleasures in both the beautiful and the sublime, and Gerard recognizes the play of both our cognitive and our moral powers as sources of pleasurable aesthetic response. None of these writers from the 1750s approach aesthetics from a traditional cognitivist point of view; rather, Hogarth emphasizes the free play of our cognitive powers in aesthetic experience to the exclusion of its emotional impact, Burke emphasizes the emotional impact of works of natural and artistic beauty and sublimity above all else, and only Gerard suggests that free play and emotional impact may be united in our experience of the diverse aesthetic categories that he recognizes. One of the jurors for the 140

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Edinburgh Society that awarded Gerard the prize for his Essay on Taste was the eminent Scottish jurist Henry Home, Lord Kames, and we will see in the next chapter that his approach to aesthetics is similar to and was perhaps influenced by Gerard’s.

1. Hogarth William Hogarth (1697–1764), the English engraver, printmaker, painter, social critic, and philanthropist, is best remembered for his brilliant satirical “moral” print series, such as The Harlot’s Progress (1732), The Rake’s Progress (1735), and Marriage á la Mode (1745), which he engraved from his own paintings and sold himself. His satirical engravings began with cartoons about the South Sea Bubble, the London stock market scandal of 1720, and continued past his works on sexual mores to series on Industry and Idleness, Beer Street and Gin Lane, and The Four Stages of Cruelty. Hogarth was also a highly successful portraitist. His social concerns were not expressed only in his satirical prints; he was also a founding governor of the London Foundling Hospital, and he and his wife personally fostered a number of foundlings. Hogarth’s father was an impecunious Latin teacher, and the boy was apprenticed to an engraver at an early age. But though he had little formal education, his sole but enduring work in artistic and aesthetic theory, the Analysis of Beauty of 1753, late in his career, is deeply informed both by the Renaissance and early modern literature of painting, such as the treatises of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (Trattato dell’arte della pittura, 1584, translated into English in 1598), Charles Alphonse Dufresnoy (De Arte Graphica, 1668, translated by John Dryden in 1694), Roger de Piles (Vie des Peintres, 1699, translated into English in 1706, and Cours de peinture, 1708), and Jonathan Richardson (Essay on the Theory of Painting, 1715), as well as by the work of the philosophical writers whom we have been discussing such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume. Hogarth’s Analysis is often reduced to the single idea that the “serpentine” line (roughly, the somewhat flattened S-shape seen in a two-dimensional depiction of a wire or thread looping around a cone) is the foundation of all visually beautiful forms, including the human body and its limbs, foliage, furniture legs, and more (see, for example, figures 6, 13, 25, 37, 49, and 50 on plate 1 accompanying the Analysis and figures 56–64 on plate 2).1 1

The fold-out plates that accompanied the original edition of The Analysis of Beauty are reproduced in the modern edition, edited by Ronald Paulson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), which will be cited here.

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But Hogarth’s preference for the serpentine line is only part of his larger theory that our pleasure in beauty arises from the free play of both our eye and our imagination with visual form and matter.2 Hogarth’s book is clearly in the tradition of the treatises on painting to which he refers in his Preface, and his examples almost all come from the visual arts of drawing, painting, and sculpture. But his full title describes his ambitions in more general terms – The Analysis of Beauty, its subtitle states, is Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating IDEAS of TASTE – and many of the categories under which Hogarth subsumes his discussion of the specific elements of beauty in the visual arts are general concepts that could be manifested in works of the other fine arts as well, including the nonrepresentational arts of architecture and landscape, the arts of music and dance, and literature. Thus, Hogarth’s list of the elements of beauty in his Introduction includes only abstract properties that could be instantiated in different forms in any and all of the arts: “The fundamental principles, which are generally allowed to give elegance and beauty, when duly blended together, to compositions of all kinds whatever . . . are FITNESS, VARIETY, UNIFORMITY, SIMPLICITY, INTRICACY, AND QUANTITY; – all which co-operate in the production of beauty, mutually correcting and restraining each other occasionally.”3 Further, Hogarth promises that his analysis will point the way toward “a perfect knowledge of the elegant and beautiful in artificial, as well as natural forms.”4 So even though some of Hogarth’s chapters concern elements that are to be found only in the visual arts, such as lines (chapters IX–X), light, shade, and colors (chapters XII–XIV), much of the book can be considered a general theory of the beautiful in both nature and art (with a very brief treatment of the sublime as

2

3 4

Works on Hogarth include the biography by Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, 3 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991–3) (Paulson also edited a complete edition of Hogarth’s graphical works) and Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal, The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). A collection of papers on Hogarth by diverse hands is David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée, and Peter Wagner, Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2001); this includes an extensive bibliography. Among the few philosophical discussions of Burke are Tom Huhn, Imitation and Society: The Persistence of Mimesis in the Aesthetics of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), pp. 64–100, and Shiner, The Invention of Art, pp. 157–9. See also Hipple, Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque, pp. 54–66. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, p. 23. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, p. 18.

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well) that happens to be illustrated primarily with examples from the visual arts. On the first page of his Preface, Hogarth says that “mere men of letters . . . have been bewilder’d in their accounts of” beauty “and obliged so suddenly to turn into the broad, and more beaten path of moral beauty” because of their failure to consider the formal elements of beauty he will describe.5 But his own analysis of beauty is by no means purely formalistic. Rather, on Hogarth’s theory beauty has two fundamental components: The first element of beauty is the “Fitness of the parts to the design for which every individual thing is form’d, either by art or nature,” and this fitness “is of the greatest consequence to the beauty of the whole,”6 while the second element of beauty comprises all of the other more or less directly perceivable aspects of objects, including those that can be manifested in all arts and in nature such as variety, uniformity or symmetry, simplicity or distinctness, intricacy, and quantity, as well as those that may be manifested only in nature as well as some forms of art, such as lines, proportions, light and shade, and color, as well as those that are manifested only in some forms of representational art, such as the attitude of depicted figures at rest and in action. While in the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume, as we saw, contrasted utility (or its appearance) and the beauty of species or (visible) form as two different kinds of beauty, Hogarth treats fitness and more formal properties as intimately linked components of beauty. Several points should be noted about Hogarth’s account of fitness as an element in beauty. First, he takes it to be so evident that anything that conveys the idea of “fitness and propriety” always pleases and that everything that conveys “an idea of weakness” always displeases7 that he feels no need to offer any explanation of why this should be so. Second, the examples of fitness that he initially offers are all examples in which objects are well suited or well made to satisfy purposes or functions that are practical but not necessarily moral: Thus, components of buildings such as pillars and arches must be suitable for the loads they have to bear while others such as doors, windows, and stairs must be sized in accordance with their intended use (the same sort of Vitruvian examples that we found in Wolff’s treatise on architecture); ships must be able to sail well; the parts of the body must be sized and proportioned to suit their 5

6 7

Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, p. 1. Paulson appeals to Hogarth’s original draft to show that this is intended as a criticism of Shaftesbury. See p. 1, n. 1, and p. 115. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, p. 25. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, p. 25.

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functions; racehorses must be proportioned differently from warhorses, and likewise humans (or humanized gods) who have different functions, such as Hercules and Mercury, or our representations of them, must also be differently proportioned.8 (This list of examples is also so close to the examples of what Kant will later call “adherent” beauty that it is difficult not to conclude that Kant was familiar with Hogarth’s work, which had been immediately translated into German.)9 But Hogarth subsequently hints that objects may also be adjudged beautiful in virtue of “being fit, and proper to answer great ends,”10 which presumably can include moral ends. Third, although fitness to ends might seem to be an abstract property of things that can only be judged to obtain by the intellect or reason, and Hogarth does at one point say that “we fall into a judgment of fit proportion; which is one part of beauty to the mind tho’ not always to the eye,”11 he also says that we can “naturally have” a “nice sensation . . . of what certain quantities or dimensions of parts, are fittest to produce the utmost strength for moving, or supporting great weights; and of what are most fit for the utmost light agility, as also for every degree, between these two extremes.”12 So he recognizes that at least sometimes our recognition of fitness seems as immediate a perception as our perceptions of shape, light, and color. Indeed, Hogarth emphasizes that at least one of what might have seemed to be among the purely formal properties of objects, namely, “uniformity, regularity, or symmetry,” is often pleasing because of its connection to fitness: In at least some cases of symmetry, “the pleasure does not arise from seeing the exact resemblance, which one side bears the other, but from the knowledge that they do so on account of fitness, with design, and for use.”13 Here his view seems to be that our recognition of symmetry’s contribution to fitness is as immediate as our perception of symmetry itself, and thus fitness is also something that can be immediately perceived, thereby satisfying the Hutchesonian requirement that the perception of beauty be like sensory perception. But what is perhaps most important to notice about fitness on Hogarth’s account is that it does not function like a sufficient condition for beauty,

8 9

10 11 12 13

Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, p. 26. Wilhelm Hogarth, Zergleiderung der Schönheit, die schwankenden Begriffe von dem Geschmacke festzusetzen, trans. Christlob Mylius (Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voss, 1754); modern reprint with introduction by Manfred Kuehn (Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press, 2001). Hogarth, Analysis, p. 30. Hogarth, Analysis, p. 61. Hogarth, Analysis, p. 68. Hogarth, Analysis, p. 29.

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the presence of which can make an object beautiful by itself, nor even like a free-standing component of beauty, the presence of which could add to other sources of beauty but the absence of which could be compensated for by other elements of beauty. Rather, although he does not initially make this clear, fitness functions more like a necessary condition for beauty: If an object is the kind of object that we would naturally judge to have a purpose at all, then we cannot be pleased with that object or its appearance unless it appears fit to satisfy that purpose, although it will take more than just satisfying that purpose to make it appear beautiful. Thus, in a discussion of architectural examples in his chapter on “Of what sort of PARTS, and how PLEASING FORMS are composed,” Hogarth says that “after fitness hath been strictly and mechanically complied with, any additional ornamental members, or parts, may . . . be varied with equal elegance.”14 This suggests that in, so to speak, the logical structure of aesthetic response, our interest in fitness or functionality must first be satisfied, and only if that is done can further factors of the sort that Hogarth includes on his list make an object positively beautiful. Again, Hogarth does not offer an explanation of why fitness should function as a necessary condition for beauty in those cases where it is relevant at all. We can only conjecture that he tacitly recognizes it to be a fundamental feature of human psychology that we are so concerned with and often dependent upon the functionality of the natural objects and artifacts with which we are surrounded, and consequently so pleased with fitness but also so displeased with dysfunctionality, that our interest in fitness must be satisfied before additional aesthetic factors can kick in to give us the specific pleasure of beauty. So now Hogarth has suggested two different relations between formal features of objects and fitness. The perception of regularity or symmetry may contribute directly to our recognition of fitness. All the other elements of beauty that Hogarth enumerates, however, contribute to our sense of beauty only if our condition of fitness, if relevant to the kind of object at issue, is felt or thought to be satisfied. But the key point for my larger argument is now that Hogarth does offer an explicit explanation of how these other factors contribute to our sense of beauty, and it is an explanation based on the assumption that free and unhindered mental activity is intrinsically pleasurable. The influence of Du Bos on this account seems undeniable:

14

Hogarth, Analysis, p. 46.

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An active mind is ever bent to be employ’d. Pursuing is the business of our lives; and even abstracted from any other view, gives pleasure. Every arising difficulty, that for a while attends and interrupts the pursuit, gives a sort of spring to the mind, enhances the pleasure, and makes what would else be toil and labor, become sport and recreation. . . . . . . It is a pleasing labour of the mind to solve the most difficult problems; allegories and riddles, trifling as they are, afford the mind amusement: and with what delight does it follow the well-connected thread of a play, or novel, which ever increases as the plot thickens, and ends most pleas’d, when that is most distinctly unravell’d? The eye hath this sort of enjoyment in winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts of objects, whose forms, as we shall see hereafter, are composed principally of what, I call, the waving and serpentine lines.15

The gist of Hogarth’s account of all of the formal components of beauty that he recognizes is that they offer just the right amount of variety to set the eye or mind or imagination into action yet just the right amount of unity to make the activity of the eye or mind playful and entertaining rather than laborious and dispiriting. So, for example, “SIMPLICITY, without variety, is wholly insipid, and at best does only not displease; but when variety is join’d to it, then it pleases, because it enhances the pleasure of variety, by giving the eye the power of enjoying it with ease”;16 “Intricacy in form” is “that peculiarity in the lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chace, and from the pleasure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful”;17 and “vast variety of changing circumstances keeps the eye and the mind in constant play, in following the numberless turns of expression it is capable of.”18 And Hogarth can then argue that the serpentine line, whether singly or in various combinations, is the basis of all visual beauty because it is the form that maximizes the opportunity for the free yet harmonious activity or play of the eye and the mind, and indeed in the case of the artist even the hand that produces the object: The waving line, or line of beauty, varying still more, being composed of two curves contrasted, becomes still more ornamental and pleasing, insomuch that the hand takes a lively movement in making it with pen or pencil. And . . . the serpentine line, by its waving and winding at the same time different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of

15 16 17 18

Hogarth, Analysis, pp. 32–3. Hogarth, Analysis, p. 30. Hogarth, Analysis, p. 33. Hogarth, Analysis, p. 40.

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its variety, if I may be allowed the expression; and which by its twisting so many different ways, may be said to inclose (tho’ but a single line) varied contents; and therefore all its variety cannot be express’d on paper by one continued line, without the assistance of the imagination, or the help of figure . . . where that sort of proportion’d, winding line, which will hereafter be called the precise serpentine, or line of grace, is represented by a fine wire, properly twisted around the elegant and varied figure of a cone.19

Gradual variations in light and shade, in color, but above all in geometrical form, give the eye and mind the best opportunity for their free play and thus afford the positive pleasure of beauty. Hogarth’s account clearly stresses the play of the purely cognitive powers of the mind, our abilities to receive and retain multiple inputs through the senses and to grasp their coherence with higher functions of the mind, although when he follows the remark previously quoted that a “vast variety of changing circumstances keeps the eye and the mind in constant play” with the further rhetorical question, “How soon does a face that wants expression, grow insipid, tho’ it be ever so pretty,”20 he may be hinting that the play of our emotions, as both the source of and the response to human expression, may also be involved in our feeling of beauty. But he does not explain this remark, and he cannot be considered to have explicitly acknowledged the emotional impact of art at the level of theory, though he surely recognized it in his practice of both visual satire and uplifting portraiture.

2. Burke Edmund Burke, later one of the leading figures in British public life as the United Kingdom responded to its acquisition of an empire and to the revolutions in America and then in France from the 1770s through the 1790s, was a little-known young Irishman, educated at the Anglican Trinity College, Dublin, and then briefly a student of law in London, when the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful appeared in 1757. But Burke says that he had finished it four years earlier,21 so it was presumably written without any knowledge of the work of Hogarth and certainly without any acquaintance with 19 20 21

Hogarth, Analysis, p. 42. Hogarth, Analysis, p. 40. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), Preface to the first edition, p. 2.

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Hume’s essay on taste, although Burke clearly knew of both of these by the time he published the second edition in 1759. Once this work as well as A Vindication of Natural Society published a year earlier had the desired effect of bringing its author to the attention of the British public, Burke devoted his attention to a political journal, the Annual Register, which he edited until 1789, and then to a public career, beginning with a position as private secretary to the chief secretary for Ireland and, beginning in 1765, to his seat in Parliament. Once he embarked on his political career, Burke wrote nothing further on aesthetics, and thus his Enquiry on Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful remained his sole contribution to the field.22 On Burke’s account, the stimulation of our emotions either directly or by association is the fundamental mechanism of aesthetic response, and thus he does not give room to the play of our purely cognitive powers the way Hogarth does. But we can also regard his theory as one according to which in aesthetic response the emotions are at play rather than at work, because the emotions involved do not occur in their ordinary circumstances and do not have their ordinary consequences. In this regard, Burke’s theory is also a direct descendent of that of Du Bos, although he develops a different aspect of Du Bos’s theory than Hogarth had. Burke’s book was instantly and widely received – for example, his exact contemporary Moses Mendelssohn published a detailed review of it in Germany in 1758 – and it made the bipartite division of fundamental aesthetic qualities into the beautiful and the sublime rather than Addison’s original tripartite division into grandeur, novelty, and beauty (or the even more complex division of Gerard) canonical at least through Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). This is not to say that Burke’s interest in the sublime in particular was unique or original, however. As noted earlier, the sublime had been a topic of fascination since the 22

Unsurprisingly, most of the large literature on Burke is concerned with his political career. Two important biographies are Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977), and Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). A survey of Burke’s political thought is C.B. MacPherson, Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). A number of works by literary scholars include discussions of Burke’s conception of the sublime, including Monk, The Sublime, pp. 84–100; Hipple, Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque, pp. 83–98; Engell, Creative Imagination, pp. 701 and 145–9; Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (London: Routledge, 1992). A rare discussion of Burke by a philosopher is in Tom Huhn, Imitation and Society, pp. 15–63.

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discovery of the Hellenistic text Περι υψους by “Pseudo-Longinus” and its translation into English by John Hall in 1652 and into French by Nicolas Boileau in 1674, and had stayed before the British public in particular with further translations of Longinus in 1698 (anonymous), 1712 (“Mr. Welsted”), and 1739 (William Smith).23 But it was clearly Burke’s elevation of the sublime to the same level of importance as the beautiful that had the greatest influence on the subsequent history of aesthetics. In the second edition of his book, stimulated no doubt by Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste,” Burke added an “Introduction on Taste.” Although this was not part of his original text, and neither is it the most original part of his work, it is a good place for us to begin our consideration of Burke’s work because it shows clearly both what he accepted and what he rejected from the tradition of aesthetic theory that been founded by Hutcheson. Burke rejects Hutcheson’s idea that taste is a special faculty or “internal sense,” saying that “to multiply principles for every different appearance, is useless, and unphilosophical too in the highest degree.”24 Instead, he analyzes taste into the three components of the senses, the imagination, and judgment, which are “All the natural powers in man . . . that are conversant about external objects.”25 But he then follows Hutcheson’s strategy of arguing that these faculties, which are involved in all of our knowledge of external objects, work pretty much the same way in everyone – indeed they must generally work the same way, “For if there were not some principles of judgment as well as of sentiment common to all mankind, no hold could possibly be taken either on their reason or their passions, sufficient to maintain the ordinary correspondence of life”26 – although there can be some difference in the degree of efficacy or vivacity of these faculties in different people which can explain differences in their judgments of taste.27 But most differences in judgments of taste can be traced back to “a defect in judgment” on the part of one disputant or the other, and such defects can be corrected “exactly as we improve our judgment” in other contexts, namely, “by extending our knowledge, by a steady attention to the object, 23

24 25 26 27

For particulars on the translations, see the bibliography in the classical work by Monk, The Sublime, pp. 242–3. For selections from the vast eighteenth-century British literature on the sublime, see Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds., The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, p. 27. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, p. 13. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, p. 11. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, p. 21.

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and by frequent exercise.”28 So in Burke’s view there is not much reason to worry about irremediable differences of taste. But the more important idea that Burke adopts from the Hutchesonian tradition is the idea that aesthetic response is founded on an immediate response of pleasure or pain to the sensory perception of external objects rather than to any higher form of cognition: “pains and pleasures” are directly “annexed” to the ideas “which are presented by the senses.”29 To be sure, we also have the power of “representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and in a different order,” and this power is what Burke calls “Imagination,” to which in turn belong “whatever is called wit, fancy, invention, and the like”; but the imagination, although it “is the most extensive province of pleasure and pain, as it is the region of our fears and our hopes,” is not actually a new source pleasure or pain. Rather, it rearranges ideas that come from the senses with, so to speak, their original charges of pleasure or pain: “whatever is calculated to affect the imagination with these commanding ideas” does so “by force of [their] original natural impression.”30 Thus, the affective aspect of our sensory ideas of external objects is the primary source of all aesthetic response, although, like Hutcheson and others, Burke acknowledges that in the case of an artistic representation a further “pleasure is perceived from the resemblance, which the imagination has to the original.”31 He does not deny that much art is mimetic, although when it comes to the case of poetry he will argue that its emotional impact does not work through mimesis. This is another source for the theory of the association of ideas in aesthetics, alongside Hume’s theory of the imagination, although on neither of these theories is the association of ideas the sole source of aesthetic pleasure. The heart of Burke’s theory is then that our feelings of the sublime and the beautiful arise from the perception of aspects of external objects that trigger some of our deepest emotions, although in special contexts where we can think of those emotions as at play rather than at work – here we see the enduring influence of Du Bos. Burke begins the body of his work by dispatching Addison’s category of novelty as a distinct source of aesthetic pleasure: The gratification of curiosity is of course pleasant, but the pleasure of novelty alone quickly fades; it must be combined with 28 29 30 31

Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, p. 26. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, p. 16. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, pp. 16–17. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, p. 27.

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other passions if it is to be of any enduring significance.32 Since Burke’s single page of argument on this score, novelty has generally not been recognized as an independent value in aesthetic theories (although it may be an entirely different matter in the history of actual art and taste). Burke then bases his theory of the “passions” or emotions that are central in aesthetic experience on two distinctions. First, he argues that pain and pleasure are each positive “simple ideas,” pleasure not consisting in the mere remission of pain nor pain in the mere absence or cessation of pleasure. The contrary of each of these positive states of feeling is more typically mere indifference.33 Rather, “the feeling which results from the ceasing or diminution of pain” can be considered at most “a species of relative pleasure,” which Burke names “delight.”34 Second, Burke claims that the two fundamental sources of our emotions are the two drives for self-preservation and society: “Most of the ideas which are capable of making a powerful impression on the mind, whether simply of Pain or Pleasure, or the modifications of those, may be reduced very nearly to these two heads, self-preservation and society; to the ends of one or the other of which all our passions are calculated to answer”; and of these, the “passions . . . which are conversant about the preservation of the individual, turn chiefly on pain and danger, and they are the most powerful of all the passions.”35 This would then seem to prepare the way for the argument that our emotion in the case of the sublime is the feeling of “relative pleasure” or “delight” at our safety from something painful that would otherwise threaten our self-preservation (as Addison had earlier argued), while our emotion in the case of the beautiful is positive pleasure at the perception of aspects of objects, especially other living beings, conducive to society, whether that is the specific “society of the sexes, which answers the purposes of propagation,” or “that more general society, which we have with men and with other animals, and which we may in some sort be said to have even with the inanimate world.”36 Burke does develop his account of beauty along these lines, but his account of the sublime is different than he might initially seem to suggest. Rather than arguing that our delight in the sublime is mediated by the thought of our safety from something that would otherwise threaten pain and self-destruction, which would make our response to the sublime 32 33 34 35 36

See Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part One, section I, p. 31. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part One, sections II–III, pp. 32–5. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part One, section IV, pp. 35–6. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part One, section VI, p. 38. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part One, section VIII, p. 40.

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dependent upon a cognitive process, he instead argues that “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” if we are at a sufficient distance from the danger so that our response can be delightful instead of painful. “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.”37 In other words, the delight in the sublime differs simply in degree from outright pain, our feeling of the sublime being an immediately delightful feeling of terror at something dangerous but remote enough not to cause actual pain, not an indirect response to the thought that we are secure from something that would otherwise be threatening. It is not reflection on our safety that is the source of our pleasure in the sublime, though our actual safety may be a necessary condition of our experience; in the tradition of Du Bos, Burke holds that what we directly enjoy in the experience of the sublime is the arousal of powerful emotions which, because of the remoteness of real or fictional distance, fall short of being actually painful. In the experience of the sublime we enjoy real emotions, but in conditions in which they – and not the cognitive powers, which play no essential rôle in this explanation – can be said to be at play rather than at work. In the second part of his book, Burke then gives an extensive list of what can bring about the “passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully,” or “Astonishment”:38 terror, obscurity, power, privation, vastness, infinity, great succession and uniformity (usually associated with beauty rather than sublimity), magnitude (in this case in building, thus in art rather than nature), difficulty (again in human works, such as the erection of Stonehenge), magnificence, great light, dark and gloomy colors, loud, low, or sudden sounds, cries, even bitter smells and tastes and “stenches.”39 In all of these cases, Burke’s position is that we actually have to experience these phenomena in order to feel the emotion of astonishment, though we have to experience them at a sufficient distance that our astonishment remains delightful rather than becoming painful. In the fourth part of the book (after the intervening discussion of beauty), Burke then goes on to give 37 38 39

Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part One, section VII, pp. 39–40. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Two, section I, p. 57. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Two, sections II–XXI, pp. 57–86.

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a physiological explanation of our delight in such astonishment – an explanation that involves activity, and thus connects his view to those of Hogarth before him and Gerard afterward, but not activity of the cognitive powers. His theory is that “a state of rest and inaction, however it may flatter our indolence,” would “be productive of many inconveniencies,” and produce “melancholy, dejection, despair, and often selfmurder,” while “The best remedy for all these evils is exercise or labour; and labour is a surmounting of difficulties, an exertion of the contracting power of the muscles; and as such resembles pain, which consists in tension or contraction, in everything but degree.”40 His theory is then that the perception of the various sources of the sublime he has enumerated produces a degree of actual physiological exercise or activity – activity in our muscles and other fibers – that overcomes indolence without becoming painful. In all these cases, if the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, as these emotions clear the parts, whether fine or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome incumbrance, they are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which as it belongs to self-preservation is one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime.41

There is no rôle for any activity of the cognitive powers in this account, which adds a physiological dimension to Du Bos’s psychological account. It is a physiological explanation – whether fanciful or not, only empirical research could show – of an immediate emotional response to sensory perception, although an emotional response that can be considered playful because it falls short of actual pain. Burke’s account of beauty is closer to his original suggestion than his account of the sublime turned out to be. After observing, as Wolff before him did and Gerard and Thomas Reid after him will do, that “men are used to talk of beauty in a figurative manner, that is to say, in a manner extremely uncertain, and indeterminate,” he states that “By beauty” he means “that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it.” He then adds that “I . . . distinguish love, by which I mean that satisfaction which arises in the mind upon contemplating anything beautiful, or whatsoever it may be, from desire or 40 41

Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Four, section VI, pp. 134–5. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Four, section VII, p. 136.

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lust: which is an energy of the mind, that hurries us on to the possession of certain objects.”42 Here Burke alludes to the disinterestedness of our pleasure in beauty, the idea that it does not depend upon or necessarily lead to interest in the possession of its object (specifically, as we shall shortly see, a sexual object). Because our pleasure in a beautiful object may be a feeling that is similar but not identical to love and that does not depend upon or lead to a desire for possession of the object, we may regard Burke’s account of beauty, like his account of sublimity, as one in which our emotions are more at play than at work. Before giving his own account of beauty, Burke criticizes some alternatives. He argues against the Hutchesonian view that beauty in vegetables, animals, or humans can consist in proportion on the Hutchesonian ground that “Proportion relates almost wholly to convenience, as every idea of order seems to do; and it must therefore be considered as a creature of the understanding, rather than as a primary cause acting on the senses and the imagination.”43 He also enumerates many cases designed to show that equally well-proportioned instances of the same species of thing can be either beautiful or ugly, depending upon other features. He next argues against the idea, which as we have seen had just been promulgated by Hogarth, that “fitness” is the cause of beauty by pointing to organs that are very useful to their owners but hardly make them beautiful: If fitness were really sufficient for beauty, “the wedgelike snout of a swine, with its tough cartilage at the end, the little sunk eyes, and the whole make of its head, so well adapted to its offices of digging, and rooting, would be extremely beautiful” – which they obviously are not.44 (However, this argument may miss its mark; as we saw, Hogarth actually argued that fitness is only a necessary, not a sufficient condition of beauty, and in Kant’s later account of “adherent” beauty it will have the same status.) Burke does concede that in human works of art, by which he has in mind not the fine arts such as painting and literature but the useful arts such as architecture or watchmaking, proportion and fitness are of real value and perhaps should even be our primary concern: “We are rational creatures, and in all our works we ought to regard their end and purpose; the gratification of any passion, how innocent soever, ought only to be of secondary consideration.” But he describes our positive response to proportion and fitness in such objects 42 43 44

Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Three, section I, p. 91. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Three, section II, p. 92. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Three, section VI, p. 105.

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as “approbation,” stemming from the understanding, not as a feeling of beauty rooted in “the passions, and the imagination.”45 There could not be more graphic evidence of Burke’s association of properly aesthetic qualities with the arousal of emotions. He likewise dismisses the theory that beauty consists in perfection (although there is no sign that he was familiar with Wolff or any of the German successors of Wolff we discuss in Part Three); this too would make beauty a matter of the understanding rather than of the senses and imagination.46 Rather, Burke says, “we must conclude that beauty is, for the greater part, some quality in bodies, acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses,” not through the activity of the cognitive powers, specifically qualities of bodies “which excite in us the passion of love, or some correspondent affection.”47 Burke’s description of beauty as consisting in a causal relation between qualities in bodies and responses in us is much like Hume’s account, except Burke conceives of beauty as directly causing love, not pleasure, and as producing pleasure only through its production of another emotion like love. Burke then enumerates – from a clearly masculine, heterosexual point of view – qualities that make others sexually attractive to us, although without necessarily leading to lust or the desire for actual possession, as well as qualities that make other people, animals, and things attractive to us in a general, nonsexual way. The latter include smallness – that’s why diminutive endings or expressions are a sign of affection in all languages48 – and colorfulness; among the former Burke picks out “smoothness” and “gradual variation.” Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface continual and yet hardly perceptible at any point which forms one of the great constituents of beauty?49

It is interesting to note that in his second edition Burke appeals to the “very ingenious Mr. Hogarth,” whose book he must have come to know after finishing the first edition, for support of his view of the pleasure of the giddily sliding eye, but only the eye, not, like Hogarth himself, the eye 45 46 47 48 49

Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Three, section VII, p. 109. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Three, section IX, p. 110. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Three, section XII, pp. 112–13. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Three, section XIII, p. 113. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Three, section XV, p. 115.

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and the mind. Again, for Burke the play that leads to aesthetic response is the play of our senses, imagination, and emotions, not the play of our cognitive powers. It is not clear why Burke is so confident that the response (of a male) to the eye playing over the figure of a beautiful woman does not lead to lust, but only to the playful enjoyment of an emotion that is “similar” or “correspondent” to love. Whatever the explanation for what we might call the distanced sexuality of Burke’s explanation of beauty, in analogy to the distanced terror of his account of the sublime, his psychological account of our pleasure in beauty, like his psychological account of the sublime, is mirrored by his physiological explanation of our pleasure in beauty. While the sublime rouses our muscles and fibers from a dangerous state of indolence, “beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system . . . and a relaxation somewhat below the natural tone seems to me to be the cause of all positive pleasures.”50 He then says that “the passion called love is produced by this relaxation,”51 which is certainly one reason for him to distinguish it from lust. Once again, however plausible or implausible this physiological explanation may be, it is evident that Burke is attempting to explain a playful response of our senses and imaginations to an external stimulus, not a play of our cognitive powers: We are not relaxed or otherwise pleased by playing with our ideas of a sexual object, but by the play of our eye with sexually or otherwise attractive features. In all of this, Burke has been talking primarily about the sublime and the beautiful in nature (including ourselves as physical creatures who are part of nature) rather than in art. In a brief discussion “Of the effects of TRAGEDY” in Part One, he did concede that there is a pleasure in imitation (which he fit into his general theory of beauty by connecting it with our pleasure in imitating other people, a pleasure connected to our love of society),52 although he also argued that it would be a mistake to attribute any considerable part of our pleasure in tragedy to this; rather, his theory is that our primary attraction to tragedy comes from the way in which it brings us just close enough to terrible events for us to enjoy delightful terror rather than real pain.53 Throughout the remainder of Parts Two to Four, Burke referred only to the useful arts, not the fine arts, in his discussion of our approbation of proportion and fitness. He 50 51 52 53

Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Four, section XIX, pp. 149–50. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, p. 151. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part One, section XVI, p. 49. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part One, section XV, p. 47.

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finally turns to the fine arts in Part Five of The Sublime and Beautiful. After briefly stating that painting affects us both by arousing the emotions that we would normally connect with what it depicts as well as by our additional pleasure in imitation and that architecture “affects by the laws of nature, and the law of reason,” which makes us approve of proportion and fitness,54 Burke turns to the case of poetry. Here he offers his version of associationism, but it is striking that he claims that poetry works not through the association of ideas with words, but through the direct association of emotional effects with sounds that have been “used on particular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil, or see others affected with good or evil; or which we hear applied to other interesting things or events; and being applied in such a variety of cases that we know readily by habit to what things they belong . . . produce in the mind, whenever they are afterwards mentioned, effects similar to those of their occasions.”55 So Burke does not hold that we enjoy mimetic art because of the activity of the cognitive powers that the association of ideas can trigger; on his view, we enjoy the play of emotions that words or other symbols trigger because of the effects of habit rather than of thought. Thus the idea of a pleasurable play of emotions is central to Burke’s aesthetics of art as well as of nature. Burke’s position that the aim of art is emotional arousal, not cognition, and that this can be achieved directly through the associations of images or words rather than indirectly through accurate representation or description, would be of immense influence on the practice of art – one might take this to be the underlying premise of Romanticism in poetry and elsewhere – even if it would not have the same impact on aesthetic theory.

3. Gerard Alexander Gerard offers an account of the activity of our cognitive powers in the observation of beauty that is similar to Hogarth’s, but he argues more explicitly for the engagement of our moral powers – powers of moral sentiment and judgment – by works of art. He also offers a well-developed theory of genius, although he does not restrict genius to the production of art. Gerard has not received the same level of attention from historians as his contemporaries Hume and Burke, but he was widely read and influential in his own time, in Germany as well as in Great 54 55

Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Five, section I, p. 163. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful, Part Five, section II, p. 165.

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Britain. His expansion of the catalogue of aesthetic qualities beyond the original three of Addison or the two of Burke may have been influential for Kames’s even more expansive list of the “elements of criticism.” And although Kant returns to Burke’s binary division between the beautiful and the sublime for his catalogue of aesthetic qualities, his central conception of the free play of imagination and understanding appears to be indebted to Gerard. At the same time, Kant’s argument that genius is displayed only in art and not in science is clearly intended as a rebuttal of Gerard’s position that genius is displayed in science as well as in art. Alexander Gerard (1728–1795) was a licensed preacher as well as professor of moral philosophy and logic at Marischal College, Aberdeen, from 1752 until 1760, when he was appointed professor of divinity, the position he held before moving a mile away to take up the chair of divinity at King’s College, also in Aberdeen, in 1771. (These two colleges, King’s College, founded in 1495, and Marischal, founded in 1593, would be merged in 1860 to form the modern University of Aberdeen, which still retains the two separate campuses, that of King’s College still including its historic buildings.) One of Gerard’s most important contributions as an educator was his 1755 Plan of Education in the Marischal College and University of Aberdeen, a document that modernized the university curriculum in Scotland and was influential in the United States as well. Gerard was a founding member of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, along with Thomas Reid among others, although he accepted more of the views of Locke and Hume than did Reid. As previously mentioned, his first work in aesthetics, An Essay on Taste, won the gold medal of the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and Agriculture in 1756, and was published in Edinburgh and London in 1759, accompanied with translations of essays on taste by Voltaire, D’Alembert, and Montesquieu.56 The book was published in both French and German translations in 1766,57 and would enjoy two more English editions in Gerard’s lifetime. His second main work in aesthetics was An Essay on Genius, which was begun in 1758 but appeared

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Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste: With Three Dissertations on the Same Subject by Mr. De Voltaire, Mr. D’Alambert, and Mr. De Montesquieu (London and Edinburgh: A. Millar, A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1759); facsimile reprint (Menton, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1971); a third edition with an additional part “Of the Standard of Taste” appeared in 1780. We will return to the French essays in the next chapter. For the German translation, see Alexander Gerard, Versuch über den Geschmack, trans. Karl Friedrich Flögel (Breslau and Leipzig: Johann Ernst Meyer, 1766); reprinted with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn (Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press, 2001).

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only in 1774 because of Gerard’s teaching load and writing as professor of divinity. However, the essay on genius was translated into German only two years later by the important “popular philosopher” Christian Garve (1742–1798),58 and Kant frequently cited it in his discussion of genius in his anthropology lectures. Gerard also published numerous volumes on both theology and pastoral care in his capacity as professor of divinity. A Compendious View of the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion written with his son Gilbert was published by the latter in 1828.59 In its original form, the Essay on Taste consisted of three parts: The first enumerates the “simple principles” of taste, that is, the main aspects of objects, both natural and artistic, that induce the pleasures of taste; the second analyzes the components of the faculty of taste and the means for its improvement; and the third discusses the “province and importance of Taste,” that is, its benefits for both theoretical inquiry and moral character and conduct. The basis of Gerard’s entire theory is that we have a natural and intrinsic enjoyment of the free activity and play of the mind, imagination, or fancy (he does not speak of the free play of the eye itself, as Hogarth did), although the exercise of the mind that is the direct source of the pleasures of aesthetic response is also beneficial for both cognitive and moral character. “We have a pleasant sensation,” Gerard says, “whenever the mind is in a lively and elevated temper. . . . Hence moderate difficulty, such as exercises the mind, without fatiguing it, is pleasant.”60 This principle does not apply to the standard subjects of aesthetics alone, for example, as Burke would have it, the beautiful and the 58

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Alexander Gerard, Versuch über das Genie, trans. Christian Garve (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erbe und Reich, 1776); modern reprint with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001). Garve is now best remembered as the author of the first review of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (for discussion, see Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987], pp. 172–7), but in his own time he was widely known for his writings on moral philosophy and aesthetics and for his translations, which also included a widely influential translation of and commentary on Cicero’s De Officiis. Kuehn’s introduction to the reprint of Versuch über das Genie gives a list of Garve’s numerous works (p. x). There is no monograph on Gerard, let alone on his aesthetics. Hipple discussed him in Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque, pp. 67–82, Engell in Creative Imagination, pp. 75–7 and 79–84, and Dickie devoted a chapter to him in The Century of Taste, pp. 29–54. I have previously discussed Gerard’s theory of aesthetic experience as mental activity in “Gerard and Kant: Influence and Opposition,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9 (2011): 59–93, and his theory of genius in “Exemplary Originality: Genius, Universality, and Individuality,” in Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston, editors, The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 116–37, at pp. 118–21, reprinted in my Values of Beauty, pp. 242–62, at pp. 244–7. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 3.

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sublime in nature and art; rather, “The exercise of thought, which moderate difficulty produces, is a principle source of the pleasure we take in study and investigation of every kind; for though the utility of many subjects enhances our satisfaction, yet the former principle, without any aid from this, often renders very great labour, not only supportable, but agreeable.”61 What is distinctive about the domain of the aesthetic is rather that the pleasure of the activity or the play of the mind is the primary source of our pleasure in its objects. Gerard hereby recognizes that our pleasure in an aesthetic object, whether natural or artistic, typically has multiple sources. In the first six “simple principles” that he enumerates in Part I – novelty, sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, and “oddity and ridicule” – Gerard emphasizes almost exclusively the play of the cognitive powers of the mind. But in the final section of Part I, “Of the sense or taste of Virtue,” and in his discussion of the elements of genius in Part III, Gerard does acknowledge, indeed in the latter case emphasizes, that the play of our emotions is also central to our enjoyment of art. Evidence of this change of tone is the fact that in Parts II and III, unlike Part I, Gerard frequently cites Du Bos. Over the course of Part I, Gerard also develops the theme of the association of ideas in aesthetic response that had been introduced by Hutcheson and Hume,62 gradually making clear that the association of ideas plays a double rôle in the pleasures of taste: Through the association of ideas, we can attach the pleasure of another object or idea to the perception of the object that triggers that idea, and thereby make pleasurable a perception that would otherwise not be pleasurable or add to the pleasure of a representation that is already pleasurable for other reasons; but we can also take pleasure directly in the association itself, as a form of mental activity. In the next generation of Scottish thinkers, as we will see, this idea is made central to his theory by Archibald Alison. Gerard’s accounts of novelty and sublimity are straightforward. We enjoy novelty because in the case of “new objects,” even if the objects “are in themselves indifferent, the efforts, that are necessary for conceiving them, exalt and enliven the frame of mind, make it receive a strong impression from them, and thus render them in some measure 61 62

Gerard, An Essay on Taste, pp. 4–5. Dickie makes it clear that Gerard introduces association as a source of pleasure only part way through his account, indeed after he has by Dickie’s reckoning identified six other sources of pleasure in aesthetic experience, so that Gerard cannot be regarded as reducing aesthetic pleasure to pleasure in associations; see The Century of Taste, pp. 31–3.

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agreeable.”63 We experience sublimity with such pleasure because “When a large object is presented, the mind expands itself to the extent of that object, and is filled with one grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes it into a solemn sedateness, and strikes it with deep silent wonder and admiration,” but at the same time “enlivens and invigorates its frame.”64 We enjoy imitation because it too is a stimulus to mental activity: “Similitude is a very powerful principle of association, which, by continually connecting the ideas in which it is found, and leading our thoughts from one of them to the other, produces in mankind a strong tendency to comparison. As comparison implies in the very act a gentle exertion of the mind, it is on that account agreeable.”65 Even in the case of “oddity and ridicule,” what we enjoy is primarily the sheer activity of the mind, because their “object is in general incongruity, or a surprising and uncommon mixture of relation and contrariety in things,” either “an inconsistence and dissonance of circumstances in the same object” or “a similitude or relation unexpected between things on the whole opposite and unlike,”66 and these inconsistencies occasion an enjoyable activity of the mind in comparing and ultimately connecting them. Gerard’s analysis of beauty, however (and of harmony, the auditory analogue of beauty, which in the tradition of Addison Gerard takes to be primarily visual), is more complicated. Gerard recognizes three sources or kinds of beauty, although he emphasizes that all of them can be combined in our experience of a single object and thereby intensify our pleasure. “The first species of beauty is that of figure,” which “belongs to objects possessed of uniformity, variety, and proportion.” These properties make for “Facility in the conception of an object,” which, “if it is moderate, gives us pleasure.”67 This pleasure is caused by mental activity, thus, in the case of “uniformity and simplicity,” “Objects endued with these qualities enter easily into the mind: they do not distract our attention, or hurry us too fast from one scene to another: the view of a part suggests the whole, and, impelling the mind to imagine the rest, produces a grateful exertion of its energy”;68 meanwhile, “Variety in some measure gratifies the sense of novelty, as our ideas vary in passing from the contemplation of one part to that of another,” and 63 64 65 66 67 68

Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 5. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 14. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 49. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 66. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 30. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, pp. 31–2.

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“This transition puts the mind in action, and gives it employment, the consciousness of which is agreeable.”69 Gerard notes that this form of beauty is widely found in the works of nature as well as in the works of art, such as architecture.70 Next, Gerard considers the beauty of utility, and here, although he does not cite Hogarth’s work published two years earlier, his approach is quite similar: Without making it explicit, he treats utility as a necessary condition of the beauty of objects to which it is relevant rather than as something that produces the sensation of pleasure in its own right. Thus he says that “utility, or the fitness of things for answering their ends,” while it “constitutes another species of beauty, distinct from that of figure,” actually does so by limiting what we can find beautiful in an object: “a great degree of inconvenience generally destroys all the pleasure, which should have arisen from the symmetry and proportion of the parts”;71 likewise, utility determines, “though with considerable latitude, the dimensions and general form of most instruments and works, without adhering to which, the greatest profusion of decoration cannot render them beautiful in the kind.”72 In any form of composition, the “impropriety” of the position of its parts relative to its purpose “wholly defaces their intrinsic beauty.” However, Gerard does recognize a way in which utility generates a positive pleasure rather than merely constituting a necessary condition for pleasure: Whenever we observe a high degree of fitness in an object for its purpose, “we then infer, not only intention, but art and skill in the case: which implying mental excellence and perfection, the view of it gives a noble satisfaction.” But even here Gerard explains this pleasure on the model of association as a form of mental activity: “When therefore we see a work, it leads us by a natural association to conceive its end; prone to comparison, we examine the propriety of the parts in relation to this end”; and When, on examination, the fitness of all the parts appears, the satisfaction, with which we think on the skill and ingenuity thus displayed, communicates itself to the effect so nearly allied to it, so closely connected with it by causation: and we sympathetically enter into a strong feeling of the delight which must attend the possession or use of what is so well designed and executed.73 69 70 71 72 73

Gerard, An Essay on Taste, pp. 33–4. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 34. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 38. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 39. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, pp. 41–2.

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The final clause of this sentence suggests a Humean account of the sympathetic enjoyment of another’s use of an object, but the first part introduces a novel conception of the sympathetic enjoyment of the activity of making such an object that is more in line with Gerard’s emphasis on mental activity as the basis of beauty. It might also be noted that in spite of his professional position as a preacher and subsequently professor of divinity, Gerard eschews Hutcheson’s use of our pleasure in fitness even in nature to launch an argument for the existence of God. Finally, Gerard recognizes as a distinct species of beauty the beauty of colors, some of which are “approved as beautiful” because they “are less hurtful to the organs of the sight than others,” but some of which, “by their splendour, afford a lively and vigorous sensation, which gratifies us, by producing a chearful and vivacious disposition of mind in contemplating them.” Here Gerard might be taken to hint at an emotional dimension to aesthetic experience; however, “the beauty of colours is, in most instances, resolvable into association,”74 and this is of course a form of mental activity, so mental activity remains more prominent than emotional impact in Gerard’s account of this third species of beauty. Gerard observes that “There is perhaps no term used in a looser sense than beauty, which is applied to almost everything that pleases us”;75 so it is easy for us to equivocate among what should be different senses of beauty when talking about different sorts of objects. However, he also emphasizes that although “the classes of beauty . . . are distinct in their principles,” “they are often in things variously united, and by their union they render our satisfaction more intense.” For example, “In a fine face all the principles of beauty are combined.” Gerard is not interested in arguing that only one of these sorts of pleasure is suited for proper judgments of taste. His interest in separating them is only to understand the multiple sources of our pleasure in objects – while showing that all these sources satisfy his general model – and thereby to show how our pleasure in particular objects can be multiplied by the multiple sources of pleasure they contain. In other words, his point in identifying different sources of beauty is not to restrict our pleasures in beautiful objects but to enrich them. We have already observed that Gerard’s account of the pleasures of imitation is complex, like his account of the pleasures of beauty, including both the pleasure transferred from one object to another and the 74 75

Gerard, An Essay on Taste, pp. 42–3. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 45.

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pleasure inherent in the activity of association itself. This duality is the basis for Gerard’s brief treatment of the paradox of tragedy. He argues that the power of imitation is so great that “The rudest rocks and mountains; the objects that in nature are most deformed; even disease and pain, acquire beauty when skillfully imitated in painting.”76 He then turns to the depiction of human character in other media, claiming that “A perfect imitation of characters morally evil, can make us dwell with pleasure on them, notwithstanding the uneasy sentiments of disapprobation and abhorrence which they excite. The character of Iago,” for example, “is detestable, but we admire Shakespear’s representation of it.”77 Gerard then interprets our pleasure in the representation of the unpleasant in terms of the mental activity that representation involves, thus emphasizing the pleasure in the activity of association rather than the pleasure in another object that may be transferred by association: Suspense, anxiety, terror, when produced in Tragedy, by imitation of their objects and causes, and infused by sympathy, afford not only a more serious, but a much intenser and nobler satisfaction, than all the laughter and joy, which farce or comedy can inspire. When thus secondarily produced, they agitate and employ the mind, and rouse and give scope to its greatest activity; while at the same time our implicit knowledge that the occasion is remote or fictitious, enables the pleasure of imitation to relieve the pure torment, which would attend their primary operation.78

Here the emotional impact of tragedy is dependent upon a cognition, but is explained in terms of play: Relieved from actually painful emotions by knowledge of distance or fictionality, we are free to let our minds play with imitations for the sake of the enjoyable stimulation of our cognitive powers. This is not a cognitivist account of our pleasure in tragedy, however, because our knowledge of the fictionality of the tragic events is only a necessary condition of our pleasure, not its object. As we shall see later, Gerard’s theory is much the same as the theory of “mixed sentiments,” distinguishing between our response to a depicted object and our response to our own representation of it, that Moses Mendelssohn was developing in Germany at the same time. Gerard maintains this account of our mental activity in aesthetic response until the last section of Part I. Then he suddenly introduces the engagement of our “moral sense” as not merely one more source of 76 77 78

Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 53. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, pp. 53–4. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, pp. 54–5.

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pleasure in the complex experience of an aesthetic object that “claims a joint authority with the other principles of Taste,” but one that “claims authority superior to all the rest.”79 There are two parts to Gerard’s claim. First, expressing the view that is now called the “overridingness” of morality, he supposes that “morality is the chief requisite” in all of our doings, so that “where this is in any degree violated, no other qualities can atone for the transgression”; thus, in the aesthetic case, “Particular beauties may be approved, but the work is, on the whole, condemned.” Here, the moral permissibility of the creation and content of a work of art – obviously this consideration cannot apply to works of nature, which are not products of human intention and action and therefore are not subject to moral evaluation – functions as a necessary condition for the pleasures of taste, because our approbation of any human work or deed as a whole is conditional upon such permissibility. But further, Gerard also recognizes that the engagement of our moral powers – our capacities for feelings of sympathy, approbation, righteous disapprobation, and so on – is not merely itself a direct source of pleasure but also a source of greater pleasure than the grateful exercise of the cognitive powers alone: How great a part of the sentiments produced by the works of genius arise from the exertions of this sense, approving or condemning, is too obvious to require our dwelling on it. The noblest and most delightful subjects of imitation are affections, characters, and actions: and their peculiar merit arises almost entirely from their continually drawing out and employing the moral faculty. By its approbation, more effectually than by any other means, we become interested for some of the persons represented, and sympathise with every change in their condition. It fills us with joyful approbation of the virtuous character, and with abhorrence, not ungrateful when thus excited, of the vicious. . . . When the vicious man is prosperous, we glow with indignation, we feel a kind of melancholy despondence: when he suffers, we become sensible to the dangers of vice, to the terrors of guilt; we allow his ill desert, but mix pity without our blame. We are thus agitated by those most important passions; the infusion of which constitutes the highest entertainment that works of taste can give.80

If the way that aesthetic objects in general and works of representational art in particular please is by setting our minds into activity, then the arousal of our moral feelings by art that represents human characters and actions is after all the most effective source of pleasure – although, as Gerard’s earlier comments about tragedy imply, the devices of distance 79 80

Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 74. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, pp. 75–6.

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and fictionality may be necessary to ensure that it is pleasant and not unpleasant moral sentiments that are aroused. Gerard does not reduce the pleasure of the play of the cognitive powers to the pleasure of the exercise of our moral powers, but he does in the end argue that the latter is a more intense source of pleasure than the former. In this way, Gerard certainly gives more emphasis to the emotional power of art than Hogarth had, while linking his recognition of the emotional impact of art more closely to the moral sentiments than Burke had. The importance of our moral as well as our cognitive faculty in our enjoyment of art plays a central role in Gerard’s analysis of the conditions for the refinement of taste as well as in his account of genius, to which the last quotation has already pointed. Part I of Gerard’s work, as we have just seen, focuses on the objects of the pleasures of taste; Part II considers “The formation of Taste by the union and improvement of its simple Principles,”81 or the conditions necessary for the ability to respond to those objects and their pleasures with discernment. Gerard’s theory of taste in this part of the Essay was not written in response to Hume’s argument in “Of the Standard of Taste” – remember that Gerard’s work, although not published until 1759, two years after the publication of Hume’s essay, was actually composed and presented to the Edinburgh Society in 1756, a year before the publication of Hume’s work – and is more traditional in its prescription of methods for the improvement of individual taste rather than of criteria for the identification of a body of qualified critics whose collective judgment over time could in turn establish a canon of objects of good taste.82 In other words, Gerard sees the development of good taste as a possibility for the individual rather than as an essentially social accomplishment. Gerard’s account of taste is based on the premise, established in Part I, that works of art (with which he now exclusively concerns himself) offer a variety of pleasures – “Poetry,” for example, “is a complication of beauties”83 – that activate both our cognitive and our moral powers of mind and feeling. Good taste therefore depends upon the “vigor and perfection” of all of our “internal senses,”84 including “delicacy of passion” or “sensibility of heart”85 because, as Gerard stresses again, “A 81 82

83 84 85

Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 79. On this point, see my “Humean Critics, Imaginative Fluency, and Emotional Responsiveness: A Follow-up to Stephanie Ross,” British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (2008): 445–56. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 82. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 79. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 86.

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very great part of the merit of most works of genius arises from their fitness to agitate the heart with a variety of passions.”86 But good taste also requires “Judgment, the faculty which distinguishes things different, separates truth from falsehood, and compares together objects and their qualities.”87 The ability to make reliable judgments is essential to taste because, while Gerard agrees with Hutcheson that virtually everyone is naturally disposed to take pleasure in some degree of beauty or other, good taste is demonstrated in preferring the highest degrees of “real excellence and beauty,”88 and forming such preferences depends upon comparative judgment. The “maturity and perfection” of taste depends upon “certain excellences of our original powers of judgment and imagination,” specifically “sensibility, refinement, correctness, and the proportion or comparative adjustment of its separate principles,”89 that is, on the proper balance among the first three of these features. Gerard then argues that while the acuity of an individual’s outer senses, internal senses, and even sensibility of heart is to some considerable extent fixed, even these can be improved by practice to some degree; but the refinement, correctness, and balance of our judgment can be considerably improved by practice and experience in making comparisons. Specifically, Gerard observes that “Refinement of taste exists only, where, to an original delicacy of imagination, and natural acuteness of judgment, is superadded a long and intimate acquaintance with the best performances of every kind.”90 “Custom enables us to form ideas with exactness and precision,”91 thus to distinguish between lesser and greater beauties and counterfeit and real ones. This is necessary so that we should “not only feel in general that we are pleased, but perceive in what particular manner; not only discern that there is some merit, but also of what determinate kind that merit is.”92 Unlike Hume, Gerard does not point toward any benefits in interpersonal agreement as such in judgments of taste; his assumption seems rather to be that any individual would naturally want to enjoy the greatest beauties, and know that he does, simply because they involve the greatest activity of the cognitive and moral powers and thus produce the 86

87 88 89 90 91 92

Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 87. Here Gerard notes that Du Bos’s only error was to suppose that the arousal of passions is the “only business” of the arts of poetry and painting. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 90. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 116. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, pp. 104–5. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 126. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 138. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 140.

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greatest pleasure, even if the individual would not have known that without undergoing the development of his taste from its initial crudity. Part III of Gerard’s Essay on Taste concerns “The Province and Importance of Taste.”93 The main argument is straightforward: The activity of the cognitive and moral powers is intrinsically pleasurable, but also has the indirect benefit of improving those powers for their use in their ordinary contexts. First, since the judgments of taste cannot be refined without the development of “a vigorous abstracting faculty, the greatest force of reason, a capacity for the most careful and correct induction, and a deep knowledge of human nature,”94 developing the conditions that are necessary for good taste likewise develops the faculties that are necessary for success in actual cognition. Second, the cultivation of taste strengthens one’s moral sensibility, and indeed actually makes moral truths that we know in an abstract way more concrete and compelling: Taste and affection are effects of the same cause, streams issuing from the same fountain; and must therefore be in a considerable measure similar. They likewise mutually influence one another . . . the prevailing passion often enlivens the sensations of taste. . . . Taste as often augments the vigour of the passions, and fixes their prevailing character. Present a mere abstract idea of good or evil; the mind feels no emotion. Mention a particular advantage or disadvantage; desire or aversion, joy or sorrow is immediately aroused. Tell us that a man is generous, benevolent, or compassionate, or on the contrary that he is sordid, selfish, or hardhearted; this general account of his character is too indefinite to excite either love or hatred. Rehearse a series of actions, in which these characters have been displayed; immediately the story draws out the affections correspondent. It is only a perception enlivened by fancy, that affects our active powers. A very general idea is so unstable, that fancy cannot lay hold of it: but when a particular idea is presented, the imagination dwells upon it, cloaths it with a variety of circumstances, runs from it to other ideas, that are connected with it, and finishes a picture of the object represented by that idea, which will infallibly produce a suitable affection.95

Here Gerard uses his language of association and activity to point to the cognitive pleasure in the exercise of the imagination with images of human character and action of the kind that are portrayed in art, but emphasizes the benefit of making our otherwise abstract estimates of character and conduct emotionally effective. Indeed, art is particularly suited to the stimulation of moral sentiments because it deals with 93 94 95

Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 159. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 181. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, pp. 197–8.

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representations of individuals rather than abstractions – thus, with his eye on the conditions of maximal emotional impact, Gerard reverses Aristotle’s famous claim that poetry is more philosophical than history because it deals with universals rather than individuals. Later on, he adds that “The exercise of taste begets serenity, and satisfaction. When these prevail, the mind is prone to benevolence. . . . A man is seldom better disposed to friendship, generosity, love, and the whole train of kind affections, then when his mind has been softened, by the charms of music, painting, or poetry. It is universally acknowledged, that these arts, when properly applied, are very powerful in recommending virtue.”96 Plato was worried that too much art would soften the reason and will, allowing the emotions too much sway in the determination of human conduct. Writing in the framework of the moral sense theory of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume, Gerard instead thinks that moral success depends upon the cultivation of the moral sentiments – the right ones, of course – and praises the experience of art – in good taste, of course – as the most effective means to the cultivation of these sentiments. In the third edition of the Essay on Taste, published in 1780, Gerard added a fourth part that takes up the challenge of replying to Hume, so a comment on that addition will be in order before we return to the discussion of the original Part III. Gerard begins the new Part IV with the thesis “That Differences of Taste are unavoidable”:97 “That there is a very great diversity of tastes among mankind,” he reports empirically, “is plain from every day’s experience; that this diversity must always continue, is no less plain from reflection on those principles of the mind, by the operation of which the several principles of taste are produced.”98 However, this undeniable fact does not lead Gerard to give up on the project of establishing a standard of taste. The first premise of his argument in behalf of a standard is that there is a difference between taste “as a species of sensation, or as a species of discernment,”99 that is, between an individual’s own preferences for particular objects and an individual’s judgments about what objects would please more generally: An individual may prefer certain objects without judging that his preferences should be canonical 96 97

98 99

Gerard, An Essay on Taste, p. 204. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste, together with Observations concerning the Imitative Nature of Poetry, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: Bell and Creech, 1780), facsimile edition with an introduction by Walter J. Hipple, Jr. (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1963), p. 197. Gerard, Essay on Taste, 3rd ed., pp. 198–9. Gerard, Essay on Taste, 3rd ed., p. 214.

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for others, and judge that certain objects should be canonical without actually liking them very much himself. Gerard thus concedes that “Taste considered in the former of these lights, in respect of what we may call its direct exercise, cannot properly admit any standard,”100 thus correcting what Kames had argued after the first edition of Gerard’s work by maintaining that about this sense of taste it is indeed “absurd to assert, that a man ought not to be pleased when he is, or that he ought to be pleased when he is not,”101 a proposition that Kames had rejected entirely. The second premise of Gerard’s argument, what allows him to maintain that it makes sense to speak of a standard of taste even while recognizing that there will always be ineradicable differences among the preferences of individuals, is the fundamental point already mentioned, namely, that any particular work of art offers a “complication of beauties,” that is, contains a variety of elements and aspects each of which may be meritorious but which are combined in such a way that it is unreasonable to expect every individual to respond to the same way to the complex. Individuals may vary in their preference for different aspects and merits in art, and thus vary in their preferences for particular objects depending upon the prominence of their more or less favored elements of aesthetic merit, while at the same time recognizing that others might emphasize different ones among the generally agreed upon aspects of aesthetic merit and thus have different responses to particular objects. Gerard’s recognition of the complexity of our responses to works of art thus constrains his expectation of unanimity among our responses. This premise is reflected in the characterization of the rôle of critics that Gerard offers in clear contrast to Hume. Hume had argued that we can noncontroversially identify qualified critics whose collective judgment over the ages can identify the most valuable works of art for the rest of us. Gerard explicitly denies that the rôle of critics is to identify a canonical body of objects of good taste for the rest of us, and argues instead that their function is to identify the principles in the senses of the causes of aesthetic approbation by induction from those objects that have been found to please, principles that ordinary individuals can then use to distinguish between their personal preferences and more generally valid judgments but also to develop and refine their own preferences. “The business of the critic,” Gerard writes, “is only to investigate the causes of those pleasures or of that disgust which mankind actually receive from 100 101

Gerard, Essay on Taste, 3rd ed., p. 215. Kames, Elements of Criticism, ch. XXV, vol. II, p. 720.

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works of imagination: he has by no means a right to determine that what pleases is not good, or that what displeases is bad.”102 Or “the critic has a right to investigate the causes of our pleasure or disgust,” and “if this investigation contributes to render our judgment more precise and certain, it will follow, that it provides us with a more accurate standard than mere sentiment. It is denied,” however, “that he has any right to pronounce that not good, which actually pleases, or that not bad, which actually displeases. In opposition to general sentiment, he can have no right to determine, and the true critic never will determine.”103 By investigating the causes of aesthetic preferences, which of course requires leisure, learning, and practice that professional critics but not most of the rest of us can enjoy, good critics can identify the complex sources of aesthetic merit and thus offer guidance to the rest of us in the development of our preferences and of our discernment, but they will have no basis for overriding our individual or collective preferences. Gerard’s approach to the standard of taste may still seem circular, however. For if the rôle of critics is not to prescribe principles of aesthetic merit to the rest of us but to discover such principles by careful investigation of our preferences, must not they depend upon agreement among our preferences in the first place from which to make inductions about their underlying causes? Gerard himself points out, in objection to those who would too confidently assert the existence of an obvious standard of taste derived from “a general or an universal approbation”104 across all times and cultures, that even if such works as “The Iliad of Homer, the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles, the orations of Demosthenes, gained the approbation of the enlightened Greeks, were admired by the Romans, and continue to be the delight and study of the moderns,” that this does not imply “the consent of all ages and nations”: “It is only the consent of the European nations, and a few others connected with them,” while “there are regions in the East, exceeding Europe in extent, and in the number of their inhabitants, who have never given their suffrage in favor of these works” (though we might want to distinguish here between substantive cross-cultural differences in preferences and mere ignorance in one culture of the masterworks of another). Certainly “poetry and eloquence” have also flourished among these other cultures,” and among them there is “extensive and . . . unanimous . . . approbation” for works 102 103 104

Gerard, Essay on Taste, 3rd ed., p. 230. Gerard, Essay on Taste, 3rd ed., p. 245. Gerard, Essay on Taste, 3rd ed., p. 234.

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“in which we acknowledge the fire of genius, but censure numberless irregularities and extravagancies.”105 How can critics discover general principles of aesthetic preferences if there are not, after all, uniform preferences across different times and cultures? Gerard’s insistence upon the complexity of the aesthetic merits in particular objects is the basis for his answer to this objection: His idea is that critics can establish general principles of approbation by careful investigation of the perhaps quite small number of works which have been found to please in a truly universal way, but then discover different combinations of genuine merits among the much broader range of works that variously please different individuals and cultures, and perhaps through these discoveries open the eyes of individuals and cultures to the merits to be found in works that they might not immediately prefer. “General approbation,” Gerard argues, is not “the proper or immediate standard of taste,” but rather provides “the materials of which the standard must be composed . . . the block from which it must be hewed out . . . the principle of those ingredients from which it must be extracted.”106 The labors of critics may never provide a single canonical set of objects which all must equally admire, but will rather identify many different but genuine sources of aesthetic merit that can be combined in complex works in different ways, works which therefore can appeal to different individuals and cultures in understandably different ways. We can now return to the argument of the original edition of Gerard’s Essay on Taste. In Part III, Gerard also gives a succinct analysis of genius, which would be the subject of a much lengthier discussion in his later Essay on Genius. In the earlier account, genius is analyzed into three components. “The first and leading quality of genius is invention, which consists in an extensive comprehensiveness of imagination, in a readiness of associating the remotest ideas, that are in any way related. In a man of genius the uniting principles are so vigorous and quick, that whenever any idea is present to the mind, they bring into view at once all others, that have the least connection with it.”107 The second element of genius is the ability to bring order to these associations, and make them into a harmonious and beautiful whole: “Thus from a confused heap of materials, collected by fancy, genius after repeated reviews and transpositions, designs a regular and well proportioned whole.”108 The third element of genius 105 106 107 108

Gerard, Essay on Taste, 3rd ed., p. 232. Gerard, Essay on Taste, 3rd ed., p. 248. Gerard, Essay on Taste, 3rd ed., p. 173. Gerard, Essay on Taste, 3rd ed., p. 174.

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is the ability to express the results of the first two to others: “ A genius for the fine arts implies, not only the power of invention or design, but likewise a capacity to express it’s designs in apt materials. Without this, it would not only be imperfect, but would for ever lie latent, undiscovered, and useless.” And he adds that “It is chiefly the peculiar modification of this capacity, which adopts a genius to one art rather than another.”109 The painter and the poet differ not in their capacities for invention and order, but in their development – and perhaps their natural aptitude for the development – of one means of expression over another. Gerard states that “genius is the grand architect, which not only chooses the materials, but disposes them into a regular structure. But it is not able to finish it by itself. It needs the assistance of taste, to guide and moderate it’s exertions.”110 We will later see that Kant virtually repeats this claim, as well as the claim that genius consists in the ability to find intersubjectively accessible means of expression, and thus should not be conceived of as an asocial idiosyncrasy of mind and manner.111 But there is also a fundamental difference between Gerard’s account and Kant’s, lying in the fact that Gerard’s account of invention is somewhat restricted: What he calls invention is the ability to discern associations of ideas which, though they may be remote, really exist independently of the genius’s recognition of them. On his account genius is more like an exceptional talent for discovery rather than for the imaginative creation of something entirely new. This is what allows Gerard in his Essay on Genius to argue that although “Genius is properly the faculty of invention,” by its means a person may be “qualified for making new discoveries in science, or for producing original works in art.”112 While in science the end of genius is “the discovery of truth” and in art it is “the production of beauty,”113 and scientific genius is characterized above all by “penetration . . . a force of imagination as leads to the comprehension and explication of a subject” while artistic genius is characterized by “brightness of imagination,” which “fits a man for adorning a subject,”114 both forms of genius essentially discover associations among ideas, which, however remote, are there to be discovered, awaiting only the arrival of someone 109 110 111 112

113 114

Gerard, Essay on Taste, 3rd ed., pp. 174–5. Gerard, Essay on Taste, 3rd ed., pp. 176–7. See Kant, CPJ, §50, 5:319–20. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London: W. Strahan, 1774), facsimile reprint with introduction by Bernhard Fabian (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1977), p. 8. Gerard, Essay on Genius, 3rd ed., p. 318. Gerard, Essay on Genius, 3rd ed., p. 323.

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with sufficient penetration and imagination. Thus Gerard says that “In genius for the arts, resemblance, the predominant principle of association, continually operates along with all the other principles. . . . The attributes, qualities, and circumstances of any subject, are connected with it by coexistence, and are naturally suggested to the imagination by this relation.”115 Note, naturally suggested to the imagination, not created by it; in this regard, artistic and scientific genius are essentially the same, both recognizing remote connections and bringing them to expression for the benefit of the less gifted, but neither genuinely creating something entirely new. Kant and following him many thinkers at the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will insist that artistic genius creates something absolutely new, and will for that reason reject the idea that science, although it certainly needs greatness of mind, requires genuine genius at all;116 others will reject the idea that science does not have room for genius, but only because they will think that science allows for the genuine creation of theories and models, and not just the discovery of realities that exist whether we discover them or not. Gerard’s theory of genius would be influential for Kant in its insistence on the necessity of an unusual gift for expression and communication as well as for discovery or invention, although Kant would argue against Gerard’s commitment to the necessity of genius for success in science as well as art. Gerard’s emphasis on the activity of our mental powers in aesthetic experience was surely also an important source for Kant’s conception of the free play of imagination and understanding as the basis of all aesthetic experience. But one of the most important features of Gerard’s aesthetics is his emphatic recognition of the presence of emotions and moral sentiments as well as the play of our cognitive powers in our aesthetic experience, and, at least in his initial account of the “free” judgment of beauty, Kant would step back from Gerard’s recognition of the complexity of the sources for aesthetic pleasure; in particular Kant would rigidly separate “pure” aesthetic response from all “charm and emotion”117 and argue that the beautiful is only a “symbol” of the morally good,118 not more immediately connected to the experience of moral sentiments – although, as we shall see in due course, Kant’s actual theory of fine art blurs these initially sharp boundaries. But as important as 115 116 117 118

Gerard, Essay on Genius, 3rd ed., pp. 349–50. See Kant, CPJ, §47, 5:308–9. See Kant, CPJ, §13. Kant, CPJ, §59.

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Gerard was, both positively and negatively, for the development of Kant’s aesthetics, we cannot turn directly from Gerard to Kant – we have first to consider the remaining developments in eighteenth-century British aesthetics and then the development of aesthetics in eighteenth-century France and Germany, much of which will also be important for our understanding of Kant’s place in the history of aesthetics.

4 From Kames to Alison and Stewart The Final Flowering

After the 1750s, British aesthetics was almost exclusively a Scottish affair. But the Irishman Burke may nevertheless have had considerable influence in persuading some of the Scots to take a less exclusively moralistic view of the emotions raised by works of art than their own countryman Gerard had maintained. At least the Elements of Criticism of Henry Home, Lord Kames, although clearly influenced by Gerard’s pluralistic approach to the sources of pleasure in objects of taste, did not emphasize the moral sentiments produced by art as exclusively as Gerard did, nor did the leading “associationist” of the next generation, namely, Archibald Alison. But both of these thinkers had in common with the writers of the 1750s that they did not conceive of works of art primarily as vehicles for the cognition of important ideas and truths, moral or otherwise, but rather emphasized the free engagement of our mental powers, both cognitive and moral, in aesthetic experience. Toward the end of the period to be considered in this chapter, however, the cognitivist approach to aesthetics, what we might consider within the British context the Shaftesburian rather than Hutchesonian approach, enjoyed a revival in the work of Thomas Reid and his chief disciple, Dugald Stewart. In between Kames and Reid, variants of both the aesthetics of play and the aesthetics of truth were developed by Adam Smith, James Beattie, and the English painter Joshua Reynolds. In this chapter we shall thus see that in the final phase of eighteenth-century British aesthetics a complex tapestry was woven with all three of the main threads of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, although in no case are all three threads woven together by a single author.

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1. Kames Henry Home, later Lord Kames (1696–1782), like his younger and distant cousin David Hume (who spelled the name the way it was pronounced), came from a Berwickshire family that was genteel but of modest means, but unlike Hume he was educated at home rather than at university. At sixteen, he went to Edinburgh to read law, but, in this again unlike his cousin, he took to it and had a brilliant legal career, reaching not only the Court of Session, the highest civil court in Scotland (upon which he took the title of Lord Kames, from the original family residence), but ultimately (in 1763), the High Court of Justiciary, the highest criminal court. His legal publications were extensive, including numerous volumes of reports of the decisions of the Scottish courts, two volumes of Historical Law Tracts in 1758, in which he discussed the evolution of Scottish legal institutions, and Principles of Equity in 1760. His legal, historical, and as we would now say sociological interests culminated in the two volumes of The Sketches of the History of Man (1774), one of the classical works of the Scottish Enlightenment describing the progress of humankind from savagery to civil society in all of its many different forms.1 But his ambitions extended beyond the law and history to philosophy and aesthetics, and in 1751 he published the Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, followed in 1762 by Elements of Criticism, originally in three volumes; these are the works for which he is best remembered by philosophers. Kames explained his choice of the modest title Elements of Criticism rather than what might have seemed more natural, The Elements of Criticism, by saying that the latter would be too assuming for his work, which unfolds a “number of these elements or principles . . . but the author is far from imagining that he has completed the list.”2 Although Kames was a man of extraordinary erudition as well as accomplishment, the modesty that pervades his works is one of their great charms.3 1

2

3

There is a modern edition, Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, edited by James A. Harris, 3 vols. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2007). Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, ed. Peter Jones (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2005), vol. II, p. 19. For general works on Kames, see Ian Simpson Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) and William C. Lehmann, Henry Home, Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Study in National Character and the History of Ideas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971). Once again, we find no monograph on Kames’s aesthetics, but see Helen Whitcomb Randall, The Critical Theory of Lord Kames (Northampton, Mass.: Smith College, 1941); Hipple, Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque,

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The two main objectives of the Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion are to argue, against Francis Hutcheson in particular, that our approbation of benevolence alone is not the foundation of morality, but that we have an antecedent and even more important sense of justice, and then to defend our knowledge of the existence of the Deity from the very sorts of criticism of arguments for that existence that his cousin Hume was simultaneously developing in drafting his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. On the second issue, Kames contended that “The Deity hath not left his existence to be gathered from slippery and far-fetched arguments. We need but open our eyes, to receive impressions of him from almost everything we perceive.”4 But Kames prefaced his discussion of these great issues with an initial chapter on “Our Attachment to Objects of Distress,” which is an explicit response to Du Bos’s treatment of the paradox of tragedy. Here Kames makes two points, the first of which is central to his subsequent aesthetics and the second of which is crucial to the approach to morality of the rest of the volume. Both points are based on the premise “that naturally we have a strong desire to be acquainted with the history of others. We judge of their actions, approve or disapprove, condemn or acquit; and in this the busy mind has a wonderful delight.”5 The point that is crucial to Kames’s aesthetics is then that “imitation” or the artistic representation of human actions has the same emotional effect upon us as the observation of real actions does: “whatever may be the physical cause, one thing is evident, that this aptitude of the mind of man to receive impressions from feigned as well as from real objects, contributes to the noblest purposes of life.”6 Thus, not only history but also novels and plays are “the most universal and favourite entertainments,” because in them we “enter deep into the concerns” and “partake of joys and distresses” of other human beings. Indeed, Kames argues, tragedy, a “feigned history,” “imitation or representation of human characters and actions,” “commonly makes a stronger impression than what is real; because, if it be a work of genius, incidents will be chosen to make the

4

5 6

pp. 99–121; Engell, Creative Imagination, especially pp. 72–3; Kivy, Seventh Sense, pp. 230–5, focusing exclusively on the question of whether Kames, like Hutcheson, posits a distinct “sense of beauty,” and properly answering in the negative, although not setting this in the context of the more pluralistic approach to aesthetic experience pioneered by Gerard; and Eva Dadlez, “Ideal Presence: How Kames Solved the Problem of Fiction and Emotion,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9 (2011): 115–33. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, ed. Mary Catherine Moran (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2005), p. 207. Kames, Essays, p. 17. Kames, Essays, p. 18.

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deepest impressions; and will be so conducted as to keep the mind in continual suspense and agitation, beyond what commonly happens in real life.”7 The medium of tragedy also affords more people more opportunity for such engagement of their emotions, because the kinds of scenes that it feigns “rarely occur” in ordinary life.8 The first part of Kames’s solution to the paradox of tragedy is thus the empirical claim that fictions can affect our emotions as strongly if not more strongly than the actions and characters of real people do. The second part of Kames’s resolution of the paradox, and what then leads to a major theme of his moral philosophy, is the claim (which in fact Du Bos had already made) that our response to the pain of others undergoing tragic events is not the very same state (that we imagine) they are suffering, a condition we would surely desire to avoid, but rather an emotional state that explains our attraction to the tragedy. Kames makes this point by distinguishing between pain as an intrinsic feature of a mental state and aversion as a desire to be free of that state, and by then arguing that in the case of tragedy the painful events that are depicted do not lead to a reaction of aversion but rather to a response of sympathy that is itself pleasurable. Thus the moral affections, even such of them as produce pain, are none of them attended with any degree of aversion. . . . Sympathy in particular attaches us to an object in distress so powerfully as even to overbalance self-love, which would make us fly from it. Sympathy accordingly, though a painful passion, is attractive; and in affording relief, the gratification of the passion is not a little pleasant.

The key to our enjoyment of tragedy is the fact that our emotional response to the depiction of tragic events is complex, by no means reducible to mere pain: “thus, tragedy is allowed to seize the mind with all the different charms which arise from the exercise of the social passions.”9 In this essay, Kames clearly assumes that the primary source of our pleasure in a form of art such as tragedy is its emotional impact, and devotes his effort to explaining the particular circumstances that allow us to enjoy the emotions aroused by works of art. In the vast Elements of Criticism, Kames locates our pleasure in the fine arts – and it is our pleasure in art rather than in nature which is his primary concern, in spite of a few comments on natural beauty – in the exercise of our cognitive as well as emotional powers, but the most 7 8 9

Kames, Essays, p. 17. Kames, Essays, p. 18. Kames, Essays, p. 20.

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important claim of the work is that the fine arts “open a direct avenue to the heart of man” – not to his mind – and that through the study of the criticism of art the “inquisitive mind . . . 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.”10 Art exists primarily to touch our emotions and passions, and the principles or “elements” of criticism are the guidelines, based on an empirical study of human nature as well as on extensive extracts from great works of art (chiefly poetry and drama) from Homer to Shakespeare and beyond, for how works of art in various media can most effectively do that. However, we will also find elements of a theory like Gerard’s that there is a sheer enjoyment of our own mental activity in aesthetic experience, and, as the last quotation suggests, Kames also supposes that we come to know the nature of human emotions through art. So we might regard Kames’s overall account of the elements of criticism as one that synthesizes the three approaches to aesthetic experience as a form of knowledge, a form of play, and a form of feeling. In its comprehensiveness Kames’s account is almost unrivaled in the eighteenth century, certainly in eighteenthcentury Britain (we will see later that Moses Mendelssohn’s approach might be considered a German rival), which might well account for the endurance of Kames’s work well into the nineteenth century (editions of Kames’s book were being produced for college use in the United States as late as the 1850s). But if one of these three factors in aesthetic experience enjoys pride of place in Kames’s work, it is surely the emotional impact of aesthetic experience. The work begins with an introduction defending the value of criticism and ends with a chapter defending the existence as well as the value of a standard of taste. We can consider these general claims before turning to the details of Kames’s account of how art opens a direct avenue to the human heart. Kames opens his introduction with the observation that since in sight and hearing, unlike taste, touch, or smell, we do not notice our own sensations of objects, only the objects themselves, we do not tend to conflate our pleasures in such perception with our impressions of the objects themselves, but “place them in the mind, where they really are.”11 For this reason, he claims, “The pleasures of the eye and the ear” are “elevated above those of the other external senses” and “acquire so much dignity as to become a laudable entertainment.” 10 11

Kames, Elements, vol. I, ch. II, p. 32. Kames, Elements, Introduction, vol. I, p. 12.

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“They are not,” he says, “set on a level with the purely intellectual,” but instead “Their mixt nature and middle place between organic and intellectual pleasures, qualify them to associate with both: beauty heightens all the organic feelings, as well as the intellectual.” Because the pleasures of beauty and other aesthetic properties can heighten both organic and intellectual feelings they will turn out to be advantageous for both our moral and our intellectual development. As he continues, Kames explains the value of both aesthetic experience itself and criticism, or the study of the principles and practice of the arts. “The pleasures of the eye and the ear” themselves are valuable because, “being sweet and moderately exhilarating, they are in their tone equally distant from the turbulence of passion, and the languor of indifference, and by that tone are perfectly well qualified, not only to revive the spirits when sunk by sensual gratification, but also to relax them when overstrained in any violent pursuit.”12 Criticism, in turn, is valuable for a number of reasons: first, “because a thorough acquaintance with the principles of the fine arts, redoubles the pleasure we derive from them”;13 second, because “the practice of reasoning upon subjects so agreeable, tends to a habit; and a habit, strengthening the reasoning faculties, prepares the mind for entering into subjects more intricate and abstract”;14 and third, because the practice of criticism strengthens not only our cognitive but also our moral powers, since “the reasonings employed on the fine arts are of the same kind with those which regulate our conduct,” and thus “The science of rational criticism tends to improve the heart no less than the understanding.”15 Specifically, Kames claims that “delicacy of taste,” which is developed through the study of criticism, “tends no less to invigorate the social affections, than to moderate those that are selfish,” and “no occupation attaches a man more to his duty, than that of cultivating a taste in the fine arts: a just relish of what is beautiful, proper, elegant, and ornamental, in writing or painting, in architecture or gardening, is a fine preparation for the same just relish of these qualities in character and behaviour.”16 Of course, Shaftesbury had already argued that a taste

12

13 14 15 16

Kames, Elements, Introduction, vol. I, p. 12. This passage may well have been a source for Friedrich Schiller’s distinction in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, three decades later, between “tensing” and “relaxing” beauties. Schiller will be discussed later in this volume. Kames, Elements, Introduction, vol. I, p. 14. Kames, Elements, Introduction, vol. I, p. 15. Kames, Elements, Introduction, vol. I, pp. 15–16. Kames, Elements, Introduction, vol. I, pp. 16–17.

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for beauty prepares the way for a taste for the order and harmony that is essential to morality, although he did not emphasize the beauty of art; the novelty of Kames’s claim is that according to him it is not only the experience but also the study of the principles and practice of art that he calls “criticism” that is so conducive to morality. This claim might seem utterly implausible if one thinks about archetypical modernist art on which late twentieth-century aestheticians focused their theories, such as the readymades of Marcel Duchamp or the aleatoric music of John Cage; but if the paradigm of art is the kind of poetry, above all Milton and Shakespeare, that Kames cites so copiously throughout the Elements of Criticism, his claim will not seem so far-fetched. Since he has such a high opinion of the value of taste, it is not surprising that Kames should stress the value of cultivating taste. But that all people have good reason to cultivate their taste does not mean that even if they do we should expect them to reach uniformity or a “standard of taste.” However, Kames has some novel arguments concerning the existence of a standard of taste as well as the value of a standard of taste. Returning to the question of a standard of taste at the end of his treatise, he begins, like Hume, by arguing against that proverb that “there is not such a thing as a good or a bad, a right or a wrong; that everyone’s taste is to himself an ultimate standard without appeal”17 – in other words, that as a matter of fact we just do not find such diversity among tastes as the slogan suggests. Or at least we do not find great diversity among the kinds of tastes that people have, although we do find considerable variation in the particular tastes of different groups; but although Hume had thought that this fact was precisely the problem of taste, Kames argues that it is actually a good thing, because it ensures that the tastes of the many different groups that constitute society can be widely gratified. “Nature, in her scale of pleasures, has been sparing of divisions: she hath wisely and benevolently filled every division with many pleasures; in order that individuals may be contented with their own lot, without envying that of others.”18 However, while being tolerant of a diversity of tastes at the most particular level, as Hutcheson had been, Kames develops a novel argument for our concern about the uniformity of taste at a more general level. He argues, “We have a sense or conviction of a common

17

18

Kames, Elements, ch. XXV, vol. II, p. 719. The designation of the commonplace that in matters of taste there is no right or wrong as a “proverb” is of course due to Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste.” Kames, Elements, ch. XXV, vol. II, p. 720.

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nature, not only in our own species, but in every species of animals,”19 and we naturally take pleasure when an individual realizes this common nature or standard and are distressed when it departs from it. This is especially important in morality, where we approve of those who realize the ideal for human nature and disapprove of those who depart from it; but this pattern of feeling carries over to the case of taste as well: We care about the uniformity of taste, at least at a general level, because we are convinced that there is a common core to human tastes, and we are pleased when individuals realize this norm and distressed when they do not. This is just a fact about our own feelings. Kames also offers two novel arguments about the “final causes” or practical value of a standard of taste. First, he holds that the enjoyment of works of art is a valuable “pastime,” but that works of art such as sumptuous and elegant buildings, fine gardens, music, sculpture, and painting would not exist without shared tastes for those things. This is because they are difficult and expensive for individuals to produce, and there would not be enough people to work together to produce them or to pay for them unless the taste for them were widely shared. “And this,” Kames observes, “suggests another final cause no less illustrious.” What he has in mind here is that even if the moral benefits of criticism that he had initially pointed out could be realized even in the face of a diversity of tastes, there is a particular moral benefit, or perhaps even more specifically political benefit, that can be achieved only through uniformity of taste: The separation of men into different classes, by birth, office, or occupation, however necessary, tends to relax the connection that ought to be among members of the same state; which bad effect is in some measure prevented by the access all ranks of people have to public spectacles, and to amusements that are best enjoyed in company. Such meetings, where every one partakes of the same pleasures in common, are no slight support to the social affections.20

Quite apart from the increased sensibility to morally important emotions that individuals may develop through the study of art and criticism, which could in principle be developed by different people studying very different works of art, there is a valuable solidarity that can come only from works of art that can be enjoyed in common, and in increasingly diversified modern societies perhaps only or at least especially from 19 20

Kames, Elements, ch. XXV, vol. II, p. 721. Kames, Elements, ch. XXV, vol. II, p. 724.

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works of art that can be enjoyed in common.21 This raises the stakes for a standard of taste. These are the grand claims that frame Kames’s catalogue of elements of criticism. Let us now turn to the details of his account. We have thus far focused on Kames’s emphasis in the emotional impact and benefit of the arts, but as has already been suggested Kames does recognize a cognitive as well as an emotional dimension in our enjoyment of the arts. In particular, his exposition proper begins with a version of the theory that aesthetic response is a play of the cognitive powers, a factor absent from his 1751 essay and perhaps now emphasized due to the influence of Gerard’s prize-winning Essay on Taste, for which Kames had been one of the jurors. Kames begins with the observation that “A man while awake is conscious of a continued train of perceptions and ideas passing in his mind,”22 and then claims that “we are framed by nature to relish order and connection” in such trains of perceptions and ideas.23 This can be considered a version of the play theory because Kames’s view, like that of Hutcheson, seems to be that we take pleasure in the sheer experience of order and connection, without suggesting, as had Shaftesbury or Wolff, that order and connection are a sign or a form of truth, or that the pleasure we take in order is itself a cognition of perfection. Next, Kames states that “Every work of art that is conformable to the natural course of our ideas, is so far agreeable; and every work of art that reverses that course, is so far disagreeable.”24 This does not mean that all works of art must be imitations of nature – Kames includes architecture, gardening, and music among the fine arts, but does not, as we will see in the next chapter the French theorist Charles Batteux does, attempt to interpret these arts as mimetic. Rather, his view is that art pleases insofar as it creates the same kind of orderly flow of perceptions and ideas as the experience of nature does. Of course, for those arts that are mimetic – literature, painting, and sculpture – the parallel between the flow of

21

22 23 24

Terry Eagleton makes the general claim about eighteenth-century British aesthetics that “The growing aestheticization of social life . . . represents a major hegemonic advance on the part of the governing bloc”; The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 44. Eagleton does not discuss Kames, but I find no reason to doubt Kames’s sincerity in hoping that common standards of good taste can cross rather than harden the boundaries between different socioeconomic groups in a stratified modern economy and society. Kames, Elements, ch. I, vol. I, p. 21. Kames, Elements, ch. I, vol. I, p. 26. Kames, Elements, ch. I, vol. I, p. 27.

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ideas that would be created by the original and the flow of ideas created by the representation must be even closer. Having started off with this premise about the effect of art on our cognitive powers, however, Kames devotes the next chapter (II), occupying about one-fifth of his entire book, to the “emotions and passions,” thus to the emotional impact of the arts. Much of the remainder of the book discusses the specific emotional quality of such aesthetic properties as beauty, grandeur, motion, and force (as we shall see, Kames’s list is even more detailed than Gerard’s), with only occasional reference to the impact of art on our cognitive powers. Kames’s extensive discussion of the “beauty of language” in chapter XVIII – the only other chapter as long as the initial chapter on emotions and passions – might be thought to stress the formal and therefore cognitive dimension of art, but even here much of Kames’s argument is that the formal features of works of literature must be consistent with and conducive to the flow of emotions they are intended to produce. Kames’s treatment of the emotions and passions is as intricate as it is interesting. We must confine our account of it to several points important for aesthetics. First, Kames notes that we have feelings of pleasure or pain that are immediately connected with the perception of external objects – we are “instantaneously conscious” of pleasure in the sight of a “gently-flowing river” or a “spreading oak” and likewise conscious of “painful emotions” in the perception of a “barren heath” or “rotten carcass” – as well as those that are connected with the perception of the qualities and actions of human beings: Qualities such as “power, discernment, wit, mildness, sympathy, courage, benevolence, are agreeable in a high degree”; qualities of action such as “graceful motion and genteel behavior” that can be perceived “without the least reflection”; and moral qualities of actions that must be inferred because they depend upon the nature of the intention from which the action flows.25 Unlike what we will find in the next generation in Archibald Alison, Kames does not hold that the emotional impact of our perception of nonhuman nature depends upon associations with our feelings about human beings. He does hold, however, that “of all external objects, rational beings, especially of our own species, have the most powerful influence in raising emotions and passions,” and therefore that works of art depicting human beings and their actions can have a more powerful impact on our feelings than either the depiction of nonhuman nature or nature 25

Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, pp. 34–5.

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itself can have; and among the arts, he claims, both literature and music can have a more powerful impact than the visual arts, because they more directly convey to us the qualities of human characters and actions to which we so strongly respond. Thus, “as speech is the most powerful of all the means by which one human being can display itself to another, the objects of the eye must so far yield preference to those of the ear,” and “Music has a commanding influence over the mind, especially in conjunction with words.” Objects of sight may indeed contribute to the same end, but more faintly; as where a love-poem is rehearsed in a shady grove, or on the bank of a purling stream. But sounds, which are vastly more ductile and various, readily accompany all the social affections expressed in a poem, especially emotions of love and pity.26

Kames’s ranking of the value of the various fine arts is thus based on his comparison of their emotional rather than cognitive impact. The next point to note is that Kames distances himself from the thesis that aesthetic experience is disinterested, in the sense of raising no desire for personal possession of the beautiful object, that we have found in Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, in Burke’s distinction between love and lust, and that we will find again in Kant. Kames uses desire as a criterion for distinguishing between emotions and passions, stipulating (he does not pretend that he is simply capturing a well-established distinction in common sense or ordinary language) that “An internal motion or agitation of the mind, when it passeth away without desire, is denominated an emotion; when desire follows, the motion or agitation is denominated a passion.”27 But he does not then go on to argue, as Du Bos might have done, that the experience of art should produce only “emotions” and that only the experience of real life produces “passions” in his technical senses. On the contrary, Kames thinks that works of art can and should raise both emotions and passions. This is perhaps because he holds that passions can be divided into two types, “general and particular,” or desires for types of things as well as for particular things or persons; among the general passions there can be passions “of friendship, of love, of gratitude, of envy, of resentment,”28 and Kames thinks it proper and desirable for art to raise general passions of at least the first three kinds mentioned on this list. Thus, unlike some of his contemporaries, 26 27 28

Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, p. 43. Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, p. 37. Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, p. 38.

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Kames cannot be thought of as responding to Plato’s fear that the arts raise inappropriate passions by arguing that they produce only emotions defanged of any real desire; rather, he must be relying on the supposition that the experience of the arts generally produces valuable passions rather than dysfunctional ones. And such a supposition would be consistent with Kames’s moral philosophy, which clearly holds that the bulk of our “social affections” are naturally good rather than evil. Next, Kames observes that our natural trains of ideas not only produce a pleasurable sense of order but also that they can convey emotional impact as well: “they have an influence, no less remarkable, in the production of emotions and passions.” Thus, “an agreeable object makes everything connected with it appear agreeable.”29 The arts can rely upon this possibility of emotional association. But what is most important to Kames’s theory of the arts is that even though man is a creature “so remarkably addicted to truth and reality,” “passions, as all the world knows, are moved by fiction as well as truth.”30 Kames does not see a paradox here that needs to be resolved, but an empirically obvious fact about human nature. His theory is that verbal descriptions as well as pictorial representations can produce “ideal presence,” or sensory imagery so rich and yet distinct “that I perceive the thing as a spectator; and as existing in my presence; which means not that I am really a spectator, but only that I conceive myself to be a spectator, and have a perception of the object similar to what a real spectator hath.”31 And since perceptions can lead directly to emotions and passions, that means that ideal presence can produce emotions and passions just as forceful as those created by the perception of real objects. Ideal presence, in turn, can be created by “speech, by writing, or by painting,” because “A lively and accurate description of an important event, raises in me ideas no less distinct than if I had originally been an eye-witness; I am insensibly transformed into a spectator; and have an impression that every incident is passing in my presence.” And “in idea we perceive persons acting and suffering, precisely as in an original survey: if our sympathy be engaged by the latter, it must also in some degree be engaged by the former, especially if the distinctness of ideal presence approach to that of real presence.” All of this holds for fiction as much as for history:

29 30 31

Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, p. 52. Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, p. 66. Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, p. 68.

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If, in reading, ideal presence be the means by which our passions are moved, it makes no difference whether the subject be a fable or a true history: when ideal presence is complete, we perceive every object as in our sight; and the mind, totally occupied with an interesting event, find no leisure for reflection.32

That is, it holds for the reflection that what is causing such vivid imagery is mere fiction rather than fact. Unlike Burke, Kames does not believe that the emotional associations of poetry (or other media of art) are immediate, but holds that they are mediated by the creation of the imagery that constitutes ideal presence; in this way, at least, Kames’s theory of our emotional response to art is more cognition-dependent than is Burke’s: The power of language to raise emotions, depends entirely on the raising such lively and distinct images as are here described: the reader’s passions are never sensibly moved, till he be thrown into a kind of reverie; in which state, forgetting that he is reading, he conceives every incident as passing in his presence, precisely as if he were an eye-witness.33

To be precise, Kames’s theory of ideal presence is cognitive in some ways and not in other ways: The emotional effect of a fiction or depiction depends upon our interpretation of what it represents, not on an immediate association, but at the same time also depends upon our ignoring our knowledge that what it presents to us is not literally true, upon our so to speak bracketing our knowledge of actual matter of fact. The theory of ideal presence is at the heart of Kames’s defense of the value of art and its study in the form of criticism. He claims that nothing would seem more “slight” than ideal presence, yet from it is derived that “extensive influence which reason hath over the heart; an influence, which, more than any other means, strengthens the bond of society, and attracts individuals from their private system to perform acts of generosity and benevolence.”34 It is through ideal presence that art can arouse socially valuable emotions and passions. And while our natural response to the perception of real human behavior of course does this too, art has the special value of making far more experience of human conduct available to us through the medium of ideal presence than we could actually have in ordinary life: “examples confined to real events are not so frequent as without other means to produce a habit of virtue. . . . It 32 33 34

Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, p. 70. Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, pp. 68–9. Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, p. 74.

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therefore shows great wisdom, to form us in such a manner, as to be susceptible of the same improvement from fable that we receive from genuine history.” Far from being dangerous or dispensable, the affection of our emotions and passions through the ideal presence afforded by art is, given the limited range of our actual experiences of human conduct, indispensable for producing the full range of social affections. This benefit is, of course, in addition to the fact that “the power that fiction hath over the mind affords an endless variety of refined amusements, always at hand to employ a vacant hour: such amusements are a fine resource in solitude; and by cheating and sweetening the mind, contribute mightily to social happiness.”35 Kames’s theory of ideal presence also leads to a ranking of the arts. Kames notes that “Of all the means for making an impression of ideal presence, theatrical representation is the most powerful,” and from this he infers that “a good tragedy will extort tears in private, though not so forcibly as upon the stage.” Thus, seeing a tragedy actually staged has more impact than merely reading it. The power of visualization also allows “a good historical picture [to make] a deeper impression than words can, tho’ not equal to that of theatrical actions,” so that “Painting seems to possess a middle place between reading and acting.”36 At the same time, because “a picture is confined to a single instant of time, and cannot take in a succession of incidents,” its overall emotional impact cannot be as great as that of an extended work of literature, whether staged or read: “seldom is a passion raised to any height in an instant,” while “reading and acting have greatly the advantage, by reiterating impressions without end”37 and thereby creating a more enduring emotional impact. Here Kames draws the oppposite inference from the contrast between painting and poetry that Du Bos had originally made, that James Harris had noticed again, and that would be the centerpiece of the argument about the merits of poetry and painting that will be made just four years later by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Germany. His theory of the emotional impact of representation is perhaps the most fundamental of Kames’s elements of criticism, and the principle of criticism that follows from it is that works of art should be created so as to take maximal advantage of the disposition of human nature to be emotionally affected by ideal presence in works of art. But, as suggested 35 36 37

Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, p. 77. Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, pp. 71–2. Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, p. 72.

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earlier, Kames also includes an extensive catalogue of the different qualities by means of which works of art can raise perceptual and emotional pleasures. His list includes beauty; grandeur and sublimity, which unlike other authors he distinguishes; motion and force; novelty; resemblance and dissimilitude; uniformity and variety; congruity and propriety; dignity and grace; and ridicule and wit. Space will allow for only a few comments on these categories. Like Addison, Kames holds that “the term beauty, in its native signification, is appropriated to objects of sight.”38 He also holds that “all the various emotions of beauty maintain one common character, that of sweetness and gaiety.” He notes that a variety of elements, including color, figure, size, and motion, can severally make an object beautiful, but can make it even more beautiful when they are conjoined. In this regard, “the beauty of the human figure is extraordinary,” he claims, because it is “a composition of numberless beauties arising from the parts and qualities of the object, various colours, various motions, figure, size, &c., all united in one complex object.” He then introduces a distinction between “intrinsic” and “relative” beauty that seems like Hutcheson’s, but is not identical: Intrinsic beauty “is discovered in an object viewed apart without relation to any other,” and “is an object of sense merely,” while relative beauty, which “is accompanied with an act of understanding and reflection,” attaches to an object when it is recognized as a “means relating to some good end or purpose.”39 Thus Kames does not include the beauty of imitation as a species of relative beauty; that he has already explained simply in terms of our natural pleasure in chains of association induced by art that resemble natural chains of association and with his theory of ideal presence. Rather, for Kames relative beauty is simply the beauty of utility. He thinks that intrinsic and relative beauty can coincide in a particular object, as in “the fine proportions and slender make of a horse destined for running,” but unlike both Hogarth and Gerard he does not make the beauty of fitness or utility a necessary condition for any other form of beauty in any object that should have the former. Kames also uses beauty to distinguish between sublimity and grandeur, which previous authors had not done. The sublime is simply that which seizes the attention and makes a “deep impression” because it is great and elevated, while the grand is that which is not only great but also 38 39

Kames, Elements, ch. III, vol. I, pp. 141–2. Kames, Elements, ch. III, vol. I, pp. 142–3.

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“possessed of other qualities that contribute to beauty, such as regularity, proportion, order, or colour.” “Thus St. Peter’s church at Rome, the great pyramid of Egypt, the Alps towering above the clouds, a great arm of the sea, and above all a clear and serene sky, are grand, because beside their size, they are beautiful in an eminent degree.”40 Kant will later take over Kames’s examples of St. Peter’s and the pyramids (which neither of them ever actually saw), but not Kames’s category of grandeur as synthesizing both sublimity and beauty. Kames also observes that although both grandeur and sublimity strictly apply to objects of sight only, they are applicable to both the objects of other senses and to works of fine art other than great works of architecture “in a figurative sense,” and retroactively makes that claim for beauty as well. The reason for this concession is that “Every emotion, from whatever cause proceeding, that resembles an emotion of grandeur or elevation, is called by the same name.”41 In other words, it is the nature of the emotion that it causes rather than any physical property of an object that is ultimately responsible for the aesthetic properties we attribute to it. This is another reflection of the centrality of emotional response in Kames’s aesthetics. Kames’s treatment of “resemblance and dissimilitude” is interesting because he does not focus on our pleasure in resemblance alone, as had Hutcheson, for example. Instead, he argues that because knowledge of our environment is so important to us, “nature hath providently superadded” to our mental proclivities “curiosity, a vigorous propensity, which never is at rest. This propensity attaches us to every new object; and incites us to compare objects, in order to discover their differences and resemblances.”42 Here Kames is concerned with the cognitive benefit of the aesthetic, but the benefit comes about precisely because the mind has a proclivity to activity when confronted with a new object even when it is not immediately concerned with acquiring some particular cognition. In other words, the mind is stimulated by new objects to play with its cognitive powers, but that play ultimately has a beneficial effect. In his discussion of “uniformity and variety,” Kames stresses even more explicitly the sheer pleasure of following out the trains of images and thoughts that are suggested by objects, and repeats his point “That in every work of art, it must be agreeable, to find that degree of variety [and uniformity] which corresponds to the natural course of our perceptions.”43 40 41 42 43

Kames, Elements, ch. IV, vol. I, pp. 151–2. Kames, Elements, ch. IV, vol. I, p. 158. Kames, Elements, ch. VIII, vol. I, p. 197. Kames, Elements, ch. X, vol. I, p. 226.

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Kames’s chapter on “Dignity and Grace” is particularly important. According to him, these are categories we properly apply “to sensitive beings, probably to man only,” because they concern the character of human intentions and actions; in the criticism of art, they are properly used only of depictions of human actions. Dignity is the expression of a human being’s “SENSE of the worth and excellence of his nature,” something that is more properly expressed “in action” than “in contemplation.”44 It is thus not so much directly perceived as it is inferred from our suppositions about the intentions behind a person’s actions. Grace, however, is “display’d externally,” and is thus “an object of one or other of our five senses.” It is displayed in the motions of persons rather than in their fixed features; specifically, it is “that agreeable appearance which arises from elegance of motion and from a countenance expressive of dignity.”45 In other words, grace is a visible aspect of the influence of a person’s character on her motions, and something we respond to with pleasure both because of its outward form and because of the inner state that it expresses. This analysis (which we will subsequently see must have influenced Friedrich Schiller’s famous essay “On Grace and Dignity”) demonstrates in an unexpected context Kames’s view that our full aesthetic response to an object can be composed of our pleasure in both its more formal features and its own emotional content or significance. That we respond with our own emotions to both formal features of objects and the emotions they may express is a central tenet of Kames’s brief treatment of music46 and his extensive treatment of the beauty of the language. Kames’s lengthy discussion of poetics, replete with examples of both successes and failures in ancient and modern literature, can perhaps be summed up in two claims. First, “communication of thought being the chief end of language,” “words that convey clear and distinct ideas, must be one of its capital beauties.”47 That the language of any literary work should allow for a clear flow of thought can be considered the basis of Kames’s detailed analysis of everything that works or does not work in the formal aspects of poetry, such as rhythm, rhyme, and figures of speech. Second, “language ought to correspond to the subject,” but in particular the emotional impact of language ought to correspond to what should be the emotional impact of its subject: thus, “heroic actions or sentiments require elevated language; tender sentiments ought to be 44 45 46 47

Kames, Elements, ch. XI, vol. I, pp. 246, 248. Kames, Elements, ch. XI, vol. I, pp. 251–2. See especially Kames, Elements, ch. II, vol. I, pp. 99–102. Kames, Elements, ch. XVIII, vol. II, pp. 382–3.

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expressed in words soft and flowing; and plain language void of ornament, is adapted to subjects grave and didactic.”48 Thus Kames also devotes much space to showing how poetic language should complement rather than undermine the emotional impact of what is depicted. Kames’s aesthetics can be included among theories of play because of his emphasis on our enjoyment of the train of our ideas for its own sake. At the same time, he recognizes that both the form and the matter of art has immediate emotional impact on us, which is not dependent upon our reflection on its ulterior benefits or even, as in his theory of ideal presence, dependent on the absence of such reflection, but also recognizes that aesthetic experience has profound cognitive and moral benefits for us. Yet in spite of Kames’s reference to poetic “subjects grave and didactic,” his view of art is as far as it can be from being didactic: Art does not work by teaching us truths, but by arousing our emotions. Thus Kames recognizes the complexity of aesthetic experience, finding it to involve both a free play of our cognitive powers and actual cognition, but emphasizing the emotional impact of art, and in particular the emotional impact of fiction, in the form of ideal presence, which is contrasted to fact and knowledge thereof. As we will see repeatedly in the history of aesthetics, such recognition of the complexity of aesthetic experience has often proven difficult to sustain, and few of Kames’s immediate successors in Britain had his taste for complexity in aesthetic theory. A generation after Kames’s work, for example, Archibald Alison will focus exclusively on the emotional associations we have with aspects of works of art. But before we come to Alison, there are several more writers, all but one Scots, who must be considered. The greatest figure in Scottish philosophy after Hutcheson and Hume, namely Thomas Reid, stands apart from the modern theory of aesthetic response as a form of mental play and advocates something closer to the older theory that aesthetic response is an important form of access to truth. In this he is the heir to Shaftesbury and his fellow Aberdonian Turnbull rather than to Hutcheson and his other fellow Aberdonian, Gerard. But before we turn to Reid, we can consider several figures who held views that straddle the boundary between the aesthetics of play and the aesthetics of truth in novel and interesting ways. These are Adam Smith and James Beattie. Another prominent writer, in this case not a philosopher but a painter, who can be considered here is the English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, although his approach to art is primarily cognitivist and only touches 48

Kames, Elements, ch. XVIII, vol. II, p. 386.

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fleetingly on the idea of the imagination as a source of intrinsically satisfying free play. After examining the aesthetic theory of Reid, we conclude this chapter with a discussion of Dugald Stewart, who is often thought of as a follower of Reid, but who by no means followed him slavishly.

2. Smith Adam Smith (1723–1790) is of course best remembered as the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776). He touches upon the relations of taste to morality in the former and of taste to economics in the latter, but here we will focus upon an essay on “imitation” that Smith probably wrote between 1773 and 1777, perhaps as part of an intended book on the “liberal sciences and elegant arts,” but that was only published in a volume of posthumous Essays on Philosophical Subjects in 1795.49 Smith was an undergraduate student of Francis Hutcheson at Glasgow (before receiving a fellowship for six years at Oxford, which he afterward valued solely for the time it gave him to pursue his own interests free from any actual instruction by others) and eventually succeeded Hutcheson in the chair of moral philosophy there; but he began his teaching career with subscription lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres in Edinburgh and then held the chair in logic and rhetoric in Glasgow before moving to the chair in moral philosophy. (He would resign that after a dozen years to accompany one of Scotland’s most important aristocrats, the Duke of Buccleuch, on his grand tour of France, during which time Smith had extensive contact with leading French economists, and then had the leisure to write The Wealth of Nations due to the generous pension that he received from the duke.) So aesthetic issues concerned him to some degree or other from an early point in his career.50 49

50

Originally edited by his friends the scientists Joseph Black and James Hutton, the modern edition of Smith’s Essays on Philosophical Subjects was edited by I.S. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, paperback, Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1982); see pp. 1 and pp. 170–5. The standard biography of Adam Smith is Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). A lively overview of Smith’s career is also offered by Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010). Neither of these works discusses Smith’s essay on imitation at any length, although Ross has a chapter on Smith’s “Literary Pursuits” (pp. 353–67). One important article is Peter Jones, “The Aesthetics of Adam Smith,” in Peter Jones and Andrew S. Skinner, editors, Adam Smith Reviewed (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 56–78.

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We can only speculate on what Smith would have said had he written a full-blown treatise on the “elegant arts.” Perhaps, like his patron Kames, the author of a Theory of Moral Sentiments might have focused on our emotional response to art and the place of that in our emotional and moral life as a whole. However, the essay that is the only surviving record of Smith’s interests in and attitude toward aesthetics concerns imitation, and thus seems focused on the cognitive rather than emotional dimension of aesthetic experience. However, the essay is concerned not so much with the cognitive value of imitation but rather with the artistic challenge of creating imitations in media that differ from the objects imitated and the pleasure that audiences take in success in imitation under this condition. Smith thus conceives of imitation as a sort of puzzle the solution to which is sought for the sake of pleasure rather than information, a form of mental activity enjoyed for its own sake rather than for some further cognitive or practical purpose. To that extent, we might think of Smith’s theory of imitation as a distinctive play theory of artistic creation and appreciation. However, in the case of some arts, such as music, Smith does in the end consider our emotional responses to works and the social value of such emotions. In the end, then, Smith may be regarded as combining the theory of aesthetic response as play with a recognition of the emotional impact of art. While there is no evidence that Smith began to think about the nature of imitation while he was still a student of Hutcheson, we can nevertheless think of his essay “Of the Nature of That Imitation which Takes Place in What are Called the Imitative Arts” as if it were a response to Hutcheson’s theory of imitation. Hutcheson’s theory, it will be recalled, was that we enjoy imitation as “relative” rather than “absolute” beauty, that is, we enjoy the discovery of unity amid the variety offered by two disparate objects, a representation and what it represents, rather than within a single object. On this account, what we actually enjoy is simply the resemblance between the imitation and its object. Smith offers a subtler account, however, on which what we enjoy is resemblance in the face of diversity, that is, we enjoy the fact that an artist has been able to create a resemblance of an object in a medium that is very different from that of the represented object and has thus overcome the limits of the medium. There are, to be sure, cases where we enjoy resemblance for its own sake, for example when we find beauty in the “exact resemblance of the correspondent members of the same object,” such as “the correspondent members of the human body, . . . the opposite wings of the same building, . . . the opposite trees of the same alley, . . . the

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correspondent compartments of the same piece of carpet-work,” and so on, or in the resemblance among a group of objects, such as a “set of coach-horses,” which “is supposed to be handsomer when they are all exactly matched.”51 But even where such pleasurably resembling objects are works of human artistry, such as symmetrical buildings or carpets, these are not cases of imitation or mimesis. Imitation exists only where resemblance is created between a represented object and a representation of it in a different medium (and, we might add, where the latter has been created with the intention of representing the former – this is what accounts for the unidirectionality of an artistic imitation, that is, the fact that we say that the portrait resembles its subject and not that the subject represents its portrait, even though resemblance as such is a bilateral relationship). In Smith’s words, Though a production of art seldom derives any merit from its resemblance to another object of the same kind, it frequently derives a great deal from its resemblance to an object of a different kind, whether that object be a production of art or of nature. A painted cloth, the work of some laborious Dutch artist, so curiously shaded and coloured as to represent the pile and softness of a woollen one, might derive some merit from its resemblance even to the sorry carpet which now lies before me. The copy might, and probably would, in this case, be of much greater value than the original. But if this carpet was represented as spread, either upon a floor or upon a table, and projecting from the back ground of the picture, with exact observation of perspective, and of light and shade, the merit of the imitation would be still greater.52

Smith’s idea is that our enjoyment of artistic representation is actually enjoyment of a challenge overcome: Where the challenge is moderate, like that of representing the texture and color of a piece of woven wool in the different medium of pigment and oil on a piece of canvas of, let us suppose, approximately the same size, our enjoyment is moderate, but where the challenge is greater, such as representing the carpet on a different scale, in perspective, in shadows, and so on, then our enjoyment of success in meeting the challenge is greater. Smith uses this theory as the basis for a variety of comparisons among the arts of painting, sculpture (including topiary), music, and the dance; he discusses poetry only in passing, but since the essay was left incomplete we cannot tell whether this is because (like Burke) he did not classify 51

52

Adam Smith, “Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in what are Called the Imitative Arts,” in Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, pp. 176–7. Smith, “The Imitative Arts,” pp. 178–9.

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poetry as primarily an imitative art or just did not complete a fuller discussion of it. He argues that in both painting and poetry what we enjoy is the representation of an object in a medium very different from it: In Painting, a plain surface of one kind is made to resemble, not only a plain surface of another, but all the three dimensions of a solid substance. In Statuary and Sculpture, a solid substance of one kind is made to resemble a solid substance of another. The disparity between the object imitating, and the object imitated, is much greater in the one art than in the other; and the pleasure arising from the imitation seems to be greater in proportion as this disparity is greater.53

That there seems to be greater ontological disparity between a twodimensional object and a three-dimensional object than between two three-dimensional objects made of different stuff (in one case flesh, for example, in the other stone) might suggest that we must enjoy any good painting more than any good sculpture, but that is not the point that Smith wants to make. Rather, he goes on to argue that the differences in the media of imitation place different constraints on what resemblances can be found beautiful in those media: “In Painting, the imitation frequently pleases, though the original object be indifferent, or even offensive. In Statuary and Sculpture it is otherwise. The imitation seldom pleases, unless the original object be in a very high degree either great, or beautiful, or interesting.”54 Thus, in painting there can be very beautiful representations of very mundane objects, as in paintings by “some Dutch masters” or, for example, Chardin, but sculpture, because of the closer resemblance between a three-dimensional representation and a three-dimensional subject, requires a beautiful or noble object in order to be beautiful or noble. But the fact that both a sculpture and its object are three-dimensional is also what makes us displeased with painted sculptures (here Smith is an eighteenth-century classicist), because if sculptures were colored then the resemblance between the imitation and its object would be too close, and we would not have the sense of the disparity that has to be overcome for a successful imitation: “Colouring, when added to Statuary, so far from increasing, destroys almost entirely the pleasure which we receive from the imitation: because it takes away the great source of that pleasure, the disparity between the imitating and the imitated object.”55 There must always be some salient differences 53 54 55

Smith, “The Imitative Arts,” p. 179. Smith, “The Imitative Arts,” p. 179. Smith, “The Imitative Arts,” pp. 180–1.

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between the imitation and its object because our pleasure in imitation “is founded altogether upon our wonder at seeing an object of one kind represent so well an object of a very different kind, and upon our admiration of the art which surmounts so happily that disparity which Nature had established between them.”56 Smith makes similar points about music and dance, where we enjoy the imitation of (most would now prefer to say the expression of) passions and sentiments through features such as melody, rhythm, and motion that are no doubt related to but still quite distinct from the “natural” means for the expression of such states in our ordinary language and motions. Here again Smith says that “On account of the great disparity between the imitating and the imitated object, the mind in” the case of music, “as in the other cases, cannot only be contented, but delighted, and even charmed and transported, with such an imperfect resemblance as can be had.”57 Music, however, is more like sculpture than like painting in that our feelings about the imitation are more closely tied to our feelings about what is imitated, perhaps because the artificial medium for the representation of feelings in music is not so remote from the natural medium for the expression of feelings in ordinary verbalization. In expounding this point, Smith reveals his underlying concern in moral and social philosophy: To these powers of imitating, Music naturally, or rather necessarily, joins the happiest choice in the objects of its imitation. The sentiments and passions which Music can best imitate are those which unite and bind men together in society; the social, the decent, the virtuous, the interesting and affecting, the amiable and agreeable, the awful and respectable, the noble, elevating, and commanding passions. . . . The passions, on the contrary, which drive men from one another, the unsocial, the hateful, the indecent, the vicious passions, cannot easily be imitated by Music.58

However, perhaps in order to compensate for the proximity of the media of music and natural human expression, which might limit the degree of pleasure that we can take in musical imitation, Smith adds that there is an important element of pleasure in pure form in music: “Music, by arranging, and as it were bending to its own time and measure, whatever sentiments and passions it expresses, not only assembles and groups, as well as Statuary and Painting, the different beauties of Nature which it imitates, but it clothes them, besides, with a new and exquisite beauty of 56 57 58

Smith, “The Imitative Arts,” pp. 184–5. Smith, “The Imitative Arts,” p. 191. Smith, “The Imitative Arts,” p. 192.

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its own . . . with melody and harmony, which, like a transparent mantle, far from concealing any beauty, serve only to give a brighter colour . . . and a more engaging grace to every beauty which they infold.”59 The same would apply in the case of dance. But we must leave aside the further details of Smith’s account of music, one of the most detailed and interesting to be found among eighteenth-century British writers on general issues in aesthetics. For our purposes, what is most interesting about Smith’s account of imitation is that although his insistence that there must be resemblance between a beautiful imitation and its object might ally him with the traditional view that we value beauty as an expression of truth, his insistence that there must also always be a disparity between the imitation and its object, a challenge posed by the medium of representation itself which must be overcome by successful artistry, suggests that the beauty of imitation rather involves a form of play: We enjoy a successful imitation not for the theoretical or practical value of the truth it reveals, but because of the sheer pleasure of exercising our mental powers (and, in the case of the artists themselves, their physical powers as well) in representing something in a medium very different from its actual mode of existence. This is more like intellectual play than ordinary intellectual or practical work (although of course the artist, most obviously in the case of sculpture, may have to do considerable work in the ordinary sense of physical labor). We might put this point by saying that on Smith’s account truthful resemblance is a necessary condition of artistic success, but that the pleasure in imitative art lies in the playful exploitation of a medium to represent something that it does not naturally represent rather than in the mere fact of resemblance as such. And in some arts, as we have also seen, the arousal of passion is a central part of our response.

3. Beattie A related conception of the truth as a necessary condition for the enjoyment of some art rather than as the object of enjoyment may also be found in the theory of poetry offered by James Beattie (1735–1803). Beattie, like Gerard and Reid before him (Reid was older than Beattie, but published his main work in aesthetics later, so we will consider Beattie first), was also a student at Marischal College, Aberdeen, although he was there only after the departure of George Turnbull. In 1760, after several 59

Smith, “The Imitative Arts,” pp. 194–5.

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years as a schoolmaster, Beattie was appointed professor of moral philosophy and logic at Marischal, which by then had shifted from the system of regents to the modern system of specialized professors; Beattie thus succeeded to the chair from which Gerard had moved to the chair in divinity. In 1760 Beattie also published the first of a number of books of poetry. He made his reputation, however, with an attack upon skepticism and Hume, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, published in 1770 – this attack upon Hume earned him an audience with George III and a royal pension, although it also earned him the epithet “a silly and bigoted fellow” from none other than Immanuel Kant. Beattie added Essays on Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind as well as on laughter and classical learning to the second edition of the essay on truth, published in 1776, and also included discussions of poetry and of taste to his Elements of Moral Science, published in two volumes in 1790 and 1793. It is in his discussion of poetry in these works that Beattie straddles the boundary between the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of play by treating truth as a necessary condition for our pleasure in some kinds of poetry rather than as the primary goal of such poetry. According to Beattie, “That one end of poetry, in its first institution, and in every period of its progress, must have been, to give pleasure, will hardly admit of any doubt.”60 He finds that in earlier times “the one chief thing attended to in its composition must have been, to give it charms sufficient to engage the ear and captivate the heart,” and that in all times “it is the form chiefly that distinguishes poetry from other writings” and allows the poet to make “the entertainment of mankind his principle concern.”61 In other words, it is through the free engagement of the mental capacities of the audience by such features as rhythm, rhyme, and imagery that poetry pleases, and thus far truth has no rôle in the explanation of our pleasure in poetry. Indeed, “verses, however instructive, have no poetical merit, unless they be in other respects agreeable.”62 However, it turns out that only short poems, such as “songs and pastorals,” can simply ignore truth, especially moral truth, and indulge in sheer fantasy or “unnatural” imagery that can “excite agreeable affections indifferent alike to vice and virtue” or to truth about other things as well. This is because human beings always have an underlying concern with virtue 60

61 62

James Beattie, Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. James A. Harris (Exeter: Imprint Academia, 2004), p. 138. Beattie, Selected Philosophical Writings, pp. 138–9. James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science (Edinburgh: Cadell and Leach, 1790–93), vol. II, p. 591.

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and vice, with the truth about these, and with other sorts of truth as well, and can ignore this concern only briefly, thus being playfully amused by short works, but must satisfy this concern in any more extended engagement with longer works even if truth and the inculcation of virtue is not the primary object of such works or of engagement with them. . . . According to Beattie, “instruction is only a secondary end of poetry,” but “moral sentiments are so prevalent in the human mind, that no affection can long subsist there, without intermingling with them . . . Nor can a piece of real and pleasing poetry be extended to any great length, without operating, directly or indirectly, either on those affections that are friendly to virtue, or on those sympathies that quicken our moral sensibility.”63 This is from the 1776 essay on poetry; in his later textbook Beattie puts the point more generally by stating that “the human mind, when it’s not biassed by prejudice or passion, generally prefers virtue to vice, and truth to falsehood,” and thus even though to instruct is not the primary point of poetry, any poetry “which tends to corrupt the heart, or which can do it no good, or which plainly proceeds from a bad heart” but also that which ignores or falsifies the truth on other matters “must always offend the most respectable part of mankind.”64 Thus, in poetry or works of art more generally that engage our attention too long for our omnipresent concern with virtue and truth to be ignored, this concern must be satisfied or at least not offended if we are to be able to take pleasure in the formal aspects of our work and our mental play with them: The latter may be the primary object in our engagement with art, but the satisfaction of our concern for truth, especially about moral matters, is a “secondary end” of or necessary condition for our enjoyment of the work. Were this point more fully developed, it might be argued that our concern for truth is itself a passion of some kind, as is our concern for virtue, and thus argued that Beattie is at least indirectly concerned with our emotional response to art, at least to the extent of holding that the emotions art arouses cannot conflict with our fundamental passions for truth and virtue. But Beattie does not argue this explicitly. However, in justifying his position, Beattie does make an important point that no other writer of the period made with equal clarity, namely, that even though we can distinguish different faculties or powers of the human mind, a human being is in fact a unified being whose responses to objects are not and cannot be rigidly compartmentalized, thus our 63 64

Beattie, Selected Philosophical Writings, p. 140. Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, vol. II, p. 592.

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aesthetic responses cannot simply be fenced off from our other concerns. As he writes, Though we distinguish our internal powers by different names, because otherwise we could not speak of them so as to be understood, they are all but so many energies of the same individual mind; and therefore it is not to be supposed, that what contradicts any one leading faculty should yield permanent delight to the rest. That cannot be agreeable to reason, which conscience disapproves; nor can that gratify imagination which is repugnant to reason. – Besides, belief and acquiescence of mind are pleasant, as distrust and disbelief are painful; and therefore, that only can give solid and general satisfaction, which has something of plausibility in it . . . no rational being can acquiesce in what is obviously contrary to nature, or implies palpable absurdity.65

Many other eighteenth-century writers (as we will see when we turn later to German authors) put the last point by saying that even if poetry is not limited to what is true it must still be limited by what is probable; but no one stated the reason for this constraint as clearly as Beattie did. Beattie thus suggests that play or entertainment is a genuine, self-subsistent source of pleasure, but that it takes place within a whole human being who has a general concern for virtue and truth, and is thus inevitably conditioned and to some extent constrained by that concern. Beattie’s recognition of the inescapable moral dimension in aesthetic experience also leads him to an important modification of previous views about the conditions for the development of good taste. As we have seen, earlier writers such as Gerard and Kames (and as we will see, a later writer such as Alison) had made the engagement of our emotional and moral concerns a central source of pleasure in art, but they had not modified their accounts of the necessary conditions of good taste to reflect that feature of their theories of the sources of aesthetic response. Beattie does. Like Gerard rather than Hume, he presents his theory of taste in the form of an account of the conditions for its “improvement.” But he explicitly lists the capacities for moral sentiments among those that must be improved by any one striving for good taste: To be a person of taste, it seems necessary, that one have, first a lively and correct imagination; secondly, the power of distinct apprehension; thirdly, the capacity of being easily, strongly, and agreeably affected, with sublimity, beauty, harmony, exact imitation, &c.; fourthly, sympathy, or sensibility of

65

Beattie, Selected Philosophical Writings, p. 145.

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heart; and, fifthly, judgement, or good sense, which is the principle thing, and may not very improperly be said to comprehend all the rest.66

Lively and strong imagination seem similar to Hume’s delicacy of taste and Gerard’s imagination, while distinct apprehension and judgment or good sense seem similar to Hume’s requirement of the good sense to free oneself from prejudice and Gerard’s requirement of correctness. Beattie’s third requirement, what he also explicates as “acuteness . . . of secondary sensation; or, to express it in other words, ‘a capacity of being easily, strongly, and agreeably affected, with sublimity, beauty, harmony, exact imitation’, &c.,” might seem simply circular; that is, it seems as if he is saying that the capacity to be affected with aesthetic responses requires the capacity to be affected with aesthetic responses. But whether that is so or not, Beattie’s fourth requirement for good taste is definitely an addition to previous analyses, and one that also acknowledges a larger rôle for the emotional response to art than initially appeared to be part of Beattie’s view. Beattie explicates his fourth condition in terms that might have been influenced by Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments: A fourth requisite to good taste is sympathy; or that sensibility of heart, by which, on supposing ourselves in the condition of another, we are conscious in some degree of those very emotions, pleasant or painful, which in a more intense degree would arise within us, if we were really in that condition.

More fully, he writes: The fine arts are intended to give pleasure rather to the mind, than to the bodily senses. For though sounds in music please the ear, and colours in painting the eye, they are little valued, if the soul receive no gratification. Now the human soul cannot be gratified, except by those things that raise in it certain passions or emotions; for a man unsusceptible of passion, who could neither hope nor fear, rejoice nor be sorry, desire nor dislike, would be incapable of happiness. And therefore, it must be the aim of all the fine arts, and of poetry in particular, to convey into the mind such passions, or affections, as bring pleasure along with them.67

Beattie is making two points in these remarks. The general point is that aesthetic response is never simply mere pleasant stimulation of the senses, but always involves the activity and gratification of the higher powers of the mind, both cognitive and moral, to sensory stimulation. 66

67

Beattie, “Of Taste, and Its Improvement,” originally published in Dissertations Moral and Critical (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1783); cited from Selected Philosophical Writings, p. 162. Beattie, Selected Philosophical Writings, p. 173.

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This is a crucial point that, as we will later see, Kant, for all his disdain of Beattie as a critic of Hume, also makes. The particular point is that persons of good taste must have, and to the extent that this is both necessary and possible, improve their capacity for moral sentiments. It might seem strange that Beattie makes this point by requiring the capacity for sympathy understood, as Smith understood it, as the capacity to put oneself into the position of another and feel what the other would feel in that position. But that of course makes good sense in the case of the kind of representational art that eighteenth-century writers always had in mind, where we are almost always responding to the depiction of other human beings in the media of poetry, painting, sculpture, or even many, although not all, kinds of music. Art arouses our own emotions by depicting others and their emotions through various means, and if we lack or have not adequately cultivated the ability to sympathize with their emotions, then we will not be able to have the emotions that works of art aim to induce in us, and of course will then not be in a position to make a sound judgment about those works. As long as it is thought that our response to art includes an emotional dimension, whether the point of art is to convey to us truths about our emotions or rather to arouse them in a playful way, the conditions for good taste must include the refinement of our emotional as well as cognitive and imaginative capacities.

4. Reynolds As we have seen, British philosophical aesthetics in the later eighteenth century was largely a Scottish affair, and it might seem natural now to turn from James Beattie to another, far more prominent Aberdeen philosopher, namely Thomas Reid. Reid’s approach to aesthetic experience, however, departed from what had become the mainstream emphasis on the pleasures of imaginative mental experience combined with a recognition of the emotional impact of art, the approach adopted most clearly by Kames but to some extent also followed by Smith and Beattie, and returned to a more Platonic emphasis on the truth or cognitive content in aesthetic experience that we can trace back to Shaftesbury, although it was not the aspect of Shaftesbury – his emphasis on sense – that had led to Hutcheson and then beyond to theorists like Hume, Gerard, and Kames. The widely circulated Discourses by the English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792, dates that make him an exact contemporary of Adam Smith) were given over the period from 1769 to 1790, thus straddling the period from Gerard and Kames to Reid, and present

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an account of art, above all of course the art of painting, that stress its rôle as a vehicle of truth although without entirely failing to notice its emotional impact, so emphasized by Du Bos and Kames. Reynolds thus combines the idea of the emotional impact of art primarily with a traditional cognitivist approach to it, and only exploits the new theory of free play in a late discussion of architecture rather than painting. For this reason, a look at Reynolds here can thus serve as a bridge from our discussion of Kames, Smith, and Beattie to the subsequent discussion of Reid, who reverts to the traditional approach to aesthetics, and beyond him of Dugald Stewart. Reynolds was the son of a schoolmaster in Plympton, Devonshire, who early noticed the boy’s artistic talent and apprenticed him with a then well-known painter in London, Thomas Hudson, at the age of seventeen. After several years with Hudson in London, Reynolds returned to Devonshire to work on his own and began to develop local renown as a portraitist. In 1749, one of his patrons, Lord Edgecombe, later Lord Keppel, offered him passage to Italy on a naval squadron, and by this stroke of fortune Reynolds was able to spend three years studying Italian art as well as developing patronage among the constant stream of wealthy Britons visiting Italy in those days. Upon his return to London, he quickly became established as the leading portraitist of the city, and also became friends with the great literary figure Samuel Johnson, who in turn introduced him to many of the leading lights of London intellectual life. By the time that George III constituted the Royal Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture out of several preceding academies in 1768, Reynolds was unquestionably the leading artist in London and was elected president of the Royal Academy. Beginning in 1769, he would present a discourse at the biannual award ceremony of the Academy, a practice he continued until ill health forced his resignation after the discourse of 1790. These discourses were eventually collected for publication, the first seven in 1778 – a volume that was translated into Italian and German by 1781 – and all fifteen in 1797, posthumously, along with three earlier essays from Johnson’s Idler, a journal of a tour through Flanders and Holland, and a commentary on Du Fresnoy’s Art of Painting. These constitute The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds.68 68

The Literary Work of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Kt., with Some Account of the Life of the Author by Edmund Malone, 5th ed., corrected, with A Memoir of the Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds by Joseph Farington, 3 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1819). This is regarded as the standard edition of the written works of Reynolds, and is cited here; the biographical information on Reynolds given earlier comes from Malone’s Memoir. Modern

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Befitting their original presentation as speeches to the students of the Royal Academy at their prize ceremonies, the Discourses take the form of advice on the education of artists, and their central theme is that budding artists must learn to mine the masterpieces of the past for ideas on both the form and the content of their own paintings and more particular techniques but must not look to the history of painting for rules that they can mechanically apply – they must look to the past for inspiration but not imitation. Reynolds’s argument that painters of each generation must look to the past for models but not rules is reminiscent of Hume’s recommendations to critics and audiences in “Of the Standard of Taste” of 1757, although Reynolds does not mention Hume (or any other contemporary philosopher)69 and anticipates Kant’s approach to the topic of genius in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, published in the same year as Reynolds’s last discourse, 1790. But in the course of giving his practical advice to the students of the Academy, Reynolds inevitably gives some account of his general theory of painting and even, at least in passing, of other fine arts, and we shall focus on his general approach before returning to his theory of artistic education and its link to the contemporary debate about genius. Reynolds’s central ideas first emerge in Discourse III, given in December, 1770 (Reynolds’s first discourse was given upon the opening of the Academy in January, 1769, his first prize discourse was given in December of 1769, and there would be one more annual prize discourse in 1771 before they settled in 1772 into the biannual pattern that would then continue until 1790). Here Reynolds stated that the principle “that the perfection” of the art of painting “does not consist in

69

editions of Reynolds’s Discourses include Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), and Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art with Selections from the Idler, ed. Stephen O. Mitchell (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). Discussions of Reynolds can be found in Hipple, Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque, pp. 133–48; John L. Mahoney, “Reynolds’s ‘Discourses on Art’: The Delicate Balance of Neoclassic Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics 18 (1978): 126–36; Engell, Creative Imagination, pp. 184–7; and John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt:“The Body of the Public” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 67–162. An interesting contrast between Reynolds and his rival Thomas Gainsborough in light of their affiliations with Samuel Johnson and David Hume, respectively, is Edgar Wind, “Humanitätsidee und heroisiertes Porträt in der englischen Kultur des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in England und die Antike: Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg (Leipzig and Berlin, 1931), pp. 156–229, reprinted in Wind, Heilige Furcht und andere Schriften zum Verhälthnis von Kunst und Philosophie, ed. John Michael Krois and Roberto Ohrt (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2009), pp. 112–236. As Wind points out (“Humanitätsidee,” passim), Reynolds was close to Samuel Johnson, who was violently opposed to Hume.

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mere imitation,” “far from being new or singular,” “is, indeed, supported by the general opinion of the enlightened part of mankind” from the “poets, orators, and rhetoricians of antiquity” to the present: It is “that all the arts receive their perfection from an ideal beauty, superior to what is to be found in individual nature.” The ancients tried to capture what it takes to apprehend and give form to “ideal beauty” with such expressions as “genius,” “poetical enthusiasm,” “inspiration,” and “a gift from heaven,”70 while “The gusto grande of the Italians, the beau ideal of the French, and the great style, genius, and taste among the English, are but different appellations of the same thing.”71 As a teacher, however, Reynolds can have no use for the idea of genius as inspiration: “Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.” “But though there neither are, nor can be any precise invariable rules for the exercise, or the acquisition of these great qualities, yet we may truly say, that they always operate in proportion to our attention in observing the works of nature, to our skill in selecting, and to our care in digesting, methodizing, and comparing our observations.”72 Although Reynolds is arguing that the goal of successful painting and thus of satisfying aesthetic experience is an ideal beauty that cannot be immediately observed, he also shares the empiricism of his contemporaries in supposing that the route to the recognition and representation of such an ideal passes through careful observation; indeed, his emphasis on “digesting, methodizing, and comparing our observations” sounds very much like Hume’s recommendation that the ideal critic be practiced in his experience of particular works and make comparisons among the varieties of works of art before issuing his judgments, an idea that in turn goes back to Du Bos and that was widely accepted by others such as Gerard and Beattie, of whom Reynolds painted a famous portrait.73 Reynolds explicitly says that “the power of discovering what is deformed in nature, or in other words, what is particular and uncommon, can be acquired only by experience.”74 But what is the ideal beauty that the artist can learn to apprehend and represent only through careful experience? Reynolds continues 70 71 72 73

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Reynolds, Discourse III, Works, I:53. Reynolds, Discourse III, Works, I:55. Reynolds, Discourse III, Works, I:57. In the possession of the University of Aberdeen, reproduced in Wind, Heilige Furcht, plate 20, and as the cover art of James A. Harris’s edition of Beattie, Selected Philosophical Writings (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004). Reynolds, Discourse III, Works, I:57.

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Discourse III by stating that “the whole beauty and grandeur of the art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities, and details of every kind.”75 As a portraitist, however, he can hardly be understood to mean that the painter should blur the identity of the individual sitter, although in the case of sculpture he certainly argues that the artist should not dress his figures in clothes that are currently fashionable, which would only detract from “the regularity and simplicity of its form,”76 and “by no means agrees with the dignity and gravity of Sculpture,”77 and in one of his grand commissioned paintings of three contemporary beauties, the Montgomery sisters, he chose to represent them in classical garb and postures as “Three Ladies adorning a Term of Hymen,” that is, garlanding a statue of the god of marriage.78 What he means is rather that whatever the subject of a work of art, whether a particular person in his or her ordinary garb or a particular person portrayed for one reason or another in classical garb, or for that matter a landscape, the painter must get beyond the inevitable “blemishes” “like weakness, minuteness, or imperfection” in order to acquire “a just idea of beautiful forms”; the artist “corrects nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect state.”79 The artist must become “possessed of the idea of that central form, if I may so express it, from which every deviation is deformity.”80 In a later discourse Reynolds uses the language of truth to capture what he means, and reveals that he understands the idea of truth broadly, so that a wide range of qualities may be subsumed under it. He writes that “The natural appetite or taste of the human mind is for TRUTH; whether that truth results from the real agreement or equality of original ideas among themselves; from the agreement of the representation of any object with the thing represented; or from the correspondence of the several parts of any arrangement with each other,” and then indicates that ideal beauty can consist in any or all of these forms of truth:

75 76 77 78

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Reynolds, Discourse III, Works, I:57–8. Reynolds, Discourse III, Works, II:29. Reynolds, Discourse III, Works, II:37. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Three Ladies adorning a Term of Hymen (1774) (National Gallery, London); see E.H. Gombrich, “Reynolds’s Theory and Practice of Imitation,” Burlington Magazine 80 (1942): 40–5, Plate I, C, or Wind, Heilige Furcht, plate 8. Reynolds, Discourse III, Works, I:58. Reynolds, Discourse III, Works, I:60.

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All these have unalterable and fixed foundations in nature, and are therefore equally investigated by reason, and known by study; some with more, some with less clearness, but all exactly the same way. A picture that is unlike, is false. Disproportionate ordonnance of parts is not right; because it cannot be true, until it ceases to be a contradiction to assert, that the parts have no relation to the whole. Colouring is true, when it is naturally adapted to the eye, from brightness, from softness, from harmony, from resemblance; because these agree with their object, NATURE, and therefore are true; as true as mathematical demonstration; but known to be true only to those who study these things.81

Reynolds’s notions of ideal beauty and truth are coextensive because his notion of truth is broad: It includes accuracy of representation, or correspondence between an artistic image and its object, although without incorporating the blemishes or imperfections of the original; internal coherence, or formal properties such as balance and proportion among the elements of the work of art in its own right (this is of course a central theme in Reynold’s account of sculpture in Discourse X as well as in his account of painting);82 and while the truth of coloring might seem to be just another instance of correspondence between representation and object, what Reynolds has in mind here is rather correspondence between representation and subject, that is, the representation being found natural and agreeable to our senses as well as truthful to its object. Reynolds thus explicates what he means by ideal beauty in terms of truth, although a broad conception of truth. Although Reynolds’s notion of the truth in art is thus by no means reducible to a conception of art as conveying abstract ideas or propositions, the cognitivist or intellectualist cast of his thought is nevertheless evident in his repeated insistence that artistic success begins from careful observation but ultimately requires intellectual insight. In Discourse III he writes: If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art [of painting], there is no doubt, indeed, but the minute painter would be more apt to succeed; but it is not the eye, it is the mind which the painter of genius desires to address; nor will he waste a moment upon those small objects which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the intention, and to counteract his grand design of speaking to the heart.83 81 82

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Reynolds, Discourse VII, Works, I:200–1. See, for example, his discussion of how the use of “solid projections” to support the central figures in a sculpture must also appear natural in their guise as drapery or tree trunks; Discourse X, Works, II:32. Reynolds, Discourse III, Works, I:70–1.

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In Discourse VII, from 1776, in which he addresses “The Reality of a Standard of Taste,” he emphasizes the knowledge or “science” that is necessary to make a great painting, that the artist “ought to know something concerning the mind, as well as a great deal concerning the body of man,”84 and, in the continuation of the passage about truth already cited, the importance of the artist being able to distinguish “real” from “apparent truth, or opinion, or prejudice.”85 What counts as mere opinion or prejudice will presumably be divergence from truth in any of its forms, thus merely apparent rather than genuine correspondence to an object, internal coherence, or naturalness to an aesthetic subject or audience. Reynolds continues to explicate his notion of truth in terms of a “general idea of nature”: The beginning, the middle, and the end of every thing that is valuable in taste, is comprised in the knowledge of what is truly nature; for whatever notions are not conformable to those of nature, or universal opinion, must be considered as more or less capricious. My notion of nature comprehends not only the forms which nature produces, but also the nature and internal fabrick and organization, as I may call it, of the human mind and imagination. The terms beauty, or nature, which are general ideas, are but different modes of expressing the same thing, whether we apply these terms to statues, poetry, or pictures. Deformity is not nature, but an accidental deviation from her accustomed practice. This general idea therefore ought to be called Nature; and nothing else, correctly speaking, has a right to that name.86

Agreement with both the “forms” of the external objects that are being represented as well as with the “internal fabrick and organization” of the humans who are both the makers of and audience for art – a page before Reynolds has asserted “If . . . we can show that there are rules for the conduct of the artist which are fixed and invariable, it follows of course, that the art of the connoisseur, or, in other words, taste, has likewise invariable principles”87 – counts as nature, ideal beauty, or truth, all three terms now turning out to be interchangeable. In Discourse IX (1780), Reynolds warns against excessive gratification of the senses, and continues that “it is therefore necessary to the happiness of individuals, and still more necessary to the security of society, that the mind should be elevated to the idea of general beauty, and the contemplation of general 84 85 86 87

Reynolds, Discourse VII, Works, I:191. Reynolds, Discourse VIII, Works, I:201. Reynolds, Discourse VII, Works, I:204–5. Reynolds, Discourse VII, Works, I:203.

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truth; by this pursuit the mind is always carried forward in search of something more excellent than it finds, and obtains its proper superiority over the common sense of life.”88 Thus, he assures his audience, The Art which we profess has beauty for its object; this it is our business to discover and to express; the beauty of which we are in quest is general and intellectual; it is an idea that subsists only in the mind; the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it; it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always labouring to impart, and which he dies at last without imparting; but which he is yet so far able to communicate, as to raise the thoughts, and extend the views of the spectator.89

And finally, in Discourse XIII (1786), the last of his substantive discourses before a eulogy for his great contemporary Thomas Gainsborough in Discourse XIV (1788) and the concluding Discourse XV (1790) on the energy and sublimity of Michelangelo as the greatest of all visual artists, Reynolds states that “the object and intention of all the Arts is to supply the natural imperfection of things, and often to gratify the mind by realizing and embodying what never existed but in the imagination.” In an umistakable allusion to Aristotle, he concludes that facts, and events, however they may bind the Historian, have no dominion over the Poet or the Painter. With us, History is made to bend and conform to this great idea of Art. And why? Because these arts, in their highest province, are not addressed to the gross senses; but to the desires of the mind, to that spark of divinity which we have within, impatient of being circumscribed and pent up by the world which is about us. Just so much as our Art has of this, just so much of dignity, I had almost said of divinity, it exhibits; and those of our Artists who possessed this mark of distinction in the highest degree, acquired from thence the glorious appellation of DIVINE.90

Reynolds is clearly moved by a Platonic conception of aesthetic experience as access to forms of truth higher than those that can be delivered by the senses. However, because he does not conceive of this truth as strictly conceptual or propositional, but rather conceives of it as consisting in perfection – perfection of external correspondence to both object and subject and of internal coherence within the representation itself – he is able to ascribe the perception of such truth to imagination as well as to intellect.

88 89 90

Reynolds, Discourse IX, Works, II:5–6. Reynolds, Discourse IX, Works, II:7–8. Reynolds, Discourse XIII, II:142–3.

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Yet the imagination as Reynolds conceives it is primarily a capacity for looking past the imperfections of the actual objects of the senses to their ideal objects, and only in passing does Reynolds hint at any recognition of the imagination as faculty that does not merely serve cognition but produces pleasure by its own play, as Gerard and Kames had already suggested. The passage just quoted from the conclusion of Discourse XIII revealed Reynolds’s predominant conception of the imagination as the ability to represent as perfected that which is only imperfectly presented in nature, thus as a faculty that is constrained by the possibilities inherent in nature and that might be regarded as essentially cognitive in character, that is, as the ability to know how nature would be if only it were not always subject to blemishes. And in at least one passage, Reynolds even warns against any use of the imagination that is not tightly constrained by knowledge of actuality: We cannot on this occasion, nor indeed on any other, recommend an undeterminate manner or vague ideas of any kind, in a complete and finished picture. This notion, therefore, of leaving anything to the imagination, opposes a very fixed and indispensable rule in our art, – that everything shall be carefully and distinctly expressed, as if the painter knew, with correctness and precision, the exact form and character of whatever is introduced into the picture. This is what with us is called Science, and Learning: which must not be sacrificed and given up for an uncertain and doubtful beauty.91

With the qualifying expressions “as if” and “what with us is called” Reynolds might seem to be signaling that the imagination is not actually constrained by knowledge, but only appears to be; it seems more plausible, however, to interpret him to mean that the imagination is constrained by knowledge, but by knowledge of how things actually appear rather than any other sort of scientific knowledge, perhaps knowledge about their inner or micro-structure: the “Science, or Learning” of artists would be knowledge of the appearance of things. The imagination would seem to have the limited task of perfecting the appearance of the objects of art by thinking away their natural imperfections while remaining within the guidelines set by what is perfect within nature. However, in his discussion of architecture in the crucial Discourse XIII of 1786, Reynolds suggests a different conception of the imagination, namely, that it is a faculty of invention and exploration that is not constrained by rules, and that we enjoy its exercise precisely for that reason. 91

Reynolds, Discourse VIII, Works, I:285.

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Thus he says that in addition to the “effect produced by that general symmetry and proportion, by which the eye is delighted,” architecture also affects “the imagination by means of association of ideas,” for example, “as we naturally have a veneration for antiquity, whatever building brings to our remembrance ancient customs and manners, such as the castles of the Barons of ancient Chivalry, is sure to give this delight.”92 He particularly praises the architecture of John Vanbrugh (1664–1726), the designer of Castle Howard, Blenheim Palace, and Greenwich Hospital, for “a greater display of imagination, than we shall perhaps find in any other” architect, “notwithstanding the faults with which many” of his works “are justly charged.”93 He also finds a source of pleasure in architecture in the “use of accidents” or departure from “regularity,” variation from any norm that might be supposed to be dictated by the intended use or “convenience” of a building: It may not be amiss for the Architect to take advantage sometimes of that to which I am sure the Painter ought always to have his eyes open, I mean the use of accidents: to follow when they lead, and to improve them, rather than always to trust to a regular plan. It often happens that additions have been made to houses, at various times, for use or pleasure. As such buildings depart from regularity, they now and then acquire something of scenery by this accident, which I should think might not unsuccessfully be adopted by an Architect, in an original plan, if it does not too much interfere with convenience. Variety and intricacy is a beauty and excellence in every other of the arts which address the imagination: and why not in Architecture?94

In this passage, which might well have been influenced by the introduction of the concept of the “picturesque” into English discourse about landscape by William Gilpin just a few years earlier,95 Reynolds suggests that there is pleasure in the exploration of variety and intricacy of forms that are not constrained by the intended function of a building; the exploration and enjoyment of such variety, like that of the association of ideas, can be attributed to the imagination. The room for the exercise of imagination in architecture thus seems to be twofold, making for a complex contrast between painting and architecture: On the one hand, 92 93 94 95

Reynolds, Discourse XIII, Works, II:137. Reynolds, Discourse XIII, Works, II:138. Reynolds, Discourse XIII, Works, II:139–40. William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc., relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (London, 1782). For discussion, see Hipple, Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque, pp. 192–201, and Andrew Ballantyne, “The Picturesque and its Development,” in Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde, editors, A Companion to Art Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 116–24.

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as nonrepresentational, works of architecture are not constrained by a concept of their content the way paintings are, and thus allow room for the free association of ideas; on the other hand, works of architecture are constrained by their intended function or “convenience” in a way that paintings are not, yet even so leave some room for the enjoyment of variety and intricacy as long as that does not clash with functionality. As previously mentioned, however, it is only in passing that Reynolds seems to recognize the potential for pleasure in the play of the imagination, and while he may be invoking the recently introduced concept of the picturesque he does not appear to be explicitly employing the conception of free play introduced by Gerard and Kames. In yet another aspect of his treatment of imagination, though, Reynolds does introduce the third great theme of eighteenth-century aesthetics, the idea of the emotional impact of art. In a passage previously quoted from Discourse III, Reynolds spoke of the artist’s “grand design of speaking to the heart,”96 and in a number of other passages Reynolds directly connects impact on the imagination with impact on feeling. Thus in Discourse XIII, which has just been discussed, he states, “The great end of all those arts” – by which he refers to all the fine arts, representational arts like painting but also nonrepresentational arts such as landscape gardening – “is, to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling.”97 But Reynolds had introduced the requirement of emotional impact long before 1786. Thus in Discourse IV, fifteen years earlier, he had stated that “With respect to the choice” of the subject of a painting, none “can be proper that is not generally interesting. It ought to be either some eminent instance of heroick action, or heroick suffereing. There must be something either in the action, or in the object, in which men are universally concerned, and which powerfully strikes upon the public sympathy,”98 and several pages later he equates impact on the imagination with impact on the emotions in saying that “The great end of art is to strike the imagination. The Painter therefore is to make no ostentation of the means by which this is done; the spectator is only to feel the result in his bosom.”99 Five years later, in Discourse VII, he similarly says that “taste . . . does not belong so much to the external form of things, but is addressed to the mind, and depends on its original frame, or, to use the expression, the organization

96 97 98 99

Reynolds, Discourse III, Works, I:71. Reynolds, Discourse XIII, Works, II:135–6. Reynolds, Discourse IV, Works, I:80. Reynolds, Discourse IV, Works, I:84.

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of the soul; I mean the imagination and the passions,”100 on the way to an argument that the imagination and passions of human beings are just as regular in their operations as the effects of external forms on the senses, and thus that there is just as much room for universally valid judgments of taste in response to art based on imagination and passion as there would be to an art of mere form without passion. This position, which would be rejected by Kant fifteen years later, is clearly grounded on the theories of the operations of imagination and sympathy of Hume and Smith, whose names are not mentioned but whose influence here is unmistakable. Reynolds does not offer an extensive catalogue of the passions that can be aroused by art, mentioning only our responses to “heroick action” and “heroick sufferings,” nor does he join in the great debate from Du Bos to Kames about why we should enjoy the representation of heroic suffering; perhaps all that is something he thinks he can take for granted, leaving both cataloguing and resolving the paradoxes of the passions to the philosophers, while he focuses the attention of his students on the means to affect the emotions of their audience, particularly on the need to make sure that their desire to display their virtuosity does not get in the way of the emotional impact of their work. Reynolds may assume rather than advance the philosophical debate about the possibility of pleasure in passion, but at the same time he seems to be trying to do for painting what Kames had done primarily for the case of literature in the Elements of Criticism, namely, give an open-ended catalogue of the means by which the end of emotional impact can be achieved in his chosen art. This discussion of Reynolds began with a mention of his conception of genius and concludes with a further comment on that topic. Throughout the Discourses, Reynolds presses upon his students the need to learn from their great predecessors without simply imitating them, but his discussion of genius comes to a head in Discourse VI of 1774, where he argues that “Genius begins where rules end” yet at the same time that it is “acquired by being conversant with the inventions of others.”101 He rejects the idea that the genius for painting is entirely “a kind of inspiration, . . . a gift bestowed upon peculiar favorites at their birth,” an explanation that he thinks no better than an appeal to “a kind of magick.”102 Rather, he is “not only very much disposed to maintain the 100 101 102

Reynolds, Discourse VII, Works, I:219. Reynolds, Discourse VI, Works, I:145. Reynolds, Discourse VI, Works, I:147.

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absolute necessity of imitation in the first stages of the art” but is also of the opinion “that the study of other masters, which I here call imitation, may be extended throughout our whole lives, without . . . preventing us from giving that original air which every work undoubtedly ought always to have.”103 The key to his position is the idea that “it is by being conversant with the inventions of others, that we learn to invent; as by reading the thoughts of others we learn to think,”104 that is, what one artist can learn from those who have preceded him is not merely subjects and techniques, though he may learn those, but the very possibility of originality itself. To explain the need for continued study of the works of past geniuses beyond the early stages of artistic education, when evidence of the possibility of originality might be thought to be most important, Reynolds adds that “The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continuously fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.” Thus “When we have had continually before us the great works of Art to impregnate our minds with kindred ideas, we are then, and not till then, fit to produce something of the same species.”105 The metaphors here are from agriculture and husbandry, but the point is clear: No matter how gifted he might be, the artist who cuts himself off from interchange with others is bound to limit his themes, style, and techniques to what he acquired at an early age, and to limit the range of his accomplishments no matter how original he might be. Reynolds never forgot the benefits of his own extended exposure to Italian art, and even at the height of his success he used its material benefits to build what must have been one of the largest collections of art held by any commoner in eighteenth-century Europe, for the sake of continued study.106 When he wrote that A mind enriched by an assemblage of all the treasures of ancient and modern art, will be more elevated and fruitful in resources, in proportion to the number of ideas which have been carefully collected and digested. There can be no doubt but that he who has the most materials has the greatest means of invention; and if he has not the power of using them, it must pro-

103 104 105 106

Reynolds, Discourse VI, Works, I:151. Reynolds, Discourse VI, Works, I:156. Reynolds, Discourse VI, Works, I:157–8. See the account of his will in Malone’s memoir: even after he had bequeathed various items from his collection to a number of noble and common friends, his “fine Collection of Pictures by the Ancient Masters, was sold by Auction for 10,319£, 2s, 6d,” and “His very valuable Collection of Drawings and Prints . . . since disposed of” (Works, I:cxviii–cxix).

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ceed from a feebleness of intellect; or from the confused manner in which those collections have been laid up in his mind,107

he clearly had his own experience in mind, although few of his students could have enjoyed his degree of success and thus assembled a collection like his own. Reynolds’s thesis that what artists should imitate is the inventiveness of their great predecessors and not their particular inventions seems much like Kant’s claim fifteen years later that the works of geniuses are not objects for “copying” (Nachmachung) but “models” for “imitation” (Nachahmung), that is, spurs for successor artists with “a similar proportion of mental powers” to achieve originality like that of their predecessors.108 But Reynolds’s claim that genius should not be thought of as a “gift” seems to be directly rejected by Kant when he claims that “Genius is the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art.”109 However, while he emphasizes that artistic genius needs to be developed by careful observation and emulation, Reynolds does not deny that a successful artist must have some native talent that can be so developed – after all, even the best collection of examples will be useless, as we have just seen, to someone with a feeble intellect; and conversely, Kant emphasizes that even though artistic genius is a gift, it must also be “academically trained, in order to make a use of it that can stand up to the power of judgment,”110 that is, produce works that are “exemplary” rather than “original nonsense.”111 So the accounts of genius or creativity in Reynolds and Kant are not in fact very different, and indeed it would not be surprising if Kant’s account of genius had been influenced by Reynolds, Discourse VI being among the seven that had been translated into German in 1781, thus after Kant began discussing aesthetics in his lectures on logic and anthropology but well before he composed the Critique of the Power of Judgment.

5. Reid We can now turn back to Scotland and to the last great contributors to eighteenth-century British philosophy, namely, Thomas Reid; his student, at least briefly, Dugald Stewart; and Archibald Alison. Reid was

107 108 109 110 111

Reynolds, Discourse VI, Works, I:159. See Kant, CPJ, §47, 5:309. Kant, CPJ, §46, 5:307. Kant, CPJ, §47, 5:310. Kant, CPJ, §46, 5:308.

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the founder of the Scottish “common sense” school of philosophy and Stewart its second-most influential member, and in the case of aesthetics we might consider their attachment to “common sense” to signal their reversion to a more traditional approach than that of most of their compatriots from Hutcheson to Kames, namely, to an approach that emphasizes the cognitive value of art above all else. We shall see that this is true of Reid but not of Stewart, whose central idea is that the imagination is a “complex power” and thereby emphasizes the complexity of aesthetic experience in a way that Reid does not. Stewart will therefore be treated in a separate section of this chapter, as will Alison. Reid (1710–1796), like Gerard and Beattie, started his career at Aberdeen, although in his case he completed it at Glasgow, where he became the successor to Hutcheson and Adam Smith in the chair of moral philosophy. It was Reid, through such successors as not only Stewart but also James Ferrier and Sir William Hamilton (who edited the standard nineteenth-century edition of the works of Reid),112 who had the greatest impact on the Scottish universities and on the curricula and instructional methods of American colleges and universities well into the nineteenth century (the Scottish commonsense philosopher James McCosh was president of Princeton as late as 1868–88, when American higher education finally fell more under the curricular and philosophical influence of the German rather than the Scottish model).113 Reid also opposed the main tendency of British aesthetics, the theory of mental play, that had developed from Hutcheson on, and in certain ways returned firmly to the aesthetics of truth represented by Shaftesbury.114 Reid was educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen, where, as previously mentioned, his regent was George Turnbull. He received the M.A. in 1726 (at the age of sixteen) and studied divinity for the next five years. He was a minister in several parishes and taught at Marischal until he 112

113

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Thomas Reid, Philosophical Works, ed. William Hamilton, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Machlachlan and Stewart, 1863; reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1983). See Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971). The standard monograph on Reid, Keith Lehrer, Thomas Reid (London: Routledge, 1989), includes a brief discussion of his aesthetics at pp. 179–85. There are two chapters on Reid’s aesthetics in Roger D. Gallie, Thomas Reid: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Anatomy of the Self (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), pp. 145–84. Other discussions of Reid’s aesthetics include Hipple, Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque, pp. 149–57, and Peter Kivy, “Reid’s Philosophy of Art,” in Terence Cuneo and René van Woudenberg, editors, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 267–88.

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was appointed a regent at King’s College, also in Aberdeen, in 1751. In 1764, upon the publication of his first book, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, he was appointed Smith’s successor at Glasgow, where he held the chair of Moral Philosophy until his death. Although his lectures were given by his assistant after 1780, he remained busy, both as vice-rector of the university, and more important for posterity, as a writer. His main works, the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man and on the Active Powers of Man, were published late in his life, in 1785 and 1788. The Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man conclude with essay VIII, “Of Taste,” which was the main source for Reid’s aesthetics for two centuries.115 More recently, a transcription from 1774 of his Lectures on Fine Arts was published,116 and in 2004 notes for his lectures on Logic, Rhetoric and the Fine Arts in his own hand appeared in print.117 The heart of Reid’s philosophy was his objection to the “way of ideas” of the modern philosophers from Descartes and Locke through Hume, that is, the theory that the immediate objects of our consciousness are themselves mental ideas or representations, from which the existence of external objects must be inferred (either confidently, as in Descartes and Locke, or not, as in Hume). Reid argued, by appeal to what he took to be common sense and ordinary language, that ideas are not mental objects that stand in the way of our direct contact with external objects, but rather mental states whose function is precisely to put us into touch with external objects, states of which we are directly aware only under special circumstances. He carried this position into aesthetics, where he opposed the view of Hutcheson and his successors that “there is no beauty in any object whatsoever; it is only a sensation or feeling in the person that perceives it”118 (although as we have seen, this subjectivist ontology of beauty had little impact on the rest of Hutcheson’s aesthetics, which in fact employed a more relational conception of beauty). Just as he held that secondary qualities such as color are not to be equated with our ideas of color but are rather to be identified with the power in objects to produce ideas of color in us, so Reid held that beauty and grandeur are 115

116 117

118

Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, with an introduction by Baruch A. Brody (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), reproduced from vols. II and III of The Complete Works of Thomas Reid, 4 vols. (Charlestown, Mass.: Samuel Etheridge, Jr., 1813–15), pp. 753–808. Peter Kivy, Thomas Reid’s Lectures on the Fine Arts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). Thomas Reid on Logic, Rhetoric and the Fine Arts: Papers on the Culture of the Mind, ed. Alexander Broadie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004/University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), pp. 195–289. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 755.

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not to be reduced to our feelings of pleasure or awe in the presence of an object, but are rather to be identified with real “excellences” in the objects, to which our feelings are the natural response – even though we sometimes cannot describe the real excellence in the object except as the power to produce the response. Thus he writes, When a beautiful object is before us, we may distinguish the agreeable emotion it produces in us, from the quality of the object which causes that emotion. When I hear an air in music that pleases me, I say, it is fine, it is excellent. This excellence is not in me; it is in the music. But the pleasure it gives is not in the music; it is in me. Perhaps I cannot say what it is in the tune that pleases my ear, as I cannot say what it is in a sapid body which pleases my palate; but there is a quality in the sapid body which pleases my palate, and I call it a delicious taste; and there is a quality in the tune that pleases my taste, and I call it a fine, or an excellent air.119

It is important, however, not to take from this passage the thought that the objective property that produces our aesthetic response is always something we cannot articulate or explain, a je ne sais quoi;120 on the contrary, Reid believes that in many cases we can readily determine what the excellences in objects that produce are aesthetic responses are: In objects that please the taste, we always judge that there is some real excellence, some superiority to those that do not please. In some cases, that superior excellence is distinctly perceived, and can be pointed out; in other cases, we have only a general notion of some excellence which we cannot describe.121

And Reid devotes most of his space to an account of those excellences that we can distinctly perceive and point out. Indeed, what is important to realize is that Reid does not use “excellence” as a value-neutral name for any sort of property of objects that may cause our aesthetic response, but rather uses it as a value-laden term, precisely because he holds that the objective source of almost all of our aesthetic responses is a property of genuine moral or other practical value, and that our aesthetic feelings are natural responses to the 119 120

121

Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 754. For a recent study of aesthetic theories that were based on this premise, especially in France, see Richard Scholar, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Frederick Beiser has emphasized the centrality of the je-ne-sais-quoi in Leibniz’s hints toward aesthetic theory in Diotima’s Children, pp. 37–41. As the present discussion suggests, Reid could have been considered a British member of the “perfectionist” tradition in eighteenth-century German aesthetics described by Beiser. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 760.

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perception of such genuine excellences or to the perception of properties associated with them or that in some way resemble them. In the latter cases, Reid is certainly in step with the Scottish theory of the association of ideas, but apart from this modification his theory of aesthetic “excellence” is thus firmly in the tradition of Shaftesbury, for the excellences that we respond to are always those of human agents, human artists, or the divine artist. Following Addison (and Mark Akenside, the author of the 1744 The Pleasures of the Imagination: A Poem)122 rather than Burke, Reid revives the trifold division of aesthetic properties into novelty, grandeur, and beauty. He even tries to transform novelty, which would seem to be the paradigmatic candidate for a purely subjective aesthetic property, into an objective one by arguing that although of course whether something is novel to someone depends on the prior state of knowledge of that person, but that even so “It is evident . . . with regard to novelty, whatever may be said of other objects of taste, that it is not merely a sensation in the mind of him to whom the thing is new; it is a real relation which the thing has to his knowledge at that time”123 (although as is obvious this attempt still leaves novelty what might be called a personal or person-relative property). Only in connection with novelty does Reid appeal to the now-standard language of mental activity, arguing that the good for man “consists in the vigorous exertion of his active and intellective powers upon their proper objects; he is made for action and progress, and cannot be happy without it,” and that although the “notions of enjoyment, and of activity, considered abstractly, are no doubt very different, and we cannot perceive a necessary connection between them,” nevertheless “in our constitution, they are so connected, by the wisdom of Nature, that they must go hand in hand,”124 so that our pleasure in novelty in the aesthetic case supports the development of our mental powers for other applications. In this context, Reid cites Gerard with approval.125 But this is Reid’s only moment of concession toward the play theory of aesthetic response; and whether his argument for the objective reality of novelty is persuasive is of little moment, because it, along with the general theory of the intrinsic pleasure of mental activity, plays no further rôle in the rest of Reid’s aesthetics, which is dedicated to explicating the real excellences that are the basis of our responses to grandeur 122 123 124 125

On Akenside, see Engell, Creative Imagination, pp. 42–7. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 763. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 764. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 763.

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and beauty. Like Alison a few years later, Reid distinguishes the grand and the beautiful in the first instance by the quality of the feelings they produce in response: “The emotion raised by grand objects is awful, solemn, and serious,”126 while beauty, although it “is found in things, so various, and so very different in nature, that it is difficult to say wherein it consists, or what there can be common to all the objects in which it is found,” nevertheless always produces “a certain agreeable emotion or feeling in the mind,”127 a feeling of “love or liking.”128 The Shaftesburian turn of Reid’s theory is evident in his explanation of the sublime: At the most abstract, it is “nothing else but such a degree of excellence, in one kind or another, as merits our admiration”; but more particularly, “There are some attributes of mind which have a real and intrinsic excellence . . . and which, in every degree, are the natural objects of esteem, but, in an uncommon degree are objects of admiration.”129 In the obvious case, there is “a real intrinsic excellence in some qualities of mind” in human beings, “as in power, knowledge, wisdom, virtue, magnanimity”; an “uncommon degree” of these merits admiration: and “What we call sublime in description, or in speech of any kind,” or presumably in any other mode of representation, “is a proper expression of the admiration and enthusiasm which the subject produces in the mind of the speaker”130 (by which Reid seems to mean the depicted character, not an actual author or actor). The experience of the sublime in nature might not seem to lend itself to this explanation as our admiration for the expression of admirable mental and moral powers, but Reid’s theory is that what we in fact admire in the natural sublime are the mental and moral powers of the author of nature: When we contemplate the earth, the sea, the planetary system, the universe, these are vast objects; it requires a stretch of imagination to grasp them in our minds. But they appear truly grand, and merit the highest admiration, when we consider them as the work of God. . . . A great work is a work of great power, great wisdom, and great goodness, well contrived from some important end. But power, wisdom, and goodness, are properly the attributes of mind only: they are ascribed to the work figuratively, but are really inherent in the author: and, by the same figure, the grandeur is ascribed to the work, but is properly inherent in the mind that made it.131 126 127 128 129 130 131

Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 767. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 779. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 781. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 768. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, pp. 771–2. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, pp. 772–3.

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(“Figure” is Reid’s term here for the operations of analogy and association.) Apart from the plainer language, these lines could have been written by Shaftesbury. Reid’s theory of beauty is more complicated. As earlier noted, he recognizes that the denotation of the term is very wide, and we find beauty “in colour, in sound, in form, in motion. There are beauties of speech, and beauties of thought; beauties in the arts, and in the sciences; beauties in actions, in affections, and in characters.”132 He also recognizes what we might call a formal element in many cases of beauty, or what he calls an “instinctive” kind of beauty. “Some objects strike us at once, and appear beautiful at first sight,” he says, “without reflection, without our being able to say why we call them beautiful, or being able to specify any perfection which justifies our judgment,” such as “the plumage of birds, and of butterflies, in the colours and form of flowers, of shells, and of many other objects,” and such beauty we might even call “an occult quality.”133 But the far greater part of beauty is “rational beauty,” “the beauties of the second class” that are derived from some relation they bear to mind, as “the signs or expressions of some amiable mental quality, or as the effects of design, art, and wise contrivance,”134 in which case “the lustre of beauty . . . is borrowed and reflected,” because a properly mental attribute is transferred “from the subject to which it properly belongs, to some related or resembling subject.”135 There are in fact two sorts of powers of mind that we like or love, our pleasure in which is transferred from its original source to external objects that literally express them or in some other way suggest them: on the one hand, amiable virtues, such as “Innocence, gentleness, condescension, humanity, natural affection, public spirit, and the whole train of the soft and gentle virtues,” as well as “many intellectual talents which have an intrinsic value, and draw our love and esteem to those who possess them, and connected with these excellences of the body which “render the body a fit instrument for the mind”;136 and on the other hand, the specific talent to produce things that are beautiful in any other regard, the object of the “agreeable emotion” like that which “an expert mechanic” feels when he “views a well made machine.”137 In other words, the two sources of rational and 132 133 134 135 136 137

Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 779. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 785. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 791. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 788. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 792. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 787.

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derivative beauty are the many admirable and agreeable qualities of mind that can be expressed or suggested by an external object, whether a natural or human body or a work of art, and the artistry that is manifested by the latter. In the case of the beautiful works of nature, of course, we can ultimately admire the artistry of the creator, just as in the case of the sublime in nature we are ultimately awed by the power of the creator. Just as “The works of men in science, in the arts of taste, and in the mechanical arts, bear the signatures of those qualities of mind which were employed in their production,” so “The invisible Creator, the fountain of all perfection, has stamped upon all his works signatures of his divine wisdom, power, and benignity, which are visible to all men.”138 However, Reid’s basic view is that most of our pleasure in art is due neither to original or occult beauty nor to our admiration for artistry, but to our natural response to the moral and intellectual virtues that can be expressed by works of art either directly or through association. This is especially evident in his treatment of music. Here, where one might have expected that our pleasure in many aspects of music, especially purely instrumental music without words sung by the human voice, would be explained as original and due to the sheer pleasure of the human mind in its own free play, Reid actually explains the great part of our pleasure as due to the way in which the music either directly expresses or suggests by resemblance or association some human perfection. He starts by saying that in a single note, we ultimately admire “a sign of some perfection, either in the organ, whether it be the human voice or an instrument, or in the execution,” and that in “a composition of sounds, or a piece of music,” where “the beauty is either in the harmony, the melody, or expression,” the beauty is derived “either from the beauty of the thing expressed, or from the art and skill employed in expressing it properly.”139 Thus far he allows for pleasure in artistry as well as pleasure in some otherwise amiable mental quality that is suggested by the music. As he continues, however, he emphasizes that we really enjoy harmony in music because it reminds us of “harmony in the intercourse of minds” through resembling the sounds of persons “convers[ing] together in amity and friendship,” while “every strain in melody that is agreeable, is an imitation of the tones of the human voice in the expression of some sentiment or passion, or an imitation of some other object in nature”140 138 139 140

Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 793. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, p. 795. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay VIII, pp. 796–7.

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(which we must in turn find beautiful because it suggests some amiable sentiment or passion of human beings or reminds us of the power and benignity of the creator). Thus, even music pleases most because it expresses beloved affections and virtues of human or divine persons. The emphasis throughout Reid’s theory is thus not on the free play of the mental powers that might be stimulated by beautiful or sublime works of nature or art, but on the feelings of awe and love that are stimulated by the emotions and virtues that those works express either directly or indirectly. These are the kinds of “excellences” to which we ultimately respond in our response to grandeur and sublimity. Reid’s invocation of feelings of love, awe, admiration, and the like might seem ground to associate his view with the emphasis on the emotional impact of art that we have found above all in Du Bos and Kames, but since Reid is interested in these feelings primarily as responses to objective “excellences” in their objects, I have associated him instead with the more traditional aesthetics of truth represented at the start of the eighteenth century by Shaftesbury; and as we have already seen, Reid pays little attention to the aesthetics of play initiated by Addison, Du Bos, and Gerard. Reid’s conception of the “excellences” of beauty could also be seen as an heir to Wolff’s theory that beauty is the sensible appearance of perfection, although there is no evidence that Reid knew Wolff or any of the successive German philosophers to be discussed in Part Three of this volume. To be sure, Reid does not, unlike Shaftesbury, explicitly reduce even the products of human artistry to forms of order ultimately created by God, nor does he literally equate order or the other expressions of divine artistry with truth. In that regard, Reid’s theory is not as paradigmatic a case of the aesthetics of truth as is the theory of Shaftesbury or, as we will see later, the aesthetics of Hegel at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But there is much to consider before we can turn to that development of the theory of aesthetic truth; in the meantime, this chapter will conclude with a discussion of the last two great representatives of the eighteenth-century British school of aesthetics, Archibald Alison and Dugald Stewart. Both of these two writers published their major works in close proximity at the beginning of the last decade of the eighteenth century, in 1790 and 1792, respectively. It might seem natural to discuss Stewart first because he is generally associated with Reid in the “common sense” school of philosophy. We will see, however, that he is actually closer to the leader of the previous generation of Scottish thinkers, namely, Kames, in his recognition of the complexity of aesthetic experience, and can be regarded as providing the cumulative as well as culminating statement

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of eighteenth-century British aesthetics. We therefore save discussion of Stewart for the final section of this chapter and, also following the order suggested by the dates of publication of their chief works, discuss Alison next. As we will see, he narrowed rather than broadened the approach of Kames, treating all aesthetic experience as a form of the association of emotions with outward properties of objects.

6. Alison Unusually for a Scot, Archibald Alison (1757–1839) was educated at Oxford (Balliol College), and spent his career in Edinburgh as an Anglican rather than a Presbyterian minister. Apart from a popular volume of sermons,141 the Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, first published in 1790 and then reissued in 1811, was his only book.142 It opens by insisting that the “Emotion of Taste,” while “very distinguishable from every other pleasure of our Nature,”143 is complex rather than simple, and Alison rejects any attempt to reduce its causes to a single sense or to a single object. Thus he explicitly rejects, among others, the theories of Hogarth and Hume, in the belief that the former reduces all the objects of taste to a single cause like the serpentine line and the latter to a single cause like utility.144 This criticism is not fair to those authors, and Alison’s own subsumption of all aesthetic properties under the two headings of the beautiful and the sublime is actually simpler than the lists of aesthetic properties that we have found in Gerard and Kames and for that matter in Hogarth himself. However, Alison does introduce a degree of complexity into his account of aesthetic response or experience when he states that “this effect is very different from the determination of a SENSE; that it is not in fact a Simple, but a Complex Emotion,” because “it involves in all cases, 1st, the production of some Simple Emotion, or the exercise of some moral Affection; and 2dly, the consequent Excitement of a peculiar Exercise of the Imagination . . . and 141

142

143 144

Archibald Alison, Sermons, Chiefly on Particular Occasions, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: Constable, 1815). This volume was widely reprinted in both Britain and the United States, with editions in Boston and Hartford the same year. Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1811). There are discussions of Alison’s aesthetics in Hipple, Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque, pp. 158–81; Engell, Creative Imagination, pp. 165–6; Dickie, Century of Taste, pp. 55–84; and Steven Jauss, “Associationism and Taste Theory in Archibald Alison’s Essays,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (2006): 415–28. Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, vol. I, p. xi. Alison, Essays, vol. I, pp. xix–xx.

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that the peculiar pleasure of the BEAUTIFUL or the SUBLIME is only felt when these two effects are conjoined, and the Complex Emotion is produced.”145 What he means by this is that in any aesthetic experience we enjoy both a play of the imagination with a train of associated ideas and an emotion that attaches to the content of what is represented, whether that is an object in nature or a work of art (which itself represents something else). Here he is following in the tradition of Gerard and Kames. Nevertheless, Alison departs from Kames in rejecting the view that we have a direct emotional response to various aspects of external objects, and argues instead that, apart from our pleasure in the sheer play of the imagination with its ideas, the emotional content of an aesthetic experience always comes from the association of what is perceived with an emotion that is originally connected with our feelings toward human beings. Yet since these emotional associations are triggered by the perception or representation of objects that are not themselves human beings and thus not the objects of these emotions in the strictest sense, we can regard Alison’s theory as one in which the emotions are at play rather than at work. And since by far the bulk of his account is devoted to exploring the emotional associations of our aesthetic experience rather than to the pleasure of the imagination’s play with its ideas apart from their emotional associations, we can regard Alison as primarily a theorist of the play of our emotional rather than our cognitive powers. In this way, Alison stands closer to Burke than to anyone else, and his theory is still narrower than that of Kames in excluding the play of our purely cognitive powers from his account of aesthetic experience. He also makes no room for the straightforwardly cognitive aspect of aesthetic experience, its presentation of fundamental truths about the nature of existence, emphasized by Shaftesbury and Reid. Alison holds that at the heart of every aesthetic experience, whether of a natural object or a work of art, there is some particular emotion, such as cheerfulness, gladness, tenderness, pity, melancholy, admiration, and feelings of power, majesty, and terror.146 Following Burke, he assumes that these particular emotions fall into the two groups of emotions of beauty and of sublimity, beautiful objects being those that produce such feelings as cheerfulness and gladness while sublime objects 145 146

Alison, Essays, vol. I, pp. xxii–xxiii. Alison, Essays, vol. I, p. 75. The following discussion of Alison draws on Section II of my article “The Ethical Value of the Aesthetic: Kant, Alison, and Santayana,” in my Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 208–15.

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produce such feelings as melancholy, admiration, or terror: “Thus, when we feel either the beauty or sublimity of natural scenery,” for example, “Trains of pleasing or of solemn thought arise spontaneously within our minds.”147 Alison argues that such emotions are not produced by their objects immediately, but only by trains of associations: When any object, either of sublimity or beauty, is presented to the mind, I believe every man is conscious of a train of thought being immediately awakened in his imagination. . . . The simple perception of the object, we frequently find, is insufficient to excite these emotions, unless it is accompanied with this operation of mind, unless, according to common expression, our imagination is seized, and our fancy busied in the pursuit of all those trains of thought, which are allied to this character or expression.148

Why the emotion should be connected with its object by a train of associations is complicated. Alison begins with the assumption that the immediately perceptible properties of objects do not directly arouse our emotions, but that our emotions are instead aroused only by more abstract properties than what is immediately perceived may in some way signify: Delicate or vigorous colors, for example, are not intrinsically pleasing, but please us because we associate them with youth or health, and indeed ultimately human youth or health. So the mind needs to traverse at least one link of association – recall some experience of an association of a perceptible property that is not obviously freighted with emotion with some other property that is – before it can experience the object now before it with an emotion. But Alison also assumes that the chains of association intervening between the present object and the felt emotion will be considerably longer than one link. There are at least two reasons for this. First, Alison holds that multiple associations with the perceived object multiply or strengthen its emotional impact: Thus, experiences like the “view of the house where one was born” or of “the school where one was educated” “recall so many images of past happiness and past affections, . . . are connected with so many strong or valued emotions, and lead altogether to so long a train of feelings and recollections, that there is hardly any scene which one ever beholds with so much rapture.”149 But further, Alison also recognizes that we enjoy the activity of association, the play of imagination itself, so that the pleasure 147 148 149

Alison, Essays, vol. I, p. 5. Alison, Essays, vol. I, pp. 4–5. Alison, Essays, vol. I, pp. 23–4.

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we take in the play of associations intensifies the core emotion in any particular aesthetic experience: That there is a pleasure also annexed, by the constitution of our nature, to the exercise of imagination, is a proposition which seems to require very little illustration. In common opinion, the employment of the imagination is always supposed to communicate delight; when we yield to its power, we are considered as indulging in a secret pleasure, and every superiority in the strength or sensibility of this faculty is believed to be attended with a similar increase in the happiness of human life.150

As we have seen, by 1790 this view of pleasure in the exercise of imagination was indeed “common opinion.” But instead of appealing to an author such as Gerard to support his own position, Alison surprisingly appeals to the authority of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to confirm it, quoting lengthy extracts from the Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782) in which Rousseau describes the pleasure of letting the mind wander freed at least temporarily from its ordinary troubles and passions.151 Rather than treating the play of the imagination with its ideas as an independent source of aesthetic pleasure, however, Alison argues that this pleasure in the play of the imagination is both a necessary condition for the aesthetic experience of emotion and that it also intensifies it: “when this exercise of the imagination is not produced, the Emotions of Taste are unfelt, and . . . when it is increased, these Emotions are increased with it.”152 Alison concludes that “The pleasure, therefore, which accompanies the Emotions of Taste, may be considered not as a simple, but as a complex pleasure; and as arising not from any separate and peculiar Sense, but from the union of the pleasure of SIMPLE EMOTION, with that which is annexed, by the constitution of the human mind, to the Exercise of IMAGINATION.”153 Thus Alison is not prepared to concede that the play

150 151

152 153

Alison, Essays, vol. I, pp. 163–4. Alison, Essays, vol. I, pp. 165–9; Alison’s extracts are from the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Fifth and Seventh Walks; in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, vol. 8 (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2000), pp. 41–8, 57–68. A characteristic passage from Rousseau is this: “I delighted in this ocular recreation which in misfortune relaxes, amuses, distracts the mind, and suspends the troubled feeling. . . . Fragrant odors, intense colors, the most elegant shapes seem to vie with each other for the right of capturing our attention. To give oneself up to such delicious sensations, it is necessary only to love pleasure” (p. 59). We will return to Rousseau in the next chapter. Alison, Essays,vol. I, p. 169. Alison, Essays, vol. I, pp. 169–70.

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of our mental faculties by itself could be the source of our pleasure in aesthetic experience. Alison devotes a great deal of his treatise to the beauty and sublimity of forms,154 and what he argues here is precisely that even the pleasure we take in features of the form of objects is based on our emotional rather than more purely cognitive associations with those forms. For example, we experience tender and affectionate feelings toward gentle curves not because of our affection for these geometrical forms as such, but because we associate them with infancy and youth in organisms of all kinds, which we love, in turn because of our love of infancy and youth in our own kind.155 Alison recognizes that we also take pleasure in such forms because they make us think of ease rather than difficulty,156 which might seem to be an emphasis on the cognitive rather than emotional play of imagination; but Alison’s explanation of the aesthetic effect of the converse of ease, that is, difficulty, stresses emotional associations: “forms which distinguish bodies that are connected in our minds with ideas of danger or power . . . great duration . . . splendor or magnificence . . . awe or solemnity, are in general sublime.”157 Alison’s model is thus something like this: We take pleasure in objects that have certain emotional associations for us, and even in features of the form of such objects that themselves have emotional associations for us. For us to experience these pleasures, the imagination needs to be able to play freely, so that the chains of association necessary to experience these emotions can be played out and also because the pleasure that we take in the play of the imagination itself can intensify our pleasure in these emotional associations. But it is the emotional associations themselves that are the basis of our aesthetic experience. The centrality of emotion in aesthetic experience is evident in another aspect of Alison’s theory which might otherwise seem to stress the cognitive. Early in his exposition, Alison claims that there are two distinctive features of the chains of association that produce our pleasures in the beautiful and sublime: first, that “the ideas or conceptions of which they are composed are ideas of emotion,” but second, “that there is always some general principle of connection which pervades the whole, and

154

155 156 157

Alison, Essays, essay II, “Of the Sublimity and Beauty of the Material World,” ch. IV, “Of Forms,” vol. I, pp. 314–76 and vol. II, pp. 3–205. See Alison, Essays, vol. I, pp. 331–3. Alison, Essays, vol. I, p. 334. Alison, Essays, vol. I, pp. 321–3.

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gives them some certain and definite character.”158 The trains of thought “which take place in the mind, upon the prospect of objects of sublimity and beauty,” differ from ordinary trains of thought, “1st, In respect of the Nature of the ideas of which [they are] composed, by their being ideas productive of Emotion; and, 2dly, In respect of their Succession, by their being distinguished by some general principle of connection, which subsists through the whole extent of the train.”159 Here Alison might appear to be arguing that we take pleasure in the unity of the train of association itself, a pleasure in form that would be distinct from our pleasure in experiencing particular emotions. But he is not; rather, what he argues is that our pleasure in the emotions aroused by our train of associations in the experience of a particular object must have an emotional consistency, or that the whole train of associations must arouse a single emotion. This is the point of the examples that he offers, passages from the works of even the greatest poets such as Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Milton, which suffer the “defect” of a bit, often a concluding line, that strikes a different emotional tone than all that has gone before.160 The only exception to his rule that Alison countenances is the case in which “the Emotion is violent and demands relief, or faint and requires support, or longcontinued and requires repose.”161 Alison does not explain why we ordinarily require emotional consistency in an aesthetic experience, but the exceptions he allows would be consistent with an essentially quantitative explanation, that is, that he takes us to be interested in maximizing the intensity and duration of our emotional experience, which we can ordinarily do best by maintaining emotional consistency but which might sometimes require an element of variation. He seems to have no thought that we might enjoy a play among contrasting emotions for its own sake, that even within a single work variety might be the spice of life. We can now turn to Alison’s much briefer account of the ethical significance of the “Emotion of Taste.” Like Kames, Alison stresses both the intrinsic pleasure of aesthetic response and its moral benefits. Thus, in his introduction he writes: The Qualities that produce these Emotions, are to be found in almost every class of the objects of human knowledge, and the Emotions themselves afford one of the most extensive sources of human delight. They occur to

158 159 160 161

Alison, Essays, vol. I, p. 77. Alison, Essays, vol. I, p. 78. Alison, Essays, vol. I, pp. 135–47. Alison, Essays, vol. I, p. 149.

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us, amid every variety of EXTERNAL Scenery, and among many diversities of disposition and affection in the MIND of Man. The most pleasing Arts of human invention are altogether directed to their pursuit; and even the necessary Arts are exalted into dignity, by the Genius that can unite Beauty with Use. From the earliest period of Society, to its last stage of improvement, they afford an innocent and elegant amusement to private life, at the same time that they increase the Splendour of National Character; and in the progress of Nations, as well as of Individuals, while they attract attention from the pleasures they bestow, they serve to exalt the human Mind, from corporeal to intellectual pursuits.162

However, while sharing the general sentiment of his age that aesthetic experience can promote the moral development of the individual and the political coherence of the state, Alison departs from the views that we have found in others in two regards. First, while we have seen that authors from Hutcheson to Kames allow room for some variation in degree among common aesthetic responses, Alison goes further than any of his predecessors in limiting the universal validity of a standard of taste. Alison’s theory that our responses to beautiful and sublime objects depend upon our emotional associations with those objects implies that our responses to and judgments of such objects will not be universal, for surely we do not all have the same emotional associations with objects. Alison recognizes this implication and observes that emotional associations range from those that are widely shared among all human beings, or “strongly marked in every period of the history of human thought,” to those that depend upon circumstances of “education” or “fortune” that may be shared among groups of humans but not among all of us at any one time or throughout history, to those that are thoroughly “individual,” and which give to “material qualities or appearances a character of interest which is solely the result of our own memory and affections.”163 Second, Alison does not see such variation as a threat, but embraces it. For he recognizes that human emotional associations vary because human circumstances vary, and the fact that different people can take aesthetic pleasure in different objects is therefore nothing less than “the means of diffusing happiness (in so far as it depends upon the pleasures of taste), with a very impartial equality among mankind.” If our “pleasures of taste” in objects were not grounded in emotional associations formed by our particular circumstances, then these pleasures would not be available to many of us 162 163

Alison, Essays, vol. I, p. xii. Alison, Essays, vol. II, pp. 421–2.

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much of the time. “If the Beauty or Sublimity of the objects of the material world arose from any original and determinate law of our nature, by which certain colours, or sounds, or forms, &c. were necessarily and solely beautiful, then there must of necessity have followed a great disproportion between the happiness of mankind, by the very constitution of their nature.”164 And reversing Kames’s argument that uniformity of taste is necessary to make possible progress in the arts, Alison also argues that the variety in aesthetic responses that ensues from its dependence upon emotional associations that are themselves variable is a “great source of the progress and improvement of human ART in every department, whether mechanical or liberal.”165 If there were fixed standards of taste, then “the common artist would hardly dare to deviate from them, even when he felt the propriety of it”;166 but the absence of such fixed standards is a challenge to human invention, which constantly lead to the development of new, sometimes successful, and sometimes even widely enjoyed works of art. Alison does not himself suggest that this variation in the pleasures of taste itself directly contributes to the development of morality, although we could easily imagine him having continued to argue that since the variability of tastes and the possibility of ever new invention in the arts increase rather than diminishing the availability of the pleasures of taste, any attempt to impose uniformity upon tastes and a restrictive canon upon the arts would be an unnecessary and even immoral restriction of the availability of the pleasures of taste. It could also easily be argued that recognition of the variety of human tastes will encourage a recognition of the variety of human needs and preferences in general, a recognition that is essential to moral development. What Alison does explicitly maintain, however, is that aesthetic experience directly produces moral emotions, and even that these moral emotions are sufficient to develop moral character. He asserts that the beauties and sublimities of the natural world, the beautiful and the sublime in the fine arts, and the beauties of the human countenance and form all have this effect. First, “While the objects of the material world are made to attract our infant eyes, there are latent ties by which they reach our hearts; and wherever they afford us delight, they are always the signs or expressions of higher qualities, by which our moral sensibilities are called forth. . . . There is not one of those features of scenery which 164 165 166

Alison, Essays, vol. II, p. 425. Alison, Essays, vol. II, p. 430. Alison, Essays, vol. II, p. 431.

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is not fitted to awaken us to moral emotion.”167 Second, he claims about works of art that if they affect us by “being expressive of fineness, delicacy, gentleness, majesty, solemnity, &c. they then awaken corresponding emotions in our bosoms, and give exercise to some of the most virtuous feelings of our nature.”168 And finally, when we respond to expressions of the human countenance or postures of the human form that “can awaken admiration or excite sensibility,” then “we share in some measure in those high dispositions, the expressions of which we contemplate,” and “our own bosoms glow with kindred sentiments.”169 For all these reasons, Alison insists that “It is on this account that it is of so much consequence in the education of the Young, to encourage their instinctive taste for the Beauty and Sublimity of Nature,” which will be the foundation for their appreciation of beauty and sublimity in the fine arts and in their fellow men: “amid the hours of curiosity and delight,” their taste for beauty and sublimity will “awaken those latent feelings of benevolence and of sympathy, from which all the moral or intellectual greatness of man finally arises.”170 It is perhaps not surprising that Alison, the clergyman, should have shown if anything even greater confidence in the moral benefits of aesthetic experience than Kames, the judge. But both have gone far beyond their sources, Burke and beyond him Du Bos, in stressing this point. Du Bos and Burke stressed the intrinsic pleasure of the arousal of our emotions outside of their usual contexts through the beauties and sublimities of nature and art; the worthy Scots were sure that in a providential nature this pleasure would also have a moral payoff. As we will see in the next chapter, the moral benefit of the aesthetic arousal of emotion would also be a central subject of debate in post-Du Bos France, and the Platonic suspicion of the benefits of such arousal would have at least one fierce defender in the person of the already mentioned Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But before we turn to the aesthetics of eighteenth-century France, we have one last Scot to consider, namely, Dugald Stewart, the culminating figure in eighteenth-century British aesthetics. Unlike Alison, whom as we have seen focuses almost exclusively on the emotional impact of aesthetic experience, regarding the free play of imagination primarily as a means for producing that impact, Stewart more fully follows the foot-

167 168 169 170

Alison, Essays, vol. II, pp. 436–7. Alison, Essays, vol. II, p. 438. Alison, Essays, vol. II, pp. 339–40. Alison, Essays, vol. II, pp. 446–7.

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steps of Kames in emphasizing the complexity of the sources of pleasure in aesthetic experience.

7. Stewart Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) was educated at Edinburgh, where his father was professor of mathematics. After a postgraduate year of study at Glasgow, he filled in for his father back at Edinburgh and subsequently held a variety of positions there, culminating in the chair of moral philosophy. During his year at Glasgow, he studied with Thomas Reid, and he is often thought of simply as a follower of Reid. But at least in aesthetics, he did not blindly follow Reid but instead combined many of the results of all of the Scottish aestheticians into his own sophisticated analyses of beauty, sublimity, and taste. For what Stewart stood for above all was the complexity rather than simplicity of aesthetic objects, responses, and judgments, and he rejected all attempts to reduce aesthetic phenomena to any single, simple model. Stewart can thus be considered one of the great synthesizers in aesthetic theory in the eighteenth century.171 Stewart discussed the fine arts and our responses to them in a section on imagination in his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind of 1792 and devoted half of the space in his Philosophical Essays of 1810 to the beautiful, the sublime, and taste (the first half of this work is devoted to a review of theories of knowledge from Descartes and Locke to Reid, including criticism of Reid; Stewart also wrote an important assessment of Reid’s life and work as a whole, as well as a similar work on Adam Smith). In his treatment of imagination, Stewart begins from the premise that “imagination is a complex power,”172 which entails that the pleasures of the imagination can arise from a variety of sources and that the “uncommon degree of imagination” that constitutes “poetic genius” is not an unanalyzable and inexplicable “gift of nature” but “the result of acquired habits, aided by favourable circumstances” and “formed by experience and situation . . . which, in its different gradations, fills up all

171

172

A biography of Stewart is Gordon Macintyre, Dugald Stewart: The Pride and Ornament of Scotland (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2003). Stewart’s aesthetics are discussed by Hipple, Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque, pp. 284–302, and Engell, Creative Imagination, pp. 187–8. As I will, Engell emphasizes Stewart’s treatment of imagination as a “complex power,” thus confirming the nonreductivist interpretation of Stewart to be presented here. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Brattleborough: William Fessenden, 1808), p. 411.

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the interval between the first efforts of untutored genius, and the sublime creations of Raphael or of Milton.”173 Stewart accepts Beattie’s view that the “primary object” of imitation in the fine arts is to please rather than to instruct, thus that truthfulness is only a necessary condition for the pleasure in much art rather than the direct source of our pleasure in it. In Stewart’s words, insofar as the poet or other artist does instruct, or as he puts it does “encroach upon the province of the philosopher or of the orator,” “he addresses the understanding only as a vehicle of pleasure: if he makes an appeal to the passions, it is only to passions which it is pleasing to indulge.”174 But Stewart is clearer than Beattie that the primary source of pleasure for the imagination is its own free exercise or play, and that a work of art must not only be the product of free play on the side of the artist but must also leave room for and stimulate free play of the imagination in its audience. Stewart compares the painter to the poet in this regard: When the history or the landscape painter indulges his genius, in forming new combinations of his own, he vies with the poet in the noblest exertion of the poetical art: and he avails himself of his professional skill as the poet avails himself of language, only to convey the ideas in his mind. To deceive the eye by accurate representations of particular forms is no longer his aim; but by touches of an expressive pencil, to speak to the imaginations of others. Imitation is not, therefore, the end which he proposes to himself, but the means which he employs in order to accomplish it: nay, if the imitation be carried so far as to preclude all exercise of the spectator’s imagination, it will disappoint, in a great measure, the purpose of the artist.175

Imitation, that is, the communication of truths about the real world of nature and human life, is not merely just an instrument for the stimulation of the play of the imagination rather than the goal of art; it must also be constrained by the requirement of room for the free play of the imagination in both artist and audience. In this way Stewart returns to the insight of Gerard and preserves it for subsequent generations in spite of the resistance of Reid. Stewart’s detailed discussion of the beautiful and the sublime in his Philosophical Essays is an extended attack upon what he regards as excessively simplistic explanations of these phenomena. He rejects Diderot’s

173 174 175

Stewart, Elements, p. 413. Stewart, Elements, pp. 419–20. Stewart, Elements, p. 416.

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theory that all “beauty consists in the perception of relations”176 (which we will consider in the next part) as too vague and general. He discusses Burke’s theory at great length but rejects the idea that beauty can be explained exclusively in terms of properties that we find sexually alluring within our own species with the rejoinder that he “cannot recollect any philosophical conclusion whatever, more erroneous in itself, or more feebly supported”: That the smoothness, for example, of some objects “is one constitution of their beauty, cannot be disputed,”177 but many objects can be found beautiful without these properties but with quite different sorts of properties, and in any case an object is never beautiful just in virtue of simply having certain properties or triggering certain associations, but because the particular properties that it does have trigger the activity of the imagination. Thus without explicitly calling attention to the obvious gender bias in Burke’s account of beauty, Stewart effectively undercuts it. But Stewart also rejects the idea that the pleasing activity of the imagination can be explained exclusively in terms of associations, and indeed argues that an attempt to explain all aesthetic pleasure by means of association would be circular: The theory which resolves the whole effect of beautiful objects into Association, must necessarily involve that species of paralogism, to which logicians give the name of reasoning in a circle. It is the province of association to impart to one thing the agreeable or the disagreeable effects of another; but association can never account for the origin of a class of pleasures different in kind from all the others we know. If there was nothing originally and intrinsically pleasing and beautiful, the associating principle would have no materials on which it could operate.178

Stewart does not regard this as a criticism of the theory of Alison, however, but regards Alison as the only theorist who previously appreciated this point. Stewart thus combines Gerard’s idea that the experience of beauty is always a free and vigorous play of the imagination with Alison’s idea that this play often takes the form of a play with associations between immediately pleasing qualities of objects and qualities that please because our imagination can of its own accord associate them with the former. In discussing our pleasure in associations, Stewart argues that the kinds of features of human beauty, particularly female beauty, that were picked out by Burke please us at least as much by their associations with qualities 176

177 178

Dugald Stewart, Philosophical Essays, First American Edition (Philadelphia: Anthony Finley, 1811), p. 235. Stewart, Essays, p. 270. Stewart, Essays, p. 297.

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of mind as in their own right. “What philosopher can presume to analyze the different ingredients; or to assign to matter and to mind their respective shares in exciting the emotions which he feels?” he asks, but then he answers “I believe, for my own part, that the effect depends chiefly on the Mind; and that the loveliest features, if divested of their expression, would be beheld with indifference.”179 This can be taken as a tacit criticism of Reid’s Shaftesburian view that beautiful objects ultimately please us as signs of the divine mind; Stewart’s aesthetic theory is resolutely humanistic. Stewart also suggests in this context that although the theorist can unpack the activity and associations that underlie aesthetic responses, those who are actually undergoing such responses simply have and enjoy them; he continues that “no person thus philosophizes when the object is before him, or dreams of any source of his pleasure, but that Beauty which fixes his gaze.” Stewart also turns his circularity objection against the theory of those who, like Joshua Reynolds, would explain beauty through “habit” or “custom,” specifically by assuming that “the most customary form in each species of things” is “invariably the most beautiful”:180 As in the case of associationism, the objection is that unless there were something intrinsically pleasing and stimulating about the paradigmatic examplars of a species, the mere fact that they are paradigmatic would not by itself explain why we should take any pleasure in them. Stewart sums up his critique of reductive theories of beauty by stating that on his own approach We are at once relieved from all the mystery into which philosophers have been insensibly led, in their theories of Beauty, by too servile an acquiescence in the exploded conclusions of the ancient schools concerning general ideas. Instead of searching for the common idea or essence which the word Beauty denotes, when applied to colours, to forms, to sounds, to compositions in verse and poetry, to mathematical theorems, and to moral qualities, our attention is directed to the natural history of the human mind.181

But his insistence that beauty cannot be equated with any particular qualities of objects irrespective of the stimulus they can offer for the play of the imagination does not preclude an attempt to enumerate some of the general characteristics of the pleasing exercise of the imagination itself. Stewart characterizes the freedom of the imagination by means of 179 180 181

Stewart, Essays, p. 302. Stewart, Essays, p. 315. Stewart, Essays, p. 311.

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four theses. First, he states that “The materials out of which some combinations of Imagination are formed, although limited in point of kind, by the variety of real objects, are by no means limited in point of degree.” Thus “We can imagine Rocks and Mountains more sublime, Forests more extensive and awful . . . than the eye has ever beheld,” but also members of our own kind more beautiful, whether physically or spiritually, than ever beheld.182 Second, “Imagination, by her powers of selection and of combination, can render her productions more perfect than those which are exhibited in the natural world.”183 Third, the artist can depart from the normal order and connection of things in order to produce greater emotional stimulation than the real world normally offers: “The poet can arrange the succession of the various emotions which he wishes to excite, in such a manner as to make the transition agreeable from one to another, and sometimes to delight his reader by skillful contrasts. . . . by a careful study of Nature, he may learn to communicate to his productions agreeable effects, which natural objects and real events do not always possess.”184 Here Stewart neatly sums up the result of the lengthy discussion of the emotional potential of fictions initiated by Du Bos, continued in Britain by Kames, and, as we will see in Part Three of this book, in Germany by Moses Mendelssohn as well. Finally, Stewart adds that the power of the imagination to combine and compress our ideas can compensate for and indeed outweigh the fact that the ideas it works with may be less vivid or forceful than occurrent perceptions. He writes that Although, when we analyze the combinations of imagination into their component elements, the pleasure produced by each of these may be weaker than that arising from the correspondent perception; yet it is possible to communicate to the mind, in a short space of time, so immense a number of these fainter impressions, as to occasion a much greater degree of pleasure, in the general result. The succession of events in the natural world, although sufficiently varied to prevent satiety and languor, is seldom so rapid as to keep pace with the restlessness of our wishes. But the imagination can glance, in the same moment, “from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;” and can, at will, shift the scene, from the gloom and desolation of winter, to the promises of spring, or the glories of summer and autumn. In accounting for the powerful effect which the pleasures of the imagination occasionally produce, I am disposed to lay particular stress on this last circumstance.185 182 183 184 185

Stewart, Essays, p. 329. Stewart, Essays, p. 329. Stewart, Essays, p. 331. Stewart, Essays, p. 332.

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Here Stewart tacitly corrects Du Bos – the natural course of events is sufficient to prevent mere boredom, so our desire to avoid boredom cannot be a sufficient explanation of our interest in aesthetic experience – and he also adds a crucial element to Hume’s theory of the imagination: if the elements with which the imagination has to work are not as vivid as perceptions (in Hume’s terms, if “ideas” are always less vivid than “impressions”), then the intense pleasure that can be afforded by the imagination cannot be explained by the intensity of the pleasure of the representation of particular properties of objects, but by the intensity of the pleasure in freely combining them in ways that go beyond ordinary experience. Here Stewart goes beyond a characterization of the activity of the imagination in terms of its freedom from the constraints of ordinary experience to a positive explanation of the pleasure in its freedom to create new worlds for both thought and feeling, to engage both our cognitive and our emotional capacities in ways that ordinary experience does not. The structure of Stewart’s discussion of the sublime is similar to that of his discussion of the beautiful, so we can omit discussion of that in favor of discussion of his treatment of taste. Stewart’s general conception of taste does not differ significantly from that of his predecessors: He agrees with Gerard, as well as with Burke, Reynolds, and Alison, that taste is not a “simple and original” faculty,186 as Hutcheson may have supposed, nor is it a mere “sensibility” or a susceptibility to be pleased by certain objects.187 It requires rather both “correctness and delicacy,”188 or more fully “justness or soundness” on the one hand – which are in turn “unquestionably connected very closely with the love of truth, and with what is perhaps only the same thing under a different form, simplicity of character” – and “sensibility and delicacy” on the other hand.189 Stewart observes that the latter “circumstances seem to depend, in no inconsiderable degree, on original temperament,” but that statement seems to leave at least some room for their cultivation by practice and experience; and the former capacities, for just and sound judgment, are of course subject to considerable improvement by well-guided practice. In none of this does Stewart depart from Gerard. However, he adds a number of interesting observations about taste. First, he notes not only the “power of analytical discrimination or discernment in the 186 187 188 189

Stewart, Essays, p. 418. Stewart, Essays, p. 422. Stewart, Essays, p. 451. Stewart, Essays, p. 473.

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examination” of the “appropriate objects” of taste but also “the promptitude with which its decisions are commonly pronounced,”190 yet argues that the latter should not be taken as a reason to characterize taste as a mere “inner sense” that automatically responds to certain external stimuli, as Hutcheson had done; in his view taste is rather itself something that is “gradually formed” even though once formed its judgments may be prompt. In other words, the “instantaneousness”191 or temporal immediacy of taste should not be confused with its simplicity, but is itself the result of practice and experience over time: It is only the experienced connoisseur or critic who can not only quickly respond to but also quickly yet reliably judge objects of taste. Second, Stewart makes an important distinction between what he calls the “traditionary Taste (imbibed in early life, partly from the received rules of critics, and partly from the study of approved models of excellence),” which “is all that the bulk of men aspire to, and perhaps all that they are qualified to acquire,” and “genius,” or “original or inventive Taste,” by means of which “a leading mind” can “outstrip its contemporaries, by instituting new experiments for its own improvement.”192 Here Stewart might seem to be making a distinction between the passive taste of the audience for art and the creative taste of an original artist, but given his own earlier emphasis on the point that the experience of art requires room for the freedom of the imagination of the audience as well as of the artist, this should be taken as a distinction that applies to both artists and audiences. So here Stewart is emphasizing, in contrast to both Hume and Gerard, that in its most developed form taste can never be a matter of simply adopting examples canonized by qualified critics or rules discovered by such critics but must always involve an element of freedom and creativity, hence inevitably also individuality. This is also reflected in Stewart’s distinction, similar to Alison’s, between “classical associations,” “national or local associations,” and “personal associations”:193 He does not suggest that all good taste must be completely universal and therefore preclude all such associations but rather seems to allow that pleasure in such associations is compatible with well-developed taste, although the person of good taste will also be able to discriminate between objects that please primarily through such associations and objects that please more universally. Thus

190 191 192 193

Stewart, Essays, p. 431. Stewart, Essays, p. 427. Stewart, Essays, pp. 441–2. Stewart, Essays, pp. 447–8.

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Stewart insists that there must be room for personal originality even in good taste. Finally, Stewart makes the interesting point that a concern for good taste can actually become excessive. He notes that there is “a secondary pleasure peculiar” to taste as an “acquired power” that is “essentially distinct from those primary pleasures, which its appropriate objects afford.”194 This secondary pleasure in having good taste can add to our immediate pleasure in an object that also pleases others, as Hume had already observed and Kant would likewise do, but it also makes one vulnerable to mere fashion instead of enduring merit: It can make one take more pleasure in agreeing with others about currently fashionable objects than the intrinsic merits of those objects themselves would warrant. Even more interestingly, Stewart observes that the secondary pleasure that one takes in one’s own good taste can lead to “fastidiousness of taste,”195 which can actually get in the way of one’s enjoyment of objects by leading to an excessive focus on their “blemishes and imperfections,” from which even the best works of art are unlikely to be completely free,” rather than on the genuine merits of those objects. A person whose taste has not been distorted by an excessive concern for the secondary pleasure in having good taste and the excessive fastidiousness to which that can lead will “avert his critical eye from blemishes and imperfections” and will instead be able to “appreciate the merits” by which objects that inevitably have such imperfections “are redeemed,” and will thus seize “eagerly on every touch of genius with the sympathy of kindred affection,” while those who are excessively concerned with their own good taste may “exult in the errors of superior minds as their appropriate and easy prey” and thus miss out on the genuine primary pleasures that many works have to offer.196 Stewart’s complex account of the pleasures of the imagination and his subtle analysis of both the pleasures and the risks of good taste are a fitting end to the vigorous discussion of aesthetics that took place in eighteenth-century Britain. We have seen that in this discussion, all three approaches to aesthetic experience, namely, the emphasis on its truth or content, the emphasis on its emotional impact, and the emphasis on aesthetic experience as a form of mental activity or play, were all represented, although only rarely in complete combination with one another. 194 195 196

Stewart, Essays, p. 457. Stewart, Essays, p. 458. Stewart, Essays, p. 463.

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Kames was one of the few authors who combined all three factors, though perhaps with greater emphasis on the emotional impact of art, the “elements of criticism” being the aspects of art best suited to produce maximal emotional impact. Stewart may have recognized the complexity of aesthetic experience more fully than any of his predecessors. In the next part of this volume we will turn to some of the debates that were simultaneously being conducted across the Channel in France, and in the part following that to the development of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germany. We shall see that the kind of synthesis achieved by Kames and Stewart was rare. There may be no author in eighteenth-century France who took such a comprehensive view of aesthetic experience, and in Germany the author who took such a view was not Kant, who synthesized the traditional cognitivist and new play theories but decidedly rejected the importance of the emotional impact of art, but his predecessor Moses Mendelssohn.

Part Two

FRENCH AESTHETICS IN MID-CENTURY

5 André to Rousseau

After Du Bos’s Critical Reflections of 1719, a quarter-century passed before another work appeared in France that would have an equal impact upon the development of aesthetics both within that country and across Europe more generally. This was Les Beaux-Arts réduit à un même principe (“The Fine Arts reduced to a single principle”) of Charles Batteux, which first appeared in 1746. Batteux’s work has often been held to be the source of the modern conception of the fine arts as a single group, distinguished not only from the natural sciences but also from all other forms of craft and technology.1 Be this as it may,2 the single principle to which Batteux’s title refers is the principle that all art is imitation of nature and that the standard for genius in the production of art and for taste in the reception and judgment of art is therefore also the imitation of nature. Surely this must mean that Batteux responded to Plato by defending art as a vehicle for the cognition of truth and thus that he rejected Du Bos’s response to Plato that the arts afford us an intrinsically pleasurable play of the emotions that has its own form of value. But it would be misleading to read Batteux in this way. For Batteux, the imitation of nature merely offers art the materials by means of which it can exercise our cognitive powers on the one hand and our emotional capacities on the other. Thus, although neither Batteux nor the successors who accepted his framework – the Encyclopedists Jean Le Rond D’Alembert and Denis Diderot and others of their circle – explicitly analyzed aesthetic experience as a free 1

2

See Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern Systems of the Arts,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951): 496–527 and 13 (1952): 17–46, reprinted in his Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 163–227; and Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). I have touched upon the debate about this thesis in the Introduction.

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play of our cognitive and/or moral and emotional powers, their views were really not so different from those of their contemporaries across the Channel. Even their one-time collaborator but later foe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who joined Plato’s attack upon the cognitive and moral value of the arts in some of his best-known writings, worked within the common framework provided by Du Bos and Batteux in his writings on music and language. The first main part of the present chapter will thus be presentation of the views of Batteux; after that we consider the developments of those views by those associated with the great Encyclopédie project, above all Diderot; and then we turn to the conflicted figure of Rousseau, considering his positive views about the expression of emotion in language and the arts, his Platonic attack upon the value of the theater in his notorious Letter to D’Alembert on the Theater of 1758, and the rebuttals of Rousseau by D’Alembert in 1759 and, perhaps less directly, by Diderot in his Paradox on Acting, first drafted in 1773 although not published until the nineteenth century. However, Batteux’s work on the Fine Arts was not the first work of any note to follow Du Bos’s Critical Reflection. That honor belongs to the 1741 Essay on Beauty by the Jesuit Yves-Maries André, so we preface our account of the mainstream of French aesthetics in mid-eighteenth century with a brief account of André’s essay.

1. André Yves-Marie de L’Isle André (1675–1764) was a Breton who began his studies at eighteen at the Jesuit college at Quimper, and was then sent by the order to the college of Clermont in Paris, which later became the famous Lycee Louis-le-Grand, and subsequently to La Flèche, famous as the school of René Descartes.3 André was a liberal thinker, however, whose career with the Jesuits was stormy because of his hospitality toward the Jansenists, the more Augustinian branch of French Catholicism; much of his career was devoted to a Life of Malebranche, the leading Jansenist intellectual, which was suppressed by the Jesuits and only partly published much later, toward the end of the nineteenth century. André eventually became a professor of mathematics at Caen. His Essai sur le Beau, ostensibly on a noncontrovesial topic, composed in 1731 and published in 3

Biographical information about André, as well as several excerpts from his work, may be found in Baldine Saint Girons, Esthétiques du XVIIIe siècle, pp. 66–79. See also Annie Becq, Genèse de l’esthétique française modern 1680–1814 (Paris: Albin Michael, 1994).

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1741, was one of the few philosophical works the Jesuits allowed him to publish during his life.4 The work enjoyed some popularity, and an expanded edition with additional essays on fashion (modus), decorum, the graces, the love of beauty, and disinterested love (l’amour desintéresse) was published in 1763, a year before the author’s death, and reprinted in 1770, after his death.5 The work was also translated into German in 1759.6 A work entitled The Art of Conversing was translated into English in 1777,7 but the Essai sur le Beau was first translated into English only in 2010.8 André’s work was deeply traditional, representing one of the purest statements of Neo-Platonic aesthetics to be found in the eighteenth century. He begins by associating his enterprise with that of Plato’s Socrates in the Hippias Major, not that of listing a variety of beautiful things but of determining what is beauty itself, not ce qui est beau but ce que c’est que le Beau, “two very different questions.”9 He then appeals to the authority of St. Augustine, “the brightest of all” and the hero of the Jansenists more than of the Jesuits, who held that it is “unity that constitutes so to speak the form and essence in all types of beauty,” or “Omnis porro pulchritudinis forma unitas est.”10 André holds that there are three types of beauty, “essential” or “even divine” beauty, “natural” beauty, and “arbitrary” beauty: To give at the outset a general plan of my design, I say that there is an essential beauty, independent of any institution, even divine; that there is a natural beauty, independent of the opinion of men: finally that there is a species of beauty of human institution, which is arbitrary up to a certain point; three propositions that encompass my whole subject, that show the order that I must follow in treating it, and that already start, if I am not mistaken, to shed some light thereon, through the distinction that they make between the things that have often been customarily mixed together.11 4

5

6

7

8 9 10 11

Yves-Marie André, Essai sur le Beau, ou l’on examine en quoi consiste précisément le beau dans le physique, dans le moral, dans les ouvrages d’esprit et dans la musique (Paris: 1741). Pere André, Essai sur le Beau, nouvelle Édition, augmentée de six discours, sur le modus, sur le decorum, sur les graces, sur l’amour de beau, et sur l’amour désintéressé (Paris: Ganeau, 1770). Versuch von dem Schönen, darinn man untersuchet, worinn das Schöne in der Natur, in den Sitten, in den Werken des Witzes, und in der Musick oder Tonkunst bestehe (Königsberg: Driest, 1753). Yves-Marie de L’Isle André, The Art of Conversing: Translated from the French (London: T. Lewis and J. Bew, 1777). Yves-Marie André, Essay on Beauty, trans. Alan J. Cain (Porto: Ebook, 2010). André, Essai sur le Beau, pp. 3–4. André, Essay on Beauty, p. 5. André, Essay on Beauty, p. 2.

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André also holds that beauty can be divided into two “different territories,” that of the mind and of the body, and apprehended in two different ways, by means of the senses or by means of the intellect. However, he makes it clear that these are not just two independent species of one genus, the apprehension of unity of form in bodies by the senses or in ideas or other abstract objects by the intellect; rather, the senses perceive the very same forms of unity that can be perceived by the intellect, although augmented with features proper to the senses alone. “Not all of our senses have the privilege of knowing beauty,” he emphasizes, for “taste, smell, and touch” are “stupid and rude senses that only seek, like idiots, that which is good for them, without making any effort regarding beauty.”12 So beauty is left for the senses of sight and hearing, “visible beauty, of which the eye is the natural judge,” and “acoustic beauty, of which the ear is the born arbiter”13 – unlike such British writers as Addison and Kames, André does not claim that beauty is properly an object of sight only and that even its extension to the object of hearing, music, is metaphorical, but is willing to countenance that both sight and hearing have an equal claim to apprehend beauty. This is precisely because both are capable of detecting unity of form, both are capable of discerning “regularity, order, proportion, symmetry,” “these first principles of good sense.”14 He then argues that the essence of beauty is in all cases unity of form, which can be apprehended by the intellect – even in the case of “arbitrary” beauty, such as the beauty of current fashions, there is at least an opinion of unity of form – but that the senses of sight and hearing have an additional object for their pleasure, namely color in the case of sight and what we call by analogy coloration in the case of tones. Thus, in visible and optical beauty as well as purely intellectual beauty, there is a beauty “which is essential, necessary, and independent . . . a geometric beauty, if I may put it thus,” a beauty “in the structure of bodies” which is “the basis of natural beauty,” but there is also an improvement, something special for the eye or ear, the brilliance of colors in the case of the eye, because “Light is beautiful on its own basis and embellishes all,”15 and overtones in the case of music that add to its purely formal unity. Unlike Leibniz or his own close contemporary Wolff, André does not regard the rôle of color or coloration in optical or auditory beauties as a sign of their confusion but simply as an additional source of pleasure in 12 13 14 15

André, Essay on Beauty, p. 3. André, Essay on Beauty, p. 3. Andre, Essay on Beauty, p. 3. André, Essay on Beauty, pp. 5–6.

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them. And these additional sources of pleasure in objects of the senses are essential to the fine arts. Thus, color is crucial to the “romance of painting,”16 and architecture too has two sources of beauty, the first founded solely on the principles of geometry and the second in sources of pleasure that can embellish the geometrical beauties of structures, sources that appeal either to universal principles of human sensibility or to particular customs at particular times and places: Architecture has rules of two sorts: first, those founded on the principles of geometry; others, shaped by the particular observations that the masters of the art have made, in different times, about the proportions that are pleasing to the eye by their regularity, true or apparent.17

The “particular observations” made by the “masters of the art” can be divided into two kinds, discoveries about what pleases all human beings and discoveries about what pleases their particular culture or clientele, and thus both “natural” and “arbitrary” beauty can augment “essential” beauty. The same three types of beauty are found in morals as well as in the natural and artificial objects of good taste; thus André writes that I distinguish, with respect to morals, three species of order that are the rule: an essential order, absolute and independent of any institution, even divine; a natural order, independent of our opinions and our tastes, but which essentially depends on the will of the Creator; finally, a civil and political order, instituted by the consent of men to maintain States and individuals in their natural and acquired rights.18

In this passage, André tries to steer his way between the poles of voluntarism and antivoluntarism, holding some rules of the moral order to be independent even of the will of God and others to be dependent on the will of God, and between the politics of divine right and of the social contract, holding some rules of the political order to be dependent on the will of God and others on the consent of human beings. But what is important for our purpose is that even though André holds that in the case of taste features of the visible and optical world can augment the underlying and intelligible order that is the foundation of beauty, this does not mean that the sensible beauties of sight and sound are on any overall scale more important than other forms of order; clearly moral

16 17 18

Andre, Essay on Beauty, p. 8. André, Essay on Beauty, p. 10. Andre, Essay on Beauty, p. 15.

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and political order is more important than order in sensible objects. And purely intelligible order, understood as the order of God himself, is the most important order or beauty of all. Beauty must ultimately be ranked on the basis of the importance of the object in which it inheres, not by how many sources it combines or how much pleasure, itself something merely sensible, it generates. Thus, if we rank objects of beauty according to their “degree of essence and perfection,” then God is “at the head, as the infinite and supreme being; the created mind immediately below, as his first subject, by its essential prerogative of knowing itself, and by its power to life itself to its author,” and “the material is in the last rank, as a blind and purely passive substance,”19 and “the Supreme Being must thus have the supreme rank in our esteem, in our love, in our commitment,” the moral order the next rank, and the beauties of the body, our own bodies and all sensible bodies, only the last rank. Thus “the essential order that we perceive between the three different objects of our knowledge: God, the mind, and the body,” is “the first rule of beauty in morals.”20 Each type of beauty consists in order, but there is also an order among beauties, and in our choices and acts we must observe that order. Rich in pleasure as sensible beauty may be, it can never be placed ahead of the observation of moral order or the admiration of divine order. Thus the Pére André can hardly be considered an advocate of any conception of the autonomy of art. André fully recognizes the complex character of human beings and thus concedes that “images are a necessary charm in a discourse of eloquence or of poetry,” and that such arts should appeal to and arouse our finer feelings as well, for “A noble and generous feeling gives testimony to the superiority of our soul to low and mundane things,” and “A fine and delicate feeling gives us a pure pleasure, which seizes us without troubling us, which penetrates us without confusing us.”21 Thus he is hardly immune or averse to the emotional impact of art. But this is not central to his conception of beauty. What is central is not only his ranking of the religious, moral, and aesthetic forms of beauty but ultimately also the Platonic idea that the experience of sensible beauty should lead us to the appreciation of the higher forms of beauty, in the end to the love of the beauty of God himself. André finds the beauty of music particularly apt for this end and thus concludes the original version of the 19 20 21

Andre, Essay on Beauty, p. 15. André, Essay on Beauty, p. 16. André, Essay on Beauty, p. 34.

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Essay on Beauty with a detailed chapter on music. Music is particularly praised because it wants to please not only the ear but also reason,22 and because, as an ancient author named Aristides23 of whom André approves is reported to have said, it elevates us “to the love of supreme beauty,” “Finis musicæ pulchri amor.”24 André emphasizes that although the three levels of beauty, essential, natural, and arbitrary, leave room for human invention in music, nevertheless music is “not a purely human invention;” rather “the author of nature is the first instituter of it,”25 and our enjoyment of nature should ultimately lead us to the deeper enjoyment of the ultimate source of beauty. This is a Christianized and musicalized version of the argument of Plato’s Symposium. Thus André’s Essay represents the survival of a deeply Christian and traditional approach to beauty, one that recognizes the complexity of our pleasures in art and uses its scheme of the three levels of beauty in any one of its forms, that is, the levels of essential, natural, and arbitrary beauty, to model the complexity of aesthetic experience, but it subordinates those the three forms of beauty themselves to the hierarchical ranking of the beauty of God, of mental and moral order, and only last of the sensible world of sight and sound. So let us now turn the less theological and more modern aesthetic theories that appeared in mideighteenth-century France, beginning with that of Charles Batteux.

2. Batteux Charles Batteux (1713–1780) studied rhetoric and theology in Reims and was professor of rhetoric there and then at several colleges in Paris before becoming professor of Greek and Latin poetry at the Collège Royal in 1749. The Fine Arts reduced to a single principle made him famous upon its appearance, and he was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1754 and the Académie Française in 1761. In 1765 he published a five-volume Cours de belles-lettres, and subsequently he published works including a study of the poetics of Aristotle, Horace, and Boileau (1771).26 The Fine Arts was quickly translated into German, with 22 23

24 25 26

André, Essay on Beauty, p. 48. Not otherwise identified, but perhaps the third-century CE music theorist Aristides Quintilianus. André, Essay on Beauty, p. 49. André, Essay on Beauty, p. 59. Charles Batteux, Les quatre poëtiques, d’Aristote, d’Horace, de Vida, de Despréaux : avec les traductions & des remarques (Paris: Chez Saillant & Nyon, 1771).

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two translations appearing in 1751 and a third, by the critic Johann Adolf Schlegel, going through three editions from 1758 to 1770.27 The final version of Schlegel’s translation transformed Batteux’s slender original work into a thousand pages in two stout volumes by means of a running battle with him in lengthy footnotes, which became a rich source for subsequent German aestheticians – it was clearly used by Immanuel Kant among others. Schlegel’s composite work is thus striking evidence of the intensive relations between French and German aesthetics in the eighteenth century and thus will be cited here along with the French text. The Fine Arts was not translated into English, although the later Cours de belles-lettres was.28 Batteux, with a background in rhetoric rather than philosophy, casts his aesthetics in the form of a search for rules for the judgment of works in particular art forms, rules that in turn should be grounded in a single rule underlying all the arts.29 Thus he writes that “All rules are twigs that sprout from a single stem. If one traces them back to their origin, one would here find a principle, that is natural and obvious enough for one to perceive it on first glance, and yet extensive enough to absorb all of the finer, particular rules, which one has been accustomed to know by feeling [sentiment, Gefühl these]. . . . All of those who genuinely have genius for the arts will be able to grasp these rules.”30 This fundamental rule, Batteux finds, is that art should imitate nature: The principle of imitation, which the Greek philosopher established with regard to the fine arts, made an impression on me. I felt its justness for painting, which is a mute poetry. . . . It turned out that poetry in all its forms is just as much an imitation as is painting. I went further: I attempted to

27

28

29

30

Charles Batteux, Einschränkung der Schönen Künste auf einen einzigen Grundsatz, aus dem Französichen übersetzt, und mit verschiedenen eignen damit verwandten Abhandlungen begleitet von Johann Adolf Schlegel, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1770). One of the earlier translations, by Karl Wilhelm Ramler, under the title Einleitung in die Schönen Wissenschaften (“Introduction to the Fine Arts”) was also reprinted in Leipzig from 1756 to 1758). For the following pages, I have consulted Schlegel’s translations (“Einschränkung”) as well as the modern French edition, Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts réduit à un même principe, Édition critique par Jean-Remy Mantion (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1989). A course of the belles lettres: or the principles of literature. Translated from the French of the Abbot Batteux, . . . By Mr. Miller. In four volumes. London: printed for B. Law and Co. T. Caslon, J. Coote, S. Hooper, G. Kearsly, and A. Morley, 1761. For discussions of Batteux’s work, see Saint Girons, Esthétiques du XVIII Siecle, pp. 83–98, and Becq, Genèse de l’esthétique française moderne, pp. 344–9. And see again Kristeller, “Modern System,” pp. 199–201, and Shiner, Invention of Art, pp. 83–4. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 73; Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 4.

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apply this principle to music and the art of gestures, and I was astounded that it fit there just as well.31

Batteux claims to confirm this principle not just from observation but from investigation of the “internal constitution of the human understanding,” and then to differentiate the fine arts simply on the basis of what media they use to imitate nature: painting, music, dance, and poetry use the media of color, tones, positions, and words, respectively. Batteux then goes on to define genius, as the capacity to produce art, and taste, as the capacity to respond to it and judge it, on the basis of his fundamental principle. Since successful art depends on the imitation of nature, genius consists in a superior gift for the observation of nature: “Its office consists not in inventing what cannot exist, but in finding what is present. . . . It is not a creator on any other ground than that it has observed precisely.”32 And taste, since it is “the judge of the arts, must be satisfied, if through the arts nature is well chosen and well imitated.”33 Batteux’s translator Schlegel objects to Batteux’s definition that genius shows itself not in imitating nature but in going beyond it.34 But his objection is premature, for Batteux’s theory is more complicated than initially appears. In fact, what nature offers us is the materials for perfection, which can be used in various ways: for purposes that are not really forms of representation at all, as well as for the representation of complex forms of perfection that go beyond the combinations of materials for perfection that are found in nature. In order to see the different ways in which Batteux uses the idea of the imitation of nature, we have to begin with the fact that he does not divide the arts into the two classical categories of mechanical and liberal arts, only the latter of which would be the arts of imitation (painting, sculpture, music, dance, and poetry) that he initially mentions. Rather he divides them into the three classes of useful, agreeable, and beautiful arts, each of which involves the imitation of nature in different ways. Batteux begins his discussion of the varieties of art with a definition that again expresses his commitment to the idea of rules: “An art in general is a collection of rules for how one can make well that which can be made either well or poorly. . . . These rules are nothing but general principles that can be derived from individual observations once one has repeated them numerous times.”35 31 32 33 34 35

Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, pp. 74–5; Batteux, Einschränkung, pp. 7–8. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 85; Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 25. Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 24. Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 26n. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 81; Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 14.

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He then divides the arts into three kinds. First, there are the mechanical arts, by means of which we use nature in order to satisfy the “needs of human beings.” Second, there are those arts which “have pleasure [plaisir, Vergnügen] as their object,” which can “be born nowhere except from the lap of joy and those sentiments which abundance and tranquility bring forth”; these arts, which include “music, poetry, painting, sculpture and the arts of attitudes and gestures, or dance,” are the fine arts “par excellence.” Finally, there are those arts which aim at “utility and grace together,” which “arise from need but are perfected by taste”; these are architecture and eloquence or oratory. Each of these kinds of arts has a different relation to the perfections of nature: the first simply uses the materials of nature for our own service; the last uses nature for both our service as well as our delectation; and the arts of the second kind, the fine arts par excellence, “do not use nature itself, but only imitate it, each in its own way.”36 Batteux’s tripartite rather than bipartite division of the arts would be influential: we will see later in this chapter how it was taken up by Diderot, and subsequently how it was developed by Kant in making his own distinctions between the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful and within the latter between pure and adherent beauty, a distinction roughly paralleling Batteux’s distinction between the arts of the second and third type. However, Batteux’s suggestion here that the fine arts par excellence simply imitate nature simplifies what he will subsequently argue. His initial claim that these arts merely imitate nature is immediately transformed into the idea that they alter nature by transferring properties “that lie in nature to objects to which they are not natural,” from reality to illusion or from the true to the probable; they create “similarities that are not in nature itself.” Thus, painting is called an “imitation of visible objects,” but “everything in it is illusion, and its perfection rests solely on its resemblance to nature”;37 and poetry uses natural properties for its own invention – for example, epic poetry “is nothing but the story of possible actions represented with the characteristics of reality.” Thus, insofar as the arts have something “really artful” in them, they are nothing but “imagined things, invented worlds, which are an impression and an imitation of the true one. For this reason, one always opposes art to nature.”38 Batteux then redefines genius, which he 36 37 38

Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 82; Batteux, Einschränkung, pp. 21–2. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 86; Batteux, Einschränkung, pp. 31–2. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, pp. 86–7; Batteux, Einschränkung, pp. 32–3.

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first defined simply as the gift for the careful observation of nature, as the gift not to present nature to us “as it is in itself, but as it could be” or, in Schlegel’s German translation, “as it ought to be.”39 The arts do not “slavishly imitate nature” but collect from it objects and features to which it then gives all the perfection of which they are capable; it takes the individual perfections from nature but makes a more perfect nature out of those materials. What did Zeuxis do, when he wanted to paint a perfect beauty? Did he make the portrait of some particular beauty, so that his portrait was her history? No; rather he collected the separate features of various, really extant beauties; from them he formed in his own mind an artful representation which arose from these united features; and this representation was the prototype or the model for his painting, which with respect to the whole was probable and poetic, and true and historical only with regard to its parts taken separately. Thus he gave an example to all who would work in the arts.40

Thus mere imitation extends only to the first stage of art, the collection of materials; the real task of art is to create something that as a whole is more perfect than the partial perfections that nature offers us. For this reason, genius needs not just a gift for observation but “an exquisite understanding, a fecund imagination, and above all a heart that is full of a noble fire easily ignited by the view of objects”41 – not just observation, but inspiration (enthousiasme, Begeisterung).42 Batteux’s principle of imitation initially suggests that his approach to aesthetic experience must be strictly cognitivist, but his development of the principle suggests that he allows far more room for the freedom of the imagination than initially appears; indeed perhaps he should be associated more with the innovative approach of Du Bos before him and Gerard afterward than with the deeply conservative approach of someone like Pére André. Later in his argument, Batteux will provide a foundation for his transformation of the original of mere imitation by stating that what brings us maximal pleasure is not the mere perception of perfection in nature but rather that “which brings us closer to our own perfection”;43 thus what is “beautiful in general is that which corresponds to its own nature and to ours” – a thought so important that Batteux states it in Latin instead

39 40 41 42 43

Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 91; Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 39. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, pp. 91–2; Batteux, Einschränkung, pp. 39–40. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 96; Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 45. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 97; Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 48. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 127; Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 91.

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of French.44 He then fleshes out this abstraction by adding that our perfection consists in the activity of our understanding and our emotions, or our “heart,” so that successful art is that “which gives our understanding something to do and sets our heart into motion, what expands the circle of its concepts and its sentiments.”45 With this premise, Batteux further reveals that his aesthetics of imitation is not after all an aesthetics in which beauty lies in the revelation of objective truth or perfection, as in Shaftesbury or Wolff, but an aesthetics of intellectual and emotional activity, in the mold of Addison and Du Bos: the imitation of nature is just the starting point for the free exercise of our own cognitive and affective powers. And from this premise, Batteux proceeds to an account of the particular forms of beauty that is not so different from that of the British successors to Addison: our cognitive powers must be exercised by the right mixture of variety for excitement and symmetry and proportion for comprehensibility, while our affective powers must be engaged by the right mixture of flattery for our self-love and elevation, to become better than we would otherwise be. Thus beauty will be pleasing but also improve us. Returning to Batteux’s division of the traditional liberal arts into the fine arts properly so called (again, painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and dance) and the mixed arts (architecture and oratory), this means that the former as well as the latter are useful as well as pleasing, although the utility of the former lies not in the use of the objects themselves for the direct satisfaction of our needs but in the indirect development of our cognitive and affective powers. Yet even in the case of the mixed arts Batteux stresses that the satisfaction of our needs should not feel completely separate from the gratification of our taste; the two must be intimately connected. Here it is the abstract property of the unity and necessity in nature that must be our model rather than particular features of nature, or it is so to speak the spirit rather than the letter of nature that should be imitated; thus “in the arts whose office it is to be useful, the decoration must take on the character of necessity; everything must appear as if need demanded it,” while “in the arts that are dedicated to pleasure, utility is only granted entry when it affords as 44

45

“Id generatim pulchrum est, quot tum ipsius naturae, tum nostrae convenit”; Batteux, Les BeauxArtes, p. 128; Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 93. Batteux appears to have adopted the epigram from a 1659 Dissertatione de vera pulchritudine by Pierre Nicole, translated into French in 1689 as a Traité de la Beauté des Ouvrages d’Espirt (Toulouse). See Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 155 n. 11. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 129; Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 97.

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great a pleasure as would be found in that which is created merely with the aim of pleasing.”46 Thus, in architecture we require the integration of form and function – What would one think of a sumptuous building that was entirely unusable? Between its expense and its uselessness there would be such a disproportion that those who saw the building would find it disagreeable and its author would be made ridiculous. If a building demands greatness, majesty, and elegance, it does so in relation to the master who will occupy it. If one perceives in it proportion, variety, and unity, the aim is only that thereby it should be more comfortable, more solid, more useful.47 –

and in oratory even the greatest “freedom” of the imagination must “always be bound to the useful and true.” In this case “The speaker must speak the truth in a way that makes it credible . . . yet with the noble simplicity that has the power to convince.”48 The underlying premise here can only be that the perfection of our own nature, not that of nature outside of us, demands not merely the gratification of both our cognitive and our affective powers but also a feeling of harmony among both kinds of powers. Both the fine arts par excellence and the mixed arts must be held to this standard. That our own requirement of harmony between our cognitive and our affective powers imposes a concern for both truth and freedom of the imagination is central to Batteux’s account of the arts that are imitative or representational in the ordinary sense, for example, representational painting (the only kind of painting that Batteux or anyone else in the eighteenth century knew) or literature. Here Batteux says that “In order for the imitation to be as perfect as it can be, it must have two qualities: exactitude and liberty,” or, in Schlegel’s German, “unforcedness” (Ungezwungenheit).49 That is, both our concern for truth, a paramount concern of the understanding, and our love of freedom, a paramount concern of our heart, must be satisfied. Indeed, Batteux holds that our love of freedom can be satisfied with an appearance of literal playfulness even in a work otherwise aiming for truth. In the case of painting, for example, Sometimes great painters allow their brush a little play in order to attain this liberty; here there is a broken symmetry; here an appearance of disorder is 46 47 48 49

Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, pp. 103–4; Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 64. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 104; Batteux, Einschränkung, pp. 65–6. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 104; Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 67. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 134; Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 106.

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assumed in some small part; here some ornament is neglected; there even what seems to be a mistake in the design is allowed to stand.

Batteux says that “The law of imitation demands this,” that in the lines of Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux from the previous century, “The painter often is diligent to let little errors stand, for then we are charmed to believe that we see nature itself”;50 but the nature that makes the demand here is clearly our own love of free play. The assumption that we have two kinds of faculty at play in our response to imitations, the understanding and the affective dimension, is also at work in Batteux’s recognition that “Objects that displease in nature are so agreeable in art.”51 Here what Batteux argues is not just that either the liberty of the representation can please our more imaginative powers apart from our attitude toward its content, that is, the disagreeable thing or event that is represented, but rather that our understanding itself is gratified with the truthful representation of what is unpleasant, as long, of course, as our mental powers collectively can be put into a harmonious play by the representation. In a significant footnote, Schlegel objects that “Only the disgusting is excluded from those disagreeable sentiments that can have their nature altered by imitation.”52 His thought is that as a matter of human psychology there are limits to our love of truth or our ability to harmonize our sense of truth with the free play of our imagination. This seems a perfectly plausible bit of empirical psychology and as such quite consistent with the psychological basis of Batteux’s own theory of representation even if he did not notice it. Kant would later repeat Schlegel’s remark almost verbatim,53 thus providing evidence that he not only read Batteux but read him in Schlegel’s translation. Kant’s adoption of this plausible bit of empirical psychology, however, may threaten his own project of replacing the empirical psychology that underlies so much of French as well as British aesthetics in the eighteenth century with his own purer, “transcendental” psychology. But this is an issue for later. Now, we turn to the aesthetic thought of the remarkable group of French intellectuals who began producing the 50

51 52 53

Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 134; Batteux, Einschränkung, pp. 108–9. The lines “A ces petits défauts marqués dans la peinture,/L’esprit avec plaisir reconnaît la nature” come from BoileauDespreaux’s Arte Poétique, chapter III, verses 107–8. I have translated Schlegel’s charming German. Batteux, Les Beaux-Artes, p. 134; Batteux, Einschränkung, pp. 108–9. Batteux, Einschränkung, p. 110 n. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (CPJ), ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), §48, 5:312.

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great Encyclopédie shortly after the publication of Batteux’s work. We see that Batteux’s view that the fine arts must engage both the intellect and the heart and that it is natural for us to want to satisfy our sense of pleasure as well as our more material needs by the transformation of nature thoroughly informed the thought of all of these thinkers. In spite of the aesthetic monism apparently implied by Batteux’s promise to “reduce” all the fine arts to a single principle and the cognitivism suggested by his claim that this principle is “imitation,” his aesthetics actually emphasizes the freedom of imagination in the creation and experience of art, or the free play of our cognitive and our emotional powers. Thus Batteux recognizes the complexity of aesthetic experience, and if anything he underplays its potential as a form of cognition itself. Batteux’s recognition of this complexity was therefore more influential on his successors than the unrepentant Platonism or Augustinianism of André.

3. The Encyclopedists One of the great accomplishments of the eighteenth century was the Encyclopédie edited by Jean Le Rond D’Alembert (1717–1783) and Denis Diderot (1713–1784).54 Originally commissioned in 1747 as a revision of the two-volume English Cyclopedia of Ephraim Chambers, it ended up being published in seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of plates, with 72,000 entries, between 1751 and 1772. It was neither the first nor even the largest of the encyclopedias published in eighteenthcentury Europe, but it enjoyed a singular success – more than 25,000 sets were sold by the end of the century – for a variety of reasons, including its coverage of every aspect of human life and history from crafts and manufacturing (which accounted for a large part of its plates) to the most abstract reaches of contemporary science and philosophy, its unabashed support for the anti-authoritarian attitude of the Enlightenment, and perhaps the fact that it was written in accessible French rather than Latin or German. Its outspokenness occasioned constant battles with the church in France and with government censors, and D’Alembert resigned from the project in 1758, leaving Diderot to continue the editorial work on his own, with the assistance of Louis de Jaucourt, until the completion of the project fourteen years later. D’Alembert was personally responsible 54

Most of the discussion of the Encyclopedists focuses on Diderot at the expense of his collaborators, but Saint Girons devotes at least several pages to Montesquieu, Voltaire, and D’Alembert; see Esthétiques du XVIII Siecle, pp. 99–120.

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for 1,500 articles, and Diderot ultimately wrote or contributed to more than 3,000. Many of the works for which Diderot is now best known were published only posthumously, and during his life he was by far best known for his work on the Encyclopédie. Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, the illegitimate son of an artillery officer and a socialite marquise, studied law and medicine, but he first made his mark as a brilliant mathematician. His first paper was accepted by the French Academy of Sciences in 1739, when he was twenty-two, and from 1743 to 1758, he published seven important treatises in which he applied novel mathematical techniques to such subjects as fluid, wave, and celestial mechanics. His analysis of the forces at work on a body in equilibrium within a system of bodies led to what is still known as D’Alembert’s principle. His background was thus hardly in belles lettres and the fine arts, and he is not known as a significant figure in the history of aesthetics in his own right. But his characterization of the arts in the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia (1751) framed the discussion of the arts for the other contributors, and he also added to the entry on “Taste” that was otherwise composed by those two giants of the Enlightenment, Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, 1689–1755) and Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778). We discuss those two texts before passing on to contributions by the other Encyclopedists and Diderot. D’Alembert conceived of the Encyclopédie as comprising two parts, the encyclopedia proper, which would “set forth as well as possible the order and connection of the parts of human knowledge,” and a “reasoned dictionary of the sciences, arts, and trades,” which would “contain the general principles that form the basis of each science and each art, liberal or mechanical, and the most essential facts that make up the body and substance of each.”55 The Preliminary Discourse itself is therefore divided into two parts, the first offering the general theory of human knowledge that is to be illustrated throughout the work, and the second a brief history of the growth of human knowledge meant to frame the discussion of the specific arts and sciences throughout the work. The general theory of human knowledge is decidedly empiricist, presenting all knowledge as beginning with the immediate deliverances of our senses;56 this reflects the extraordinary impact of John Locke rather than René Descartes on 55

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Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab, with the collaboration of Walter E. Rex (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 4. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 6.

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advanced thought in eighteenth-century France and was no doubt at least partially responsible for some of the hostility to the Encyclopédie in more reactionary quarters. On this model, the rest of our knowledge arises from the unification and combination of what we receive from the senses, and moral principles are also to be explained as arising entirely naturally from our recognition of the forms of association with others that we need to adopt in order to protect “our own bodies from pain and destruction.”57 Our powers of abstraction lead us to logic and mathematics. Our powers of communication lead us to develop signs for the communication of our sensible ideas and our abstractions about them to one another, and this in turn requires the development of grammar. But “while communicating their ideas to one another, men try also to communicate their passions,” and this leads to “eloquence” in addition to grammar and logic.58 This is the first place for an aesthetic dimension in D’Alembert’s conception of human thought. But he introduces a second when he observes that “the notions formed by the combination of primitive ideas are not the only ones of which our minds are capable”; there is another kind of “reflective knowledge” consisting “of the ideas which we create for ourselves by imagining and putting together beings similar to those which are the object of our direct ideas.” D’Alembert thus arrives at an analysis of the sources of aesthetic experience which is indebted to both Batteux and Du Bos, and in spite of the overriding concern of the Encyclopédie with knowledge, the aesthetics on the Encylopedists emphasizes the activity of the imagination in aesthetic experience. We take pleasure in the exercise of our imagination on imitations of nature and in the passions which are excited by the imitations of nature. Imitation can arouse a wide range of passions: “That imitation of objects capable of exciting in us lively, vivid, or pleasing sentiments, whatever their nature may be, constitutes in general the imitation of la belle Nature,” and through imitation we can even take pleasure in objects that would in reality arouse unpleasant responses; as D’Alembert says, in terms drawn directly from Du Bos: “As for the objects which, when real, excite only sad or tumultuous sentiments, imitation of them is more pleasing than the objects themselves, because it places us precisely at that distance where we experience the pleasure of the emotion without feeling its disturbance.”59 Here D’Alembert offers a particularly clear 57 58 59

D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 11. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 33. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 37.

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statement of the idea of appropriate distance rather than sheer disinterestedness as the key to understanding aesthetic response: our pleasurable responses to the depiction of even pleasant events do not depend upon any separation of our responses from the fundamental forms of human interest but only on a suitable distance from the depicted objects, created by the very fact of depiction or other aesthetic devices and conventions. This idea, as we see in the next part also prominent in the writings of Moses Mendelssohn from the 1750s, would be suppressed by Kant’s emphasis on the disinterestedness of judgments of beauty,60 but it would be taken up again at the beginning of the twentieth century in Edward Bullough’s famous theory of “psychical distance.”61 On the basis of these premises, D’Alembert rapidly sketches a system of the fine arts. “Painting and sculpture ought to be placed at the head of that knowledge which consists of imitation, because it is in those arts above all that imitation best approximates the objects represented and speaks most directly to the senses,” thus having a strong impact upon both our cognitive and affective powers. Although architecture is an art “born of necessity and perfected by luxury,” D’Alembert treats it as a fine rather than mixed art because what is essential to it is not so much the way in which our basic needs for shelter are fulfilled but rather the way in which these needs are “embellished.” He then argues that the imitation of nature is more restricted and less striking in architecture than in painting and sculpture, because while in those any part of nature can be imitated, in architecture it is only the “symmetrical arrangement that nature observes more or less obviously in each individual thing” that is imitated,62 in other words, to borrow a phrase from our discussion of Batteux, in architecture it is the spirit rather than the letter of nature that is imitated. Someone of a more formalist bent (like André in his passing comments about architecture) might have thought that the fact that architecture imitates the form but not the materials of nature should make it greater than painting or sculpture. Be that as it may, D’Alembert next ranks poetry after painting and sculpture because, since it “imitates merely by means of words disposed according to a harmony agreeable to the ear,” it “speaks to the imagination rather than to the senses,” and for that reason presumably has less immediate emotional impact. Finally, music, although it “speaks simultaneously to the 60 61 62

See Chapter 5. See the discussion of Edward Bullough, Volume 3, Chapter 3. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 38.

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imagination and to the senses,” and for that reason might be expected to have the greatest impact upon us, “holds the last place in the order of imitation – not that its imitation is less perfect in the object which it attempts to represent, but because until now it has been restricted to a smaller number of images.”63 That is, the imitative capacity of music has not been developed in fact although it could be in principle. As we will see later, the development of music in the classical and romantic periods, all of which occurred after D’Alembert wrote, led some nineteenthcentury philosophers to revise this assessment of the emotional impact of music drastically.64 D’Alembert’s system of the fine arts concludes his enumeration of the parts of knowledge, among which he includes the fine arts even though their aim is clearly to arouse pleasure through imitation rather than to yield knowledge per se – in spite of his language, D’Alembert clearly belongs among those eighteenth-century theorists who locate the essence of aesthetic experience in the play of our mental powers rather than in cognition of truth. The theoretical part of the Preliminary Discourse then concludes with what might be thought of as an epistemological assessment of the potential for certitude in the various branches of human knowledge that have been distinguished. According to D’Alembert, the mathematical and natural sciences as well as grammar, logic, and ethics among the liberal arts “have fixed and settled rules which any man can transmit to any other” and by means of which disputes can be conclusively settled. But the “practice of the fine arts,” namely, those of the liberal arts “that undertake the imitation of nature” with “pleasure for their principle object,” have rules only for their “mechanical part” but otherwise consist “principally in an invention which takes its laws almost exclusively from genius.”65 In other words, rules for how to mix pigments, draw perspective, or construct the right number of lines and rhymes in a sonnet can be devised and taught, but there are no rules for creating or judging the kind of impact a work needs to be a work of genius. The creation and judgment of fine art depends upon feeling rather than rules. D’Alembert recognizes two kinds of feeling: the “evidence of the heart” that is “concerned with moral truths” and is called “conscience,” which “differs greatly from the evidence of the mind which concerns speculative truths” but “subjugates us with the same force”; and the feeling that 63 64 65

D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 38. See the discussions of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Volume II. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 43.

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“pertains in particular to the imitation of la belle Nature and to what we call beauties of expression.” This kind of feeling grasps sublime and striking beauties with rapture, subtly discerns hidden beauties, and proscribes those that merely feign their appearance. Often, indeed, it pronounces severe judgments without bothering to describe in detail the motives for them, because these motives depend upon a multitude of ideas that are difficult to expound all at once and still more difficult to transmit to others. It is to this kind of feeling that we owe taste and genius, which are distinguished from one another in that genius is the feeling that creates and tastes the feeling that judges.66

As we shall see, the idea that there is not anything that is in principle inexplicable about why beauty or other aesthetic excellences please us but that we cannot in practice devise rules for creating and judging aesthetic objects because of their richness and complexity would become a central theme for eighteenth-century German aesthetics culminating in Kant. This passage from D’Alembert was no doubt widely known in its own right, although it also no doubt drew on a discussion of genius that was already well developed when D’Alambert wrote. D’Alembert sums up his model of human mental powers by saying that “memory, reason (strictly speaking), and imagination are the three different manners in which our soul operates on the objects of its thoughts.”67 Unlike many others at the time, he does not include memory as part of imagination but takes “imagination in the more noble and precise sense, as the talent of creating by imitating.” He then says that among the three great branches of human knowledge, history “is related to memory,” philosophy “is the fruit of reason,” and the fine arts “are born of imagination”68 (presumably mathematics is a branch of philosophy and the natural sciences must use the techniques of both history and philosophy, since they require both observation and memory as well as mathematics and abstract reasoning). Here he says that the imagination begins by creating objects that “are similar to those which it has known by direct ideas and by sensations,” but that it is free to depart from these models even to the point of creating something “bizarre and unpleasant.” Of course, since the point of the fine arts is to yield pleasure, the imagination must stop short of the bizarre and the unpleasant, and it is for this that substantive rather than merely technical rules for the fine arts would 66 67 68

D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 45. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 50. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 51.

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be necessary. “In the imitation of nature, invention itself is subjected to certain rules,” which form the “philosophical part of the fine arts.” But such rules must remain “imperfect because [they] can be the work only of genius, and genius prefers creation to discussion.”69 The fact that there are at best imperfect rules for the creation and judgment of works of artistic genius does not mean, however, that it is unreasonable to expect a certain degree of consensus in our judgments about art. Exploring both the basis for and the limits of consensus in taste is the task for the entry on that subject, which was begun by Montesquieu (who had been asked to write entries on politics but felt he had said everything he could about that in his monumental Spirit of the Laws [1748] and wanted to try his hand at something new), continued after Montesquieu’s death by Voltaire, and finally supplemented by D’Alembert himself with a lecture that he gave before the French Academy in March 1757. The final article presents first Voltaire’s essay, next Montesquieu’s incomplete work, and finally D’Alembert’s lecture.70 In their separate contributions, the three authors make distinct but compatible points, thereby at least collectively realizing the potential for complexity in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Voltaire’s contribution is the briefest and aimed chiefly to establish a single point: although there is an obvious similarity between the capacity for taste in its ordinary, physical sense and taste in the metaphorical sense in which it “designate[s] the discernment of beauty and flaws in all the arts,”71 namely, that both are capacities to react with pleasure or displeasure to the perception of what is good and bad in objects, there is also a difference between them, namely, that taste in art needs to be molded and educated much more than the natural, sensual taste for food. Not that the latter needs no education at all: both forms of taste are “frequently uncertain and misleading, at times . . . cannot even tell whether something is pleasant or not, and sometimes it needs practice to develop discrimination.”72 Further, while the proverb that “one should 69 70

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D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 51. This material was quickly translated into English, and published as three separate dissertations accompanying the first edition of Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Taste in 1759 (Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste, with Three Dissertations on the Same Subject by Mr. De Voltaire, Mr. D’Alembert, and Mr. De Montesquieu [London: A. Millar and Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1759]) (see this volume, Chapter 3). In a modern translation of selections from the Encyclopédie, it is presented as a single text. Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas Cassirer, trans., Encyclopedia Selections (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), “Taste,” p. 336. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 337.

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not argue about matters of taste” is true in the case of “sensual taste,” because “the revulsion one experiences for a certain food and the preference one feels for another” cannot be altered by any form of reasoning, since a “flaw that is organic” cannot be corrected by an argument, the same is not true in the arts; here,Voltaire supposes, “the arts have genuine beauty” and “often the flaw of the mind that produces wrong taste can be corrected.”73 Voltaire does not consider the possibility that some of our aversions or preferences even for foods might have psychological rather than merely physiological causes, in associations that might be altered, for example, by conditioning or by a psychoanalytic analysis of their origins even if not by a simple argument, nor does he offer any account of what the objective beauties in art are that might explain both why it should take a long process of acculturation to learn to appreciate them and how discussion and argument can be part of this process, although he does give examples that may suffice to make these points obvious: A young man who is sensitive but untutored cannot at first distinguish the parts in a large chorus; in a painting, his eyes do not at first distinguish the shadings, the chiaroscuro, the perspective, the harmony of its colors, and the correctness of the draughtsmanship; yet little by little his ears learn to hear and his eyes to see. The first time he sees a beautiful tragedy he will be moved, but he will be unable to discern either the effect of the unities, or the subtle art by which all unjustified entrances and exits are avoided, or the even greater art by which the unity of interest is created, or any of the other difficulties mastered by the author. Practice and reflection alone will make it possible for him to experience immediate pleasure from elements that formerly he could not distinguish at all.74

But even in the absence of any sophisticated theory, this passage at least suggests two important points: first, aesthetic response may take the form of a feeling with all of its immediacy,75 rather than of a rational judgment, even if it takes practice and experience to discern that to which one so responds; and second, that arguments about taste may not take the form of offering premises and inferring conclusions but rather that of helping another to discern the particular features to which, one expects, he or she will respond with feeling once they are discerned. 73 74 75

Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 339. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 338. The eighteenth-century translation had “delightful sensations” where the modern one has “immediate pleasure” (see Gerard, Essay on Taste, p. 217), but this difference in translation does not affect the point that the response to the discernment of the qualities of a work of art can have the immediacy of feeling even if it takes a protracted process of education to come to be able to discern those qualities.

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Montesquieu’s fragment offers a fuller account of the sources of the pleasures that taste allows us to discern. Like Voltaire, he stresses that taste “is only another word for the gift of subtly and rapidly discovering the degree of pleasure men can derive from any object,” yet holds that this is not incompatible with the need “to educate and mold our taste”; but unlike Voltaire he supposes that in order to learn how to accomplish that education and molding, we must “examine our soul, study it as it appears in its actions and passions, and seek its nature in its pleasures, for this is where it reveals itself most clearly.”76 Two general claims frame the theory of beauty that underlies Montesquieu’s discussion of taste. First, in explicit contrast to Plato, he holds that “there is no longer any meaning to arguments that treat what is good, beautiful, perfect, wise, mad, hard, soft, dry, and humid as if these were real entities,” but instead the “source of what is beautiful, good, pleasing, etc., lies in ourselves,”77 or in the relation of objects to our ways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling. Thus, “if we had been made differently, we would have felt differently; an organ more or less in our machine would have produced a new eloquence, a new poetry; a different make-up of the same organ would have produced still another kind of poetry. . . . In a word, all the laws that derive from the fact that our machine is made in a certain way would change if our machine were made differently.”78 But this of course does not mean that there cannot be commonalities of response and thus standards of taste across the human species as we are in fact, even if arbitrarily, constituted. Second, in a passage the general form if not the precise content of which might have been influenced by André, Montesquieu holds that “In our present mode of existence our soul experiences three kinds of pleasures: some it derives from its own experience, others result from its union with the body, others again take their origin in the habits and prejudices acquired from certain institutions, customs, and conventions.”79 He says that “these different pleasures of our soul constitute the objects of taste,” including “whatever is beautiful, good, pleasant, naïve, delicate, tender, graceful, noble, great, sublime, majestic, endowed with je ne sais quoi, etc.,” so taste is not restricted to the realm of the aesthetic. But within the realm of taste, there is a distinction between “pleasure in seeing something that is useful for us,” which is what we call good, and finding pleasure in seeing something, “without discerning for the 76 77 78 79

Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 341. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 341. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” pp. 342–3. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 341.

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moment any utility in it,” which is what we call beautiful.80 He thus seems committed to a more rigid distinction between utility and beauty than many of the British authors we previously considered, such as Hume and Gerard, who held at least some forms of beauty to depend on utility or at least its appearance, or than Batteux, who recognized that in the mixed arts such as architecture and oratory, utility and the beauty of imitation have to be combined. Montesquieu then characterizes the specifically aesthetic pleasures as those that belong to the soul alone in contrast to those that the soul receives from the senses,81 although his ensuing discussion makes it clear that the pleasures that are the soul’s own arise from its response to materials furnished to it by the senses. What he means by calling these pleasures the soul’s own is that they arise from the soul’s mental activity: Such are the pleasures inspired by curiosity, by ideas concerning the soul’s greatness and perfection, by the perception of its existence in contrast with the awareness of night,82 by the pleasure of comprehending a general idea in its entirety, of seeing a great number of things, etc., of comparing, linking, and separating ideas. These pleasures are in the nature of the soul and independent of the senses, because they are proper to every thinking being.83

Here it might initially seem as if Montesquieu is thinking of aesthetic pleasure as pleasure in the cognition of important truths, but at least the conclusion of the passage suggests that the source of these pleasures is not so much the content that the soul cognizes as it is the activity of the soul in comparing, linking, and separating, in short, in playing with its ideas, unconstrained by concerns about utility. Thus Montesquieu’s position seems quite consistent with the work of Gerard alongside of which the English translation of his work was published, and Montesquieu too, like D’Alembert, seems to be more of a supporter of the novel theory of aesthetic experience as free mental activity than of the traditional theory of it as a kind of cognition. This impression is strengthened when Montesquieu lists the specific pleasures of the soul. The first that he mentions is the pleasure of curiosity, but what he emphasizes is not the pleasure of discovering a new fact but rather that of following ideas along a chain, just as Kames and after 80 81 82

83

Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 341. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” pp. 341–2. Here the eighteenth-century translation has simply “the ideas of its own existence, grandeur, and perfections”; Gerard, Essay on Taste, p. 260. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 342.

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him Alison were to do. He says that “The pleasure given us by one object always inclines us toward another. That is why the soul always seeks new objects and is never at rest,” and thus “one sure means of always pleasing the soul is to present it with many objects or a greater number than it had expected to see.”84 He follows this with a passage that clearly starts from Addison’s description of our pleasure in grandeur almost half a century earlier but adds a special rôle for art to Addison’s analysis: Since we like to see a large number of objects, we would like to expand our vision, to be in several places and cover greater distances. Our soul abhors limits, it would like, so to speak, to widen the sphere of its presence; it derives great pleasure, for instance, from looking into the distance. But how can this be done? In the cities our vision is limited by houses, in the countryside by a thousand obstacles: we can barely see three or four trees. Art comes to our rescue and lifts the veil behind which nature conceals herself. We love art, and we love it more than nature, that is to say, nature which is hidden from our eyes. When, however, we find a beautiful view, when our vision is freed and can see far in the distance meadows, brooks, hills and those arrangements which are, so to speak, created expressly for our pleasure, then our soul experiences far greater delight than in seeing the gardens of Le Nôtre, because nature does not imitate itself, while the creations of art always resemble each other.85

This is an unusually subtle comparison of the beauties of nature and art, for Montesquieu argues that we cannot simply rank one over the other without qualification, but that the strength of the impact of a particular view of nature or work of art depends upon how much freedom for its own activity that particular object offers the soul. Montesquieu continues his psychological analysis of the sources of aesthetic pleasure, like many of his contemporaries, by explaining and illustrating the pleasures derived from order, variety, symmetry, contrasts, and surprise. His discussion of the last is particularly interesting, because he ascribes the “invisible charm” that persons or objects sometimes have, “a natural grace which defies definition and has perforce been called je ne sais quoi,” chiefly to surprise. He illustrates this in a discussion of the male response to female beauty (although in this case, unlike the case of Burke’s account of beauty, there is no reason why his analysis would not work for any heterosexual or homosexual relation): charm affects us more deeply than beauty of any merely formal kind because of its element of surprise. 84 85

Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 345. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 345.

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Our feelings are roused because a woman attracts us more than we had expected at first, and we are pleasantly surprised because she has been able to overcome defects which our eyes reveal to us but which our heart no longer believes to be true. This is the reason why ugly women very often have charm, while it is very rare for beautiful women to have it. . . . Thus it is that beautiful women rarely arouse great passions; these are almost always addressed to women who have charm, that is, who have delightful qualities we did not expect and had no reason to expect.

And this applies not just to our responses to other human beings but to our responses to art as well. Of course, Montesquieu illustrates the point with representational art, but it would seem entirely general: We admire the majesty with which Paul Veronese drapes his figures, but it is the simplicity of Raphael and the purity of Correggio that move us. Paul Veronese promises much and delivers what he promises. Raphael and Corregio promise little and deliver a great deal, and this pleases us even more.86

Now although the power of surprise may be valid for all human beings, what particular things produce the effect of surprise will vary from person to person and from time to time within the life of any particular person; thus if surprise is to play a major rôle in the pleasures of taste, then the principles of taste may be uniform but the particular judgments of taste will vary among persons and even within one person’s experience. We do not know whether this implication would have bothered Montesquieu or not, since his fragment breaks off before he might have raised this issue. He does observe, however, that even when we are just considering the pleasures of the soul, our experience of any particular object is complex or has a multiplicity of causes. For example, we can be pleased with a neatly arranged garden because “(1) our vision is not blocked; (2) each avenue is a whole . . .; (3) we see an arrangement we are not in the habit of seeing; (4) we are appreciative of the trouble that has been taken; (5) we admire with what care a ceaseless battle is waged against nature which attempts to cause total confusion by producing growth which was not required of it.” And he then suggests that we may sometimes be more moved by one of these factors than by another: thus “Sometimes we like the difficulty and sometimes the ease of execution, and just as in a magnificent garden we marvel at the greatness of its owner and at the expense to which he has gone, so we sometimes take pleasure in seeing that someone has had the skill to please us with little 86

Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” pp. 355–6.

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expense and work.” So he recognizes that the aesthetic preferences of an individual can vary from time to time, indeed his own theory of the importance of variety and surprise to aesthetic response would suggest that the aesthetic preferences of an individual must vary from time to time; and from this it would seem to follow that the aesthetic preferences of different individuals must also be expected to vary. Perhaps the mathematician D’Alembert drew back from these implications of Montesquieu’s psychology of aesthetic preferences, for in his addition to the entry on “Taste” he argued that although “Good taste is rare, yet it is not a matter of whim.” He says that “Taste might be defined as the talent of discriminating in works of art between those elements which should please sensitive souls and those which should shock them,” suggesting that only sensitive souls, not everybody, will respond properly to any particular work; yet he insists that taste rests on “incontrovertible principles” and that it “follows necessarily . . . that any work of art can be judged by the application of these principles.”87 However, in spite of his confidence that there can be such rules for taste, he is vague about what they are. He says that “In a poem, for example, the author must sometimes speak to the imagination, sometimes to feeling, sometimes to reason, yet he must always speak to the organ of hearing,” and infers from this that the ear imposes specific rules on how a poem can sound in spite of whatever else it might be attempting to do.88 However, he also holds that “a philosophical man of letters” who “grants the ear all its rights . . . does not believe that the need to satisfy the organ dispenses us from the more important obligation to think,”89 and thus from the need to satisfy reason. He goes on to say that such a person, “Precisely because he is appreciative of the beauty of an image, . . . desires only images that are new and striking; yet above all he prefers beautiful feelings, especially those which have the advantage of expressing truths useful to mankind in a noble and moving manner.”90 Thus D’Alembert attempts to balance Montesquieu’s emphasis on the free play of the mind in aesthetic experience, expressed above all in his emphasis on surprise and the je ne sais quoi, by placing weight on a more traditional conception of the value of truth in aesthetic experience. In the same way he attempts to balance genius’s “wish to be left free of all constraint at the moment of creation” with the insistence “that there is no danger that discussion and analysis will dull feeling or cool 87 88 89 90

Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 364. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 365. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” pp. 366–7. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 367.

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the ardor of genius in men who possess these precious gifts of nature.” On his account, reason must review the work of genius, although true genius will survive the scrutiny of reason: “Thus reason gives the creating genius entire freedom and permits it to exhaust its strength until it is in need of rest. . . . At that point reason reviews the creations of genius with severity, preserves whatever is an effect of true enthusiasm, condemns whatever is the work of impulsiveness, and in this way helps the flowering of a masterpiece.”91 The Encyclopédie’s multiauthored entry on “Taste” thus becomes a crossroads where what are sometimes alternative ideas intersect: aesthetic pleasure comes from both truth and play, taste has universal principles but room for particular sensitivities, and artistic genius requires both the inspiration of genius and the control of reason. The entry does not stress the affective dimension of aesthetic experience as much as we might have expected from its authors as heirs to Du Bos. However, this dimension is stressed by other contributors, and above all by Diderot. So let us continue our study of eighteenth-century French aesthetics by examining a few other contributions to the Encyclopédie, in particular the entries on painting, sculpture, and the general entry on beauty. The entry on painting was written by Louis de Jaucourt (1704–1779), who, though trained as a doctor, was the most prolific contributor to the Encyclopédie, supplying even more articles than Diderot himself, and on at least as wide a range of topics. The entry on painting is not particularly penetrating, but it is nevertheless revealing in its attempt to strike a balance between the ideas that painting exists simply to entertain and that it is an important means for moral development. Jaucourt begins by defining painting as a form of imitation: it is “An art which, through the use of line and color, depicts on a smooth and even surface all visible objects.”92 He then states that “painting should be put among the purely agreeable things, since this art bears no relation whatever to the things called the necessities of life and exists entirely for the pleasures of the eye and the mind.”93 He says that poetry too “seemingly has only pleasure as its goal.” And while “virtue has borrowed the charm of the one as well as the other in order to make a greater impression on man,” this is apparently secondary to the sheer possibility of pleasure in these arts: they “did not arise from any need; necessity is not their origin.” Jaucourt then suggests 91 92 93

Hoyt and Cassirer, “Taste,” p. 371. Hoyt and Cassirer, Encyclopedia Selections, “Painting,” p. 278. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Painting,” p. 279.

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the rather complex position that although the impact of painting can be even more immediate and moving than that of poetry, because while poetry “speaks directly to the spirit,” “painting captures the soul through the senses and this is perhaps the surest way,”94 and “the sense of sight” in particular “usually has greater influence on the soul than the other senses,”95 at the same time painting is capable of making us “look with pleasure” at objects such as “monsters, men dead or dying,” and the like, which we would ordinarily “see only with horror.”96 He is not completely clear about the means by which painting does this: he says that the better such objects are imitated, “the more avidly we gaze upon them,”97 which might suggest that the source of our pleasure is our recognition of the quality of the imitation in contrast to the content that is imitated; but he also says that “This art beguiles our eyes by the magic that makes us enjoy objects too far removed or no longer in existence,”98 which suggests that painting pleases us not so much by the skill of imitation itself but by the transformation of unpleasant emotions into pleasant ones through the phenomenon of psychological distance which imitation makes possible. However, he does not formulate the idea of psychological distance as clearly as D’Alembert did in the Preliminary Discourse. Finally, Jaucourt does not pause to ponder whether there is any tension between the idea of painting as an immediate source of sensuous pleasure that may work by distancing us from unpleasant emotions and the idea that it can stir our deepest emotions. He observes that people in positions of power “have always used paintings and statues in order better to inspire in their subjects the sentiments they wanted them to have, either in religion or in politics.” The emotional impact of painting can go either way: on the one hand, according to St. Gregory of Nazianius, a courtesan was made to “commune with herself” and presumably reform herself by gazing on the portrait of a philosopher; on the other hand, “Other painters are no less capable of corrupting the heart and inflaming unfortunate passions by the alluring spectacles they present.”99 Jaucourt does not ask how an art that is originally a mere entertainment for the senses can acquire such power, nor does he consider why it is that some painting can effectively manipulate people while other painting moves them to self94 95 96 97 98 99

Hoyt and Cassirer, “Painting,” p. 279. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Painting,” p. 281. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Painting,” p. 280. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Painting,” p. 280. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Painting,” p. 279. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Painting,” pp. 280–1.

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examination, presumably an expression of their own freedom, although his essay could suggest all these questions. Thus while Jaucourt recognizes both the cognitive and emotional dimensions of aesthetic experience, he hardly analyzes either alone or their relation to one another. The entry on sculpture was written by the sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet (1716–1791) and is both a more thoughtful and a more passionate piece than Jaucourt’s essay on painting – as might be expected from a man who committed twelve years of his life to a single sculpture, a monumental equestrian sculpture of Peter the Great in St. Petersburg. Like Jaucourt, Falconet begins by defining his art too as a form of imitation: “Sculpture is defined as the art which, through the use of design and solid materials, imitates with the chisel the palpable objects of nature.” But Falconet stresses from the outset the power of sculpture to move our moral sentiments rather than our pleasure in its formal aspects: Sculpture, like history, is one of the most enduring repositories of men’s virtues and weaknesses. . . . This art, by displaying deified vices, makes the horrors transmitted by history even more striking; on the other hand, the precious features of those rare human beings whose lives should have lasted as long as their statues, incite us to a noble emulation of the virtues which have thus been preserved from oblivion.100

The other side of sculpture, “when it serves simply to decorate or embellish,” is “less useful” and should always be subordinated to sculpture’s “worthiest goal” of “perpetuat[ing] the memory of famous men and . . . provid[ing] models of virtue which are all the more effective because these men can no longer be the objects of envy.” But Falconet does stress that in order to achieve this worthy goal, sculpture must reach the emotions through the senses rather than through the formal fact of imitation as such, which might be thought to appeal to reason: “cold resemblance” or “verisimilitude, even though perfectly rendered,” will not move the soul of the spectator; “It is living, vivid, passionate nature that the sculptor must express through marble, bronze, stone, etc.”101 Thus, when he comes to describe what a sculptor needs for success, he accompanies study, practice, observation, and so on with “a superior gift . . . so essential and so rare,” namely, “feeling.” “It is feeling which instills life. If all the artist’s studies constitute the foundations of his art, feeling is its soul.” And in a very brief remark, Falconet stakes out a distinctive position in the eighteenth-century debate about the universality of taste 100 101

Hoyt and Cassirer, Encyclopedia Selections, “Sculpture,” p. 311. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Sculpture,” p. 312.

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by suggesting that it is the commonality of feeling or emotion rather than any more purely cognitive capacity that is the foundation of shared taste: “Acquired knowledge is an individual thing; feeling belongs to all men; it is universal in that all men can judge the works permeated by feeling.”102 Thus far, Falconet’s thought is firmly in the tradition of Du Bos, although he has clearly been influenced by Batteux in his view of the emotional impact of imitations. He also follows in the footsteps of Batteux when he asserts that although the ultimate goal of sculpture is the depiction of real exemplars of human virtue, and at that level it is an art of imitation, at a more concrete level it works by perfecting rather than simply copying what is found by nature, or by assembling through the imitation of materials from nature a degree of perfection that may not exist in nature: The noblest and most sublime creations of a sculptor should be merely the expression of the possible relationships in nature, their effects, their fortuitous interplay. This means that the beautiful, even the ideal in sculpture as in painting, should be an epitome of the real beauty of nature. There is an absolute beauty, but it is scattered throughout the universe. To feel, to assemble, to bring together, to select, even to imagine these composite parts of beauty . . . is to express through art the ideal of beauty that has its origin in nature.103

This view also leads Falconet to take a nuanced stance toward the famous quarrel between the ancients and moderns that had been a central form of French thought about the arts since the end of the seventeenth century: while on the one hand a key element of the artist’s ability to concentrate and perfect the beauties scattered throughout nature is his ability to focus and simplify, and “This simplicity created the masterpieces of Greece, as if they were meant to become the eternal models for artists,”104 on the other hand the works of the ancients like any others, are “works of the human hand, and thus subject to human frailty”; so the successful artist cannot indiscriminately copy the works of the ancients, but “must be guided by a clear, informed, unbiased understanding so as to distinguish between the perfections and the imperfections of the ancients,”105 and use the former but not the latter in his own, individualized idealization of nature. 102 103 104 105

Hoyt and Cassirer, “Sculpture,” p. 321. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Sculpture,” p. 313. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Sculpture,” p. 313. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Sculpture,” p. 320.

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As we have seen beginning with Du Bos, the contrast between emotional impact of painting and poetry was a common topic for eighteenthcentury writers. Falconet departs from this standard topic by offering a detailed comparison of painting and sculpture. While both can exploit the emotional immediacy of the sense of sight, sculpture, which typically depicts a single figure or at most a group of figures, but does not set its figures in landscapes, interiors, and so on, has to achieve all its emotional effects through the figure alone and cannot rely upon the charms of color or upon the many associations that the imagery that is possible in painting allows. For this reason, Falconet suggests that “beauty” might not even be the right term to convey the special quality of successful sculpture; rather, because of the economy and concentration of means that it can use, sculpture must be sublime: “This is the way by which the sculptor will approach his goal and move the soul to the extent to which it can be moved.”106 This connection of the sublime to economy and concentration is as distinctive a contribution to the theory of the sublime as is Falconet’s location of the standard of taste in the commonality of human emotion. The article on beauty in the Encyclopédie was written by Diderot himself, and it seems to expound a formalist theory of beauty far removed from the emotional account of sculpture offered by Falconet. As we will see, however, the formalist approach of Diderot’s article on beauty is belief by his extensive practice as a critic of many forms of art, in which he amply demonstrates his recognition of the emotional impact of art.

4. Diderot Diderot, the son of a prosperous cutler from Langres, in Champagne, was made an abbé, or intended priest, at fourteen, and sent to Paris at sixteen to study for that life. It is not clear whether he was enrolled at the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand (where Pére André had studied) or the Jansenist Collège d’Harcourt (his master’s degree from the University of Paris in 1732 is compatible with either), but which one he attended does not make much difference: in the end, the materialism of Epicurus and Lucretius and of such contemporaries as the Baron D’Holbach was a much greater influence on him than Christianity was – his great work D’Alembert’s Dream (written around 1769, but withheld from publication during Diderot’s lifetime because of D’Alembert’s distress with the views 106

Hoyt and Cassirer, “Sculpture,” p. 314.

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imputed to him in it) is one of the great eighteenth-century statements of a thoroughly naturalistic worldview, in which all aspects of life, including the most vaunted capacities of human beings, are described as consequences of matter in motion. Diderot clearly gave up any thoughts of the priesthood during his education and spent several years reading law after receiving his degree. But he early decided to make a career as a man of letters, to the distress of his father, who cut off his funds. Diderot then earned a hand-to-mouth existence for years as a tutor, freelance writer, and translator. Unlike many Frenchmen, he mastered English, and one of his most important translations was of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit (1745). He then worked for three years on the translation of Robert James’s three-volume Medicinal Dictionary, which no doubt prepared him for his position as co-editor, and after the withdrawal of D’Alembert, sole editor of the Encyclopédie, which would be the great work of his middle life and finally bring him some financial security. Diderot wrote on every conceivable subject, in every format, and in every venue: Some of his works were commercially published, some were privately circulated – his pioneering Salons, his reports on the biannual painting exhibitions at the Royal Academy appeared in the Correspondance littéraire, a newsletter edited by Melchior Grimm that was sent in handwritten copies to a dozen European princes and nobles to keep them informed of the latest Parisian art – and many of his most famous works were published only posthumously, including not only D’Alembert’s Dream but also the dialogue Rameau’s Nephew and the Tristram Shandy-like novel Jacques the Fatalist. Here we can touch upon a tiny fragment of Diderot’s work.107 107

Standard sources for Diderot’s life and work are Lester G. Crocker, Diderot: The Embattled Philosopher (New York: Free Press, 1966), and Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). As previously mentioned, most of the work on the aesthetics of the Encyclopedists is dedicated to Diderot; e.g., Saint Girons devotes a lengthy section to the Encyclopedists, mostly to Diderot but with briefer discussions of D’Alembert and Turgot as well; see Esthétiques du XVIIIe siecle, pp. 120–99; Becq, Genèse de l’esthétique française moderne, Livre III, passim; and Moshe Barasch, Modern Theories of Art I: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 122–32. Two monographs on Diderot’s aesthetics are Yvon Belaval, L’Esthétique sans paradoxe de Diderot (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), and Lester G. Crocker, Two Diderot Studies: Ethics and Esthetics, The Johns Hopkins Studies in Romance Literatures and Languages, Extra volume 27 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1952). Diderot’s views about painting are discussed throughout Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

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We begin with the entry on beauty, which appeared in the second volume of the Encyclopédie in 1752. Here Diderot argues for a strongly formalistic conception of beauty that is based on the assumption that we take pleasure in the activity of our cognitive faculties for its own sake. He begins by describing the human capacities of feeling and thought as originally engaged in the activities of examining, comparing, combining, and relating its perceptions in order to learn how to fulfill our natural needs.108 However, we also discover that we can enjoy the contemplation of “order, relation, arrangement, symmetry, propriety, impropriety, etc.” without direct regard to our material needs,109 and this is the origin of our sense of beauty. “I therefore term ‘beautiful,’” Diderot writes, “independently of my existence, everything that contains the power of awakening the notion of relation in my mind; and I term ‘beautiful’ in direct relation to myself everything that does awaken that notion.”110 By means of the contrast between what is beautiful independently of myself and what is beautiful in direct relation to myself Diderot wants to distinguish between the real existence of relations in a beautiful object and an individual’s actual perception of and response to those relations; but although an object can be really beautiful even if particular individuals fail to recognize and respond to it, it is in virtue of the pleasure that the perception of relations would have in “hypothetical beings with bodies and mind like ours” that such relations are properly called beautiful.111 In other words, beauty lies not merely in relations within objects but in the possibility of pleasure in those relations in the right kind of observer. Diderot further observes that When I say “everything that does awaken in us the notion of relations,” I do not mean that in order to call a thing “beautiful” it is necessary to evaluate exactly what relations are prevailing within it; I do not require that a person looking at a piece of architecture should be able to state definitely things that the architect himself may be ignorant of, that such and such a part is to another as such and such a number is to another number. . . . It is enough for him to perceive that the various parts of the building or the sounds of [a] piece of music are in fact related, either among themselves or 108

109 110 111

“On the Origin and Nature of the Beautiful,” in Diderot’s Selected Writings, ed. Lester G. Crocker, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 51. A new selection of Diderot’s writings on aesthetics, not available to me when I composed this chapter, is Denis Diderot, On Art and Artists: An Anthology of Diderot’s Aesthetic Thought, ed. Jean Szenec, trans. John S.D. Glaus (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011). Diderot, “On the Origin and Nature of the Beautiful,” p. 53. Diderot, “On the Origin and Nature of the Beautiful,” p. 54. Diderot, “On the Origin and Nature of the Beautiful,” p. 54.

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with other objects. It is the indefiniteness of these relations, the ease with which we grasp them, and the pleasure that accompanies their perception that have made us imagine that the beautiful was rather a matter of feeling than of reason.112

Our perception of the beautiful involves our cognitive capacities to detect order, symmetry, and the like, but it amounts more to a sense than to knowledge of such relations. For this reason, as well as because Diderot locates our pleasure in beauty in a sense of such relations that goes beyond anything that is needed to satisfy our concrete material needs, we can say that his theory is one in which our pleasure in beauty arises from the exercise of our cognitive capacities without reference to either cognitive or practical utility. In other words, his theory is a form of the new idea that the play of our mental powers is the source of aesthetic experience, much like that of Gerard, although with the properties of objects that can trigger such play more uniformly subsumed under the rubric of “relations” than is the case with Gerard or other contemporaries. Diderot also argues that although there is no “absolute beauty” in the sense of beauty that would exist without relation to any perceivers at all, so that all beauty is relative in that general sense, beauty can be divided into beauty that is “real” and beauty that is “relative” in another sense:113 “real” beauty is what we find in an object when we consider it by itself or in isolation from others, because we respond to the order, arrangement, and symmetry of its parts, while “relative” beauty is what we ascribe to things of a certain kind when “among other things of their own kind” they “awaken in me the strongest ideas of relation and the largest number of a certain sort of relations.”114 (Following Hutcheson, this could have been called “comparative” beauty.) Either way, however, it is just the perception of formal relations among the parts of objects, whether considered in isolation or in comparison to similar relations in other objects, that arouse our pleasure. Thus, although like Crousaz and André before him Diderot recognizes a variety of specific types of beauty – Either we consider the relations apparent in men’s actions, and we have moral beauty; or in works of literature, and we have literary beauty; or in music compositions, and we have musical beauty; or in the works of nature, and we have natural beauty; or in the mechanical creations of man, and we have the

112 113 114

Diderot, “On the Origin and Nature of the Beautiful,” pp. 54–5. Diderot, “On the Origin and Nature of the Beautiful,” p. 54. Diderot, “On the Origin and Nature of the Beautiful,” pp. 55–6.

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beauty of artifice; or in the likenesses provided by works of art or of nature, and we have imitative beauty115 –

in every case what we respond to is relations that engage our cognitive powers without yielding any explicit cognition. This is so even in the case of moral beauty, where what interests us is apparently only the relations among the various features of some moral situation or conduct, and not, so to speak, the morality of the conduct itself. This seems to remain true even in the case of the artistic depiction of a situation with moral significance. Diderot illustrates his theory with one example, “the sublime phrase” “Qu’il mourût” (“That he would die”) from Corneille’s play Horace. On Diderot’s analysis, someone who heard just that phrase, since he cannot place it in any context, indeed cannot even “tell whether it is a complete sentence or merely a fragment of one,” will not find it either beautiful or ugly. But if I tell him that it is the reply of a man who has been consulted about what another man should do in combat, then he will begin to apprehend a kind of courage in the speaker. . . . If I add that this combat involves a nation’s honor, that the combatant is the son of the person being questioned, that he is his last remaining son, that the young man was confronting three foes who had already taken the lives of his two brothers, that the old man is talking to his daughter, and that he is a Roman, then the reply “Qu’il mourût,” at first neither beautiful nor ugly, acquires beauty in proportion as I develop its relation to the circumstances and eventually becomes sublime.116

On Diderot’s theory, however, what makes the object beautiful or sublime is not the moral force of the old Roman’s words, but the nest of relations in which his words stand and to which we respond with the pleasurable engagement of our cognitive powers. There seems to be no place for a direct engagement of our moral emotions in this picture. However, the apparent formalism of Diderot’s pure play theory of the beautiful is belied by his critical practice, in which he certainly emphasizes that successful art moves our emotions as well as our cognitive powers. Thus, like D’Alembert, Diderot really finds beauty and even sublimity in that which stimulates the free activity of both our cognitive and our moral powers. 115 116

Diderot, “On the Origin and Nature of the Beautiful,” p. 55. Diderot, “On the Origin and Nature of the Beautiful,” p. 57. Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting The Oath of the Horatians, made in the year of Diderot’s death (1784), illustrates the earlier moment in the same story when the three sons of Horace pledge to their father that they will defend Rome to their death.

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Indeed, in Diderot’s fuller conception of the sources of aesthetic pleasure, beauty can be connected to our practical needs on the one side as well as to our morally significant emotions on the other. Both of these connections figure in Diderot’s thought about architecture, which he considers in several places. One source is a letter to his friend Sophie Volland written in 1762, where he reports a conversation about the relation between taste and instinct that he had recently had. He illustrates his position on this general issue, to which we shall return shortly, with some comments on Michelangelo’s design for the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome. This leads him to the question, “why is it that what is useful in reality is also what we consider beautiful in works of art and imitations of nature?” which in turn leads him to consider the relations between beauty and utility. He takes it as obvious that “we invariably give our approval to usefulness, or more generally to goodness.” But there are three possibilities, he says: a work can be useful or good without that being evident in its appearance, in which “case the work is good, but not beautiful”; or “there can be an appearance of goodness, but not the reality,” in which case the work is only “superficially good” and only “superficially beautiful”; or there can be “both the appearance and the reality of goodness,” in which case the work is “truly good and beautiful.” He goes on to say “We should have to imagine ourselves in another world, where all the laws of nature were different, for something that both is good and appears good not to be beautiful.”117 This appeal to laws of nature suggests that it is a fact about human nature that we can take pleasure in both the fact of the utility of an object and in a harmony between its appearance and its utility, and more pleasure in an object whose appearance is harmonious with its utility than in an object with utility alone. Further, the ease with which Diderot moves between utility and goodness in this discussion suggests that our judgments about the utility of an object are themselves moral as well as merely practical or prudential, and thus that we can take pleasure in harmony between the response of our cognitive powers to an object and the response of our moral powers, or, since Diderot shares his approach to morality with the British moral sense theorists, with the engagement of our moral emotions. He concludes this letter with a contrast between European architecture and Turkish architecture, saying that in Europe “we see large doors, large windows, and everything open,” while “If you go to Constantinople, you will see thick, high walls, 117

Denis Diderot, Diderot’s Letters to Sophie Volland, translated by Peter France (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 2 September 1762, pp. 113–14.

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flattened arches, small doors, and small windows.” This, he claims, is because in Europe “there are no slaves,” while in Constantinople “It is as if a building were beautiful in proportion to its resemblance to a prison. And indeed prison is the right word for these houses where one half of the human race keeps the other half” – he means, of course, the women – “shut up.” And then, “To decide which form of architecture is more beautiful, we shall have to decide between two ways of life.”118 The implication is that there is in fact no purely aesthetic response to the form of an object and no purely moral response to what it reveals about human moral sentiments and conduct; rather, our overall pleasure or displeasure in an object involves its effect upon both our cognitive and our moral powers. This view can be reconciled with the formalism of Diderot’s Encyclopédie article on beauty only if the theory of beauty as based in relations there is taken to include substantive practical and moral relations that are not regarded merely as instances of some more abstract relations, such as geometrical relations, that appeal to our purely cognitive powers. Diderot also discusses architecture in the “Notes on Painting” that he added to the Salon of 1765 in Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire. There he says, approximating Vitruvius’s famous triad of order, propriety, and economy,119 that “The whole of this art is contained in these three words: solidity or security, decorum, and symmetry.”120 This can be taken to say that architecture pleases by satisfying our practical concerns (“solidity or security”), arousing favorable moral sentiments in us (“decorum”), and stimulating the activity of our cognitive powers (“symmetry”), but that it pleases most when there is harmony among these three kinds of responses in ourselves. As Diderot says a few pages later, “everything in nature” is “interconnected,” and we always care in a painting, whether it is of “the shop of a middle-class woman” or “the assembly of the gods,” that “it’s all of a piece.”121 This is because since nature is always interconnected and of a piece, and we are part of nature, it will be maximally gratifying to us when our own responses to an object can also be interconnected and all of a piece.

118 119

120

121

Diderot, Letters to Sophie Volland, 2 September 1762, p. 115. Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan, ed. Herbert Langford Warren (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), Chapter II, p. 13. Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art I: The Salon of 1765 and Notes on Painting, trans. Thomas Goodman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 234. Diderot, on Art I, “Notes on Painting,” pp. 236–7.

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In much of his writing on literature and painting, Diderot stresses almost exclusively the emotional impact of good art. In another letter to Sophie Volland, he writes about a tragedy by Voltaire that he had just seen that the first and second acts left him cold, but that “The third is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. It is a series of great emotional tableaux. There is one particular scene without words which wrings the spectator’s heart.”122 Here he equates beauty with the power of a work to move our emotions. In an essay “On Dramatic Poetry” that he had written two years earlier, in 1758, he suggests a theory of the emotional impact of art that is reminiscent of Du Bos’s: The poet, the novelist, and the actor make their way into our hearts by indirect means. They touch our souls all the more strongly and the more surely because we are relaxed, because we offer ourselves to the blow. The sufferings with which they move me are imaginary, I agree, but they move me all the same. Every line rouses an impulse of concern in me for the misfortunes of virtue and moves me to expend my tears on them. What could be more pernicious than an art that instilled in me a feeling of complicity with an evil man? But, by the same token, what art could be more precious than the one that imperceptibly makes me feel concern for the fate of a good man, that draws me out of the quiet and comfortable situation I myself enjoy in order to accompany him?123

We shall soon see how Jean-Jacques Rousseau responded to this sort of confidence that feelings of empathy for fictional characters are themselves of positive moral value and can consider the plausibility of the view of so many writers from Du Bos to Diderot that such feelings of empathy are morally valuable. For the moment the point is only that Diderot does continue the thought of Du Bos that the value of art does not consist in teaching us any abstract moral truths but in stimulating the play of our moral emotions. In Diderot’s writing on painting, it sometimes seems as if there too he finds aesthetic value solely in the arousal of emotions. Thus at one point in the “Notes on Painting,” he says that “One should inscribe over the door of one’s studio: Here the unfortunate will find eyes that will weep for them. To make virtue attractive, vice odious, and ridicule effective: such is the project every upstanding man who takes up the pen, the brush, or the chisel should make his own.”124 However, this probably simplifies his view, which is not so much that moving our emotions should be the sole 122 123 124

Diderot, Letters to Sophie Volland, 5 September 1760, p. 53. Diderot’s Selected Writings, “On Dramatic Poetry,” p. 104. Diderot, “Notes on Painting,” p. 225.

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aim of art, but that it is the primary aim of art, to which the interest of our cognitive powers in formal properties such as harmony should be subordinated even though that is also a genuine source of pleasure. Thus, a few pages earlier he had written: Let’s return to organization, to the arrangement of the figures [in a painting]. A little can, and should, be sacrificed to such technical considerations. How much? I have no idea. But I know I don’t want it to compromise expression or the impact of the subject. First touch me, astonish me, tear me to pieces, make me shudder, weep, and tremble, make me angry; then soothe my eyes, if you can.125

In fact, even this suggestion that the pleasure that comes from soothing our eyes is independent of the pleasure of having our emotions moved and needs to be subordinated to the latter fails to reflect the true character of Diderot’s thought about painting. A few pages later he quotes the lines from Horace, “Less vividly is the mind stirred by what finds entrance through the ears than by what is brought before the trusty eyes, and what the spectator can see for himself,”126 and his real argument is that painting, and by implication the other arts, should use all the means afforded by their particular media and by our sensory modalities to move our emotions through the full range of their aesthetic properties, formal and less formal. Thus, he earlier comments that “Drawing gives a being form; color gives it life. It is the divine breath that animates it.”127 This remark, reminiscent of André’s approach to geometrical form as “essential” beauty and color in painting as its “natural” beauty, suggests that drawing and color, both enjoyable in themselves, are even more enjoyable when together they give us a feeling of life, perhaps the basis of all of our more particular emotions. Some pages later, he suggests that even the most formal properties of a work of art are enjoyed not so much for their own sake but rather because it is through them that the idea that moves our emotions is conveyed: “If the scene is unified, clear, simple, and coherent, I can absorb it in the blink of an eye; but this is not sufficient. It must also be various; and it will be, if the artist is a rigorous observer of nature.”128 That the successful artist must stimulate both our cognitive powers and our emotions, but best of all accomplish the latter through the former, is 125 126 127 128

Diderot, “Notes on Painting,” p. 222. Diderot, “Notes on Painting,” p. 225. Diderot, “Notes on Painting,” p. 196. Diderot, “Notes on Painting,” p. 221.

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also implicit in this comment about expression, by which Diderot means the depiction of emotion in a work of art that can in turn arouse emotion in its audience: It’s been claimed that organization is inseparable from expression. It seems to me that there can be organization without expression, and even that nothing is more commonplace. As for expression without organization, this strikes me as much rarer, especially when I consider that the slightest superfluous accessory hinders expression. . . . Expression requires a strong imagination, a burning ardor, the art of stirring up phantoms, of bringing them to life. . . . ; organization, in poetry as in painting, presupposes a certain temperamental blend of judgment and verve, of enthusiasm and wisdom, of drunkenness and cold calculation such as rarely occurs in nature. Without this meticulous balance, a prevalence of enthusiasm will make the artist either extravagant or cold.129

The artist must stimulate and satisfy both our understanding and our emotions, and thus offer both organization and expression. Our interest in the former has to be constrained by our interest in the latter, but the latter also has to be achieved through the former. How does the artist come to do this, and how does the audience come to recognize when the artist has done it well? Diderot stresses that taste, whether in the artist or the audience, is not capricious but is grounded in the natural responses of human beings: If taste is capricious, if there are no rules determining beauty, then what is it that prompts these delicious feelings that arise so suddenly, so involuntarily, so tumultuously in the depths of our souls, dilating or constricting them, forcing our eyes to shed tears of joy, pain, and admiration, whether in response to some grand physical phenomenon or to an account of some great moral action?. . . . You’ll never convince my heart that it’s mistaken in skipping a beat, nor my entrails that they’re wrong to contract from profound emotion.130

Indeed, Diderot’s view is not merely that aesthetic responses are as natural as physiological responses of the heart or entrails; given his materialism, in the last analysis our intellectual and emotional responses to art are also physiological responses. So just as human physiological responses are fairly uniform (unless disrupted by illness or injury), so are human aesthetic responses (unless distorted by education and environment). The successful artist can thus rely upon the laws of human intellectual

129 130

Diderot, “Notes on Painting,” p. 226. Diderot, “Notes on Painting,” pp. 237–8.

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and emotional response just as the good physician can rely upon the laws of human physiology. But how does the artist or the critic know these laws? Diderot emphatically denies that there is any basis for such knowledge other than experience. He reports to Sophie Volland another conversation among some of their friends, who “had been searching for the reason why sensitive souls are so quickly, strongly, and agreeably affected by stories of noble actions.” One of them asserted that “it was because of a sixth sense which Nature gave us to judge the good and the beautiful.” Diderot “replied that this sixth sense, which a few metaphysicians have brought into fashion in England” – he means Shaftesbury and Hutcheson – “is a figment of the imagination; that all our ideas come from experience.”131 Here he goes on to describe how our moral sensibilities, and thus our capacity to depict and/or to respond to expression in art, are developed through normal experience. In the earlier letter to Sophie Volland previously mentioned, as well as in a passage in the discussion of taste in the “Notes on Painting,” he makes the same point in explaining how Michelangelo came to combine utility and beauty perfectly in the dome of St. Peter’s. The topic of that letter passage, recall, was instinct. Diderot argues that “it is nothing but the result of innumerable minute experiences which begin on the day we first see the light and continue until the day when, secretly influenced by this long training which we no longer remember, we pronounce such and such a thing to be good or evil, beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant, without having any clear idea of the reasons for our favorable or unfavorable judgment.”132 How did Michelangelo, seeking to make the most beautiful dome possible, give it the curvature that a great mathematician subsequently discovered to be precisely the curve of greatest resistance? What I say is that when Michelangelo was an urchin at school, he played with his schoolmates, and in wrestling and pushing with his shoulders, he soon felt what was the best way of leaning so as to resist his opponent’s force most effectively; that in the course of living he was bound to have been obliged hundred of times to prop up leaning objects and once again to find the most effective angle . . . and that this was how he had learnt how to construct the dome of St. Peter’s according to the curve of greatest resistance.133 131 132 133

Diderot, Letters to Sophie Volland, 5 October 1767, p. 167. Diderot, Letters to Sophie Volland, 2 September 1762, p. 112. Diderot, Letters to Sophie Volland, p. 113.

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Of course, there is a difference between Michelangelo and the rest of us, as indeed there is a difference between the great mathematician and most of the rest of us: Michelangelo clearly learned better from experience than most of us ever do, just as the mathematician no doubt has a greater gift for calculating curves than most of the rest of us do. But there is nothing unnatural about this; some great athletes naturally have better eyesight or more efficient red blood cells than the rest of us. But all such gifts are natural, and then they are developed, whether for sport, for mathematics, for the creation of art, or even just for the deepest enjoyment of art, by natural means. Thus in Diderot’s view there is nothing unnatural in either the creation or the appreciation of art. Having begun with what seems to be a pure play theory of aesthetic response, leading to an exclusively formalist account of beauty, Diderot the practicing critic ended up by stressing the emotional impact of art above all, though he recognized that the formal beauty of a work can contribute to its emotional impact and formal failings detract from such impact. Diderot is in turn confident in the moral value of having our empathetic feelings aroused by art. Through the detour of formalism Diderot thus arrives at a traditional and common view of the value of aesthetic experience, although he never falls back into the most traditional view that art is a vehicle of truth. One of Diderot’s contemporaries took exception to this commonplace view, namely, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So the present chapter concludes with a look at Rousseau’s views about art.

5. Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), unquestionably the most widely read and influential of eighteenth-century French writers, had ambivalent relations with the Encyclopedists, as indeed he did with everyone he encountered in his complicated life. The son of a Genevan watchmaker who educated him on a mix of sentimental novels and Plutarch’s Lives, Rousseau’s own life story, as recounted in his Confessions (1770, published posthumously), was more like one of the former than the latter.134 After 134

For some brief accounts of Rousseau’s life and thought, see Robert Wokler, Rousseau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Nicholas Dent, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2005). For a detailed biography, see the three volumes by Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754–1762 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Rousseau’s own account of his life is the Confession and Correspondence, including the Letters to Malesherbes, trans.

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unsuccessful apprenticeships with an engraver and a notary, he struck out on his own at sixteen, spending years under the patronage of older women in France and Italy, converting from Calvinism to Catholicism and back again, and somehow acquiring a considerable education along the way. Through much of the 1740s, with positions as a tutor or secretary, he attempted to make his name in music, publishing a Project for a New Musical Notation (1742), writing the articles on musical subjects for the Encyclopédie, which he would later include in his own Dictionary of Music (1767), and composing a number of operas that finally culminated in a success with the “Village Soothsayer” in 1752. Rousseau’s work on music, which would also result in his Essay on the Origin of Languages (1753, published posthumously), was the high point of his relations with D’Alembert and Diderot. But Rousseau also argued that the development of the arts and sciences was a sign of degeneracy rather than progress and thus controverted a fundamental tenet of the Enlightenment, in his prize-winning but controversial Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1751), and his break with the encyclopedists became irremediable with his Letter to D’Alembert on the Theater (1758), in which he utterly rejected the standard Enlightenment view about the moral benefits of art. The works of Rousseau which remain most influential are his political writings, especially The Social Contract (1762), and his novelistic treatise on education, Émile (also 1762), which contains Rousseau’s central philosophical statement, “The Creed of the Savoyard Vicar.” After a comment on Émile, our discussion here focuses on the views about music and language Rousseau expressed in the Essay on the Origin of Languages and on his attack upon the arts in the first Discourse and the Letter to D’Alembert.135

135

Christopher Kelly, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, volume 5 (Hanover, N.H: University Press of New England, 1995). Much of the vast literature on Rousseau is focused on his contribution to political philosophy in The Social Contract. Some works that consider his contributions to aesthetics are Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), ch. 2, pp. 83–128; James F. Hamilton, Rousseau’s Theory of Literature: The Poetics of Nature (York, S.C.: French Literature Publications, 1979); Robert Wokler, Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language: An Historical Interpretation of His Early Writings (New York: Garland, 1987); Michael O’Dea, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Music, Illusion, and Desire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Christopher Kelly, “Rousseau and the Case against (and for) the Arts,” in Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov, editors, The Legacy of Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 20–42; C.N. Dugan and Tracy B. Strong, “Music, Politics, Theater, and Representation in Rousseau,” in Patrick Riley, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 329–64; and Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One’s Life to the Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), especially chs. 2 and 3, pp. 29–81.

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Underlying all of Rousseau’s thought about the arts is a rejection of the idea that aesthetic experience is a free play of our mental powers that needs no justification beyond its own pleasurableness. Instead, Rousseau remains firmly committed to the traditional idea that aesthetic experience can be justified only if it provides access to truth of some kind, ultimately important truth about human nature and morality. Thus Rousseau represents a reversion in the eighteenth century to the most traditional approach to aesthetics, and in his fierce controversy with his one-time fellow encyclopedist D’Alembert he firmly takes the side of Plato in his critique of the epistemological as well as moral merit of much fiction and theatrical presentation, making his allegiance in aesthetics clear in historical terms. A passage in Émile in which Rousseau discusses the rôle of drawing in his educational ideal reveals his commitment to truth as the object of art, although in this instance the conception of truth at stake is the relatively innocuous idea of veridical representation of nature. Rousseau thinks his pupil should be taught to draw, “not precisely for the art itself,” however, “but for making his eye exact and his hand flexible.” He does not see the imitation of nature as a source of materials for the stimulation of the free play of the imagination which could be enjoyed by a budding artist and his future audience, but solely as a means to the perception of truth: I want him to have no other master than nature and no other model than objects. I want him to have before his eyes the original itself and not the paper representing it, to sketch a house from a house, a tree from a tree, a man from a man, so that he gets accustomed to observing bodies and their appearances well and not to taking false and conventionalized imitations for true imitations. I will even divert him from drawing from memory in the absence of the objects until their exact shapes are well imprinted on his imagination . . . for fear that, by substituting bizarre and fantastic shapes for the truth of things, he will lose the knowledge of proportions and the taste for the beauties of nature.136

There is no hint here that the free play of the imagination and/or other mental powers could itself be the basis of aesthetic pleasure and taste; taste for the beauties of nature is to be grounded solely in veridical perception and depiction of the objects of nature.

136

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), pp. 143–4. I was directed to this passage by the discussion in Kelly, Rousseau as Author, p. 61.

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This premise is not always at the surface of Rousseau’s arguments but is usually connected with them. Thus, a central theme of his writings about music and language is that they should be considered as media for the expression of the passions, indeed as originally a single medium for the expression of human emotions which have only subsequently come apart. This view of music, originally expressed in a critique of the French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, involved Rousseau in another major controversy because he argued for the superiority of Italian music as a better expression of passion over French music, which he saw as specializing in precisely the sort of free play of invention with formal elements that he despised.137 In this conception of music and language, Rousseau does not directly say that music and language should be considered as media for the cognition of truth, but he does evaluate them as media for the truthful communication of passions. Further, he also evaluates passions themselves as natural and proper or unnatural and degenerate, and thus criticizes the character of musical styles and languages as part of his larger critique of cultures and societies.138 Rousseau begins his Essay on the Origin of Languages, which grew out of his work on his second discourse, the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755), with the commonplace that “Speech distinguishes man from the animals.”139 He argues, however, that in the first instance, speech was developed not in order to communicate truths that had been discovered about how external objects could enable people to use them to satisfy their material needs, but rather in order to communicate “feelings and thoughts”140 from one person to another. It might be thought that people would want to express and communicate their feelings and thoughts for the sheer pleasure of it, and thus that this account of the origins of speech should lead to an aesthetics of pleasurable play. However, Rousseau conceives of the expression of the passions as the expression of a “moral need” to “bring men together” even while “the necessity of seeking their livelihood makes them flee one another”141 (he is thinking here of a primitive hunting and gathering society, where people seek to 137

138

139 140 141

See the Letter on French Music and polemical writings on Rameau in Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, trans. John Scott, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 7 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998), pp. 141–74, 175–97, and 222–88. For this approach to Rousseau’s treatment of music and language, see Wokler, Rousseau, ch. 2, pp. 17–32. Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, p. 289. Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, pp. 289–90. Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, p. 294.

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collect the means of sustenance in competition with one another rather than, as in a developed agricultural society, creating means of sustenance collectively), so language is not after all a source of playful pleasure but the medium for the satisfaction of a fundamental human need, the need for companionship, that is as basic and unremitting as the need for sustenance. Rousseau then argues that a language developed for the expression of passions would be indistinguishable from music: Along with the first voices were formed the first articulations or the first sounds, depending on the kind of passion that dictated the one or the other. Anger wrests menacing cries which the tongue and the palate articulate; but the voice of tenderness is gentler, it is the glottis that modifies it; and this voice becomes a sound. Only its accents are more or less frequent, its inflections more or less acute depending on the feeling that is joined to them, Thus cadence and sounds arise along with syllables, passion makes all the vocal organs speak, and adorns the voice with all their brilliance; thus verses, songs, and speech have a common origin. . . . the first discourses were the first songs; . . . poetry and music [were] born along with language; or rather, all this was nothing but language in itself in those happy climates and those happy times when the only pressing needs that required another’s help were those to which the heart gave rise.142

The rest of the Essay is largely an account of how the migration of human beings into less happy climates and the development of history into less happy times have separated music and language, and how each has grown more complicated but ultimately less satisfying as human needs have grown more complicated. The Essay on the Origin of Languages seems at least to contemplate a golden age in which a certain form of art, language as musical poetry, genuinely satisfied a natural and healthful human need. In the attack upon the arts that he began in his first Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, however, Rousseau’s view of the arts seems entirely negative. This essay was written in response to the Dijon Academy of Science’s essay competition on the question, “Has the restoration of the Sciences and Arts tended to purify or corrupt morals?”143 and Rousseau’s answer, which won the prize (in spite of the ensuing charges that his essay was unoriginal, indeed replete with plagiarism),144 was decidedly that the development of the sciences and arts has corrupted morals. He makes three 142 143

144

Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, pp. 317–18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (First Discourse) and Polemics, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 2 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992), p. 4. See Wokler, Rousseau, pp. 20–1.

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main charges. The first is that the sciences and arts in general, but particularly the fine arts, which one might have thought offer human beings the possibility of an independent source of pleasure in their lives no matter what other problems they may face, have throughout history been exploited by the powerful in their domination of the rest of humanity. The arts have been used to “spread garlands over the iron chains with which men are burdened, stifle in them the sentiment of that original liberty for which they seemed to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized peoples.” By means of the arts, Rousseau claims, such civilized peoples have been given “the semblance of all the virtues without the development of any.”145 As part of this charge, Rousseau alleges that the use of the arts to dominate entire populations stifles individual genius, and that the more the arts and corresponding taste claim to have achieved perfection, the more effectively do they stifle individuality: “Today, when subtler researches and a more refined taste have reduced the Art of pleasing to principles, a base and deceptive uniformity prevails in our morals, and all minds seem to have been cast in the same mold. Incessantly politeness requires, propriety demands; incessantly usage is followed, never one’s own genius.”146 Here Rousseau prizes individual liberty and creativity but sees the fine arts as the enemy of rather than the site for the exercise of genius. Rousseau’s second charge is that the fine arts are both the product of and also a stimulus to luxury, and that luxury is always an evil. “Human learning,” he argues, will not be found to have an origin corresponding to the idea we like to have of it. Astronomy was born from superstition; Eloquence from ambition, hate, flattery, and falsehood; . . . all, even Moral philosophy, from human pride. Thus the Sciences and Arts owe their birth to our vices,” and specifically, “What would we do with Arts without the luxury that nourishes them?”147 Luxury, in Rousseau’s view, is an evil “misuse of time,” born “from the idleness and vanity of men,” which “rarely develops without the sciences and arts, and they never develop without it.”148 The value of luxury was a topic of intensive discussion in the first part of the eighteenth century, with polemicists like Bernard de Mandeville arguing that the pursuit of luxury by the rich was a good thing because it created markets and work for the rest

145 146 147 148

Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, p. 5. Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, p. 6. Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, p. 12. Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, p. 14.

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of society.149 Rousseau focused on the moral effects of the love of luxury in those who pursued it and concluded that “Ostentatious taste is rarely combined in the same souls with the taste for honesty. No, it is not possible that minds degraded by a multitude of futile concerns could ever arise to anything great, and even if they should have the strength, the courage would be lacking.”150 Finally, Rousseau charges that education in the arts and sciences, but especially in the fine arts, is an obstacle to a proper moral education. If cultivating the sciences is harmful to warlike qualities, it is even more so to moral qualities. From our earliest years a foolish education adorns our mind and corrupts our judgment. I see everywhere immense institutions where young people are brought up at great expense, learning everything except their duties. Your children will not know their own language, but they will speak others nowhere in use; they will know how to write verses they can barely understand. . . . But they will not know what the words magnanimity, equity, temperance, humanity, courage are.151

Here Rousseau seems to find no room at all for the arts in an education for a moral life, outdoing even Plato who had allowed some forms of orderly and pious music and poetry into his ideal education, indeed held such forms of music and poetry to be a necessary part of education. Rousseau’s indictment of the arts in the first Discourse proceeds without any distinction between the fine arts and the other arts and sciences, and without any analysis of the means and media by which particular forms of fine art achieve their effects. When he turns to a more detailed discussion of one form of art, namely, the theater, in his 1758 Letter to D’Alembert, here again his attack upon the arts is even more vigorous than Plato’s own (an attack which Rousseau explicitly endorsed in “On Theatrical Imitation: An Essay Drawn from Plato’s Dialogues,” published in 1764).152

149

150 151 152

See Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Virtues, ed. Phillip Harth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), and M.M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) as well as John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, p. 15. Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, pp. 18–19. Rousseau, “On Theatrical Imitation: An Essay Drawn from Plato’s Dialogues,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 7, pp. 337–50.

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The Letter to D’Alembert was triggered by D’Alembert’s entry on “Geneva” in the Encyclopédie. One thing that annoyed Rousseau in this entry about his hometown – in spite of the fact that he had left it early and was not welcomed back – was D’Alembert’s praise for the Calvinist clergy of Geneva because they no longer believed in so much of the dogma of Christianity, had indeed in some cases become unitarians (“Socinians”) who no longer believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ.153 But what really aroused Rousseau’s ire was the suggestion that it would be a good thing to introduce a theater into Geneva, where it had been banned since the Reformation. A main worry among the Genevans, D’Alembert wrote, was that “troops of actors would spread the taste for adornment, dissipation, and loose morals among the youth,” but such tendencies, he thought, could easily be controlled by laws regulating the conduct of actors. With that problem solved, “Theatrical performances would educate the taste of the citizens and endow them with a delicacy of tact and a subtlety of feeling, which it is very difficult to acquire otherwise. Literature would profit while morals would not decline, and Geneva would add to the wisdom of Sparta the civility of Athens.”154 Such a remark was bound to catch the attention of Rousseau, who often held up Sparta as a model of virtue and Athens as an example of corruption and degeneracy, and, mild as it was, enraged him to an attack upon the theater a hundred times longer than D’Alembert’s single-page proposal. After a brief remark that D’Alembert should confine his judgment of the Genevan clergy to their actions and leave the judgment of their faith to God, Rousseau turns to the main business of his letter. He raises a slew of questions about the wisdom of introducing theater into Geneva: Whether the theater is good or bad in itself? Whether it can be united with morals? Whether it is in conformity with republican austerity? Whether it ought to be tolerated in a little city? Whether the actor’s profession can be a decent one? Whether actresses can be as well behaved as other women? Whether good laws suffice for repressing the abuses? Whether these laws can be observed? etc.155

Rousseau then explores these questions in three stages. First, he considers the effect of attending the theater on the morals of the individual members of its audience. Second, he considers the impact of the 153 154 155

See Hoyt and Cassirer, Encyclopedia Selections, “Geneva,” p. 136. Hoyt and Cassirer, “Geneva,” p. 132. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, in Letter to D’Alembert and Writings for the Theater, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth, and Christopher Kelly, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 10 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2004), p. 261.

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establishment of a theater on the well-being of the polity of Geneva. Third, he considers the character of the actors and actresses and their effect on the morals of the citizens and the well-being of the polity. At each stage, he claims that the effects of introducing a theater into Geneva would be harmful. Rousseau dismisses out of hand the idea that the theater could be the occasion for a pleasurable free play of the mental powers of its audience and that it needs no more justification than that: Such a proposal falls under the proscription that “every useless amusement is an evil for a being whose life is so short and whose time is so precious”; only those pleasures “which are derived from [man’s] nature and are born of his labors, his relations, and his needs” are permissible.156 Having thus dismissed the modern theory of play, Rousseau turns to the more traditional view that art is valuable because it teaches us morally important truths and/or makes our antecedent knowledge of such truths vivid and thereby efficacious. He actually rejects this possibility too, not on the ground that art cannot convey truth but on the grounds that even in principle a work of art could only have a beneficial effect on an audience which already knows the truth about morality and is committed to it, and that in practice works of art typically teach moral falsehoods and encourage morally vicious rather than virtuous feelings and dispositions. If we already know the truths of morality and are moved by them, the experience of the theater is otiose: “I should like to be clearly shown, without wasting words, how it could produce sentiments in us that we did not have and could cause us to judge moral beings otherwise than we judge them by ourselves?” The love of the “morally beautiful,” Rousseau continues, is a sentiment as natural to the human heart as the love of self; it is not born out of an arrangement of scenes; the author does not bring it; he finds it there.”157 But for the audience for art that does not already have sound moral judgments and sentiments, the theater only makes things worse. First, the theater is more likely to present falsehoods than truths. From tragedy, if we do not already know better then we learn that good men unjustifiably suffer evil fates: “What do we learn from Phèdre and Œdipe other than that man is not free and that Heaven punishes him for crimes that it makes him commit?”158 From comedy, if we do not already know 156 157 158

Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 262. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 267. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 274.

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better then we learn that the virtuous are ridiculous: speaking about Molière’s Misanthrope, Rousseau writes, “You could not deny me two things: one, that Alceste in this play is a righteous man, sincere, worthy, truly a good man; and second, that the author makes him a ridiculous figure. This is already enough, it seems to me, to render Molière inexcusable.”159 So the good person has nothing to learn from the theater, and the person who does not already know the truths of morality will only learn falsehood. Second, the theater does not strengthen the moral sentiments and dispositions of its audience. At best, the theater does not have “power to change sentiments or morals, which it can only follow and embellish”; more typically, the theater corrupts those sentiments and morals. Rousseau develops this charge in a number of ways. First, in order to gain and keep its audience, it must flatter its audience, even when their morals need improvement rather than flattery: “The stage is, in general, a painting of the human passions, the original of which is in every heart. But if the painter neglected to flatter these passions, the spectators would soon be repelled and would not want to see themselves in a light which made them despise themselves.”160 Second, the theater enfeebles what tendencies to virtue many people have: especially through its glorification of lovers who pay no heed to the ordinary laws of morality in the pursuit of their love, the theater, even if it does not directly inspire “criminal passions,” nevertheless disposes “the soul to feelings which are too tender and which are later satisfied at the expense of virtue.”161 “The continual emotion which is felt in the theater excites us, enervates us, enfeebles us, and makes us less able to resist our passions.”162 But worst of all, the distance from actual human suffering that is created by the fictions of the theater do not, as Du Bos and so many others had supposed, allow us to experience emotions that are morally valuable but that in real life could only be produced at great cost; rather, it allows us to content ourselves with idle empathy rather than real action. With an explicit reference to Du Bos, Rousseau says that “everything that is played in the theater is not brought nearer to us but made more distant.” In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves, whereas unfortunate

159 160 161 162

Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 277. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 263. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 288. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 293.

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people in person would require attention from us, relief, consolation, and work, which would involve us in their pains and would require at least the sacrifice of our indolence, from all of which we are quite content to be exempt. It could be said that our heart closes itself for fear of being touched at our expense.163

In short, “the sterile interest taken in virtue” in our experience of fiction “serves only to satisfy our amour-propre” or self-love “without obliging us to practice it.”164 After his detailed analysis of the either otiose or deleterious effects of the theater on the personal morals of the members of its audience, Rousseau offers a briefer catalogue of its costs to the polity. Here he argues that going to the theater will lead to a “slackening of work,” that it will lead to an increase of private expenditure for tickets and fancy dress, that it will lead to a “decrease in trade,” that it will lead to increased public expenditure for roads, streetlights, and so on, that it will introduce new victims, such as the “wives of the mountaineers” going to the theater for the first time, to the vices of luxury, in short, that it will cause “a prosperous people, but one which owes its well-being to industry,” to exchange “reality for appearance” and to ruin “itself at the very moment it wants to shine.”165 In other words, Rousseau utterly rejects the argument of other Enlightenment thinkers that even if the theater may be a source of private vice, it nevertheless leads to public benefits; in his view, it only piles public vices on top of private ones. Finally, Rousseau argues that “the estate of the actor is one of license and bad morals; that the men are given to disorder; that the women lead a scandalous life.”166 His confidence in this judgment is based on the premise that the actor’s work requires “the art of counterfeiting himself, or putting on another character than his own, of appearing different than he is, of becoming passionate in cold blood, of saying what he does not think as naturally as if he did think it, and, finally, of forgetting his own place by dint of taking another’s.”167 In other words, actors can succeed in their work only by putting aside their original selves, including the natural dispositions to virtue that they share with all human beings but which are so easily corrupted, and learning how to deceive. Even laws to regulate their conduct cannot be effective, because their expertise 163 164 165 166 167

Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 269. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 293. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, pp. 297–8. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 306. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 309.

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in deception makes it easy for them to appear to conform to laws while not actually doing so. Actors cultivate “by profession the talent of deceiving men and of becoming adept in habits which can be innocent only in the theater and can serve everywhere else only for doing harm.”168 And if actors are esteemed and rewarded in a society, their manners will inevitably be imitated by others, thus encouraging the practice of deceit throughout the society. Naturally Rousseau’s jeremiad did not go unanswered. D’Alembert himself published a response in which he first defended the value of amusement that has no further benefits – “Why begrudge men, destined by nature almost only to weep and to die, some fleeting diversions that help them to bear the bitterness or the insipidity of their existence?”169 – and then stood up for the thesis that the theater, precisely because it is enjoyable, can become “a school of morals and virtue” for its audience “almost without them noticing it.”170 He rejects Rousseau’s claim that the theater distances us from the real pains of other human beings, arguing on the contrary that “the theater is the one among all our pleasures that calls us back the most to other men, by means of the image it presents to us of human life, and by the impressions it gives us and it leaves us.”171 He argues that even though we go to see tragedies “less to be instructed than to be moved,” which is itself no crime, “there is not one of them that does not leave in our soul some more or less developed great and useful lesson of morality after the performance.”172 He doubts whether Rousseau could even be serious in his claim that the art of actors leads them to acquire a general tendency to deception.173 And he argues in particular that if actresses have poor morals, that is not a by-product of their art but an unfortunate reflection of the general repression of women: The slavery and debasement into which we have put women; the shackles that we give to their mind and their soul; . . . finally the fatal – I would almost say murderous – education that we prescribe to them . . . in which they learn almost solely how to counterfeit themselves ceaselessly, not to have a feeling that they do not stifle, an opinion that they do not hide, a thought they do

168 169

170 171 172 173

Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 310. “Letter of M. d’Alembert to M.J.J. Rousseau on the Article ‘Geneva,’ ” The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol.10, p. 354. “Letter of M. d’Alembert,” p. 356. “Letter of M. d’Alembert,” p. 358. “Letter of M. d’Alembert,” p. 360. “Letter of M. d’Alembert,” p. 368.

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not disguise. . . . If the majority of nations have acted like us with respect to them, it is because everywhere men have been the stronger, and everywhere the stronger is the oppressor of the weaker.174

If Rousseau’s Letter to D’Alembert were to be remembered for no other reason, it deserves to be remembered although not itself honored for having inspired one of the leaders of the European Enlightenment to this impassioned statement of one of the fundamental insights of modern feminism. A late piece by Diderot may also be at least an indirect response to Rousseau. This is the dialogue “Paradox on Acting,” written in 1773, revised in 1778, but not published until 1830. Here Diderot argues that actors cannot succeed by trying to raise up in themselves the passions they are supposed to be expressing on the stage, for if they try to do that they will be “by turns strong and weak, hot and cold, flat and sublime.” Instead, successful acting requires close observation of the conduct of real human beings and of the effect of their conduct on their audience. Only the actor “who works from reflection, from a study of human nature, from constant imitation of some ideal model, from imagination, from memory will give uniform performances, all of them equally perfect. . . . he is a mirror, always ready to reflect nature – and always ready to reflect it with the same precision, the same force, and the same truth. Like the poet, he continually goes back to replenish himself from the inexhaustible store of nature.”175 The actor does aim to recreate “the external signs of feelings with such scrupulous accuracy that you,” the audience, “are taken in by them,” but he does this through his knowledge of human behavior, based on observation, and not through himself experiencing the feelings he is expressing. And this means that there is no reason to think that the actor takes on the traits of the characters he represents: “he is not the character; he plays it – and plays it so well that you take him for the character he is playing. The illusion is all on your side: the actor knows that he is not the character.”176 The premise of Rousseau’s argument about the harmful effects of acting upon the actor is thus undercut, because in acting the actor does not experience morally inappropriate sentiments which can then spread to his conduct off the stage; his art depends upon his knowledge of human

174 175 176

“Letter of M. d’Alembert,” p. 370. Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 319. Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 323.

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conduct, which presumably cannot be separated from a knowledge of what is right and wrong in human conduct. Even if Diderot is right about the experience of the actor, this leaves undecided the larger issue between Rousseau and D’Alembert, indeed between Rousseau and most of the rest of the Enlightenment: Is the experience of fiction, whether in the theater or in some other form, harmful or helpful to human morals? Rousseau’s rejection of the contemporary play theory of aesthetic experience and his revification of Plato’s ancient attack upon the arts did not settle this question, certainly not in the eyes of his contemporaries. As we next see, questions about the nature of aesthetic experience and whether or not it can be beneficial for morals simmered throughout the intensive development of aesthetic theory in Germany (and German-speaking Switzerland) from the immediate successors of Christian Wolff to Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller. Our ensuing study of this development shows in the end that Kant and Schiller, although influenced by Rousseau in many ways, accepted neither a simple, didactic view that the arts can teach morals nor the charge that art necessarily corrupts morals. Kant and Schiller as well as their important predecessor Moses Mendelssohn find more subtle but still beneficial relations between aesthetics and morality. We come back to this issue after we have seen how the three threads of eighteenth-century aesthetics – the cognitivist approach, the theory of free play, and the recognition of the emotional impact of art – were woven together to form the complex fabric of eighteenth-century German aesthetics.

Part Three

GERMAN AESTHETICS BETWEEN WOLFF AND KANT

6 The First Generation of Wolffian Aesthetics

As we saw in Chapter 1, Christian Wolff defined the experience of beauty as the “sensitive cognition of perfection.” Cognition is naturally understood as knowledge of truth, so in the first instance Wolff’s formula meant that the experience of beauty is knowledge of true perfection by means of the senses. In Wolff’s Leibnizian metaphysics, the perfection of anything should be its status as a part of the best possible world and its reflection of the perfection of that world as a whole, although as we also saw Wolff’s notion of perfection was broad enough to include successful adaptation to an intended purpose, and thus in his analysis of our experience of architecture he emphasized our sense of the utility of structures as well as a sensory response to the kind of abstract form that could be considered an object of cognition. But it was the idea that aesthetic experience is a sensory apprehension of truth that dominated in Wolff’s most general statements. After 1720, Wolff’s philosophy enjoyed an influence in most parts of Germany similar to that which the philosophy of Locke by then exercised in most parts of Britain and in France for much of the eighteenth century as well. So the history of German aesthetics after Wolff is a history of the attempt to find room for a fuller account of aesthetic experience within a framework that privileges the idea of cognition, and only very gradually was room found for the idea that the free play of our mental powers including both imagination and emotion could be equally important. (In Volume 2, we shall see that this effort to acknowledge these other aspects of aesthetic experience starting from within a purely cognitivist paradigm replayed itself over the course of nineteenth-century German aesthetics.) The first round of this struggle was a debate extending from the late 1720s until the 1740s between the Leipzig philosopher and literary 305

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figure Johann Christoph Gottsched and the Zürich critics Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann Jacob Breitinger, in which the issue was really just how much room there could be for the freedom of imagination within a theory of poetry based on the idea that poetry is a truthful imitation of nature. In the next round, from 1735 to 1750–8, the philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and his only slightly younger student Georg Friedrich Meier made room for a fuller characterization of the subjective aspects of aesthetic experience by transforming Wolff’s formula of the sensitive cognition of perfection into the idea of the perfection of sensitive cognition, which opened the way for a more complex conception of the sources of pleasure in aesthetic experience but still emphasized the rôle of the cognitive powers over other mental powers. In their detailed list of aesthetic categories, however, Baumgarten and Meier also recognized the importance of the emotional impact of art, and then Moses Mendelssohn, the dominant figure in German aesthetics from the later 1750s to the early 1770s even though his religion barred him from any appointment to a university or academy of sciences, in his theory of “mixed sentiments” made even more explicit the emotional dimension of aesthetic experience. Although his essays on aesthetics were relatively few and relatively brief, certainly in comparison to the lengthy academic treatises of Baumgarten and Meier, they make clearer than any other German work from this period the complexity of aesthetic experience. Mendelssohn provided the conceptual framework for the art criticism of his friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, especially for Lessing’s famous Laokoön (1766), which took up anew the comparison of poetry and painting in response to the classicism of the historian of ancient art Johann Joachim Winckelmann as well as to the argument of Du Bos that the arts of sight have a greater, because more immediate impact upon our feelings than the verbal arts. In the 1770s, another Swiss, although in this case one transplanted to Berlin, namely, Johann Georg Sulzer, dominated the German scene with his encyclopedic General Theory of the Fine Arts and argued that the arts make moral truths emotionally gripping as well as stimulating the activity of our cognitive powers. While both Mendelssohn and Sulzer still saw themselves as working within the framework of Leibnizo-Wolffian metaphysics and epistemology, the fundamental assumption of this philosophy, that reason alone can give us insight into the basic nature of reality, came under profound attack, or “critique,” from Immanuel Kant, who argued that only in combination with sensibility could intellect yield knowledge, and even then knowledge only of how things appear to us, not how they are in

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themselves. This might have left Kant a variety of options for aesthetic theory – for instance, he might have exploited the Neo-Platonic possibility that reason alone gives us insight into reality only in the aesthetic domain. But that would have conflicted with Kant’s cherished view that it is only practical reason, that is, reason in its application to our conduct through the moral law, that gives us any kind of grounded belief about the ultimate objects of metaphysics, namely, our own freedom, the immortality of our souls, and the existence of God. Instead, having imbibed deeply from British writers from Addison to Gerard and Kames as well as from his immediate German predecessors such as Mendelssohn and Sulzer and his own as well as Mendelssohn’s student Marcus Herz, Kant opted for the view that aesthetic experience is grounded in the free and playful rather than businesslike and rule-governed cooperation between sensibility and understanding, and that in the particular case of fine art, reason is also brought into play, for fine art consists of nothing but the play of the imagination with the most profound ideas of reason. In this way, Kant achieved a synthesis between the traditional idea that art and aesthetic experience are a form of cognition of the deepest truths about reality and morality and the novel idea that aesthetic experience is a pleasurable free play of our mental powers. Kant’s conception that aesthetic experience is in some way free from the ordinary rules of understanding finds expression in his conception of the “autonomy” of aesthetic judgment, but his view that fine art has “spirit” only when it deals with the highest ideas of reason and otherwise quickly becomes dull and distasteful shows that he was far from advocating the autonomy of fine art – that idea should rather be attributed to the novelist and essaysist Karl Philipp Moritz, who promulgated it a few years before Kant announced his own, quite different theory of the autonomy of aesthetic judgment. However, although the ideas of reason that are the core of the “aesthetic ideas” that according to Kant give works of fine art their spirit are precisely the kinds of ideas that might be thought to stir our deepest emotions, Kant went to great lengths to exclude all “charm and emotion” from aesthetic experience and thus missed the opportunity to synthesize all three of the main approaches to aesthetic experience in the eighteenth century the way that we have seen a few others, notably Kames and later Stewart in Britain and Diderot in France, did. But others who were close to Kant, such as the great poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller and the philosopher Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, did find ways to make room for the emotional impact of art within a framework that

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was generally Kantian, so we might regard the Kantian school as a whole if not Kant personally as having succeeded in recognizing the full complexity of aesthetic experience. Or at least as having come close to doing so: Johann Friedrich Herder, originally a student of Kant and later a bitter opponent, argued early in his career that Lessing failed to recognize the full complexity of the sensory aspect of aesthetic experience and later in his career that Kant and Schiller failed at this as well. It might seem as if the next stage of aesthetic theory in Germany should have been to consolidate the synthesis of the three approaches – cognitivism, play theory, and emotionalism – that had perhaps been achieved collectively by a loose coalition of Kantians but that had not been achieved by Kant himself. However, that is not what happened: the successors to Kant, the so-called German idealists including Friedrich Schlegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, and Arthur Schopenhauer, all shared Kant’s distrust of the arousal of emotion as a proper response to art, but also all rejected Kant’s theory of free play and so reverted to a purely cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience (or did so at least at some point in their careers – we will see that Schelling’s evolving conception of the aesthetic has to be described more carefully than that). It would take the rest of the nineteenth century to reconstitute the synthetic approach to aesthetic experience that had been achieved in their different ways by Kames, Diderot, and the Kantian school as a whole; and even then only some of the leading aestheticians of the twentieth century, in the Anglophone as well as the German world, would follow in the footsteps of a few great synthesizers of the late nineteenth century, notably, Wilhelm Dilthey. This is what I meant by saying that the history of aesthetics in nineteenth-century Germany replayed the effort of the eighteenth century to escape the reductive cognitivism of Wolff. But that will all be the subject of the next two volumes of this work; for now, our task is to describe the development of aesthetic theory in eighteenth century Germany.

1. Gottsched and His Critics From a distance of almost three hundred years, the differences between the “critical poetics” (critische Dichtkunst) of Johann Christoph Gottsched and his critics look small, even trivial, because to us they are all so clearly working well within the paradigm established by Wolff.1 But in the 1730s 1

In one of the few recent discussions of the conflict between Gottsched and his critics, Frederick Beiser argues that the real difference between the two sides was that the Swiss

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and 1740s their debate was intense, not just because Gottsched was a self-important controversialist who clearly enjoyed being on center stage but because their debate about the proper scope and power of the imagination was not only theoretically interesting but also reflected a tectonic shift in German taste from the French classicism represented by Racine and Corneille to the freer forms of Milton and Shakespeare that in turn subsequently led to the pan-European romanticism of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) was born in Königsberg and studied philosophy there at the Albertina, later the university of Immanuel Kant. Gottsched began teaching philosophy there in 1723 but fled the Prussian draft the next year – the year Kant was born – and settled in the Saxon city of Leipzig, a trading and publishing city that was home to one of the great universities of Germany (Leibniz’s father had been a professor of law there and Leibniz himself studied there). Leipzig is only thirty kilometers away from Halle, the Prussian city where Wolff had been teaching for two decades; but Wolff himself had been chased away from Halle the year before Gottsched arrived in Leipzig because of his argument that the atheistic Chinese could arrive at the same moral

critics Bodmer and Breitinger were trying to make room for novelty and sublimity alongside beauty among the central categories of aesthetic experience. (Frederick C. Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], chs. 3–4, pp. 72–117, especially pp. 112–17). I do not disagree that the Swiss critics made more room for the sublime and the novel, especially the latter, than did Gottsched, although in this the Swiss were only playing catch-up with the British, who had recognized these categories since Addison’s essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” of 1712 (and not surprisingly so: Bodmer was an admirer of English literature, having translated and written extensively on Milton, and among the many works of Bodmer and Breitinger was a short-lived journal based on the model of The Spectator – but then again, as we will see, Gottsched also published “moral weeklies” based on the same model, so admiration for Addison alone cannot explain the difference between the two sides). But I will argue here that the difference in emphasis on novelty is tied to a crucial theoretical difference between the conceptions of the imagination of Gottsched on the one hand and his critics on the other that go beyond the fact of being open to a wider range of aesthetic experiences. Aspects of the debate between Gottsched and his critics are also discussed in Alfred Baeumler, Das Irrationalitätsproblem in der Ästhetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Kritik der Urteilskraft (originally 1923), 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967), Part I, ch. 2, pp. 65–82; Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C.A. Koelln and James A. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 331–8; and Howard Caygill, Art of Judgment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 141–8. Gottsched is also discussed in Gabriele Dürbeck, Einbildungskraft und Aufklärung: Perspektiven der Philosophie, Anthropologie, und Ästhetik um 1750 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1998), pp. 47–54.

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truths as Christian Europeans by the use of human reason alone, and there is no reason to believe that Gottsched ever met Wolff. Nevertheless, he had already been exposed to Wolffian philosophy in Königsberg, and his two-volume Erste Gründe der gesamten Weltweisheit (“First Principles of all Philosophy,” 1733–34), which includes an extensive review of natural science as well as logic, metaphysics, and ethics, became the most widely adopted textbook of Wolffian philosophy. However, although he eventually held the professorship in logic and metaphysics in Leipzig, he was also the professor of poetry, and by far the greatest part of Gottsched’s boundless energy was devoted to literature and philology. Gottsched composed several tragedies, including Der sterbende Cato (“The Dying Cato,” 1731), a patchwork from Addison’s popular play and a French version, and published the plays of others in the six volumes of Die deutsche Schaubühne (“The German Stage,” 1741–45); he edited and largely wrote a series of “moral weeklies” modeled on The Spectator, including Die vernünfftigen Tadlerinnen (“The Reasonable Scolds,” 1725–26), Der Biedermann (“The Honest Man,” 1728–29), the Critische Beyträge (“Critical Contributions,” 1732–44), the Neuer Büchersaal (“New Library,” 1745–50), and Das Neuste aus der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit (“The Latest Pleasant Scholarship,” 1751–62); he wrote an “Outline of Rational Rhetoric” (Grundriß zu einer vernünffmäßigen Redekunst, 1729) and a subsequent Ausführliche Redekunst (“Complete Rhetoric,” 1736), which argued for an elegant but judicious rather than bombastic Baroque style; and he wrote a German grammar, Deutsche Sprachkunst (1748), that was used well into the nineteenth century and did much to standardize modern literary German. But in the history of aesthetics, his reputation rests on his Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen (“Essay toward a Critical Poetics for the Germans,” 1730, with further editions in 1737, 1742, and 1751).2 The practical aim of the Critical Poetics was to elevate the tone of German popular theater and moderate the Baroque excesses of the upper-class theater by recommending the model of the classical French theater of 2

For the description of Gottsched’s career on which this paragraph is based, see Katherine Goodman, “Gottsched’s Literary Reforms: The Beginning of Modern German Literature,” in Barbara Becker-Cantarino, editor, German Literature of the Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment and Sensibility (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005), pp. 55–78. A striking account of Gottsched late in life, when Goethe encountered him as a university student in Leipzig, is found in the Seventh Book of his autobiography, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer et al., 40 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1984), vol. 14, pp. 293–4; Goethe briefly describes the conflict with Bodmer and Breitinger on pp. 287–9.

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Racine and Corneille. The theoretical basis of the work was the Wolffian principle that the theater and other forms of poetry (Gottsched had little to say about the novel) should be used to convey important moral truths through images that would make them accessible and engaging for a wide audience. Gottsched stated his position a year before the Critical Poetics (and long before the debate between D’Alembert and Rousseau) in a speech with the anti-Platonic title “Plays and especially tragedies are not to be banished from a well-ordered republic” when he defined a tragedy as “an instructive moral poem, in which an important action of preeminent persons is imitated and presented on the stage,”3 and he revealed the underlying premise of his argument when he observed that “The improvement of the human heart is not a work that can happen in an hour. It requires a thousand preparations, a thousand circumstances, much knowledge, conviction, experiences, examples and encouragement.”4 Regardless of other differences, a central theme of German Enlightenment aesthetics, just as in Britain and France, is that even if people know the general truths of morality in some abstract way, the arts can make those truths concrete, alive, and effective for them in a way that nothing else can – an implicit synthesis of the cognitive and the emotional approaches to aesthetics thus underlies Gottsched’s work. The Critical Poetics opens with a brief history of poetry rather than with a statement of theoretical principles, but its first chapter concludes with a similar suggestion that the point of poetry is to make moral truths alive through their presentation in a form accessible to our senses: “The arousal of affects is . . . much livelier” in tragedy and comedy than anywhere else, “because the visible representation of persons is far more sensibly touching than the best description. The manner of writing is, especially in tragedy, noble and sublime, and it has rather a superfluity than a lack of instructive sayings. Even comedy teaches and instructs the observer, although it arouses laughter.”5 The details of Gottsched’s view emerge in the succeeding chapters on “The character of a poet” and “On the good taste of a poet.” In the first of these chapters, Gottsched defines a poet as one who produces imitations of nature: A poet is a skilled imitator of all natural things; and this he has in common with painters, connoisseurs of music, etc. He is however distinguished 3

4 5

Johann Christoph Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, ed. Horst Steinmetz (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1972), p. 5. Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, p. 9. Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, p. 33.

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from these by the manner of his imitation and the means through which he achieves it. The painter imitates nature with brush and colors; the musician through beat and harmony; the poet, however, through a discourse that is rhythmic or otherwise well arranged; or, which is much the same, through a harmonious and good-sounding text, which we call a poem.6

Gottsched goes on to argue that a poet must have a sharp wit or acumen, a “power of mind which readily perceives the similarity of things and thus can make a comparison among them,” but also that such a “natural gift” is “in itself still raw and imperfect if it is not awakened and cleansed of the incorrectness that clings to it.”7 For the wit of a poet to lead to good results, it must therefore be accompanied with “art and learning”: just as a painter must be learned in “geometry, perspective, mythology, history, architecture, even logic and morals if he is to bring [his work] to any perfection,” so the poet, “who also has to imitate the invisible thoughts and inclinations of human minds,” cannot accomplish this without “extensive scholarship,” indeed “no science is entirely excluded from his domain.”8 “Above all, for a true poet a thorough knowledge of humankind is necessary, indeed entirely indispensable.”9 Thus, Gottsched denies Plato’s charge that the poet is an expert only in the appearances of things and does not really know whereof he speaks. Further, the poet must have a strong “power of judgment” in order to keep his imagination from overheating, because not all of his flashes of inspiration will be “equally beautiful, equally well-founded, equally natural and probable.”10 Moreover, a poet must have sound moral judgment, because his task is to make moral truths accessible to his audience through his imitations: The poet must himself be intrinsically virtuous if he is always to write chastely and purely, otherwise he will betray himself. . . . This virtuous cast of mind of the poet must above all manifest itself in his being neither a flatterer nor a slanderer. Both of these are a far too contemptible occupation for a rational and upright man. A true poet is never barred from manifesting esteem for everything that is good and truly honorable. Rather the duty to which he is obligated as an honest citizen is to praise what is virtuous in a rational way, to commemorate its memory and through the description of its

6 7 8 9 10

Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, p. 39. Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, p. 44. Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, p. 46. Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, p. 48. Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, p. 49.

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worthy example to encourage those who live in his time and also posterity to praiseworthy deeds.11

In other words, the artist has a double task of imitation: through the imitation of worthy deeds in the medium of his art, he is to encourage his audience to the performance of similarly worthy deeds themselves. Here, Gottsched’s poet sounds like the kind Plato would admit into his republic. Thus far, Gottsched has not made special use of Wolffian terms. His ensuing discussion of the “good taste of a poet” is more explicitly Wolffian. Gottsched begins by characterizing taste in its literal sense – the taste of food or drink – as a form of representation “that for all of its clarity has nothing distinct in it.” He then states that in its “metaphorical” sense taste is always associated with the “liberal arts and other sensible things,” such as “poetry, oratory, music, painting, and architecture, likewise in dress, gardens, household furnishings, etc.,” not with subjects “where it is a matter of reason alone” and “where it is possible to make the strictest demonstrations from distinctly cognized fundamental truths,” such as “arithmetic and geometry or other sciences.”12 Thus “metaphorical as well as ordinary taste has to do only with clear but not entirely distinct concepts of things, and distinguishes from one another the sort of things that one judges in accordance with mere sensation.”13 However, although it follows from the fact that judgments of taste are made on the basis of “clear but not entirely distinct concepts” that “people who judge merely on the basis of taste” can arrive at opposite conclusions, Gottsched holds that such opposed judgments cannot both be true and that there must be a true fact of the matter to which one of them corresponds but the other not – for example, if two judgments about a work of architecture conflict, “that judgement must be preferred to the other which is consonant with the rules of architecture and the pronouncements of a master in this science.” In other words, although judgments of taste are made on the basis of clear but indistinct concepts, which is to say sensory perceptions and feelings rather than clear and distinct concepts, they nevertheless “have their ground in the unalterable nature of things themselves; in the concordance of the manifold; in order and harmony. These laws, which are investigated, discovered, and confirmed through lengthy experience and much reflection, are unbreakable and firm, even if someone who 11 12 13

Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, p. 54. Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, pp. 60–1. Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, p. 62.

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judges in accordance with his taste sometimes gives preference to those works which more or less violate them.”14 In Gottsched’s view, judgments of taste, even if they are not made on the basis of explicit knowledge of objective rules about the perfection of things, track those objective rules when they are in fact correct, and indeed experts in the relevant art can make those rules explicit. The “touchstone” for judgments of taste “is thus found in the rules for perfection that are suitable for every particular kind of beautiful things, whether buildings, paintings, music, etc., and which can be distinctly conceived and demonstrated by genuine masters thereof.”15 Thus judgments of taste are not to be attributed to “wit, nor to imagination, nor to memory,” and not to any “sixth sense,” but to “understanding,” although not to “reason,”16 since they track the rules that the experts know but are not explicitly derived from those rules. A similar analysis was in fact offered a few years before Gottsched’s Critical Poetics by another Wolffian, Johann Ulrich König, who defined taste as “a sensation in our soul which, in virtue of the correspondence between our concepts and our sensations, makes an object worthy of love and esteem to us,” and which “does not have to delay its judgment of a thing which comes before us as either agreeable or disagreeable, until it has proven the proper order, uniformity of its parts, beauty or utility in accordance with all rules and good grounds in a careful investigation,” but which nevertheless is a response to “that which is perfect in all things, in all arts, and in all human institutions,” and which “rests on a correct concordance between our thoughts and actions and nature and true reason.”17 And what are the rules in accordance with which judgments of taste are tacitly made? Writing almost two decades before Batteux, Gottsched asserts that the most general rule is simply that art should imitate nature, in particular that in order to be beautiful art must imitate what is beautiful in nature: The beauty of a work of art does not rest on an empty obscurity, but has its firm and necessary ground in the nature of things. God has created everything in accordance with number, measure, and weight. Natural things are 14 15 16 17

Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, pp. 62–3. Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, pp. 64–5. Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, pp. 63–4. Johann Ulrich König, Untersuchung von dem guten Geschmack in der Dicht- und Redekunst (“Investigation of good Taste in the Arts of Poetry and Oratory”) (Leipzig and Berlin, 1727), cited from Henning Boetius, Dichtungstheorien der Aufklärung (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1971), pp. 23–4.

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beautiful; and thus if art is to produce something beautiful, it must imitate the model of nature. The exact relationship, the order and correct proportion of all parts of which a thing consists is the source of all beauty. The imitation of nature can thus give a work of art the perfection through which it is pleasing and agreeable to the understanding.18

There is no room in Gottsched’s account for the creation of beauty in a work of art that does not reflect the beauty of a depicted object; in this regard we might consider the beauty of art as itself a form of cognition, knowledge of something that is there in the world rather than the creation by the imagination of something not already in the world. There is no room for free play of the imagination in Gottsched’s conception of beauty. This will not be an immediate bone of contention between Gottsched and his Swiss critics, but we will see that creating room for beauty in a representation even when there is less or none in the represented object is a fundamental goal of Baumgarten and Mendelssohn, who may thus be regarded as at least opening up room for the free play of imagination in creating artistic representations even if they do not explicitly affirm that idea (as Baumgarten certainly does not). Poets in particular must give truthful but lively descriptions of “natural things,” and in the case of poetry destined for the theater they must give their characters “such words, gestures, and actions” as are “appropriate to their circumstances,” and the poets and those who portray their characters on the stage must “imitate the manner of a mind standing in such passions so precisely and express them with such natural manners of speech as if they really felt the affect themselves.”19 (We might suppose that characters should express affects as if they actually felt them so that the audience can feel them too – but that is at most implict here.) Gottsched does not interpret this rule to mean that poets can describe only the actual actions and feelings of actual people; of course poetry can present fables as well as history. But for Gottsched a fable is “an occurrence that is possible in certain circumstances although it has not actually taken place, in which a useful moral truth lies hidden. Philosophically one could say that it is a piece of another possible world.”20 Insofar as it does not recount an actual event, a fable is “probable” rather than “true.” But for Gottsched probability depends upon the consistency of the fictional event with the actual laws of nature, in particular the laws

18 19 20

Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, p. 70. Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, p. 81. Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, p. 86.

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of human nature, even though the circumstances of the fictional world differ in some regard from those of the actual world. In this regard even the fable must still be an imitation of nature with all its perfections. And of course Gottsched’s rider that the fable must contain a hidden moral truth means that it must also be consistent with the real rules of moral perfection, and indeed that the point of poetic indulgence in fable or fiction is precisely to make a moral truth alive and forceful to us by showing that it holds even in a possible world that differs from the actual world in certain of its facts but not in its principles. As earlier mentioned, Gottsched’s work became the subject of a heated controversy, indeed a “war of the poets,” with the Swiss writers Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann Jacob Breitinger. Bodmer (1698–1783), originally a merchant, taught Swiss history in Zürich for forty years, advocated the works of Dante and Shakespeare, and translated Milton’s Paradise Lost into German prose. Breitinger (1701–1776) taught Greek, Hebrew, logic, and rhetoric, and edited the works of the German Baroque poet Martin Opitz.21 Together, they edited Die Discourse der Mahlern (“The Discourse of the Painters”), Switzerland’s first “moral weekly” based on the model of The Spectator, from 1721–23. These essays did not concern painting at all or even general issues about the arts very much – its name merely reflects their use of the names of famous painters as pseudonymous signatures for their articles – although one of Bodmer’s articles on Opitz celebrated the imagination as the key to poetic success: “A writer such as our Opitz who has enriched and filled the imagination with images of things can write poetry that is lively and natural” and by “the strength of his imagination bring back all the ideas that he had when he was really in love, empathetic, depressed, or enraged.”22 Again, the emphasis on the artist’s expression of his emotions might imply that a goal of art is to arouse similar emotions in its audience, but that is left implicit, and the emphasis on the freedom of the imagination seems rather to have been the central issue of their dispute with Gottsched, which came to a head in Breitinger’s own Critische Dichtkunst, published in 1740 with a foreword by Bodmer. Because Bodmer and Breitinger shared with Gottsched the general assumption that art is based on the 21

22

For this information, see Rosemarie Zeller, “Literary Developments in Switzerland from Bodmer, Breitinger, and Haller to Gessner, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi,” in BeckerCantarino, German Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005), pp. 131–53, at p. 150. Die Discourse der Mahlern, Erster Theil, XIX Discourse (Zürich, 1721), by Bodmer, cited from Boetius, Dichtungstheorien der Aufklärung, p. 13.

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imitation of nature and has the goal of making important moral truths come alive for us, it is hard to see exactly what divided the two sides in this dispute, but the key seems to lie in their conception of poetic fables. As we saw, Gottsched believed that a poetic fable describes events in a possible rather than in the actual world, but he insists that the laws of nature and human nature must remain constant: thus a poetic fable can depict a hero who never existed and make some moral truth alive to us through its depiction of this possible rather than actual hero, but everything about this hero and his world should still be natural. Bodmer and Breitinger, however, the advocates of Shakespeare and Milton, believed that important moral truths could be made alive to us through works of the poetic imagination that depart more drastically from actual nature and history. They were also, remember, students of Addison, and they held that novelty was an especially powerful source of aesthetic pleasure23 and thus an especially powerful means of making moral truths come alive. For this reason they concluded that “since the most ancient times” the fable has been the means “for bringing the most useful but at the same time best known moral truths home to us in a pleasing way.”24 Their idea is that the more imaginative inventions of the poets – the Satan of Milton or the Caliban of Shakespeare rather than the more ordinary heroes of Racine and Corneille admired by Gottsched – make the moral truths communicated by the works in which they appear more alive precisely by their attention-grabbing departure from the familiar creatures of the real world. Thus when I say that the new and uncommon is the sole source of the gratification that poetry produces, I understand under this title of the novel everything that has not become known and familiar through daily use and intercourse, and which has thereby become diminished and contemptible. . .; thus everything which is rarely found, which is remote from our understanding on account of time or place, what does not accord with our concepts, customs, and habits and precisely through its alien appearance powerfully grasps our senses and causes an attentive and agreeable admiration in us. Now since we are accustomed to call beautiful everything that is pleasing to us and amuses us, but nothing can be pleasing nor amusing to us except that which is grounded in truth and yet new, so we see immediately in what poetic beauty consists, namely it is a brightly illuminating beam of truth that penetrates the senses and the mind with such force

23 24

As Beiser has observed; see Diotima’s Children, p. 105. Breitinger, Critische Dichtkunst (Zürich: Conrad Orell und Comp., 1740), cited from Boetius, Dichtungstheorien der Aufklärung, p. 42.

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that we cannot prevent ourselves from feeling it no matter how heavily inattentiveness lies on us.25

Thus Bodmer and Breitinger thought that the moralistic aim of poetry that they accepted in common with Gottsched could be better achieved by a freer use of the imagination in poetry than Gottsched was prepared to allow. We might thus conclude that they agreed in their philosophical analysis of the ends of art but disagreed in their empirical assessment of its most effective means. By their advocacy of Milton and Shakespeare, the most imaginative poets of the preceding century, Bodmer and Breitinger prepared the way for subsequent artistic movements that emphasized the freedom of the imagination,26 even while they continued to work within the conceptual framework of Wolffian perfectionism, as the second part of the paragraph just quoted shows: There the authors attempt to force their emphasis on the imagination into the Procrustean bed of cognitivism, suggesting that a powerful imagination is in the end a more powerful beam of light on otherwise hidden truths. The reluctance to give up the prevailing paradigm is true for two professional philosophers of the time who also worked within the Wolffian framework but took at least one step toward an aesthetic theory that could subsequently give the play of the mental powers equal importance with the sensible representation of truth by treating the aesthetic qualities of representations as parallel to rather than identical with their purely cognitive qualities, while more explicitly emphasizing the emotional impact of aesthetic experience than had either side in the “poet’s war.” So let us now turn to the innovations of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and his disciple and ally, Georg Friedrich Meier. Meier actually responded directly to Gottsched in a number of polemics, but since his views were based largely – although not entirely – on Baumgarten’s, it will be better to treat them together than to treat Meier first as merely a critic of Gottsched.

2. Baumgarten and Meier Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) introduced the term “aesthetics” in his 1735 thesis Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (“Philosophical mediations pertaining to some matters

25 26

Breitinger, Critische Dichtkunst, in Boetius, Dichtungstheorien der Aufklärung, p. 43. See Zeller, “Literary Developments in Switzerland,” p. 134.

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concerning poetry”),27 although as we have already seen the subject had not waited for Baumgarten’s baptism to get under way, and indeed in Britain it would continue to develop for another century before the new name was widely accepted. Nor did Baumgarten’s new name for the discipline signify a complete break in his own conception of it from the philosophical views within which he had grown up, that is, from the perfectionist aesthetics of Leibniz and Wolff, although Baumgarten did make one key departure from the Wolffian model that would eventually open the way for much more radical reconceptions of aesthetic experience in Germany. But Baumgarten remained more a Moses who glimpsed the new theory from the shores of Wolffianism than a Joshua who conquered the new aesthetic territory: while introducing an emphasis on the perfection of our representations rather than (or in addition to) objects that would open the door for the idea of free play with our representations, he did not himself pass through that door. However, he did introduce a category, vita cognitionis aestheticae, the “life of aesthetic cognition,” under which our emotional response to art could readily be subsumed and thus established a connection between the cognitivist paradigm for aesthetic experience upheld by Wolff and the emotional impact of art emphasized by Du Bos in France and by Kames in Britain just at the end of Baumgarten’s life. The importance of this category would be emphasized even more by Baumgarten’s disciple Georg Friedrich Meier (1718– 1777) than by Baumgarten himself. Baumgarten was the son of a Pietist minister from Berlin, but both his parents had died by the time he was eight. After some further education in Berlin, he followed his older brother Jacob Siegmund, who would become a prominent theologian and historian of religion, to Halle when he was thirteen years old (along with another brother, Nathaneal); their father had intended for all of them to study for the ministry there, the hotbed of the Pietist movement within German Lutheranism. That means that the Baumgartens arrived in Halle just after Wolff had been expelled and the study of his philosophy banned, although the ban was less strictly enforced at the “Waisenhaus,” the famous Pietist orphanage and school where Alexander was first enrolled, than at the university, 27

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus/Philosophische Betrachtungen über einige Bedingunge des Gedichtes, trans. and ed. Heinz Paetzold (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983). Translated as Reflections on Poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, by Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954).

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and as a young teacher there the older brother Jacob Siegmund did introduce Alexander and other students to Wolffianism. The younger Baumgarten started at the university at sixteen (in 1730), and studied theology, philology, poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy, especially Leibniz, whose philosophy was not banned. He began teaching there himself in 1735, upon the acceptance of his thesis on poetry for the venia legendi, and published his Metaphysics, which would be Kant’s textbook for his metaphysics lectures throughout his career (and therefore the closest target at hand for the Critique of Pure Reason) in 1739. In 1740, the same year that he published his Ethics (also the basis for Kant’s lectures in that subject, and again a major target for his critique in his own writings in moral philosophy), and just when Wolff had been welcomed back to Halle by the new Prussian king, Friedrich II, Baumgarten was appointed to the chair in “Philosophy and Beautiful Sciences” (Weltweisheit und schöne Wissenschaften) at another Prussian university, the Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder (in poor shape then, and finally dissolved in 1811).28 Georg Friedrich Meier, who had been studying with Baumgarten, took over his classes at Halle and was himself appointed professor there in 1746. Having published the textbooks for his metaphysics and ethics classes, Baumgarten then returned to aesthetics and began working on a major treatise in 1742. The first volume of his Aesthetica, like his other books written in Latin, appeared in 1750, the first work ever to use the name of the new discipline as a title. The next year, however, Baumgarten’s health began to decline from lung disease, probably tuberculosis, and a second volume of the Aesthetica came out only in 1758, under pressure from the publisher.29 The two volumes covered just under a third of Baumgarten’s original plan, 28

29

For the title of Baumgarten’s chair, see Pauline Kleingeld, “Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb,” in Heiner F. Klemme and Manfred Kuehn, editors, The Dictionary of EighteenthCentury German Philosophers, 3 vols. (London: Continuum, 2010), vol. I, pp. 66–73, at p. 67. This entry stresses the breadth of Baumgarten’s education in the literary humanities as well as philosophy. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Frankfurt [an der Oder]: Johann Christian Kleyb, 1750), and Aestheticorum Pars Altera (1758). A beautiful modern edition of the Latin text was produced in honor of Benedetto Croce (Naples: Bruno Laterzi, 1936). A bilingual Latin-German edition of selected passages was included in Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Ästhetik als Philosophie der sinnlichen Erkenntnis: Eine Interpretation der “Aesthetica” A.G. Baumgartens mit teilweiser Wiedergabe des lateinischen Textes und deutscher Übersetzung (Basel: Schwabe, 1973), which also includes a commentary on those passages. A complete bilingual Latin-German edition has finally been published: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Ästhetik, translated with introduction, notes, and index by Dagmar Mirbach, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007). That will be cited here.

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although they may have included the most original part of the plan. Meanwhile, Meier had been publishing profusely in Halle since the early 1740s, with works in or relevant to aesthetics including a Theoretical Doctrine of the Emotions in 1744, a twenty-five part Evaluation of Gottsched’s Poetics collected in book form in 1747, a three-volume Foundations of the Beautiful Sciences from 1748 to 1750, and a condensation of the latter, the Extract from the Foundations of the Beautiful Arts and Sciences in 1758. (Meier also published massive textbooks in logic, the shorter version of which Kant would use for his logic courses, metaphysics, and ethics, as well as a memoir of Baumgarten and a German translation of Baumgarten’s Latin Metaphysics). Although Meier thus published his main treatise in aesthetics before Baumgarten did, he claimed it was based on Baumgarten’s lectures, and always presented himself as a disciple of Baumgarten – although we will see that one significant difference between their views emerged after Baumgarten left Halle.30 Baumgarten’s Meditations on Poetry conclude with his famous introduction of the term “aesthetics”: “The Greek philosophers and the Church fathers have always carefully distinguished between the αισθητα and the νοητα,” that is, between objects of sense and objects of thought, and while the latter, that is, “what can be cognized through the higher faculty” of mind, are “the object of logic, the αισθητα are the subject of

30

For monographs on Baumgarten’s aesthetics, see Ursula Franke, Kunst als Erkenntnis: die Rolle der Sinnlichkeit in der Ästhetik des Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1972); Michael Jäger, Kommentierende Einführung in Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1980); Friedhelm Solms, Disciplina aesthetica: zur Frühgeschichte der ästhetischen Theorie bei Baumgarten und Herder (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990); Egbert Witte, Logik ohne Dornen: Die rezeption von A.G. Baumgartens Ästhetik im Spannungsfeld von logischen Begriff und ästhetischer Anschauung (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2000); Steffen W. Gross, Felix aestheticus: die Ästhetik als Lehre vom Menschen (Würzburg: Königshaus & Neumann, 2001); and a special issue devoted to Baumgarten, including eight articles on his aesthetics, Aufklärung 20 (2008). For briefer treatments of Baumgarten’s aesthetics, see Baeumler, Irrationalitätsproblem, Part One, B, chs. 2 and 4, pp. 188–97, 207–31; Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, pp. 338–60; Leonard P. Wessel, Jr., “A.G. Baumgarten’s Contribution to the Development of Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30 (1972): 333–42; Mary J. Gregor, “Baumgarten’s Aesthetica,” Review of Metaphysics 37 (1983): 357–85; Caygill, Art of Judgment, pp. 148–71; Cabriele Dürbeck, Einbildungskraft und Aufklärung (Tübingen: Max Nicmeyer Verlag, 1998), pp. 182–94; Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 3–13; Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Aesthetic Orientation in a Decentered World,” in David E. Wellbery, A New History of German Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 350–5; and Beiser, Diotima’s Children, ch. 5, pp. 118–55. For a life of Meier, see Günter Schenk, Leben und Werk des halleschen Aufklärers Georg Friedrich Meier (Halle: Hallesches Verlag, 1994).

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the ε πιστημης αισθητκης or AESTHETICS,” the science of perception.31 But this work says nothing about in what way the new discipline might be a general science of perception, and analyzes only the nature of poetry and our experience of it. We will first see what is novel in Baumgarten’s theory of poetry and then turn to his larger work to see what it suggests about the more general character of the new discipline. Baumgarten begins the Meditations with a series of definitions, defining “discourse” as a “series of words that bring to mind [intelligimus] connected representations,” “sensible representations”32 as those “received through the lower part of the cognitive faculty,” “sensible discourse” as a “discourse of sensible representations,” and finally a “poem” as a “perfect sensible discourse.” The parts of sensible discourse are “(1) sensible representations, (2) their interconnections, and (3) the words, or the articulate sounds which are represented by the letters and which symbolize the words,” and sensible discourse is “directed toward the apprehension of sensible representations.”33 The key thoughts in this series of definitions are that poetry is aimed not just at conveying truth but at conveying it by means of “sensible representations,” or imagery drawn from the senses, and that the “perfection” of a poem may lie in both its medium, that is, the words it uses, and the imagery it arouses, and indeed in the relationship between these two dimensions. Thus Baumgarten introduces the idea that the sensible imagery a work of art arouses is not just a medium, more or less perfect, for conveying truth but a locus of perfection in its own right. This is a view that was barely hinted at by Wolff, and not at all in his discussion of imitation as the perfection of mimetic arts, but only in his discussion of mixed arts like architecture, where he took into account the appearance as well as the function of structural elements. That both the medium and what is represented by it are loci for 31

32

33

Baumgarten, Meditationes, §CXVI, p. 86; Aschenbrenner and Holther, trans., Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, p. 78, though I depart from their translation here and elsewhere. Baumgarten’s Latin term is sensitivus, which Aschenbrenner and Holther translate as “sensate.” Meier equates this with the German word sinnlich, which can be translated as “sensible,” “sensory,” or “sensuous.” None of these translations is entirely happy: “sensate” can sometimes mean conscious, “sensible” can sometimes mean reasonable, sensory is usually used only in scientific contexts, and “sensuous” of course may hint at the physical and even sexual in a way that Baumgarten certainly does not intend. Since “sensible” is the standard rendition of sinnlich in translations of Kant, who based much of his own terminology on Meier’s German equivalents for Baumgarten’s Latin terms, I will use it here as the translation for both sensitivus and sinnlich. Baumgarten, Meditationes, §§I–IX, pp. 6–10; Aschenbrenner and Holther, trans. Baumgarten, Reflections, pp. 37–9.

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perfection and thus potential sources of pleasure is Baumgarten’s fundamental innovation within the Wolffian school, and will make possible Mendelssohn’s subsequent theory of “mixed sentiments” and, it could be argued, Kant’s conception of “aesthetic ideas.”34 As he continues, Baumgarten remains within the Wolffian framework by defining sensible representations as clear rather than obscure – thus he rejects poetry that aims at obscurity for its own sake35 – but confused rather than distinct, and thus as conveying more representations packed together rather than fewer that are neatly separated. Or as he puts it, poems aim for extensive rather than intensive clarity, conveying more rather than less information but without separating the images from each other, as would be aimed for in scientific or “logical” discourse.36 And since individuals are more fully determined, or more fully characterized, than any abstraction, “particular representations are in the highest degree poetic”:37 poetry achieves its goal of arousing a density of images by portraying individuals in particular circumstances rather than by trafficking in generalities and abstractions. Thus Baumgarten turns what is a vice in scientific knowledge – connoting too many ideas without clearly distinguishing among them – into the paradigm virtue of poetry. But what is particularly striking is that he then uses what we might call this quantitative conception of the aim of poetry, that it should arouse more and denser rather than fewer and more clearly separated images, as the basis for an argument that poetry should be emotionally affecting and thus incorporates a recognition of the emotional impact of art into what initially seems to be a purely cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience. First he argues that poetry aims to arouse our affects or engage 34

35

36

37

Beiser’s summary of Baumgarten’s central assumption in the Meditations as “the perfection of a poem consists in cognition of things through the senses” (Diotima’s Children, p. 126) simplifies the conception of the multiple loci of perfection in an aesthetic object that is in my view already present in this work. On Baumgarten and Kant’s conception of “aesthetic ideas,” see Hammermeister, German Aesthetic Tradition, p. 11, and SchulteSassen, “Aesthetic Orientation,” p. 354. Baumgarten, Meditationes, §XIII, p. 14; Aschenbrenner and Holther, trans., Baumgarten, Reflections, p. 41. Baumgarten, Meditationes, §§XVI–XVII, p. 16; Aschenbrenner and Holther, trans., Baumgarten, Reflections, p. 43. Baumgarten’s conception of “extensive clarity” is stressed in most accounts of the aesthetics of the Meditations, including Baeumler’s account which emphasizes “individuality” (Irrationalitätsproblem, pp. 207–31), Cassirer, who states that by means of it “the artist seeks to portray the full scope of intuitively perceived reality” (Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 348), and Beiser, Diotima’s Children, pp. 127–30. Baumgarten, Meditationes, §XIX, p. 18; Aschenbrenner and Holther, trans., Baumgarten, Reflections, p. 43.

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our emotions simply because they are sensible: “Since affects are more notable degrees of pain and pleasure, their sensible representations are given in representing something to oneself confusedly as good or bad, and thus they determine poetic representations, and to arouse affects is poetic.”38 But then he goes on to give an explicitly quantitative argument for this conclusion: The same can be demonstrated by this reasoning also: we represent more in those things which we represent as good and bad for us than if we do not so represent them; therefore representations of things which are confusedly exhibited as good or bad for us are extensively clearer than if they were not so displayed, hence they are more poetic. Now such representations are motions of the affects, hence to arouse affects is poetic.39

Baumgarten thus arrives at a recognition of emotional impact as an essential aim of poetry or art more generally by means of a very unconventional argument from cognitivist premises.40 In this way he innovates within the formal structure of Wolffian philosophy in order to accommodate a view of the aims of art that is no part of Wolff’s own account but much more in the tradition of Du Bos (as well as in the tradition of rhetoric going back to Cicero and Quintilian on which Baumgarten draws).41 This aspect of Baumgarten’s early poetics clearly impressed his student Meier, who devoted one of his earliest books to a Theoretical Doctrine of the Emotions, or “Gemüthsbewegungen,” literally, “movements of the mind,” precisely because in his view “the most eminent books dealing with the arts of oratory and poetry are still very deficient in the chapter in which the emotions should be treated.”42 Professing his allegiance to the Wolffian framework, Meier states that “Aesthetics is in general the science of sensible cognition. This science concerns itself with everything that can be assigned in more detail to sensible cognition and to 38

39

40

41

42

Baumgarten, Meditationes, §XXV; Aschenbrenner and Holther, trans., Baumgarten, Reflections, p. 47. Baumgarten, Meditationes, §XXVI, pp. 24–6; Aschenbrenner and Holther, trans., Baumgarten, Reflections, p. 47. Beiser has noticed this point, commenting that “Baumgarten makes the value of the affective aspect of the poem a function of its cognitive aspect” (Diotima’s Children, p. 131). See Caygill, Art of Judgment, p. 167; Pietro Pimpinella, “L’Æsthetic di Baumgarten: Gnoseologia leibnizian e retorica antica,” Lexicon Philosophicum 4 (1989): 101–12; and Salvatore Tedesco, “Baumgartens Ästhetik im Kontext der Aufklärung,” Aufklärung 20 (2008): 137–50, with further references at p. 137n3. Georg Friedrich Meier, Theoretische Lehre der Gemüthsbewegungen Überhaupt (Halle: Carl Hermann Hemmerde, 1744), unpaginated preface.

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its presentation.”43 Nevertheless, he continues, “Now since the passions have a strong influence on sensible cognition and its presentation, aesthetics for its part can rightly demand a theory of the emotions.”44 However, since Baumgarten’s recognition of the emotional impact of art is not as explicit in his Aesthetica as his earlier Meditations might lead us to expect, we will have to see how this theme is nevertheless implicit in Baumgarten’s mature work before we return to Meier’s development of this theme.45 Before we can turn to the Aesthetica, however, we must look at some of the key definitions Baumgarten lays down in the chapter on “Empirical Psychology” in his Metaphysics (the chapter that would later be the text for Kant’s courses on anthropology, beginning in 1772, where he would in turn work out much of his own aesthetic theory). Baumgarten begins by defining the “inferior” or “lower faculty of cognition” as that which works with sensible representations, which are in turn “indistinct, that is, obscure or confused.”46 Sensible representations can be developed in either of two ways, however: either with increasing clarity of their component “marks,” in which case they acquire “greater clarity (claritas intensive maior),” or with increasing “multitude of marks,” in which case they acquire “liveliness (vividitas, claritas extensive maior, cogitationum nitor).”47 The former development of cognition leads to proofs, while what makes a perception lively is a “painterly” form of clarity (eine malende), thus one that consists in richness of imagery rather than analytical clarity.48 It is this liveliness rather than probative clarity that is the basis of aesthetic experience. Baumgarten then defines judgment as the representation 43

44 45

46

47 48

Meier’s word here is Vortrag, a term that can mean a lecture, a recital, a musical performance; in other words, it can be used both generically and specifically for the presentation of material in various artistic media. Meier, Gemüthsbewegung, §7, p. 7. Dürbeck devotes special attention to Meier’s aesthetics in Einbildungskraft und Aufklärung, pp. 285–307. I cite from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Metaphysik, translated by Georg Friedrich Meier, with notes by Johann August Eberhard, 2nd ed. (1783), ed. Dagmar Mirbach (Jena: Dietrich Scheglmann Reprints, 2005), §§382–3, pp. 115–16. The paragraph numbers of the German translation do not correspond to those of the original Latin, since Meier sometimes combined several of the original paragraphs into one; Mirbach’s edition includes a table showing the correlation between the two versions. A bilingual edition of the Metaphysica with a modern German translation is now Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica/Metaphysik: Historisch-critische Ausgabe, translated, introduced, and edited by Günter Gawlick and Lothar Kreimendahl (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Fromann-Holzboog, 2011). Nitor means brightness or splendor. Baumgartens Metaphysik, §393, p. 119.

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of the perfection or imperfection of things. Judgment is initially divided into “practical” judgment, the object of which is “things foreseen,” and “theoretical judgment,” which concerns everything else.49 Theoretical judgment is in turn divided into that which is distinct and that which is rather sensible, and the “ability to judge sensibly is taste in the broad,” that is aesthetic, sense. So taste is the ability to judge perfections and imperfections sensibly rather than intellectually. Perfections and imperfections, it should be noted, are defined entirely formally as the “agreement or disagreement” of the “manifold of a thing.”50 Next, Baumgarten divides the sensible representation or judgment of perfections and imperfections into the “intuitive” and the “symbolic,” that is, those which consist in sensible properties directly and those which consist in sensible properties taken as symbols of something else, and then adds that the sensible cognition of a perfection is pleasing and that of its imperfection displeasing. If I have sensible cognition neither of an object’s perfection nor its imperfection, then it is indifferent to me.51 Finally, Baumgarten states that In so far as perfection is an appearance [Erscheinung], or in so far as it can be noticed through taste in the broader sense, it is beauty (pulcritudo), and in so far as imperfection is an appearance, or in so far as it can be noticed through taste in the broader sense, it is ugliness (deformitas). Consequently the beautiful, in so far as it is beautiful, delights one who intuits it, and the ugly causes him dissatisfaction.52

In other words, beauty is perfection perceived by means of the senses rather than by the pure intellect. Thus far, then, Baumgarten has remained within the conceptual framework of Wolff. One key addition to Wolff that he makes in the Metaphysics, however, is the concept of the analogon rationis, the “analogue of reason.” He writes: I cognize the interconnection of some things distinctly, and of others indistinctly, consequently I have the faculty for both. Consequently I have an understanding, for insight into the connections of things, that is, reason (ratio); and a faculty for indistinct insight into the connections of things, which consists of the following: 1) the sensible faculty for insight into the concordances among things, thus sensible wit; 2) the sensible faculty for cognizing the differences among things, thus sensible acumen; 3) sensible 49 50 51 52

Baumgartens Metaphysik, §451, p. 139. Baumgartens Metaphysik, §452, p. 139. Baumgartens Metaphysik, §478, p. 150. Baumgartens Metaphysik, §488, pp. 154–5.

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memory; 4) the faculty of invention; 5) the faculty of sensible judgment and taste together with the judgment of the senses; 6) the expectation of similar cases; and 7) the faculty of sensible designation. All of these lower faculties of cognition, in so far as they represent the connections among things, and in this respect are similar to reason, comprise that which is similar to reason (analogon rationis), or the sum of all the cognitive faculties that represent the connections among things indistinctly.53

Baumgarten’s departure from Wolff here may be subtle, its innovation masked by his continuing use of rationalist idiom, but his idea is that the use of a broad range of our mental capacities for dealing with sensory representations and imagery is not an inferior and provisional substitute for reason and its logical and scientific analysis, but something parallel to reason. Moreover, this complex of human mental powers is productive of pleasure, through the sensible representation of perfection, in its own right. The potential of this idea finally begins to emerge in the Aesthetica. Taking up where the Meditations had left off, Baumgarten begins the “Prolegomena” of this work with his famous definition of aesthetics: “Aesthetics (the theory of the liberal arts, the logic of the lower capacities of cognition [gnoseologia inferior], the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogon rationis) is the science of sensible cognition.”54 Baumgarten’s list of synonyms may be confusing, for it includes both traditional and novel designations of his subject matter. He explains in the preface to the second edition of the Metaphysics that he “adds synonymous designations from other authors in parentheses alongside [his own] defining expressions so that the latter might more easily be understood,”55 but it is clear that he means his own new science to be broader in scope than some of the more traditional definitions he brackets: he intends to provide a general science of sensible cognition rather than just a theory of the fine arts or our taste for them. But although Baumgarten makes some broad claims for the new science – The uses of artful aesthetics, which are added to those of natural aesthetics,56 consist . . . above all in that it 1) prepares appropriate material for the 53 54 55

56

Baumgartens Metaphysik, §468, p. 146. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §1; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, vol. I, pp. 10/11. Cited from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Die Vorreden zur Metaphysik, edited, translated and commented upon by Ursula Niggli (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), p. 43. By the addition of “artful” (künstlerisch) to “natural” aesthetics Baumgarten means that the natural dispositions subsumed under the analogon rationis also need to be developed by exercise and training.

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sciences which rest chiefly on the cognition of the understanding, 2) makes that which is known scientifically suitable for the comprehension of everyone, 3) drives the improvement of cognition beyond the boundaries of that which is distinctly known, 4) lays good foundations for all contemplative mental activities and for the liberal arts, 5) and provides a certain superiority to others in the activities of common life.57 –

this is not where the novelty of the Aesthetica lies, for at least in the extant part of the work Baumgarten never actually develops this theme.58 Instead, the innovation comes at the beginning of the first chapter of the work, when Baumgarten writes that “The aim of aesthetics is the perfection of sensible cognition as such, that is, beauty, while its imperfection as such, that is, ugliness, is to be avoided.”59 Baumgarten’s departure from Wolff’s formula that beauty is the sensitive cognition of perfection may easily be overlooked, but in his transformation of that into his own formula that beauty is the perfection of sensitive cognition he is saying that beauty lies not – or more precisely, as the details of his subsequent exposition suggest, not just – in the representation of some objective perfection in a form accessible to our senses, but rather – or again, more precisely, also – in the exploitation of the specific possibilities of sensible representation for their own sake. In other words, there is potential for beauty in the form of a work as well as in its content because its form can be pleasing to our complex capacity for sensible representation – the analogon rationis – just as its content can be pleasing to our theoretical or practical reason itself. The satisfaction of those mental powers summed up in the analogon rationis is a source of pleasure in its own right. What does this mean in practice? Baumgarten’s recognition of the perfection of sensible cognition as well as the perfection of what is represented as a distinct source of pleasure in beauty leads him to recognize 57

58

59

Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §3; Baumgarten Ästhetik, pp. 12/13. Meier particularly stressed the benefits of developing one’s aesthetic capacities; see, for example, “Gedanken von dem Werthe der freyen Künste und schönen Wissenschaften in Absicht auf die oberen Kräfte der Seele” (“Thoughts on the value of the liberal arts and beautiful sciences with respect to the higher powers of the soul”), in Critischer Versuch zur Aufnahme der Deutschen Sprache, number 14 (Greifswald: Johann Jacob Weitbrecht, 1745), pp. 131–41, reprinted in Georg Friedrich Meier, Frühe Schriften zur ästhetischen Erziehung der Deutschen, ed. Hans-Joachim Kertscher and Günter Schenk (Halle: Hallescher Verlag, 1999), Part I, pp. 62–9. Thus, I find the emphasis on Baumgarten’s project of a general science of sensibility in many writers, for example, Caygill, Art of Judgment, p. 160, and Beiser, Diotima’s Children, p. 119, overstated, since Baumgarten did not merely fail to deliver on this promise in the incomplete Aesthetica but does not give even a hint of what this general science would be like. This claim seems to be a pure bit of rhetoric on Baumgarten’s part. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §14; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 20/21.

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not just one but in fact three different potential sources of beauty in a work of art: “the harmony of the thoughts insofar as we abstract from their order and their signs,” or means of expression; “the harmony of the order in which we meditate upon the beautifully thought content,” and “the harmony of the signs” or means of expression “among themselves and with the content and the order of the content.”60 Here Baumgarten is importing the traditional rhetorical concepts of inventio, dispositio and elocutio into his system61 and conceiving of the latter two, the harmony of the thoughts and the harmony of the expression with the thoughts, as the dimensions in which the potentials for pleasure within our distinctively sensible manner of representing and thinking are realized. He thus recognizes those aspects of works of art, which were touched upon only in passing by Wolff and Gottsched, as sources of pleasure internal to works of art that are equally significant with the pleasure that arises from the content of works, considered as representations of perfections outside of the works themselves. The three main sections of Baumgarten’s planned project, the “heuristic,” “methodology,” and “semiotics,” were intended to cover these three sources of pleasure in works of art.62 As it happened, Baumgarten was not able to complete even the first of these three parts. Further, the material he did complete suggests that he may have been more successful in making conceptual space for the appreciation of the particularly sensible aspects of art than in substantively changing how art is actually experienced (and Meier’s completion of the other two parts in his completed version of the Baumgartian system might suggest that they would not have added a great deal). What Baumgarten does is to take a list of the categories of the perfections of the content of logical or scientific cognition and construct a parallel list by adding the adjective “sensible” to them in order to arrive at a list of sensible or aesthetic perfections (and Meier makes a similar addition to lists of the perfections of the organization and expression of scientific knowledge). But even if he arrived at his list of categories of aesthetic perfection by a pedantic method, some of Baumgarten’s categories of aesthetic quality are of great importance. The list of the perfections of every kind of cognition that Baumgarten gives in the first chapter of the Aesthetica is “wealth, magnitude, truth, clarity, certitude, and liveliness” (ubertas, magnitudo, veritas, claritas, certitudo et vita cognitionis), and thus 60 61

62

Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §§18–20; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 22/23. See Armand Nivelle, Kunst- und Dichtungstheorien zwischen Aufklärung und Klassik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), p. 21, as well as Caygill, Art of Judgment, pp. 153, 159. See Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §13; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 16–18/17–19.

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beauty consists in the aesthetic versions of these perfections.63 A corresponding list offered by Meier comments on these categories, and brings out the main ideas of the view: For sensible representation to enjoy the greatest possible beauty, the following is required: 1) The wealth of these representations. A beautiful cognition must represent a great variety in a single image. Variation is pleasing. And the most beautiful cognition is to be considered like a broad region that contains infinitely many and different treasures. 2) The magnitude of cognition, the noble, the sublime, etc. For the sake of this beauty sensible cognition must not only represent great, suitable, important, noble objects, and so on, but must represent them in a way that is suitable and proportionate to their magnitude. 3) The truth of cognition. Without truth cognition is mere illusion, and thus the sensibly beautiful cognition must be as true as possible. 4) The liveliness and brilliance of cognition. 5) Its certitude. A sensible cognition, when it is to be properly beautiful, must not only produce conviction of its own beauty, but also conviction of the correct representation of its object. 6) The touching. A beautiful cognition must not only itself be as delightful as possible, but must also produce a proper gratification or dissatisfaction with its object. 7) The beautiful order in the entire fabric of a sensible representation, and in the interconnection and interweaving of all the individual representations, insofar as a whole is composed out of them. 8) The beautiful designation of sensible cognition. We can hardly ever or never think if we do not attach our thoughts to certain signs, which are related to the thoughts as the body is related to the soul. And thus if sensible cognition is to be as beautiful as possible, then so to speak not only its soul but also its body must have the greatest possible beauty.64

This paragraph contains Baumgarten’s whole view, as well as Meier’s own emphasis, in a nutshell. Meier’s gloss on the concept of wealth shows that this category captures the quantitative idea of “extensive clarity” or density of ideas that Baumgarten already emphasized in the Meditations on Poetry, but his remark that this wealth must be captured “in a single image” also reveals that this category is Baumgarten’s and Meier’s version of the idea that beauty consists in uniformity amid variety that was emphasized by writers in the British and French traditions as well, such as Hutcheson and André. Meier’s explanation of the category of magnitude emphasizes that part of our pleasure in art derives from the value (or perfection) of what it represents, as Wolff had held, but also that 63 64

Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §§22–25; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 24/25. Meier, Betrachtungen über den ersten Grundsatz aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (“Considerations on the First Principle of all Fine Arts and Sciences”) (Halle: Carl Hermann Hemmerde, 1757), §22; reprinted in Meier, Frühe Schriften, Part 3, pp. 170– 206, at pp. 192–3.

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part of our pleasure derives from the way in which such important ideas are made alive for our senses (as the category of liveliness also suggests). Meier’s comment on certitude likewise suggests that the beauty of the work of art resides in the features of the work of art considered by itself as well as in what it represents, for we may have a conviction both of “its own beauty” as well as of its “correct representation of the object.” Meier’s emphasis that the “whole fabric” of the work of art must have an organization that is pleasing to our senses and that the form of expression of our thoughts must add to their beauty encapsulates what would have been the theses of the second and third parts of the Aesthetica that Baumgarten never wrote. And finally, Meier’s insistence that a beautiful work of art must be “touching” suggests the importance for him of the claim that works of art must move our emotions, which Baumgarten had formally derived in the Meditations on Poetry but which he did not emphasize at least in the extant portion of the Aesthetica. Let us look at Baumgarten’s and Meier’s list of aesthetic “perfections” in a little more detail. All that Baumgarten lived to produce was only part, even though it comprises 904 paragraphs, of the intended “heuristics,” namely, an initial characterization of the partially innate and partially acquired characteristics of the “aesthetician,” himself part artist and part audience, and then sections on five of the six merits or “perfections” of the contents of beautiful or successful works of art that he intended to describe. These perfections were to be ubertas aesthetica, magnitudo aesthetica, veritas aesthetica, lux aesthetica, certitudo aesthetica, and vita cognitionis aesthetica, or “aesthetic wealth,” “aesthetic magnitude,” “aesthetic truth,” “aesthetic light,” “aesthetic certitude,” and “the life of aesthetic cognition.”65 Baumgarten’s text thus breaks off precisely where it should have reached the concept of vita cognitionis or the “life” of aesthetic cognition. But Meier not only reached the category of “life” of aesthetic cognition but also claimed that it was the most important of the aesthetic categories. Meier’s exposition of the life of aesthetic cognition must be taken as an authentic part of the Baumgartian theory. In Meier’s version of Baumgartian aesthetics, as expounded in his large Anfangsgründe and in a briefer Betrachtungen über den ersten Grundsatz aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (“Considerations on the first principle of all the fine arts and sciences”) published in 1757 (the same year as Mendelssohn’s “Main Principles”), Baumgarten’s category of aesthetic “light” becomes the “liveliness and brilliance of cognition” (Lebhaftigkeit und Glanz), and 65

Baumgarten, Aesthetica, “Synopsis”; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 4–10/5–11.

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the category of “life,” while remaining the same in the Anfangsgründe, is tellingly replaced by that of “the touching” (das Rührende) in the Betrachtungen.66 That gives us the key to what was meant by the category of “the life of aesthetic cognition,” and places the ultimate focus in the analysis of beauty on the emotional impact of a work of art upon its audience. But before we examine that category more closely, let us take a quick look at several of the others. By the first category, “aesthetic wealth,” Baumgarten means the “copiousness, abundance, multitudinous, treasures, and resources” (copia, abundantia, multitudo, divitae, opes) of material that a work of art presents for sensitive cognition.67 “He who would think beautifully . . . offers . . . the overflowing fullness of objects . . . so that it seems to the observer that the material is inexhaustible.”68 The category of “aesthetic wealth” thus develops Baumgarten’s earlier famous thought that a poem should be “clear but confused,” that is, convey a maximal amount of information but without articulating or sorting it out the way a “logical” or scientific work must.69 This might sound as if it concerns solely the content of works of art, a requirement that a work of art give its audience “much to think about beautifully.” In fact, in spite of Baumgarten’s intended division between “heuristics” and “semiotics,” the category of “wealth,” like all his other aesthetic categories, has both an “objective” and a “subjective” side, that is, can be displayed in both the content of art and the manner of artistic representation. Thus, AESTHETIC WEALTH is . . . either OBJECTIVE (the wealth of objects, of material), insofar as in the objects and what is to be thought itself there lies the foremost reason why the powers of the human genius [ingenii] can paint richly, or SUBJECTIVE (the wealth of the genius and the person), the natural possibility and the resources of certain people by means of which . . . a certain object can be richly represented [ubertim representandi].70

Baumgarten continues the discussion under the rubrics of “wealth of material,”71 which clearly concerns content, “topics”72 and “enriching arguments,”73 which both concern the ways in which ideas are presented 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Meier, Betrachtungen über den ersten Grundsatz aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften, §22, reprinted in Meier, Frühe Schriften, vol. III, p. 192. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §115; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 92/93. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §117; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 94/95. See Baumgarten, Meditationes, §XV, pp. 16–17. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §118; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 94/95. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §§119–29. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §§130–41. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §§142–8.

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rather than the complexity of the ideas themselves, and then “the wealth of genius” (ubertas ingenii),74 which concerns the sufficiency of the powers of the mind of the artist to “conceive the given material richly relative to the occasion, the time, and the place,”75 or to invent appropriate ways of presenting his material. Thus “objective wealth” is the requirement that works of art represent sufficiently diverse or complex objects to hold our interest, and “subjective wealth,” as Baumgarten’s word representare makes obvious, is the requirement that they represent their content in sufficiently diverse or complex ways to hold our interests. Baumgarten’s second category is “aesthetic magnitude.” Here his concern is not the quantity of information contained in and conveyed by a work of art; rather, “aesthetic magnitude” is his term for the sublime,76 and he begins his discussion with a Latin translation from Longinus, “That is truly great which always returns to our thought and consideration, which hardly and not even hardly can be banned from our soul, but which is continuously, firmly, and indelibly retained in our memory.”77 It may nevertheless seem as if “aesthetic magnitude” concerns primarily the content of art, namely, that it represent sublimia or “sublime things.”78 Baumgarten’s further distinction between “natural” and “moral” aesthetic magnitude (which anticipates Kant’s later distinction between the “mathematical” and the “dynamical” sublime) also seems to concern primarily the content of art: AESTHETIC MAGNITUDE, absolute as well as relative, is further either NATURAL, which pertains to that which is not closely connected with freedom, or MORAL, which is to be attributed to things and thoughts insofar as they are more closely connected with freedom.79

Natural magnitude seems to be that which is vast or great in nature, and moral magnitude seems to concern the greatness of human actors and their intentions, thus both seem to concern greatness or sublimity in what is represented by art. This distinction will later be adopted by 74 75 76

77 78 79

Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §§149–57. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §150; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 126/127. Beiser comments that “Although Baumgarten devotes several chapters to the sublime in the Aesthetica, he is always concerned that it be treated according to the standards of beauty” (Diotima’s Children, p. 122). This does not make clear that Baumgarten treats the sublime under the rubric of “aesthetic magnitude,” but that this is hardly subordinated to the other aesthetic categories, nor does it make clear the importance his treatment of this category would have for subsequent treatments of the sublime, especially Kant’s. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §177; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 152–4/153–5. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §179; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 154/155. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §181; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 156/157.

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Kant in his famous distinction between the “mathematical” and “dynamical” sublime, although one fundamental difference between Kant and Baumgarten will be that while Kant conceives of the experience of the sublime as arising primarily in our experience of nature rather than of art, Baumgarten, in this remaining closer to the Longinian tradition, has in mind greatness in the manner of artistic representation as well as greatness in content. Thus the passage just quoted continues to say that “If the themes that are to be found within the aesthetic horizon are richly thought, and you know how to use topics and enriching arguments, then these will also have magnitude,”80 that is, the artistic representation as well as the content will have magnitude. Indeed, the section on aesthetic magnitude began with the suggestion that magnitude is to be found in both represented content and representation – “under this name we comprehend 1) the weight and gravity of the objects, 2) the weight and gravity of the thoughts proportionate to them, and 3) the fecundity of both together.”81 Baumgarten’s conception of the perfection of sensuous cognition clearly comprises perfections on the side of both represented content and its representation, in this case sublimity of content and sublimity in the manner of representation – his illustration of the category of magnitude with passages from the Aeneid and Eclogues of Virgil makes that clear. Thus Baumgarten’s treatment of the category of aesthetic magnitude reflects his recognition of the perfection of both represented content and representations themselves as potential sites for aesthetic perfection and thus sources of our pleasure in art. Baumgarten also stressed the importance of the category of aesthetic magnitude in his own classroom lectures on the Aesthetica, a transcription of which has been preserved. Here Baumgarten mentioned that works of art will be “touching” in the following explanation of the concept of aesthetic magnitude: Everything that we are to think beautifully must be aesthetically great. This is an indispensable necessity. For this it is requisite that the objects of thought be great, and then that the thoughts of the object be made equal or proportionate, and that finally both not be without important consequences, but must rather be fruitful and touching.82 80 81 82

Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §181; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 156/157. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §177; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 152/153. The lecture notes are reproduced in Bernhard Poppe, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten: Seine Bedeutung und Stellung in der Leibniz-Wolffischen Philosophie und seine Beziehungen zu Kant: Nebst Veröffentlichung einer bisher unbekannten Handschrift der Ästhetik Baumgartens (Borna-Leipzig: Robert Noske, 1907), §177, p. 154.

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Baumgarten stresses that the moral content of a work of art is only one source of beauty, and that a work of art can be beautiful without any moral grandeur, for “aesthetic dignity” “belongs to aesthetic magnitude as a part to the whole,” but that if a work of art represents moral agents then it cannot be maximally beautiful without representing moral dignity, and certainly cannot be beautiful if it conveys an attitude contrary to morality. What is important here, he adds, is the moral standing of what is contained in the work of art, not the actual morality of the artist himself: When we speak here of the dignity of subjects, this is not because we demand virtue or honor for God because it is a virtue, but insofar as nothing can be beautiful that is not moral, and because insofar as I would think beautifully I must think morally and virtuously. We are not of the opinion that one cannot make any beautiful poems except in praise of divinity, although these can be the best among the beautiful, but only that they must never be contrary to the honor of God. If I would think beautifully, then I must necessarily think virtuously, but it is another question whether I must be a virtuous man in my actions. If Cicero and other ancients assert that an orator must be a vir bonus, they do not adequately distinguish this from what we have just said. Our rule goes only so far as to say that the orator and the beautiful mind in general must think morally and virtuously. If Voltaire says nothing against religion in his Henriade,83 when he rather speaks to its advantage, I can demand nothing more of him as a beautiful mind, whether or not he denies Christianity elsewhere. That we always hold only the virtuous and moral to be beautiful is constantly evident from experience.84

In this passage, Baumgarten is willing to commend Voltaire as an artist, although he carefully withholds judgment on Voltaire’s advocacy of religious toleration. While quite conservatively emphasizing the importance of appropriate moral content and attitudes in art, however, he does not further develop the suggestion that works of art should be “touching.” That would be left to Meier, although before we can turn to Meier’s development of this concept there are several more of the aesthetic categories that Baumgarten did reach in the Aesthetica that need to be discussed. Baumgarten’s next category, “aesthetic truth” is the requirement of possibility – physical and moral – in objects depicted85 so that they may produce a sense of probability in the audience for art, “that degree of 83

84 85

Voltaire’s epic poem, published in 1726, on the life of Henry IV, who ended France’s religiously motivated civil wars in the seventeenth century and is treated by Voltaire as a forerunner of religious toleration. Poppe, §182–3, pp. 156–7. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §§424–34.

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truth which, if it does not rise to complete certainty, nevertheless may contain nothing of noticeable falsehood.”86 This category (about which Baumgarten seems closer to Gottsched than to his critics) thus clearly straddles the boundary between content and representation; it places certain constraints on the permissible content of art in order to ensure that the representation of the content can have a desired effect on the audience, an effect of acceptance of the content of the work even in the absence of “logical” truth or truth proper, an effect that is in turn necessary for the emotional impact of the work.87 Baumgarten’s category of “aesthetic light,” by contrast, would seem to concern solely the way in which things are represented, and thus to be the first of his categories to concern solely perfection on the side of sensuous representation rather than perfection in what is sensuously represented. But even here Baumgarten stresses that “light” can be achieved by the choice of objects to be represented as well as by the manner of representing them strictly understood. He writes: He who in thinking strives for a truer beauty and truer elegance must, in the fourth place, strive diligently for LIGHT, for the clarity and comprehensibility of all of his thoughts, but for AESTHETIC light. . . . Quintilian, who recommends comprehensibility as one of the foremost virtues of eloquence . . . thus distinguishes entirely correctly between comprehensibility in words . . . and the comprehensibility of things, by means of which objects for a graceful reflection should be accessible and lucid even to those who listen and attend only negligently.88

Aesthetic light or comprehensibility is to be achieved by the appropriate choice of distinctive objects for artistic representation as well as by the lucid presentation of them; once again the perfection of sensuous cognition comprises perfection both on the side of the represented content of art and on the side of the manner of artistic representation. The concept of “aesthetic light” is obviously related to the concept of “clarity” that figured in Baumgarten’s original conception of “clear but confused representation” and alludes to the particularly graphic but not analytic way in which dense content is artistically represented. The last section of the completed portion of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica concerns “aesthetic certitude,” which clearly turns the focus of the work 86 87

88

Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §483; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 460–2/461–3. Mirbach, the German translator of Baumgarten’s work, indicates this by translating his Latin terms probabilia and improbabilia as “believable” and “unbelievable things” (glaubhafte and unglaubhafte Dinge) (Baumgarten, Ästhetik, §485, p. 463). Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §614; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 602/3.

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from the content to the manner of representation: aesthetic certitude concerns how content can be presented persuasively. But the work stops just where the discussion of the “life of aesthetic cognition” should have begun. Here is where we must turn to Meier for the exposition of this category. When we do, we find a category that concerns primarily the emotional effect of art – as already mentioned, in Meier’s 1757 short presentation of his theory, the category of “life” is replaced with that of “the touching.” “A cognition is living,” Meier explains, “if through the intuition of a perfection or imperfection it causes gratification or vexation, desire or aversion.” Insofar as it is a sensuous cognition or cognition by means of the senses that has such an effect, then it has “aesthetic life of cognition (vita cognitionis aesthetica).” Such a cognition “fills the entire mind” because it occupies the “power of desire” as well as the “power of cognition”; it thus “inflames the spirits of life” and “takes possession of the heart,” and for that reason Meier holds “the aesthetic life of cognition to be the greatest beauty of thoughts.” To convey the importance of the category of aesthetic life, Meier illustrates this claim with an extract from a poem by Albrecht von Haller, which concludes with the lines “Certainly Heaven cannot enlarge the happiness/Of him who loves his condition and never wishes to improve it”; as the complete engagement of the two basic powers of the human mind, the power of cognition and the power of desire, aesthetic life is the perfection that completes all the other forms of beauty.89 The hundred pages of Meier’s extended discussion of the aesthetic life of cognition in his main work reiterate the preeminence of this perfection over all the other perfections comprising beauty, a preeminence based in the fact that “touching” works of art “fully move”90 us because by “representing future good or evil” as things that can be “preserved” or “hindered” they “cause a sensory gratification or a sensory vexation.”91 Meier emphasizes that although the depiction of the sorts of objects that naturally produce an emotional response – “a beauty” or “an ugliness” or “hatefulness” – is a necessary condition for aesthetic life, it is not sufficient; what is further necessary to produce this effect is that the content of the work of art be presented in such a way that attention is focused on it for maximal emotional impact: “Whoever would think in a touching way must (1) do everything by means of which attention will be drawn entirely 89

90 91

Georg Friedrich Meier, Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften, 2nd ed., vol. I (Halle: Hemmerde, 1754), §35, vol. I, pp. 59–61. Meier, Anfangsgründe, §179, vol. I, p. 425. Meier, Anfangsgründe, §180, vol. I, p. 426.

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or preeminently to the object itself.”92 “The object must either be really sensed [würcklich empfinde] or by means of the imagination made present to the mind”; “attention must be entirely occupied with the object itself, so that one does not have time to think of anything else by means of which the intuition of the object itself might be hindered,”93 and in particular “everything must be avoided by means of which the contemplation of the object could be diverted to the contemplation of the signs and images [Zeichen und Bilder] in which the object is enveloped”; the presentation of the object must not be “symbolic” but must instead be concrete.94 Meier emphasizes that aesthetics should deal with the passions because they have a “strong influence on sensible cognition.” But his position is not just that the passions have influence on sensible cognition but that they are themselves a great source of sensible pleasure, and that it is therefore part of the aim of art to arouse them. Meier analyzes the passions, in spite of their name (the German term Leidenschaft, like the Latin passio, etymologically means something that happens to someone rather than something that one does, an actio), as a form of mental activity: they are “efforts or strivings of the soul” that result in a desire or an aversion, more precisely particularly strong and firm desires or aversions.95 This might lead one to expect that desires and aversions can be sources of great pleasure or displeasure, depending upon whether they are realized or not, but Meier goes on to argue that “all emotions, the disagreeable ones not excluded, produce a gratification,” because they are active states or perfections of the soul, and “whenever the soul feels a perfection in itself, it is sensitive of a gratification”; this recognition would later become the foundation of Mendelssohn’s theory of mixed sentiments. And because they are so strong, the passions, whether desires or aversions, are those among our mental states that make us most aware of our own mental activity and therefore are actually the strongest source of pleasure for us: “in the passions almost the entire lower power of cognition and desire is engaged, that is, almost the entire lower part of our soul. Thus in the emotions the soul is sensitive of the strength of its powers, that is, of its perfection.” It must therefore necessarily be gratified with its own strength. It must be joyous when it feels as

92 93 94 95

Meier, Anfangsgründe, §181, vol. I, p. 427. Meier, Anfangsgründe, §181, vol. I, p. 428. Meier, Anfangsgründe, §181, vol. I, p. 429. Meier, Gemüthsbewegungen, §27, p. 30.

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much as it can.”96 Meier identifies this feeling of joy at the activity of our own soul with the category of the “life of cognition” and thus makes it a central source of our pleasure in art. “ Living cognition becomes alive through the sensible representations. The lower powers of the soul, the desires and aversions, constitute the life of a cognition. Everything that leaves our powers in peace when we cognize it is a dead cognition.”97 Art aims for the opposite. Indeed, Meier continues that it is by arousing our passions that art achieves its goal of a clear but confused, that is, manifold but densely packed, cognition. Returning to Baumgarten’s original definition of a poem, he says: Poetry is a discourse that is in the highest degree sensible, both in the concepts that it awakes as in the words that it applies to them. Sensible cognition represents all things sensibly, as striking the senses, that is, by means of images. Hence poetry is in the highest degree rich in images. But that our sensible cognition is engaged with images is natural for us. For when we are so strongly moved and touched, then we do not distinguish the circumstances of the subject any more; we represent it to ourselves as really there and as standing before us; the imagination is too strongly aroused to think otherwise. . . . The inner essence of poetry consists in sensible representations and in affect . . . in representations that impress lively images on our fantasy and work on our heart and arouse passions.98

For Meier, moving our emotions is not just some small part of the beauty of art. Instead, the arousal of our emotions, even ones that considered by themselves should be disagreeable, is the strongest source of the pleasure at which art aims because it is the most intense form of mental activity. With this emphasis on the arousal of emotions, Baumgarten and Meier connected the cognitivist and perfectionist aesthetics of Wolff with the passionate aesthetics of Du Bos, and in particular, Meier, by means of his connection of the pleasure in experiencing emotions to the pleasure of experiencing mental activity as such, began to bridge the gulf between Wolffian cognitivism and the theory of play of such closely contemporary British aestheticians as Gerard. He thereby prepared the way for the tremendous influence that British aesthetics would have in Germany by the end of the 1750s. But while Meier stressed the activity of the mind, 96 97

98

Meier, Gemüthsbewegungen, §89, p. 124. Meier, “Daß das Wesen der Dichtkunst in unserer Natur gegründet ist” (“That the essence of poetry is grounded in our nature”), Der Mensch, number 31 (Halle: Johann Justinus Gebauer, 1751), pp. 273–9; reprinted in Meier, Frühe Schriften, Part 3, pp. 160–4, at p. 162. Meier, Frühe Schriften, Part 3, p. 163.

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neither he nor Baumgarten wase quite ready to introduce the idea of the free play of our mental powers as the fundamental source of our pleasure in aesthetic experience. Baumgarten mentioned play once, but only to recommend that children be allowed to play in order to develop their cognitive powers, not as the fundamental source of mature aesthetic pleasure: “the games [Spiele] of children can be considered as practice for the beautiful mind, which is often but perhaps unjustifiably said of the games of adults.”99 Baumgarten also at least once characterized the mental state of aesthetic experience as a form of harmony: he says that the “aestheticodogmatic” thinker, by which he means a thinker aiming to express a true doctrine aesthetically, “should in his striving for truth put before the eyes of his audience the truth of which he has known with certitude and which can be represented in its aesthetic truth on the basis of the harmony between the upper and lower faculties of cognition” (per harmonium facultatum cognoscitivarum inferiorium et superorium).100 But as the occurrence of this comment in the context of Baumgarten’s discussion of aesthetic truth, or of how truths can be presented in ways agreeable to the senses, makes clear, with this reference to “harmony” between the lower and upper faculties of cognition Baumgarten was far from introducing the idea of a free play between them. That idea would be decisively introduced into German aesthetics only when Kant made his unique synthesis of the preceding German tradition with the British tradition. Before that was to happen, however, the ideas that art aims at arousing our emotions and (this one more Meier’s than Baumgarten’s) at the pleasurable activity of the mind, thus at the former as an instance of the latter, would be further developed by an intervening generation of German thinkers. Let us now turn to some of those.

99 100

Poppe, §55, p. 102. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §573; Baumgarten, Ästhetik, pp. 550/551.

7 German Aesthetics at Mid-Century

1. Mendelssohn In a 1757 review of Meier’s abridgment of his main work, thus entitled the Extract from the Foundations of all fine Arts and Sciences, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) wrote the following about the work of Baumgarten, of whom he took Meier to be a mere expositor: It seems to us that the inventor of this science has not delivered everything to the world that his explanation of the word aesthetics promised. Aesthetics is supposed to contain the science of beautiful cognition in general, the theory of all the fine sciences and arts; all of its explanations and doctrines must therefore be so general that they could be applied to each fine art in particular without force. . . . But if one considers the aesthetics of Herr Professor Baumgarten or the “Foundations” of Herr Meier (for the latter are nothing but a more extensive exposition of the former), then it seems as if in the whole organization of the work they have had their eye only on . . . poetry and eloquence. . . . But these clues will not take us very far. Just as little as the philosopher can discover the appearances of nature, without examples from experience, merely through a priori inferences, so little can he establish appearances in the beautiful world, if one can thus express oneself, without diligent observations. The securest path of all, just as in the theory of nature, is this: One must assume certain experiences, explain their ground through an hypothesis, then test this hypothesis against experiences from a quite different species, and only assume those hypotheses to be general principles which have thus held their ground; one must finally seek to explain these principles in the theory of nature through the nature of bodies and motion, but in aesthetics through the nature of the lower powers of our soul.1

1

Moses Mendelssohn, review of G.F. Meier, Auszug aus den Anfangsgründen aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften, in Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste (1756–1759, III.1:130–8, reprinted in Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, begun by

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Mendelssohn rejects what he takes as the narrow basis and a priori method of Baumgartian aesthetics and formulates a good description of the modern hypothetico-deductive method, in which hypotheses are formed on the basis of empirical evidence, tested against further empirical evidence, revised as necessary, tested further, and so on, in place of Baumgarten’s method (although as we have seen, Baumgarten’s extensive reliance on the rhetorical tradition of poetics could itself be regarded as a kind of empirical source for his views). But the reference to the “lower powers of the soul” in the final line of the quotation suggests that he will continue to work within the general paradigm of Wolffian philosophy himself. He certainly does, but what he aims to do is to provide a catalogue of the perfections that can be realized in aesthetic experience that is even fuller than that recognized by Baumgarten, and for that reason also more responsive to a wide range of both artistic accomplishments and for that matter natural beauty as well than was Baumgarten’s theory. What Mendelssohn’s method allows him to recognize is that all of our aesthetic experiences draw on a range of mental and even physical resources, and that because of this, many aesthetic experiences can be understood only as “mixed” rather than simple feelings.2 Mendelssohn’s analysis of the complexity of aesthetic experience places more emphasis on the powers of mind and body involved in such experience than on the objective perfections that art may represent or nature contain and further prepares the ground for the full-blown theory of aesthetic experience as based in a play of our powers that will subsequently be achieved by Kant and Schiller – indeed, in his emphasis on the role of the body as well as the mind in aesthetic experience, Mendelssohn may even go beyond his successors. At the same time, Mendelssohn develops the emphasis on the emotional impact of art that began with Du Bos and found its way into German aesthetics through Baumgarten and Meier. Mendelssohn thus more fully recognizes the multiple sources of our pleasure in aesthetic experience and art than any eighteenth-century German writer before him or, as we’ll see, any individual writer after him, perhaps until well into the nineteenth century.

2

J. Elbogen, J. Guttmann, E. Mittwoch, continued by Alexander Altmann (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann Holzboog, 1929 –), vol. 4, ed. Eva J. Engel (1977), pp. 197–8. The importance of Mendelssohn’s theory of mixed sentiments has been recognized in two books by Konrad Paul Liessmann, Reiz und Rührung: Über ästhetische Empfindungen (Vienna: Facultas Verlags- und Buchhandlung, 2004), pp. 21–36, and Ästhetische Empfindungen: Eine Einführung (Vienna: Facultas Verlags- und Buchhandlung, 2009), pp. 21–36.

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Moses Mendelssohn was an extraordinary figure in the European Enlightenment.3 A Jewish student from Dessau, he followed his rabbi to Berlin at the age of fourteen. At twenty-one, he became a tutor in the home of a Jewish silk manufacturer, at twenty-five his accountant, subsequently his manager, and finally a partner in the business, in which he would work full-time for the rest of his life. But by twenty-five he had also mastered not only literary German but Greek, Latin, French, and English as well as a vast range of literature and philosophy in all those languages; become friends with the critic and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the writer and publisher Friedrich Nicolai; and begun an active publishing career. In 1755, before he turned twenty-six, he published Philosophical Dialogues on the model of Shaftesbury, the letters On Sentiments, and with Lessing, Pope, a Metaphysician! The next year he published Thoughts on Probability and a translation of Rousseau’s second discourse On the Origins of Inequality. From 1756 to 1759 he collaborated with Lessing and Nicolai on the Library on Fine Sciences and Liberal 3

The standard work on Mendelssohn remains Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University [Tuscaloosa]: University of Alabama Press, 1973. Altmann’s monograph Moses Mendelssohns Frühschriften zur Metaphysik (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1969), includes a discussion of the Letters on Sentiments (pp. 110–38), Mendelssohn’s first and main work on aesthetics. Altmann collected his other essays on Mendelssohn in Trostvolle Aufklärung: Studien zur Metaphysik und politischen Theorie Moses Mendelssohns (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Fromann-Holzboog, 1982). Other general works on Mendelssohn are Alan Arkush, Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), and The Religious Enlightenment: Protestant, Jew, and Catholic from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Shmuel Feiner, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity, trans. Anthony Berris (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010); and Gideon Freudenthal, No Religion without Idolatry: Mendelssohn’s Jewish Enlightenment (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). Anne Pollok, Facetten des Menschen: Zur Anthropologie Moses Mendelssohns (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2010), is, in spite of its subtitle, a broad study of Mendelssohn’s theory of human nature, knowledge, social theory, and theology, and includes a detailed study of his aesthetics in ch. 2, parts 2 and 3 (pp. 154–244). Ernst Cassirer did not discuss Mendelssohn’s aesthetics in his early work on German aesthetics, Freiheit und Form: Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1916) or in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, but did in “Die Philosophie Moses Mendelssohns” (1929), reprinted in Cassirer, Aufsätze und kleine Schriften, ed. Tobias Berben (Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2004), pp. 115–37. I have previously addressed Mendelssohn’s aesthetics in “The Perfections of Art; Mendelssohn, Moritz, and Kant,” in my Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 131–60. Hammermeister discusses Mendelssohn in The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 13–20, and Beiser devotes a chapter to Mendelssohn’s aesthetics in Diotima’s Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 196–243.

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Arts, for which he wrote two dozen reviews of new works in aesthetics and literature, and from 1759 to 1765 he contributed close to a hundred reviews to Nicolai’s Letters concerning the newest Literature, discussing works not only in aesthetics and literature but also metaphysics, mathematics and natural science, and politics: He wrote about the metaphysics of Wolff and Baumgarten; the mathematics and physics of Newton, Euler, and Boscovich; Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees and Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (which he, like many since, thought was a terrible novel interspersed with some good philosophical essays); and some of the early philosophical works of Kant.4 In 1761, he published the first edition of his Philosophical Writings, mostly on aesthetics, and in 1763 he took first place in a Prussian Academy of Sciences essay competition for an essay on Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences, beating out the entry by Kant5 – but as a Jew, he was denied membership to the Academy by the “enlightened” Friedrich II, “Frederick the Great,” even though he had the strong support of its members. In 1767, he published Phaedo: or on the Immortality of the Soul, loosely based on Plato’s dialogue of the same name, an immensely popular work that advocated one argument for immortality that Kant would later reject in his Critique of Pure Reason but another that would become the basis for Kant’s own theory of the “postulates of pure practical reason.” But Mendelssohn never abandoned his Jewish religion or studies, and in the 1770s, after the onset of a “nervous debility” that he would henceforth claim prevented him from serious philosophical work, he began a translation of the Pentateuch and Psalms into modern German (but printed in Hebrew characters) that he hoped would both preserve the Jewish religion and yet facilitate the assimilation of Jews into German society at the same time. His masterpiece Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism,6 in which he argued for the civil rights of the Jews by claiming that the state had no right to 4

5

6

Mendelssohn’s contributions to the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend are collected in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5.1 (1991), pp. 5–676. A translation of the essay on evidence is included in Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), even though it was not part of Mendelssohn’s 1761 book nor included in his 1771 revision, on which Dahlstrom’s translation is based. Selections from Mendelssohn’s work on aesthetics not included by Mendelssohn in Philosophical Writings can be found in Mendelssohn, Ästhetische Schriften im Auswahl, ed. Otto F. Best (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), and Ästhetische Schriften, ed. Anne Pollock (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2006). Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush, introduction and commentary by Alexander Altmann (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983).

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recognize any religion at all and therefore must allow all religions equal freedom from interference, was published in 1783. In 1785, he returned to philosophy one last time with Morning Lessons,7 a magisterial summary of his own version of Wolffianism growing out of his lessons for his son Joseph and two other young men. By this time, however, he was caught up in a strenuous controversy with the anti-Enlightenment, fideist philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi over whether his own lifelong friend Lessing had been unbeknownst to him a Spinozist or pantheist, thus virtually an atheist, and in the midst of this controversy Mendelssohn died of a stroke in January 1786, at the age of fifty-six. His efforts to find a way for Jews to retain their own culture and religion while becoming part of the larger German society were partly successful, ultimately leading to Reform Judaism, and partly a failure, as three out of his own four surviving children would convert to Christianity, including his son Joseph, the recipient of the Morning Lessons and the father of the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. As already mentioned, Mendelssohn worked his entire life within the framework of Wolffian metaphysics and psychology, and thus he accepted the definition of sensible perception as clear but confused. He accepted Wolff’s explanation that pleasure arises in the sensible perception of perfection but also Baumgarten’s transformation of that formula into the explanation of beauty as the perfection of sensible cognition: In his statement that “the essence of the fine arts and sciences consists in an artful, sensibly perfect representation or in a sensible perfection represented by art,”8 Mendelssohn puts the Wolffian and Baumgartian definitions together with an “or,” but his account of our experience of art in his central writings in aesthetics shows that Mendelssohn should have said “and”: It is the core of his theory that we can take pleasure in the perfections of representations as well as in those of the objects they represent, and in the case of “mixed sentiments” we can even take pleasure in the former in their own right when the depicted objects are themselves imperfect or unpleasant. As we saw in the previous chapter, however, Baumgarten himself may have intended his reformulation of 7

8

Moses Mendelssohn, Morning Hours: Lectures on God’s Existence, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom and Corey Dyck (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011). Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences” (1757), quoted from Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 172–3. I use Dahlstrom’s translations, but for the sake of consistency translate sinnlich as “sensible” rather than “sensuous” or “sensuously,” as he does (see Chapter 6, note 32).

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Wolff’s definition to be understood, in practice he too recognized our pleasure in both the content of artistic representations and the representations themselves, so Mendelssohn is in fact only making explicit what was already implicit in Baumgarten and then applying this recognition of the multiplicity of sources of pleasure in art to explain the case of “mixed sentiments.” Mendelssohn vigorously rejected any interpretation of the Wolffian premise according to which the confusion of sensible perception itself could be the source of our pleasure in it.9 For Mendelssohn, any “pure gratification of the soul must be grounded in the positive powers of our soul and not in its incapacity, not in the limitation of those original powers.”10 For Mendelssohn, “neither fully distinct nor fully obscure concepts are compatible with the feeling of beauty,” for what is required is that an object offer enough “extensive clarity,” that is, richness and variety, to stimulate us, but enough unity so that we can easily take it in as a whole: Listen, now, my noble young man, to how I prepare myself to enjoy something pleasurable. I contemplate the object of the pleasure, I reflect upon all sides of it, and strive to grasp them distinctly. Then I direct my attention at the general connection among them; I swing from the parts to the whole. The particular distinct concepts recede as it were back into the shadows. They all work on me but they work in such a state of equilibrium and proportion to one another that the whole alone radiates from them, and my thinking about it has not broken up the manifold, but only made it easier to grasp.11

Mendelssohn’s explicit thesis here is that while the parts of an object must be distinct enough to allow us to have a sense of their variety but dense enough to allow us to grasp them together with equilibrium and proportion, it is the latter that is the source of our pleasure; but it does not seem a stretch to read him as also suggesting that it is the play of the mind back and forth between its perception of the parts and its grasp of the whole that is pleasant. In this case he would at least be pointing toward the idea that the source of pleasure in beauty is the free play of the mental powers. While rejecting any interpretation of obscurity or confusion as itself the source of our pleasure in beauty,12 Mendelssohn also rejects the idea 9 10 11 12

See also Beiser, Diotima’s Children, pp. 201–2. Mendelssohn, Letters on Sentiments, Fourth Letter; Philosophical Writings, p. 19. Mendelssohn, Letters on Sentiments, Third Letter; Philosophical Writings, pp. 14–15. See also Letters on Sentiments, note h; Philosophical Writings, p. 79.

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of Du Bos (and of Meier’s theory of the emotions) that it is the mere arousal of feelings as such that is the aim of art, that “souls long merely to be moved,”13 as well as the idea of Batteux that “the imitation of nature is the general means by which the fine arts please us, and [that] it is possible to derive all particular rules of the fine arts and sciences from this single principle.”14 Yet he no more rejects the idea that works of art do arouse our emotions and that they are, at least in many cases, imitations of nature than he rejects the idea that the perception of perfection and the perfection of perception are central to our experience of beauty and other aesthetic properties. So how does he fit all of these ideas together into his own distinctive theory? Mendelssohn never presented his aesthetic theory in a full-length treatise. His most systematic presentation, the 1757 essay that he renamed “On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences” when he reprinted it in 1761, discusses only three out of the four axes of potential perfection that he finds in the complete aesthetic experience, so we need to supplement what we can glean from this essay with suggestions from On Sentiments and the Rhapsody, or addition to the Letters on Sentiments that he also added to his 1761 collection. The four axes that Mendelssohn identifies are the perfection in the object of the aesthetic experience, typically the perfection of what is depicted by a work of art but not always, since some arts, such as music and architecture, and all of nature are not mimetic at all (thus Batteux’s principle that the imitation of nature is the ultimate source of all beauty cannot be accepted – as Mendelssohn says, “Is not nature pleasing as well, without imitating?”15 – although as we saw in our discussion of Batteux, he himself interpreted his principle of imitation more broadly than Mendelssohn may have recognized); the perfection of our own perceptual capacities in the experience of an object, the “perfection of sensible cognition” that Mendelssohn adopted from Baumgarten; the perfection of our bodily condition that can be produced through the effect of our mental condition on our body, a dimension lacking from all previous accounts in the German rationalist tradition but perhaps inspired by Mendelssohn’s acquaintance with Burke’s account of the physiology of our feelings of the beautiful and the sublime; and finally, the perfection

13 14

15

Mendelssohn, Letters on Sentiments, Conclusion; Philosophical Writings, p. 71. Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences”; Philosophical Writings, p. 170. Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, p. 171.

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of the artistry that has gone into the production of an object, whether human artistry in the case of a work of art or divine artistry in the case of the beauties of nature. Perfection along any of these axes is a potential source of pleasure in the experience of an object, and the effect of these sources of pleasure can be additive, each increasing our pleasure in the same object. In particular, these multiple dimensions to our pleasure in objects create the possibility of the “mixed emotions” which we experience in the artistic representation of unpleasant or tragic objects, because in those cases our pleasure in the mental activity stimulated by the work of art, the pleasant effect of that on the body, and our admiration of the artistry that has gone into the object can outweigh any pain associated with the depicted content of the work. As Mendelssohn says, “This representation by art can be sensibly perfect even if, in nature, the object of the representation is neither good nor beautiful.”16 This theory may sound a bit crude. In particular, it might suggest that we do not enjoy a work that arouses tragic or other unpleasant emotions because of those emotions, but in spite of them; however, we shall see that Mendelssohn’s theory is more subtle than that. Mendelssohn’s characterization of the intrinsic perfection of objects in nature and thus of the objects depicted in representational art follows in the path already marked out by Wolff and Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and André, and the ancient tradition on which they all drew: the perfection of an object lies in the order, symmetry, and rational coherence of its parts, and its beauty lies in that perfection insofar as it can be grasped in sensible cognition. Thus in On Sentiments Mendelssohn writes that we “call the structure of the world beautiful in the proper sense of the term when the imagination orders its chief parts in as splendid a symmetry as that of the order that reason and perception teach us that they possess outside us.”17 In the case of natural objects, this order is comprised by both the internal organization of an object to suit its overall goal and the part that the particular object plays in nature as a whole: Think, now, of the genuine perfection of trees. Consider these leaves, these branches, these buds here, those blossoms there; what sort of common final purpose binds them together? In what connection do they stand to the tree and, through it, to the whole of things? Here your soul will become

16 17

Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, pp. 172–3. Mendelssohn, Letters on Sentiments, Third Letter; Philosophical Writings, p. 15.

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intoxicated from the ecstasy, here you will attain intuitive knowledge of an authentic perfection, a pleasure that depends not on your weakness, but on the rational striving for representations grounded in one another.18

In the “Main Principles,” Mendelssohn goes beyond this formalistic characterization of perfection and offers a more concrete list of the kinds of things that count as perfections in objects, whether objects in nature enjoyed in their own right or objects in nature enjoyed through the artistic depiction of them, which provide “the first level of satisfaction and dissatisfaction which alternately accompany all our representations.” Here he says that Everything capable of being represented to the senses as a perfection could also present an object of beauty. Belonging here are all the perfections of external forms, that is, the lines, surfaces, and bodies and their movements and changes; the harmony of the multiple sounds and colors; the order in the parts of a whole, their similarity, variety, and harmony; their transposition and transformation into other forms; all the capabilities of our soul, all the skills of our body. Even the perfections of our external state (under which honor, comfort, and riches are to be understood) cannot be excepted from this if they are fit to be represented in a way that is apparent to the senses.19

When Mendelssohn refers to the capabilities of our soul and the skills of our body here, he is referring to them as objects for depiction or description in a work of art, thus as part of the content of works of art. This is how he fits into his model the representation of human intentions, actions, and responses to them, which are the subject matter of most mimetic art. The next axis of perfection that Mendelssohn considers is the state of our mind in response to perfection or imperfection in a real or represented object. His clearest treatment of this may come in the Rhapsody, which begins by taking up the question of how we can be “powerfully attracted to the representation” of something unpleasant – how it could be that “Lisbon’s demise in the earthquake attracted countless people 18

19

Mendelssohn, Letters on Sentiments, Fifth Letter; Philosophical Writings, p. 24. This passage should be recalled when we come to Kant, for it could explain his connection of aesthetics and teleology in the Critique of the Power of Judgment: he will argue that an experience of the internal purposiveness of the parts of an organism and the purposiveness of its place in the whole of nature as Mendelssohn describes is a valid aesthetic experience and a valuable heuristic for both science and morality, but not a conception that can be directly incorporated into the contents of science. Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles”: Philosophical Writings, p. 172.

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to take in the sight of this terrible devastation with their own eyes”?20 Mendelssohn responds to this question by saying that Each individual representation stands in a twofold relation. It is related, at once, to the matter before it as its object (of which it is a picture or copy) and then to the soul or the thinking subject (of which it constitutes a determination). As a determination of the soul, many a representation can have something pleasant about it although, as a picture of the object, it is accompanied by disapproval and a feeling of repugnance.21

Several points about this passage need comment. First, while by “representation” (Vorstellung) here, Mendelssohn means a mental state that represents something other than itself, not an external object such as a painting or a poem that depicts or describes something, a mental representation can of course represent an external object that is not directly present to it but is indirectly presented to it by an external representation such as a painting or a poem which is its direct external object, and that is indeed how artistic representation typically works. Second, while Mendelssohn here refers to a mental representation as a “determination” (Bestimmung) or property of the mind, his further discussion suggests that he is actually thinking of representation as a kind of mental activity, an activity involving our capacities for both knowing and desiring, and that we enjoy representation because we enjoy mental activity – the view that goes back to Du Bos. Thus he continues that while “elements of perfection” in a thing are “satisfying and comfortable to us,” “elements of imperfection . . . are perceived with dissatisfaction,” In relation to the thinking subject, the soul, on the other hand, perceiving and cognizing the features as well as testifying to enjoying them or not constitutes something actual [Sachliches] that is posited in the soul, an affirmative determination of the soul. Hence every representation, at least in relation to the subject, as an affirmative predicate of the thinking entity, must have something about it that we like. For even the picture of the deficiency of the object, just like the expression of discontent with it, are not deficiencies on the part of the thinking entity, but rather affirmative and actual determinations of it. We cannot perceive a good action without approving it, without feeling inside a certain enjoyment of it, nor can we perceive an evil action without disapproving of the action itself and being disgusted by it. Yet recognizing an evil action and disapproving it are affirmative features of the soul, expressions of the mental powers in knowing and desiring, and elements of perfection which, in this connection, must be gratifying

20 21

Mendelssohn, “Rhapsody”; Philosophical Writings, p. 131. Mendelssohn, “Rhapsody”; Philosophical Writings, p. 132.

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and enjoyable. . . . considered as a representation, a picture within us that engages the soul’s capacities of knowing and desiring, the representation of what is evil is itself an element of the soul’s perfection and brings with it something quite pleasant that we by no means would prefer not to feel than to feel.22

It is striking how Mendelssohn writes here in gerundives and infinitives rather than in substantives in order to convey a sense of mental activity: recognizing and approving or even disapproving are actions of the mind in knowing and desiring,23 and we enjoy that mental activity, even when it is stimulated by the representation of something of which we disapprove. We even enjoy the representation of something evil as long as our pleasure in the activity of representing is not overwhelmed by disapproval of the object of the representation. A more sophisticated theory of the emotional impact of art than the theory of mere arousal is at least implicit here: it is not the arousal of emotions as such that we enjoy, but the activities of understanding and judging the appropriateness of all sorts of human emotions, the whole range of which should therefore be able to be depicted or expressed in art. The presentation of emotions in art can fully engage our cognitive and judgmental powers. Although, as earlier noted, Mendelssohn has two further dimensions of perfection to add, the perfection of the body in aesthetic experience and the perfection of artistry in the production of aesthetic objects, the present contrast between perfection or imperfection in the content of a representation and the enjoyable activity of the mind in representing that content is the heart of his theory, so we can interrupt our catalogue of all four axes of perfection for some comments on this contrast. The first thing to be noticed is that Mendelssohn here emphasizes the engagement in aesthetic experience of our powers of both knowing and judging on the one hand and desiring on the other, and in particular the power of knowing and judging emotions or desires. This gives him room to combine Du Bos’s emphasis on our enjoyment of the arousal of our emotions with Baumgarten’s emphasis on our enjoyment of the perfection of sensible cognition into a more sophisticated account of our enjoyment of emotional responses to art than either of those writers had achieved. Further, Mendelssohn adds another crucial point here, 22 23

Mendelssohn, “Rhapsody”; Philosophical Writings, pp. 133–4. In the phrase “expressions of the mental powers in knowing and desiring,” Mendelssohn uses the word Aeusserungen rather than Ausdrücke, and the phrase in Erkennen und Begehren rather than der Erkenntnis und Begierde, in all of his choices thereby emphasizing the activity of the mind.

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leading to a fundamental revision in the significance of artistic imitation: In order for us to enjoy the mixed emotions in a pleasing representation of something that is objectively displeasing, our sense of the difference between the represented content and our act of representing it cannot be allowed to collapse, and the rôle of artistic imitation is precisely to create enough distance between our representation and its object to allow us to enjoy the representation rather than to collapse that space by creating the illusion that we are in the actual presence of the depicted object. Mendelssohn writes in the Rhapsody that “the imperfect, evil, and deficient always arouse a mixed feeling that is composed of an element of dissatisfaction with the object and satisfaction with the representation of it.” He continues, “If the object gets too close to us, if we regard it as a part of us or even as ourselves, the pleasant character of the representation completely disappears, and the relation to the subject immediately becomes an unpleasant relation to us since here subject and object collapse, as it were, into one another.”24 He then says that a “means of rendering the most terrifying events pleasant to gentle minds is the imitation by art, on the stage, on the canvas, and in marble, since an inner consciousness that we have an imitation and nothing genuine before our eyes moderates the strength of the objective disgust and, as it were, elevates the subjective side of the representation.”25 Thus, contrary to Wolff and Batteux, and for that matter to Hutcheson as well, Mendelssohn does not suppose that what we enjoy in imitation is accuracy of representation taken to the point of illusion, but rather the room for the experience of our own mental activity that the knowledge that the depicted object is only being imitated allows. This innovation in the theory of imitation lies behind Mendelssohn’s extended discussion of suicide in On Sentiments. Suicide was a fascinating topic for Enlightenment thinkers, as evidenced by the popularity of Addison’s Cato and Gottsched’s Dying Cato: At least the hero who commits suicide for noble reasons seems to have been widely admired. But Mendelssohn wants to draw a strong distinction between suicide in real life, of which he cannot approve, and suicide on the stage, which may be moving. He writes: You are mistaken . . . if you believe that suicide seals the moral goodness of a character. It does not seal moral goodness at all. The stage has its own ethos. In life nothing is ethically good that is not grounded in our perfection. 24 25

Mendelssohn, “Rhapsody”; Philosophical Writings, p. 134. Mendelssohn, “Rhapsody”; Philosophical Writings, p. 138.

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On the stage, on the other hand, everything that is grounded in powerful passions is good. The purpose of the tragedy is to arouse passion, and the darkest vice that leads to this final purpose is welcome on stage. Thus, even suicide is good from a theatrical point of view.26

We can enjoy the passions aroused by the suicide on stage precisely because we know it is on stage and can thereby separate the enjoyable activity of our cognitive and emotional powers from our disapproval of suicide in real life. This sense of distance must be preserved from the incursions of real life, so if someone in the audience were to shout out at a suicide on the stage, “‘What are you doing, you rogue? Are you willing to do penance for your vices?’ At that moment the morality of the theater would disappear. . . . Held up to the mirror of genuine morality, our sympathy . . . would turn into disgust.” But our pleasure would not be ruined simply because the coherence of an illusion has been shattered, but rather because the distance that is created by our knowledge that what is on stage is an illusion has been shattered, and thus we are forced to turn from our enjoyment of the representation to our disapproval of what it represents.27 In fact, Mendelssohn’s analysis of our mixed emotions in the experience of tragedy is even more subtle than thus far suggested, for a further aspect of it is that our knowledge that we are experiencing represented rather than real people allows us to enjoy sympathy with the perfections of the noble characters who are depicted rather than pity at their weaknesses or at the fate that overcomes them – a point that he makes in order to preserve his premise that “The imperfect, considered as imperfection, cannot possibly be gratifying.”28 But rather than pursuing that point,29 I want to make one further point about Mendelssohn’s general account of our enjoyment of the engagement of our powers of knowing and desiring. This explanation of a fundamental source of aesthetic pleasure as arising from the engagement of those two powers might seem to conflict with Mendelssohn’s later but influential ascription of aesthetic 26 27

28 29

Mendelssohn, Letters on Sentiments, Thirteenth Letter; Philosophical Writings, p. 58. Hammermeister interprets Mendelssohn’s differentiation between our response to suicide on the stage and in reality as an assertion of the “autonomy of art” (German Aesthetic Tradition, p. 19). That seems to me anachronistic; as we will see, the idea of the autonomy of art was only introduced by Karl Philipp Moritz in 1785 and was not in fact widely accepted before that date, or even after it, until the promulgation of the idea of “art for art’s sake” well into the nineteenth century. See Letters on Sentiments, Conclusion; Philosophical Writings, pp. 73–5. Mendelssohn’s transition from a theory of tragedy on which our response is pity to one in which it is admiration is recounted by Beiser, Diotima’s Children, pp. 206–10.

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pleasure to a third faculty, the “faculty of approval,” distinguished from both the “faculty of cognition” and the “faculty of desire.” Mendelssohn introduces this third faculty in the Morning Lessons, a quarter-century after his early writings on aesthetics. There he says that One usually divides the faculties of the soul into the faculty of cognition and the faculty of desire, and assigns the sentiment of pleasure and displeasure to the faculty of desire. But it seems to me that between knowing and desiring lies the approving, the assent, the satisfaction of the soul, which is actually quite remote from desire. We contemplate the beauty of nature and of art, without the least arousal of desire, with gratification and satisfaction. It seems to be a particular mark of beauty that we contemplate it with quiet satisfaction; that it pleases, even if we do not possess it, and that is remote from the urge to possess it.30

This passage is often thought to be that from which Kant derived his conception of the disinterestedness of judgments of taste,31 or perhaps more plausibly the text which reminded him of the earlier ideas of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson on this subject as he prepared to write the Critique of the Power of Judgment. And it may well have been. But whatever use later thinkers made of this idea, it should not be taken to have undermined Mendelssohn’s own view that the engagement of our powers of knowing and desiring is a fundamental source of our pleasure in representation. Rather, Mendelssohn’s explanation of the “faculty of approval” shows that his basic theory has not changed. By introducing this faculty, he wants to emphasize that the experience of beauty or other aesthetic qualities is not actual knowledge, nor does it lead to specific desires and actions (except perhaps the desire to be able to continue contemplating an object already found to have been beautiful). But what satisfies the faculty of approval is still the activity of the other mental powers. Thus Mendelssohn writes, first with reference to the power of cognition but then with reference to desire as well, that “We can consider the cognition of the soul in different respects; either in so far as it is true or false, which I call the material aspect in cognition; or in so far as arouses pleasure or displeasure, has as its consequence the approval or disapproval of 30

31

Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden, oder Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes, ed. Dominique Bourel (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1979), Lesson VII, p. 70. See Armand Nivelle, Kunst- und Dichtungstheorie zwischen Aufklärung und Klassik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), p. 64. For an early statement of Mendelssohn’s influence on Kant, see Theodor Wilhelm Danzel, “Moses Mendelssohn” (an 1845 review of an 1843– 45 edition of Mendelssohn’s Gesammelte Schriften), in Danzel, Zur Literatur und Philosophie der Goethezeit: Gesammelte Aufsätze zut Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Hans Mayer (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1962), pp. 1–23.

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the soul, and this can be called the formal aspect in cognition.” And he explains the latter aspect precisely in terms of mental activity: Every concept, in so far as it is merely thinkable, has something that pleases the soul, that occupies its activity, and is thus cognized by it with satisfaction and approval. Nothing is in the highest degree evil; nothing in the highest degree ugly. But where the soul finds more satisfaction in one concept than in another, more agreeable occupation, then can it prefer the former to the latter. In this comparison and in the preference that we give to an object consists the essence of the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the evil, the perfect and the imperfect. What we cognize as the best in this comparison works on our faculty of desire and stimulates it, where it finds no resistance, to activity. This is the side on which the faculty of approval touches demand or desire.32

Ordinarily, the faculty of cognition aims at truth, and the faculty of desire aims at action. The faculty of approval, however, aims just for the pleasing activity of the other two faculties without their usual results. Mendelssohn stresses that “If we seek truth, only truth can satisfy us. It is another matter if we have the intention of occupying our faculty of approval, and thereby making ourselves more perfect” – note, making ourselves more perfect, not another object. “In this respect the human being loves invention,” or fiction (Erdichtung). “He forms things in accord with his inclination, so as to set his satisfaction and dissatisfaction in an agreeable play. He will not be instructed, but moved.”33 The faculty of approval should be distinguished from the faculties of cognition and desire, since it does not aim at the same results they do. But it is itself satisfied by creations that set those faculties into an “agreeable play.” This is not a breach with Mendelssohn’s earlier doctrine, but an explanation of it.34 Mendelssohn’s introduction of the concept of play here may also be just as influential for the development of Kant’s aesthetics as is his insistence that the faculty of approval does not lead to actual knowledge or actual desire. In the Morning Lessons Mendelssohn does not 32 33 34

Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden, Lesson VII, pp. 72–3. Ibid., p. 75. Thus while I agree with Beiser that Mendelssohn’s introduction of the “three-faculty” theory into Morning Lessons does not represent a radical departure from his earlier views (Diotima’s Children, pp. 240–3), I do think that it constitutes a valuable amplification of the view of our enjoyment of the mental activities of knowing and desiring that he earlier expounded, one that makes it clear that we enjoy the activity of judging in both cognitive and practical contexts. And thus the doctrine may indeed point the way toward Kant’s ascription of aesthetic experience to a faculty of judgment.

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emphasize that the free play of the mind has a pleasing effect on the body, but he does in his earlier writings, so let us now return to this third item in Mendelssohn’s catalogue of the axes of perfection in aesthetic experience. This is the effect of the activity of the mind in aesthetic experience on the state of the body, a point that Mendelssohn emphasizes in On Sentiments and the Rhapsody although not in the essay on the “Main Principles.” Mendelssohn’s first reference to this in On Sentiments makes it sound as if pleasure in “the improved condition of the state of our body or sensible gratification” is an independent pleasure that may or may not accompany pleasure in beauty or in intellectual perfection.35 His next mention of it, however, suggests that the mental and the physical effects of the perception of beauty are intertwined. He says that if “each sensible rapture, each improved condition of the state of our body, fills the soul with the sensible representation of a perfection, then every sensible representation must also, in turn, bring with it some well-being of the body. . . . And in this way a pleasant emotion [Affekt] arises.” He distinguishes between a “sensible rapture” (sinnliche Wollust) and an emotion because the former begins in a part of a body, that is, with an actual external perception, while the latter “arises in the brain itself,” but in either case the feeling of the pleasure “arrange[s] the fibers of the brain into an appropriate tone, employing them without fatiguing them,” and then “The brain communicates this harmonious tension to nerves of the other parts of the body and the body becomes comfortable.”36 In other words, although as a rationalist metaphysician Mendelssohn maintains the formal distinction between the mind and the body (the mind is simple and indivisible, while body is essentially divisible),37 as a psychologist and aesthetician he nevertheless sees them as in the most intimate interaction, with the perception of harmony by the body infusing the mind with a pleasant sense of harmony that then further stimulates the harmonious condition of the body. Finally, in the Rhapsody, Mendelssohn defends the importance of the “pleasure of the senses” (Sinnenlust), denigrated by puritans before him and even after him (Kant), because of its favorable effect on the soul: 35 36 37

Mendelssohn, Letters on Sentiments, Eleventh Letter; Philosophical Writings, p. 48. Mendelssohn, Letters on Sentiments, Twelfth Letter; Philosophical Writings, p. 53. This distinction, which goes back to Descartes and beyond, is the basis for Mendelssohn’s argument for the immortality of the soul in Phädon (First Dialogue), in Moses Mendelssohn, Phädon oder Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, ed. Dominique Bourel (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1979), pp. 40–77.

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I have said of sensible pleasure that it consists in a feeling of the improved condition of the body that is pleasant to the soul. I have also regarded the body’s movements as the object, the soul merely as a spectator that takes pleasure in this representation because it perceives an objective perception, although one that specially concerns it because its object is one that is most closely connected to it. But there is yet another source of the gratification that we find in sensible pleasure that must not be left out of consideration. The soul enjoys the well-being of its body not merely as a spectator . . . but the sensible pleasure arouses in the soul itself no little degree of perfection, through which what is agreeable in the sentiment becomes incomparably livelier. To the harmonious movements in the organs of the senses correspond harmonious sentiments in the soul, and in a sensible rapture the entire neural structure is set into a harmonious motion; thus the entire basis of the soul, the entire system of its sentiments and obscure feelings is moved in a similar way, and set into an harmonious play. Thereby every faculty of sensible cognition, every power of sensible desire is occupied in the way most fitting to it and maintained in its exercise, that is, the soul itself is transported into a better state.38

I have quoted this passage at length because it contains Mendelssohn’s fullest analysis of what an aesthetic experience can be: It is an experience in which both the body and all of the lower capacities of mind, from the faculties of sensible cognition to those of desire to the sentiments and feelings, are set into a harmonious play and state of activity. Finally, the “Main Principles” introduce a fourth source of perfection and therefore pleasure in the aesthetic experience, namely, our appreciation of the artistry that is manifested in the production of a beautiful object. In explaining this source of pleasure, Mendelssohn also makes another revision to the traditional theory that it is resemblance alone that is the source of our pleasure in imitation, because resemblance is easily produced by means far less complex and admirable than all of the faculties that go into artistry – a point that Plato had already made when he had Socrates argue that if it is mere imitation that the artist were after, he could just go around with a mirror:39 All works of art are visible imprints of the artist’s abilities which, so to speak, put his entire soul on display and make it known to us. This perfection of spirit arouses an uncommonly greater pleasure than mere similarity, because it is more worthy and far more complex than similarity. It is all the more worthy the more that the perfection of rational beings is elevated above the perfection of lifeless things, and also more complex because many abilities of the soul and often diverse skills of the external limbs as well are required 38 39

Mendelssohn, “Rhapsody”; Philosophical Writings, pp. 139–40 (translation modified). Plato, Republic, Book X, 596d–e.

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for a beautiful imitation. We find more to admire in a rose by Huysum than in the image that every river can reflect of this queen of the flowers; and the most enchanting landscape in a camera obscura does not charm us as much as it can through the brush of a great landscape painter.40

Even though in the next paragraph he says that “Genius demands a perfection of all the powers of the soul as well as their harmonization for a single final end,”41 it is striking that in this paragraph Mendelssohn, unlike many of his philosophical contemporaries, explicitly recognizes the physical skills as well as the mental powers of the artist as among the perfections that we indirectly admire in admiring the work of art; this is another example of his recognition of the close connection between mind and body in spite of their metaphysical distinction. Mendelssohn also stresses the superiority of artistic representation over the mere imitation of nature by observing that the artist can create “ideal beauty” by gathering “together in a single viewpoint what nature has diffusely strewn among various objects, for himself a whole from this and taking the trouble to represent it just as nature would have represented it if the beauty of this limited object had been its sole purpose.”42 However, although human artistry may concentrate beauty more than nature does, that hardly means that artistic beauty is in all regards superior to natural beauty. Mendelssohn concludes the paragraph just cited by saying that “the most perfect, ideal beauty . . . is to be encountered nowhere in nature other than in the whole and is perhaps never fully to be attained in the works of art.” That is, the beauty of nature as a whole exceeds the beauty of any work of art, and accordingly our admiration for the skill and genius of any human artist must be exceeded by our admiration for and pleasure in the artistry that lies behind nature as a whole. Thus, “The pleasure we take in the beauties of nature itself is inflamed to the point of ecstasy by regard to the infinite perfection of the master who has produced them,” and “the pleasure of an atheist who must content himself merely with the beauties of the objects themselves” must be incomplete and “cold.”43 Thus, admiration for the perfection

40

41 42 43

Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, p. 174. I have modified the translation here, particularly by using the more literal translation “elevated above” rather than “sublime” for erhaben über, since introducing a reference to the sublime into this discussion of the source of beauty seems confusing. Jan van Huysum (1682–1748) was a Dutch still-life painter of flowers and fruit. Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, p. 175. Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, p. 176. Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, pp. 174–5.

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inherent in human artistry adds considerably to our other pleasures in works of art, but admiration for the perfection inherent in divine artistry adds even more to our other pleasures in natural beauties, even if the latter are themselves in some regards more limited than the former. Mendelssohn concludes the essay on the “Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences” with a brief but pregnant division of the arts. The basis of his division is a distinction between “natural” and “arbitrary” signs, which has precedents in Du Bos, in Leibniz and Wolff, and beyond all of them in St. Augustine. Signs are natural “if the combination of the subject matter signified is grounded in the very properties of what is designated,” as smoke is a natural product of fire or “The passions are, by their very nature, connected with certain movements in our limbs as well as with certain sounds and gestures.”44 Signs are arbitrary that “by their very nature have nothing in common with the designated subject matter, but have nevertheless been arbitrarily assumed as signs for it,” such as the “articulated sounds of all languages, the letters, the hieroglyphic signs of the ancients, and some allegorical images.”45 The arbitrary signs could also be called conventional. Mendelssohn’s chief distinction is then between those arts that convey their content by artificial signs, namely, poetry and rhetoric, and those arts that employ natural signs, which convey both reference to content and the expression of feeling through natural signs and do “not presuppose anything arbitrary in order to be understood,” namely, painting, sculpture, music, dance, and even architecture insofar as it conveys any meaning and expression. In fact, Mendelssohn distinguishes between the fine arts and the beautiful sciences, or between beaux arts and belles lettres, on this basis: The fine arts employ natural signs, and the beautiful sciences or belles lettres employ arbitrary or conventional signs.46 Among the belles lettres, poetry and rhetoric are distinguished by the fact that “The main, ultimate purpose of poetry is to please by means of a sensibly perfect discourse, while that of rhetoric is to persuade by means of a sensibly perfect discourse.” This distinction, which alludes back to Baumgarten, will subsequently be taken up by Kant. Mendelssohn does not explain why the fact that poetry and rhetoric employ artificial rather than natural signs entitles them to be called sciences rather than arts; perhaps what he has in mind is that since the meanings of arbitrary signs can be codified, there is more room 44 45 46

Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, p. 177. Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, pp. 177–8. Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, pp. 178–9.

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for precision in the interpretation of poetry and rhetoric than there is in the various fine arts (with the exception of their allegorical or iconographical aspects, which as Mendelssohn has suggested are more like arbitrary than natural signs). In the case of rhetoric, moreover, there was a long tradition going back to antiquity of formulating rules for how persuasion can be achieved, and perhaps this made it seem like more of a science than an art to Mendelssohn. Be this as it may, the main point of Mendelssohn’s distinction is that because its signs are arbitrary and can therefore be associated with any conceivable content, “the poet can express everything of which our soul can have a clear concept,” while the arts that employ natural signs are limited to the expression of those ideas and emotions the natural signs for which can be replicated in their specific media. Each of the latter arts thus “must content itself with that portion of natural signs that it can express by means of the senses,” or more precisely by means of its particular way of engaging the senses. For example, “Music, the expression of which takes place by means of inarticulate sounds,” though it can express both the general ideas of harmony and all of the particular “inclinations and passions of the human soul which tend to make themselves known by means of sounds,” cannot possibly indicate particular concepts of objects such as “the concept of a rose, a poplar tree, and so on, just as it is impossible for painting to represent a musical chord to us.”47 (Much that has happened in both music and painting since Mendelssohn’s time could be interpreted as an attempt to refute this confident statement.) Mendelssohn next assumes that only hearing and sight can convey natural signs – presumably the senses of taste, smell, and touch do not traffic in natural signs, although since the invention of Braille touch can deal with arbitrary signs – and then observes that “the natural signs that effect the sense of sight can be represented either successively or alongside one another, that is to say, they can express beauty either through movement or through forms.”48 The art of dance employs movements that naturally express human feelings and emotions, while the arts of painting and sculpture must “express beauties that are alongside one another” through line, color, and shape. This leads Mendelssohn to the point that although works of music, dance, and for that matter poetry themselves take place through a succession of moments and can thereby convey a succession of movements, painting and sculpture can represent only a 47 48

Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, pp. 178–9. Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles”; Philosophical Writings, p. 179.

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single moment in the history of their objects. The painter and sculptor must therefore choose the instant that is most favorable to their purpose. They must assemble the entire action into a single perspective and divide it up with a great deal of understanding. In this instant everything must be rich in thoughts and so full of meaning that every accompanying concept makes its own contribution to the required meaning. When we view such a painting [or sculpture] with due attention, our senses are all at once inspired, all the abilities of our soul suddenly enlivened, and the imagination can from the present infer the past and reliably anticipate the future.49

Mendelssohn’s thesis that the visual arts must convey all of their content through their representation of an object at a single moment while other arts can represent movements and actions in, as we would say, real time, was, as we have seen, already suggested by Du Bos, Harris, and Kames, and would shortly be used as a premise in a famous controversy between his friend Lessing and the renowned historian of ancient art Johann Joachim Winckelmann, to which we turn next. But before doing so, we must complete our survey of Mendelssohn’s aesthetics with a comment on his discussion of the sublime. Although Baumgarten had addressed the topic of the sublime under the rubric of “aesthetic magnitude,” Mendelssohn was instrumental in introducing the topic of the sublime into German aesthetics under its more common name, publishing a lengthy review of Burke’s book on the beautiful and the sublime just a year after it appeared in England50 and an essay “On the Sublime and Naïve in the Fine Sciences” the year before Burke’s book appeared.51 In the latter essay, Mendelssohn makes a number of points that will become central to the subsequent German discussion of the sublime, especially in Kant. His premise, not surprisingly, is that “The sentiment produced by the sublime is a composite one.”52 For one thing, it may be produced by the perception or thought of an “immensity of extended magnitude” or of an “immensity of strength or unextended magnitude”53 – by the sight, image, or thought of something vastly big or of something vastly powerful. This distinction, like 49

50

51 52

53

Mendelssohn, “On the Main Qualities”; Philosophical Writings, pp. 180–1; translation modified. In the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, vol. III, part 2, pp. 290– 320, reprinted in Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, pp. 216–36. See also Beiser, Diotima’s Children, pp. 217–21. Mendelssohn, “On the Sublime and the Naïve in the Fine Sciences”; Philosophical Writings, p. 195. Mendelssohn, “On the The Sublime and Naïve”; Philosophical Writings, p. 194.

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Baumgarten’s distinction between “natural” and “moral magnitude,” anticipates Kant’s subsequent distinction between the “mathematical” and the “dynamical” sublime, and while it was not uncommon in British discussions of the sublime,54 Mendelssohn may be Kant’s most likely source for it. Mendelssohn then says that either immensity of size or immensity of strength first “captures our attention” and “arouses a sweet shudder that rushes through every fiber of our being . . . giving wings to the imagination to press further and further without stopping.” “All these sentiments blend together in the soul,” becoming “a single phenomenon which we call awe.”55 But the feeling of awe at immensity does not yet complete the complex experience of the sublime; for that, there must also be an element of admiration at a perfection – for remember that Mendelssohn’s project is still to ground all aesthetic experience on the single principle of pleasure in perfection. So the immensity that inspires us with awe must also be interpreted as a manifestation of perfection. Mendelssohn then invokes the same distinction he employed in his discussion of artistry. The immensity that fills us with awe may be either a product of divine artistry, in which case “the properties of the Supreme Being which we recognize in his works inspire the most ecstatic awe and admiration because they surpass everything that we can conceive as enormous, perfect, or sublime,” or it can be due to human artistry. In that case we may not find the represented object so extraordinary but feel with pleasure how “the artist possesses the skill of elevating its properties and showing them in an uncommon light,” or alternatively we may be awed by both the represented object and the divine artistry that lies behind it and by the “great wit, genius, imagination, and capacities of the soul” of the human artist who produces the image of the work of divine artistry. “What especially pleases us in the case of art, considered as art, is the reference to the spiritual gifts of the artist which make themselves visibly known. If they bear the characteristics of an uncommon genius . . . then they inspire awe on our part.”56 We will see in the next chapter that Kant accepts not only Mendelssohn’s distinction between magnitude and strength, but also his distinction between mere awe at immensity and admiration of a perfection; however, he transforms our admiration of the genius of the artist, whether human or divine, into admiration of 54

55 56

See my article “The Difficulty of the Sublime,” in C. Madelein, J. Pieters, and B. Vandenabeele, editors, Histories of the Sublime (Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van Belgie voor Wetenschapen en Kunsten: 2005), pp. 33–43. Guyer, “The Difficulty of the Sublime,” pp. 33–43. Mendelssohn, “On the Sublime and Naïve”; Philosophical Writings, pp. 196–7.

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something within ourselves. Nothing in Mendelssohn’s general theory of pleasure in perfection would have blocked that move: He could have argued that in the experience of the sublime the perfection we admire is that of our own reason. But he did not make that move, so it was left to Kant to do so. In spite of that omission, Mendelssohn’s accomplishment in aesthetics was great. Within the framework of Wolffian perfectionism, he managed to distinguish between our enjoyment of the content of art, which comes close to the traditional cognitivist theory of art; our enjoyment of our own mental activity in representing and judging, which both allows for a sophisticated account of our enjoyment of the arousal of emotions by art and at least makes room for the idea of free play, on which Mendelssohn even touches; our enjoyment of our own bodily condition in aesthetic experience, which no one in the German tradition before Mendelssohn even mentioned; and our admiration for the skill of artistry, which incorporated the contemporary theory of genius into his framework in a distinctive way. It would be a long time before anyone else developed such a complex and comprehensive theory of the multiple pleasures of aesthetic experience. Some though by no means all of Mendelssohn’s ideas would be applied by his friend Lessing in his great debate with Winckelmann over the difference between literature and the visual arts centered on the famous statue of the Trojan priest Laocoön that had been unearthed in Renaissance Italy; Herder would in turn develop his views in aesthetics through a critique of Lessing. So we turn next to the debate between Lessing and Winckelmann, and subsequently to Herder’s critique of Lessing.

2. Winckelmann and Lessing Winckelmann Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) was the son of a poor cobbler from Prussia. He studied theology at Halle and medicine at Jena without receiving a degree and for five years was deputy headmaster of a Latin school, during which time he mastered ancient literature. In 1748 he was appointed librarian for a count near Dresden and gained access to the court of the Elector of Saxony, home of one of the great art collections of Europe, and also a Catholic court (in a Protestant land) that ultimately gave him access to Rome. He established his fame in 1755 with

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an essay “On the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture.” Having converted to Catholicism, he moved to Rome later that year, in the service of the Papal Nuncio to the Saxon court, and in 1758 he entered the service of Cardinal Allessandro Albani, the nephew of Pope Clement XI and owner of a great collection of antiquities. During this time he was also close to the classicist painter Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–1779), who himself published a widely popular treatise on beauty in 1762.57 In 1764 Winckelmann published The History of Ancient Art to great acclaim. He was working on a revision of it when, on his way back to Rome from a trip to Vienna, where the Empress Maria-Theresa had awarded him with a collection of gold and silver medallions, he was murdered in Trieste in June 1768, not yet fifty-one years old, by a thief with whom he may also have had a homosexual liaison.58 Winckelmann was born the same year as Meier and his two years in Halle (1738–40) came while Baumgarten was still teaching there and Meier was also a student. But his writing offers no evidence that he knew their works. His History of Ancient Art does cite Du Bos, Batteux, and the essays of Hume, however, and he had clearly absorbed some of the most general ideas of eighteenth-century aesthetics. A 1763 essay “On the Capacity for the Sentiment for the Beautiful in Art, and on Instruction in it” suggests several of the premises assumed throughout his work on ancient art history. He shares the assumption that art derives its beauty 57

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Anton Raphael Mengs, Gedanken über die Schönheit und über den Geschmack in der Malerey (Zürich: 1762), trans. in The Works of Anthony Raphael Mengs, ed. Joseph Nicholas D’Azara, 2 vols. (London: Faulder and Robinson, 1796). For these biographical details, I have drawn on Winckelmann, Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, with an introduction by Curtis Bowman, 3 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001), pp. v–viii. Two famous older sources are Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert, in Goethe, Ästhetische Schriften 1806–1815, ed. Friedmar Apel, in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer et al., vol. 19 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), pp. 10–244 (most of this is a general history of eighteenth-century visual art, but pp. 176–232 are devoted specifically to Winckelmann), and Carl Justi, Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen, 3rd ed. (originally 1866), 3 vols. (Leipzig: Vogel, 1923). Recent works on Winckelmann include Simon Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Moritz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992); Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); Jeffrey Morrison, Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Élisabeth Décultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann: Enquête sur la genèse de l’histoire de l’art (Paris: PUF, 2000). Briefer treatments include Cassirer, Freiheit und Form, pp. 127–39; Moshe Barasch, Modern Theories of Art, I: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 97–121; Suzanne L. Marchand, “Becoming Greek,” in Wellbery, New History of German Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 376– 81; and Beiser, Diotima’s Children, pp. 156–95.

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from the imitation of nature and derives the most beauty from the imitation of beauty in nature, with Wolff as well as with Batteux: thus he writes that “Art, as an imitator of nature, should always seek out what is natural for the form of beauty, and should avoid, as much as is possible, all that is violent, because even the beauty in life can become displeasing through forced gestures.”59 However, he believes that natural beauty itself lies not merely in the superficial appearance of bodies but, at least in the case of human beauty, is an expression of the thought and character of persons: “Above all things, one is to be attentive to the particular, characteristic thoughts in works of art, which sometimes stand like expensive pearls in a string of inferior ones, and can get lost among them. Our contemplation should begin with the effects of the understanding as the most worthy part of beauty, and from there should descend to the execution” – a point that he illustrates with examples from the paintings of Poussin, Corregio, and Domenichino rather than from ancient art.60 But he does not follow Shaftesbury in suggesting that all natural beauty and therefore all beauty imitated in art is an expression of thought, and therefore of divine thought; he avoids such a general claim in his main work by focusing on the depiction of human beauty in ancient art. Given these premises, Winckelmann clearly belongs to the tradition that finds beauty in the truthful representation of the objective perfections of body and mind rather than in the stimulation of the play of the mental powers of the audience for beauty. Winckelmann’s premises underlie his history of ancient art, the main claims of which are already evident in his 1755 essay “On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks” (translated into English in 1765 by the painter Henry Fusseli). This essay begins with the claim that “There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the antients”61 – his topic is thus in the first instance the imitation of ancient art, not imitation in ancient art. Winckelmann then attributes the excellence of ancient, specifically Greek art, to three factors: first, nature in ancient Greece was particularly favorable to the development of beautiful bodies; second, the “natural” way 59

60 61

Winckelmann, “On the Capacity for the Sentiment for the Beautiful in Art,” in Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, vol. I, p. xlvi (trans. Curtis Bowman). Winckelmann, “The Sentiment for the Beautiful,” p. xlv. Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks: with Instructions for the Connoisseur, and an Essay on Grace in Works of Art, translated by Henry Fusseli (London: A. Millar, 1765), p. 2; facsimile reprint in Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, volume I.

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of life in Greece was particularly favorable to the observation of beautiful bodies and thus to their imitation in art; but finally, and at least equally important, Greek thought and character were particularly noble, and thus the external beauty of Greek bodies was an expression of the beauty of the Greek mind as the “most worthy part of beauty.” The first of these claims is in the tradition of the emphasis of the influence of climate on human character and society initiated by Du Bos and continued by many eighteenth-century thinkers, including Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748). The benign influence of both the Greek climate and the “natural” way of Greek life on Greek bodies is stated thus: “The forms of the Greeks, prepared to beauty, by the influence of the mildest and purest sky, became perfectly elegant by their early exercises. Take a Spartan youth, sprung from heroes, undistorted by swaddling-cloths; whose bed, from his seventh year, was the earth, and compare him with one of our young Sybarits, and then decide which of the two would be deemed worthy, by an artist, to serve for the model of a Theseus, an Achilles, or even a Bacchus.”62 Winckelmann also emphasizes the effects of the Greek diet and dress on the development of their bodily beauty and the absence of “those diseases which are destructive of beauty,” such as smallpox.63 Winckelmann’s second point is that the Greek climate and way of life were conducive to the development of art. He makes the general claim that freedom is conducive to the development of art: “Art claims liberty: in vain would nature produce her noblest offsprings, in a country where rigid laws would choak her progressive growth, as in Egypt, that pretended parent of sciences and arts: but in Greece, where, from their earliest youth, the happy inhabitants were devoted to mirth and pleasure, where narrow-spirited formality never restrained the liberty of manners, the artist enjoyed nature without a veil.” (To be sure, the claim that the Greeks were devoted to mirth and pleasure may be hard to reconcile with our image of Sparta; indeed, all generalizations about “the Greeks,” a population actually divided among many polities with radically different cultures, must be handled with care.) Winckelmann then makes the specific point that freedom from excessive clothing among the Greeks, particularly in their gymnastic and athletic exercises, gave their artists unparalleled opportunity to observe and to learn how to represent the beauty of their bodies: “The Gymnasies, where, sheltered by public 62

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Winckelmann, “On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks,” Reflections, pp. 4–5. Winckelmann, “On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks,” Reflections, pp. 6–8.

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modesty, the youths exercised themselves naked, were the schools of art. These the philosopher frequented, as well as the artist, Socrates for the instruction of a Charmides, Autolycus, Lysis; Phidias for the improvement of his art by their beauty. . . . Here beautiful nakedness appeared with such a liveliness of expression, such truth and variety of situations, such a noble air of the body, as it would be ridiculous to look for in any hired model of our academies.”64 And Winckelmann’s reference to expression and nobility here points the way to his last claim, that above all the bodily beauty of the Greeks is an expression of their mental and moral beauty: “The last and most eminent characteristic of the Greek works is a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur in Gesture and Expression. As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming surface, a great soul lies sedate beneath the strife of passions in Greek figures.”65 Winckelmann illustrates the last claim with a discussion of the famous statue of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons being strangled by the serpents Neptune sent to stifle his warnings against accepting the “gift” of the Trojan horse. The version of this statue that was unearthed near Naples in 1506 and quickly acquired by Pope Julius II for the Vatican, where it has been displayed ever since, is now thought to be a Roman copy of a Pergamese bronze from the second century BCE, and may or may not be the same one described by Pliny.66 Winckelmann took it to be a classical Greek work. He also must have known it only from illustrations and a plaster cast in Dresden when he first wrote about it in “On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks,” since he moved to Rome only after that essay was published.67 Be that as it may, Winckelmann writes: ’Tis in the face of Laocoon this soul shines with full lustre, not confined however to the face, amidst the most violent sufferings. Pangs piercing every muscle, every labouring nerve; pangs which we almost feel ourselves, while

64

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Winckelmann, “On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks,” Reflections, pp. 9–10. Winckelmann, “On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks,” Reflections, p. 30. The use of the metaphor of the stillness of the sea beneath its storm surface, which Winckelmann will repeat, is stressed by Barasch, Modern Theories of Art, I, p. 116. Pliny, Natural History, XXXV. The statue was known from engravings as early as 1544; an engraving from that year is reproduced in Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 8. That a plaster cast was available in Dresden is noted by Simon Richter in “Winckelmann, Johann Joachim,” in Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers, vol. 3, pp. 1276– 9, at p. 1276.

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we consider – not the face, nor the most expressive parts – only the belly contracted by excruciating pains: these however, I say, exert not themselves with violence, either in the face or gesture. He pierces not heaven, like the Laocoon of Virgil;68 his mouth is rather opened to discharge an anxious overloaded groan, as Sadolet says;69 the struggling body and the supporting mind exert themselves with equal strength, nay balance all the frame. Laocoon suffers, but suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles: we weeping feel his pains, but wish for the hero’s strength to support his misery. The Expression of so great a soul is beyond the force of mere nature. It was in his own mind the artist was to search for the strength of spirit with which he marked his marble. Greece enjoyed artists and philosophers in the same persons; and the wisdom of more than one Metrodorus70 directed art, and inspired its figures with more than common souls.

The last paragraph of this is somewhat contorted: since Laocoön was not himself a classical Greek but a pre-classical Trojan (though no doubt the Trojans and the Greeks were from the same stock), Winckelmann does not quite attribute the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” that shines through his face even in the midst of his suffering to him and to nature as it might have been at work in Troy, but rather to the classical Greek artist whom he supposes did make the statue. But his basic point remains: Since in his view the statue itself was Greek, the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur of the Greek soul inevitably manifests itself and elevates these figures caught in a moment of supreme suffering to the highest level of beauty. Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art, published nine years after the essay on imitation, reaffirms his general commitment to contemporary aesthetics as well as his particular emphasis on a certain kind of mental condition as the ultimate source of physical beauty, but gives a slightly varied and perhaps more plausible account of the Laocoön statue, which by then he had seen firsthand. He gives a general statement that could have been written by Hutcheson or André: “All beauty is enhanced by unity and simplicity, as is everything we say and do. . . . For everything that we must consider in divided form or cannot survey at a glance because of the quantity of constituent parts loses its greatness thereby. . . . The harmony that delights our spirit resides not in infinitely broken, linked, 68 69

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Virgil presents the story of Laocoön in the Aeneid, Book II, lines 199–224. The Italian Latinist Cardinal Jacobus Sadoletus (1477–1547) published a poem on the statue to which Winckelmann refers and which Lessing would subsequently quote in his Laocoön, ch. 6, note b. Metrodorus was an Athenian artist of the second century BCE. The description of him as both an artist and a philosopher comes from Pliny, Natural History, XXXV.135.

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or slurred notes but in simple and long-sustained tones.”71 Winckelmann also says that youthful figures are particularly beautiful in a passage that sounds as if it was influenced by Hogarth but apparently was not: “In the beautiful youth, the artist found a source of beauty in unity, variety, and harmony – for the forms of a beautiful body are defined by lines that continually change their center point, never tracing a circle, and thus the forms are simpler but more varied than a circle.”72 Winckelmann then adds to these passages on the beauty of outward form a passage on the expression of inward attitude that is reminiscent of his description of the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of the Greeks in the earlier essay: “Expression is an imitation of the active and suffering states of our minds and our bodies and of passions as well as deeds. . . . Stillness is the state most proper to beauty, as it is to the sea, and experience shows that the most beautiful beings are of a still and well-mannered nature.”73 But, as noted, in the History Winckelmann gives a slightly different account of the Laocoön, in which he suggests that the beauty of the central figure of the work lies not so much in the nobility of character that is expressed in spite of Laocoön’s agony but rather in a kind of harmony between his agony and his nobility: “Laokoon is a being in the greatest pain, fashioned in the likeness of a man seeking to gather the conscious strength of his mind and spirit against it. . . . Beneath the brow, the battle between pain and resistance, as if concentrated in this one place, is composed with great wisdom. . . . Thus, where the greatest pain is expressed, the greatest beauty is also to be found.”74 Winckelmann’s later description of the Laocoön statue might have suggested a synthesis of the perfectionist view of beauty with the recognition of the emotional impact of art, but Winckelmann did not develop such a synthesis. Instead, in the History of Ancient Art he adds to his definition of beauty the idea of “indeterminacy” or “unspecificity” (Unbezeichnung): From this unity proceeds another attribute of high beauty – its unspecifiability, that is, its forms are defined neither by points nor by lines, for they in and of themselves constitute beauty; accordingly, a shape should neither be

71

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Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave, introduction by Alex Potts (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), p. 196. This is a translation of Winckelmann’s first edition of 1764 rather than of the later edition supplemented by other hands that was translated by G. Henry Lodge in 1880 and is reproduced as volumes 2 and 3 of the Thoemmes Press Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, p. 197. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, p. 204. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, pp. 313–14.

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particular to this or that specific person nor express any one state of mind or sensation of passion, for that would mix foreign elements into beauty and disturb the unity. According to this conception, beauty should be like the purest water drawn from the source of a spring; the less taste it has, the healthier it is seen to be, because it is clear of all foreign particles.75

Winckelmann’s insistence on the unspecifiability of beauty as a form of purity blocks the way toward any synthesis of his perfectionist approach with an approach emphasizing the emotional impact of art. The idea of unspecifiability might point the way to Kant’s later notion that the experience of beauty is independent of the application of a determinate concept to its object, to which, for Kant, the only alternative is that it is an experience of free play of the cognitive powers; but there is no hint of the idea of free play in Winckelmann either.

Lessing But in any case, it was Winckelmann’s earlier account of the Laocoön statue rather than the later one that inspired the criticism of Lessing, whose Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, although not published until 1766, was clearly begun and largely written before the appearance of Winckelmann’s History in 1764 and was thus a response to the earlier essay.76 Lessing’s book, although part of the larger eighteenth-century debate about the comparative merits of literature and the visual arts, and in that regard a riposte to Du Bos that builds upon the division of the arts by his friend Mendelssohn, first argues against Winckelmann that the beauty of the Laocoön statue comes not from the special nobility of the Greek soul but from the particular demands of its visual rather than literary medium. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) published his Laocoön at the midpoint of his varied literary and intellectual career. Lessing, born in the same year as Mendelssohn, was the oldest of thirteen children of a Saxon pastor, and at twelve he entered the monastic school at Meissen; at seventeen he went to Leipzig to study theology, then changed to medicine, and then went to the university at Wittenberg. But at twenty, he left the 75

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Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, p. 196. This passage is stressed by Barasch, Modern Theories of Art, I, p. 115, and Richter, in Laocoon’s Body, pp. 56–7, and “Winckelmann,” p. 1278. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962; with a foreword by Michael Fried, Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), ch. 26, p. 138, where Lessing says that Winckelmann’s History “has appeared, and I shall not venture another step until I have read it.”

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university and went to Berlin to make a career as a writer, where he quickly met among others Voltaire, at that time employed by Frederick the Great, as well as Mendelssohn, who would become his close friend. In 1755, Lessing had his first great success with the bourgeois tragedy Miss Sara Sampson, which initiated a new direction toward “bourgeois” drama in the German theater. That same year he moved to Leipzig, though he returned to Berlin in 1758 and at that time started collaborating with Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai on the Letters concerning the newest literature. From 1760 to 1765 Lessing worked in Breslau as secretary to the governor of Silesia, during which time he wrote Laocoön as well as the comedy Minna von Barnhelm. He returned to Berlin again in 1765, but, disappointed in his hopes for the position of Royal Librarian, went to Hamburg in 1767 as director of the National Theater. The program notes he wrote in that capacity became his Hamburg Dramaturgy, his most extended critical work. In 1770, he finally found a secure post as librarian for the great collection of the Dukes of Brunswick in Wolffenbüttel, where he remained until his death. There he wrote the tragedy Emilia Galotti and his famous plea for religious tolerance in the form of Nathan the Wise, a play inspired by Mendelssohn. In addition to various theological polemics, he also published his Education of the Human Race the year before his death.77 The thesis of Lessing’s Laocoön, as already noted, is that the character of the famous statue is due not to the nobility of the Greek mind but to the conditions of the possibility of achieving beauty in its visual medium. Thus from the outset Lessing’s argument shares an underlying assumption with Winckelmann’s, namely, that the expression and arousal of emotion cannot be an independent end of art that might trump the importance of beauty, at least in the visual arts. Lessing begins his work by quoting the same passage from Winckelmann’s essay “On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks” that we quoted earlier.78 77

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An early work on Lessing is Theodor Wilhelm Danzel, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig: Dyk, 1850). Lessing’s general philosophical and theological standpoint is described in Henry E. Allison, Lessing and the Enlightenment: His Philosophy of Religion and Its Relation to Eighteenth-century Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966). A monograph on Lessing’s aesthetics is David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Briefer treatments of Lessing’s aesthetics include Cassirer, Freiheit und Form, 91–108; Nivelle, Kunst- und Dichtungstheorien, pp. 85–126; Anthony Savile, Aesthetic Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings of Lessing, Kant, and Schiller, Aristotelian Society Series Volume 8 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 1–64; Richter, Laocoon’s Body, pp. 62–89; and Beiser, Diotima’s Children, pp. 244–82. Lessing, Laocoön, ch. 1; in the McCormick translation, p. 7.

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He then argues that the Greek, like anyone else, “felt and feared, and he expressed his pain and grief,” and that this was not thought to be incompatible with nobility of soul; he appeals to examples from Homer’s Iliad to prove this point. So he concludes that “if, according to the ancient Greek, crying aloud when in physical pain is compatible with nobility of soul, then the desire to express such nobility could not have prevented the artist from representing the scream in his marble. There must be another reason why he differs on this point from his rival the poet.”79 The reason is, Lessing claims, “that among the ancients beauty was the supreme law of the visual arts. Once this has been established, it necessarily follows that whatever else these arts may include must give way completely if not compatible with beauty, and, if compatible, must at least be subordinate to it.” In the case of the story of Laocoön, “The demands of beauty could not be reconciled with [his] pain in all its disfiguring violence, so it had to be reduced. The scream had to be softened to a sigh, not because screaming betrays an ignoble soul, but because it distorts the features in a disgusting manner.”80 Indeed, in a later discussion of the demands of religion on visual art, Lessing adds that I should prefer that only those be called works of art in which the artist had occasion to show himself as such and in which beauty was his first and ultimate aim. None of the others, which betray too obvious traces of religious conventions, deserves this name because in their case the artist did not create for art’s sake [weil die Kunst hier nicht um ihren selbst willen gearbeitet, literally “because here art did not work for its own sake”], but his art was merely a handmaid of religion, which stressed meaning more than beauty in the material subjects it allotted to art for execution.81

The phrase “art for art’s sake” is often thought to be a nineteenth-century invention,82 but here Lessing clearly anticipates it, meaning that at least in the visual arts all other considerations must be subordinated to the creation of beauty. Lessing does not appeal to any philosophical theory to back up this insistence. But his next step is to buttress his argument by borrowing Mendelssohn’s idea, itself already suggested by Du Bos and Harris and, 79 80 81 82

Lessing, Laocoön, chapter 1, pp. 9–11. Lessing, Laocoön, chapter 1, pp. 15, 17. Lessing, Laocoön, chapter 9, pp. 55–6. On standard accounts, it is said to have first been introduced by Théophile Gautier in the introduction to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin in 1834; see Crispin Sartwell, “Art for Art’s Sake,” in Michael Kelly, editor, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. I, pp. 118–21, at 119.

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by the time Lessing was writing his work, Kames, that since works of visual art present objects in a single moment, they must choose that moment carefully, in particular must choose a moment that gives “free rein” to the imagination. Even if it were to be conceded that “Truth and expression are art’s first law,” the second part of which, as we have just seen, Lessing is not actually willing to concede, this would still hold. Thus paintings and sculptures must not represent the moment of the culmination of an action, which leaves nothing further to the imagination, but a moment of anticipation which leaves the imagination free to play with further possibilities: The single moment of time to which art must confine itself by virtue of its material limitations will lead us, I believe, to such considerations. . . . It is evident that the single moment and the point from which it is viewed cannot be chosen with too great a regard for its effect. But only that which gives free play to the imagination is effective. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine. And the more we add in our imaginations, the more we must think we see. In the full course of an emotion, no point is no less suitable for this than its climax.83

The artist of the Laocoön did not represent his subject at the moment of his greatest pain and full scream because that would have foreclosed the free play of the imagination of the audience for the work. Here Lessing employs the new theory that it is the play of our mental powers rather than the representation of some form of truth which is the fundamental aim of art, at least visual art, though he probably would yet not have seen the German translation of Gerard’s Essay on Taste at the time he wrote this passage (if he ever did). Frederick Beiser glosses this crucial passage by saying that “Such free play takes place when seeing and thinking reinforce one another, so that the more we think about the object the more we see in it, and the more we see in it the more we think about it.”84 This may subtly distort Lessing’s meaning, suggesting that the free play stimulated by a successful painting is an interplay between sensible images and intellectual concepts, when what Lessing may actually have had in mind seems more likely to have been a play of multiple sensible images suggested by the one that the painting actually suggests. But Beiser may be right in suggesting that this widely known passage could have been a source for Kant’s later development of the idea – at least, it could have been the source for Kant’s terminology, since as we have 83

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Lessing, Laocoön, ch. 3, p. 19. McCormick translates freies Spiel in this passage as “free rein,” thereby masking Lessing’s use of the term “play.” Beiser, Diotima’s Children, p. 273.

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seen the idea itself is already present in other sources, including Du Bos, Gerard, and Mendelssohn, with whom Kant would have been equally familiar – and the interpretation that Beiser provides for Lessing’s concept of free play is certainly one of the common interpretations of what Kant means by the idea. Be all that as it may, this passage suggests that Lessing did synthesize the new idea of free play with a more traditional account of beauty even if he did not add the emotional impact of art into this synthesis, or at least constrained its significance by the overriding demand for beauty. Lessing continues his argument by turning, although again without acknowledgment, to the other half of Mendelssohn’s theory, that is, to the claim that poetry is an art that can represent a succession of events over time rather than one moment in time. “Accordingly, bodies with their visible properties are the true subjects of painting,” while, since actions take place over time, “actions are the true subjects of poetry.” Thus, “painting too can imitate actions, but only by suggestion through bodies,” and again “can use only a single moment of an action in its coexisting compositions and must therefore choose the one that is most suggestive,” while conversely in order to represent a body poetry can only describe an action in which the body is made, used, or otherwise involved.85 This leads Lessing to a memorable analysis of some examples from Homer: “If Homer wants to show us Juno’s chariot, he shows Hebe putting it together piece by piece”; when he “wants to show us how Agamemnon was dressed, he has the king put on his garments, one by one,” and, most famously, when he wants to show us Achilles’s shield, he does not describe it “as finished and complete, but as a shield that is being made.”86 So far, Lessing has merely rejected Winckelmann’s analysis of the Laocoön statue on the basis of his own insistence that beauty is the primary aim of visual art combined with Mendelssohn’s distinction between arts that can represent one moment and arts that can represent a succession of moments. But he broadens his target when he says, in a passing discussion of the fact that both Homer and Milton were blind, that “if the range of my physical sight must be the measure of my inner vision, I should value the loss of the former in order to gain freedom from the limitations on the latter.”87 Here his implication is that sight actually constrains the imagination, while nonvisual media – in other words, 85 86 87

Lessing, Laocoön, ch. 16, pp. 78–9. Lessing, Laocoön, ch. 16, p. 80; ch. 18, p. 95. Lessing, Laocoön, ch. 14, p. 74.

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poetry – free the imagination for a wider play with both ideas and emotions. Here the emotional impact of art can come into Lessing’s theory after all, under the restriction that it is compatible with the nature of verbal media although not with visual media. This point also depends on an idea that could have been transmitted to Lessing through Mendelssohn, namely, his contrast between natural and arbitrary or conventional signs. Lessing touches upon this in passing, arguing that although “the symbols of speech are arbitrary,” the poet actually wants to overcome our awareness of that fact: “He wants rather to make the ideas he awakens in us so vivid that at the moment we believe that we feel the real impressions which the objects of these ideas would produce in us. In this moment of illusion we should cease to be conscious of the means which the poet uses for this purpose, that is, his words.”88 But while emphasizing that the poet aims to create a vivid response in us, in particular a vivid emotional response – in a passage reminiscent of Burke, Lessing suggests that the aim of poetry is to invoke the emotional associations we have with objects rather than the physical appearance and beauty of the objects89 – Lessing fails to mention the point of Mendelssohn and several French authors going back to Du Bos that we also need to retain some awareness of the artificiality rather than reality of the artistic depiction of persons and actions in order to maintain the distance necessary to allow us to enjoy the emotions evoked by art rather than being overwhelmed by them into actual suffering. He does not need to mention this, perhaps, in the case of his visual arts, since on his theory the visual artist by not depicting the moment of the greatest suffering of his subject leaves the audience some freedom of the imagination, which may afford the necessary distance, but he might have done well to mention it in the case of poetry. Lessing thus at least touches upon the new idea that aesthetic response is based on the free play of our mental powers stimulated by a work of art, while allowing for the importance of our emotional response to art in the case of literature if not of visual art. That could even be part of a case for the superiority of verbal to visual art, which might be the thesis that underlies what otherwise seems to be a nonevaluative description of the differences between the two fundamental forms of art. In the course of his argument, Lessing exploits several of Mendelssohn’s theoretical tools, but he should be seen as a practicing critic using theoretical 88 89

Lessing, Laocoön, ch. 17, p. 85. “Paint for us, you poets, the pleasure, the affection, the love and delight which beauty brings, and you have painted beauty itself”; Lessing, Laocoön, ch. 21, p. 111.

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developments for his own purposes rather than as a theorist in his own right. However, his criticism immediately triggered more philosophical aesthetics in response. In the next chapter, we see how Johann Gottfried Herder reasserted yet refined an aesthetics of truth beginning with a response to Lessing, while Johann Georg Sulzer attempted to combine an aesthetics of truth with an aesthetics of play that shows affinities to the theories of Du Bos in France and Gerard in Britain. Sulzer’s combination of the aesthetics of truth and play would in turn prepare the way for Kant, while Herder’s final work, more than twenty years after he completed his main work in aesthetics, would be a critique of Kant’s aesthetics. The next chapter also includes a discussion of the aesthetic theories of Marcus Herz, who was first a student of Kant and then a friend of Mendelssohn, but who developed an aesthetic theory that is in interesting ways independent of both, and of Karl Philipp Moritz, who introduced the idea of the “autonomy of art.”

8 Breaking with Rationalism From Herder to Moritz

The period from the late 1760s to the late 1780s, thus the two decades preceding the publication of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment in the 1790s, saw an increasing eclecticism in German aesthetics, as the grip of Wolffian rationalism was – at least temporarily – loosened, and new concepts or at least new emphases were introduced into German aesthetic discourse. Some would argue that the 1762 Aesthetica in nuce of Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), a fellow Königsberger and early friend of Kant who took a radical turn toward mysticism, is the start of a fundamentally new movement in German aesthetics, a synthesis of an emphasis on the subjectivity of genius that points toward Sturm und Drang and later Romanticism on the one hand and on art as a vehicle of truth, ultimately of theological truth, on the other, that points toward the cognitivist aesthetics of German Idealism.1 The rhapsodic prose of Aesthetica in nuce is hard to fit into any philosophical tradition, even by the somewhat relaxed standards of much of what has been here treated as philosophical aesthetics, and this chapter instead begins with a discussion of some of the early work of Johann Gottfried Herder, who, though himself certainly capable of rhapsodic prose, remained more closely engaged with the mainstream of eighteenth-century aesthetics than did Hamann; indeed, one of Herder’s earliest preserved essays is a “Monument to Baumgarten.”2 In that essay, Herder also praised Mendelssohn, and one theme in his early work in aesthetics can be considered the development of Mendelssohn’s recognition of the rôle of the body and the senses as 1

2

See Frederick Beiser, “Hamann, Johann Georg,” in Edward Craig, general editor, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 10 vols. (London: Routledge, 1998), vol. 4, pp. 213–17. Johann Gottfried Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Gregory Moore (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 41–50.

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embodied in aesthetic experience. Another theme that Herder introduced is historical and cultural relativism in contrast to the universalist ambitions of much eighteenth-century aesthetics, although it is suggested here that Herder’s relativism should not be orerstated. Following its discussion of Herder, this chapter turns to three now lesser-known figures, the Swiss Johann Georg Sulzer, author of a monumental encyclopedia of aesthetics and the arts who further developed Mendelssohn’s emphasis on aesthetic experience as a form of activity; the Jewish physician Marcus Herz, first a student of Kant in the later 1760s and then, more informally, of Mendelssohn in the early 1770s, who tried to marry an emphasis on the role of the senses in aesthetic experience that he learned from Mendelssohn with the distinction between sensibility and intellect that he had learned from Kant long before Kant developed his own aesthetics; and finally Karl Philipp Moritz, a novelist and pioneering psychologist who came up with an early version of the idea of “art for art’s sake” that may have been a target for Kant’s eventual theory of the fine arts. All of these figures are important pieces in the puzzle that is the immediate background to Kant’s aesthetic theory but are also worthy of remembrance in their own right.

1. Herder I Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is most often remembered for his philosophy of history, expounded with relative brevity in his 1774 work This Too a Philosophy of History for the Education of Humanity and at great length in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity, published from 1784 to 1791. He is typically read as having advocated cultural relativism and historicism against the universalist pretensions of the Enlightenment – manifested in aesthetics in the search for a universally valid “standard of taste” – and thus as having been a forerunner of Romanticism.3 We shall see in passing that this view of Herder is a simplification, but only in passing, because our focus here is on Herder’s work 3

See Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1976) and The Roots of Romanticism, A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 45 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). Sonia Sikka, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), argues for a nuanced interpetation of Herder according to which he recognizes the importance of cultural differences to human identity without “entirely reject[ing] Enlightenment ideals and the universalism they entailed” (p. 3). See also Hansjakob Werlen, “The Universal and the Particular,” in Wellbery, New History of German Literature, pp. 414–18.

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in aesthetics, which fully occupied him for the first fifteen years of his career as well as at the very end of his career, when he wrote a vigorous polemic against the aesthetic theory of Kant. Here we consider Herder’s early work in aesthetics, while discussion of his later work follows our discussion of Kant.4 Herder’s first major work in aesthetics, Fragments on Recent German Literature, appeared in 1767, when Herder was only twenty-three.5 The first three volumes of his next work, the Groves of Criticism (Kritische Wa͘lder) were published in 1769.6 The first volume of the Groves is a spirited but friendly critique of Lessing’s Laocoön, the next two a detailed polemic against the now forgotten Halle rhetorician Christian Klotz (whom Lessing also attacked in a 1769 essay, “How the Ancients Depicted Death”).7 The fourth volume, a polemic against the now equally forgotten Friedrich Justus Riedel, who had published a hodgepodge Theory of the Fine Arts and Sciences: Extracts from various Authors in 1767,8 remained unpublished during Herder’s lifetime, although Herder restated its most important ideas in Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, begun in 1770 although not completed 4

5

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8

The standard work on Herder in German remains Rudolf Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken, 2 vols. (Berlin: R. Gaertner, 1880–85), and in English is Robert T. Clark, Jr., Herder: His Life and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955). Also important is Frederick M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). Herder’s historicism is addressed by Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 98–166; there are valuable chapters on Herder in two other works by Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 127–64, and Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought 1790–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 189–221. A monograph on Herder’s aesthetics is Robert E. Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). See also Ernst Cassirer, Freiheit und Form: Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1916), pp. 108–15, and Armand Nivelle, Kunst- und Dichtungstheorien zwischen Aufklärung und Klassic (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), pp. 137–77. A valuable volume of translations from Herder’s writings outside of philosophy is Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Translated in Johann Gottfried Herder, Selected Early Works 1764–1767, ed. Ernest A. Menze and Karl Menges, trans. Ernest A. Menze with Michael Palma (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). The first and fourth of these are translated, under the title of “Critical Forests,” in Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics, pp. 51–290. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet (Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voß, 1769). Friedrich Justus Riedel, Theorie der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften: Ein Auszug aus den Werken verschiedener Schriftsteller (Jena: Cuno, 1767).

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and published until 1778.9 Herder’s work on Sculpture was interrupted by several of what are now his best-known works, the Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772) and This Too a Philosophy of History for the Education of Humanity (1774). After finishing Sculpture, Herder published a collection of folk poetry from around the world, Popular Songs (1778–79); a work on the Old Testament, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–83); the multivolume work on philosophy of history already mentioned; an influential defense of Spinoza under the name of God: Some Conversations (1787); another multivolume work, this time on political philosophy, the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–97); and finally his critiques of Kant’s theoretical philosophy and aesthetics, A Metacritique on the Critique of Pure Reason (1799) and the Kalligone or “Birth of Beauty” (1800). Herder came from Mohrungen, a small town in East Prussia, and from 1762 to 1764 was a student at the university in Königsberg, where he studied with Kant (and made the earliest surviving transcriptions of Kant’s lectures) – his later attack upon Kant could thus be psychoanalyzed as an Oedipal conflict, although Herder himself saw his turn against Kant as necessitated by Kant’s own turn away from an empirical approach to aesthetics to one that is excessively abstract and a priori.10 From 1762 to 1769, he taught school in Riga, and then left for a tour of France and Western Germany, during which he met not only his future wife and his next employer, Graf Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe, but also the young Johann Wolfgang Goethe, while he was still a student in Strassburg.11 After Herder served as preacher in Schaumburg-Lippe’s small court at Bückeburg from 1771 to 1776, and the still young but now (because of the Sorrows of Young Werther) famous Goethe had become chief minister to the equally young Duke of Saxony-Weimar, Goethe had Herder appointed the General Superintendent of Lutheran clergy in the duchy, court chaplain, and chief schools examiner. These positions, 9

10

11

Johann Gottfried Herder, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, ed. and trans. Jason Gaiger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). See Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics, pp. 234–5, and John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). See also Michael N. Forster, “Herder and the Birth of Modern Anthropology,” in Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 199–243. For Goethe’s memorable portrayal of his first encounters with Herder, see Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit. In Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer et al., vol. 14 (Frankfurt am Main: Duetscher Klassiker Verlag, 1984), Book X, pp. 438–52.

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which Herder occupied for the rest of his life, nevertheless allowed him ample time to write and put him into contact with the many other leading figures of late eighteenth-century German literary and intellectual life whom Goethe brought to Weimar. In his later years at Weimar, however, Herder’s own fame was overshadowed by that of Goethe himself as well as others such as Friedrich Schiller, Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel. Lessing, as we saw, following Du Bos, Harris, and Kames, had argued that visual art presents an object as it is at a single moment and thus can only intimate an action, while poetry describes a succession of states comprising an action and thus can represent an object only by describing the act of producing it; he had also argued that beauty is the first law of the visual arts and thus that a work of art must not only depict an object at a pregnant moment in an action or event but must also depict it at a beautiful moment. In his critique in the first of his Groves of Criticism, Herder argued that Lessing’s division of the arts was schematic and incomplete. With regard to the visual arts, Herder argued that Lessing had failed to explain why beauty must be the first law of the visual arts and also argued that there is an essential difference between specific visual arts that Lessing fails to capture. With regard to literature, he argued that Lessing’s emphasis on time and succession in poetry better fits the art of music, which Lessing had completely ignored, and that the essence of poetry lies not in such an accidental feature of the kind of sign that it uses but in the way in which it captures and communicates the energy of real life, something no other art does equally well. “Energy” (Kraft) is a central concept throughout Herder’s thought. Herder’s contrast between painting and sculpture, which he claims Lessing ignored, becomes central in the argument of the fourth of the Groves of Criticism and in the essay on Sculpture, so let us consider the other two themes first and then return to that one. Herder’s first charge is that Lessing fails to explain why beauty must be the first law of the visual arts. In Herder’s view, visual art must aim at beauty because only in that way can it overcome the essential conflict between its own spatial, static character and the incessantly changing, transitory character of everything in nature. “In nature everything is transitory, the passion of the soul and the sensation of the body: the activity of the soul and the motion of the body: every state of changeable finite nature. Now if art has only one instant in which everything is to be contained: then every alterable state of nature is unnaturally immortalized through it, and thus with this principle all imitation of nature

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through art ceases.”12 Furthermore, all ordinary sensuous pleasures are also momentary: “All sensible joys are only for the first glance.”13 The only way for an essentially static art to overcome the transitory nature of both what it depicts and of ordinary pleasures is by picking a beautiful moment which is exempt from the actual transitoriness of an object’s history in real nature and our pleasure in which also does not fade like other pleasures do: “Why is beauty the highest law of the pictorial arts? Because . . . their effect takes place in one instant, and their work creates for an eternal look. This sole look therefore affords the highest that can be firmly held in its arms – beauty.”14 In other words, our pleasure in beauty in a sense lifts us out of the ordinary passage of time. However, Herder quickly adds that not any kind of beauty can do this: Bodily beauty is too closely connected with time – because it all too obviously does not last? – so a truly beautiful work must somehow instead intimate the beauty of soul rather than body: “Corporeal beauty is not satisfying: through our eye there looks a soul, and through the beauty that is represented to us a soul thus also peers.”15 By a very different argument, Herder thus arrives at a Platonistic view like that of Shaftesbury, namely that the ultimate object of our appreciation of beauty is something more like a soul than a body, and in this way he deemphasizes the purely sensual or sensuous aspect of beauty.16 Thus far Herder’s conception of beauty seems traditional. However, this opening sally against Lessing is misleading in two regards, first for its suggestion that the task for aesthetics is to give a better explanation of beauty than Lessing had, and second for its suggestion that aesthetics must be grounded on a metaphysical distinction between mind and body. The latter suggestion is misleading because Herder does more than almost anyone else in the eighteenth century to minimize separation between mind and body through his emphasis on the connections between thought and speech, bodily sensation and expression, and the 12

13 14 15 16

Johann Gottfried Herder, Kritische Wälder, oder Betrachtungen, die Wissenschaft und Kunst des Schönen betreffend, Erstes kritisches Wäldchen (“Groves of Criticism, or Considerations concerning the Science and Art of the Beautiful,” First Grove), in Herder, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur 1767–1781, ed. Gunter E. Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), p. 133. Herder, First Grove, p. 134. Herder, First Grove, p. 137. Herder, First Grove, pp. 137–8. Sikka discusses Herder’s critique of Shaftesbury’s concept of the kalos k’agathos, the person who is both beautiful and virtuous, in his early Fragments (p. 179), but also recognizes the enduring influence of Shaftesbury on Herder’s thought in her discussion of Herder’s theology (p. 222).

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natural and man-made environment of the linguistic community.17 And the former suggestion is misleading because while Herder will go on to argue that painting in particular strives after beauty, he also links beauty to mere appearance, indeed illusion, and argues that both sculpture, which, unlike Lessing, he emphatically distinguishes from painting, and poetry ultimately aim much more at truth than at beauty. Here Herder’s conception of beauty remains Platonic, part of the approach that beauty is a form of access to some profound truth, even if he does not accept the traditional Platonic divide between mind and body. Herder’s path to this conclusion is not direct, however, and just what sense, or senses, of truth he has in mind is difficult to pin down, so we will have to look at his classification of the arts in some detail to see what he means. In fact, Herder suggests two different classifications of the arts, and a central challenge in the interpretation of Herder’s aesthetics is to see how they are connected. In the first of the Groves of Criticism, Herder argues that Lessing’s distinction between the visual arts as the representation of objects in space at a single moment in time and poetry as the representation of a succession of events in time confuses poetry with music and thereby misses what is essential to poetry altogether, namely, that it communicates to us the real force of objects, including but not limited to actions, and thereby most deeply engages our own force in response. The first part of this argument is that the contrast between the coexistence of the properties of an object in space and the succession of events in time properly grounds the contrast between painting and music, not between painting and poetry, and that both painting and music depend upon natural signs of coexistence and succession: Painting works entirely through space, and music through temporal succession. What colors and figures alongside of one another are in the former, namely the ground of beauty, the succession of tones are in the latter, namely the ground of harmony [Wohlklanges]. As in the former the satisfaction, the effect of art rests on the glimpse of the coexistent, so in the latter the means of the musical effect is the succession, the connection and alteration of tones. And, I continue, although the former, painting, can arouse in us the concept of temporal succession merely through an illusion, this side-effect never constitutes its chief aim: namely, as painting to work in the succession 17

For all of these bridges rather than gulfs, see Herder’s “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” e.g., Philosophical Writings, p. 131, and “On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul,” e.g., p. 211; we will return to the first of these essays later. On Herder’s philosophy of language, see Michael N. Forster, “Herder’s Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation: Three Fundamental Principles,” in After Herder, pp. 55–90.

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of time but through colors: otherwise the essence and all effect of art is lost. . . . And in contrast music, which works entirely through temporal succession, never makes it its chief goal to depict objects in space musically, as inexperienced bunglers do. The former never loses touch with the coexistent, the latter never with succession: for both are the natural means of their effects.18

Both painting – which Herder is thus far, like Lessing, still using as a generic term for the visual arts comprising both painting proper and sculpture – and music use natural signs, that is, signs that communicate the thought of their objects to us by means of resemblance between their own fundamental properties and the fundamental properties of their objects. Painting and music are thus best suited to represent objects in space and successions of events in time. Poetry, however, uses primarily artificial rather than natural signs, and is thus, unlike music, not restricted to the depiction of events as Lessing thought it was: In poetry things are different. Here what is natural in the signs, e.g., letters, sound, tonal succession, has little or nothing to do with the effect of poetry: the sense that lies in an arbitrary correspondence in the words, the soul that the articulated tones inhabit is everything. The succession of tones is not as essential to poetry as the coexistence of colors is to painting, for “the signs do not at all have the same relation to the designated things.”19

The words in quotations are from the Laocoön, but Herder is in the process of turning Lessing’s distinction between natural and artificial signs against him, for what he is arguing is that precisely because poetry uses artificial rather than natural signs, its content is not in any fundamental way constrained by the natural properties of its signs themselves. Thus in the proper hands it can effectively represent anything, and in this way it certainly has a wider sphere of truth accessible to it than painting or music do. But this is only the first step of Herder’s argument. The second step of the argument is that just as Lessing’s division of the arts into painting and poetry is incomplete, the distinction between space and time on which the former division is based is also incomplete, because it leaves out the essential category of force (Kraft), and it is precisely this that is essential to the effect of poetry: Painting works in space, and through an artistic representation of space. Music . . . works not merely in but also through temporal succession, 18 19

Herder, First Grove, p. 193. Herder, First Grove, pp. 193–4.

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through an artistic temporal alternation of tones. Can the essence of poetry also be brought under such a fundamental concept, since it works on the soul through arbitrary signs, through the sense of words? We will call the means of this effect force [Kraft]; and thus, just as in metaphysics space, time, and force are three fundamental concepts . . . so in the theory of the fine sciences and arts we would say: the arts that produce works achieve their effect in space; the arts that achieve their effect through energy work in time; the fine sciences, or rather the only fine science, poetry, works through force. – Through force, that inhabits the words, through force, that to be sure goes through the ear, but works immediately on the soul. This force is the essence of poetry, not however coexistence or succession.20

Herder is not particularly clear about the difference between the energy (Energie) that is displayed in music and the force (Kraft) that is at work in poetry, but his idea seems to be that energy is the outward manifestation, in change or motion, of underlying forces. Thus poetry, precisely because it employs artificial rather than natural signs, can bring us closer to the reality that underlies the superficial features of objects captured by artificial signs. Poetry may thereby reach not only wider but also deeper than these other arts.21 In continuing his discussion of poetry in the first Grove, what Herder initially emphasizes is the broader reach of poetry: Precisely because in taking in poetry we do not focus on the physical or acoustical properties of the signs themselves but on their meanings, poetry can represent anything. In the case of poetry, “it is not the sign itself but the sense [Sinn] of the sign that must be felt; the soul must not feel the vehicle of the force, the words, but the force itself, the sense. . . . But thereby it also brings every object as it were visibly before the soul.”22 Herder then develops his view by invoking Baumgarten’s characterization of poetry as “the sensibly perfect in discourse.”23 What he now argues is that poetry actually

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Herder, First Grove, p. 194. Robert Norton mentions Herder’s “well-known” indebtedness to James Harris for the concept of energy (Herder’s Aesthetics, p. 138); but Harris means by energy only that art is an activity and not merely the product of the activity (the work), while Herder means something more complex, that the energy of art is an expression of the underlying force that is the essence of existence itself. He did not get this idea from Harris. Herder, First Grove, p. 195. One of Herder’s earlier pieces is a “Monument to Baumgarten,” in which he approvingly states that “Baumgarten’s account of poetry is drawn from psychology and hence also gives us most cause to trace poetry back to its mother and companion, the human soul. . . . it is preeminently Baumgarten’s principle that teaches us to become initiated into the profoundest secrets of our soul and to make a psychological discovery with each rule of beauty” (Selected Writings on Aesthetics, pp. 43, 45).

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gets its force by exploiting both the depiction of objects as in painting and their energy as represented by music: Neither of these taken alone is its entire essence. Not the energy, the musical in it; for this cannot take place if what is sensible in its representations, which it paints before the soul, is presupposed. But not what is painterly in it; for it works energetically, in succession it builds the concept of the sensibly perfect whole in the soul: only both together, I can say, the essence of poetry is force, which works from space (objects, that it makes sensible) in time (through a series of many parts in one poetic whole); in short, therefore, sensibly perfect discourse.24

Once painting and music have been properly distinguished from each other and poetry from both, then it can also be recognized that poetry, because it uses artificial rather than natural signs, can present both objects and actions to us, and in that sense present more truth to us than either painting or music alone. Herder concludes this passage by invoking Baumgarten’s definition of poetry, but as part of a discussion of distinctions among the arts that Baumgarten, whose new aesthetics was in fact just a poetics, never undertook. What still remains unclear, however, is just what Herder means by “force” here. He only hints at what he might mean a few pages later when he says that “the essence of poetry” is “the force, which adheres to the inner in words, the magical force, which works on my soul through fantasy and recollection”:25 the force that is unique to poetry seems to be precisely its power to make us feel as if the objects and events it describes are real and thereby to engage our own emotions and passions more fully than the other arts can. But he may make clearer what he has in mind in his praise for the poetry of primitive peoples in a famous 1773 essay on what were later to be revealed to be the fraudulent poems of the fictional Scottish bard Ossian. This essay was included in a collection On German Style and Art that also included Herder’s equally famous essay on Shakespeare, to which we return below, and a seminal essay by Goethe on Gothic architecture. Here Herder declaims: Know then, that the more barbarous a people is – that is, the more alive, the more freely acting (for that is what the word means) – the more barbarous, that is, the more alive, the more free, the closer to the senses, the more lyrically dynamic its songs will be, if songs it has. The more remote a people is from an artificial, scientific manner of thinking, speaking, and writing, the

24 25

Herder, First Grove, pp. 195–6. Herder, First Grove, p. 197.

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less its songs are made for paper and print, the less its verses are written for the dead letter. The purpose, the nature, the miraculous power of these songs as the delight, the driving-force, the traditional chant and everlasting joy of the people – all this depends on the lyrical, living, dance-like quality of the song, on the living presence of the images, and the coherence and, as it were compulsion of the content, the feelings; on the symmetry of the words and syllables, and sometimes even of the letters, on the flow of the melody, and on a hundred other things which belong to the living world, to the gnomic song of the nation, and vanish with it.26

Leave aside the fact that the poems of the supposed Ossian were concocted in eighteenth-century Edinburgh by James MacPherson and were thus very much made for paper and print.27 Leave aside as well Herder’s supposition that the most dynamic poetry can only be composed by a “barbarous people,” Mycenaean Greeks or Scottish highlanders. The point remains that he connects the “living presence of the images” achieved by the most effective poetry with a corresponding feeling of freedom and of being alive. Paradoxically, poetry’s use of artificial rather than natural signs, which allows it to achieve the effects of painting and music combined, also allows it to engage our deepest emotions, ultimately the joyous feeling of being alive itself, more thoroughly than those other arts, even though they use natural signs and might therefore have been thought to be more effective. Through his emphasis on the force of poetry, Herder thus connects his Platonic conception of beauty to the contemporary recognition of the emotional impact of art. Herder’s suggestion in this quotation that the effect of poetry does arise from the formal features of its signs – their symmetry and musicality – as well as from their sense is a reflection of his insistence that aesthetics must be grounded in an intimate experience of the arts and should not be misled by excessively rigid distinctions such as those between arts of space and time or between natural and artificial signs. This tendency of Herder’s thought is also apparent in his Treatise on the Origin of Language, published the year before the essay on Ossian. Here Herder argues that all animals naturally express their inner states – what 26

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Herder, Extract from a Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient People, trans. by Joyce P. Crick, in H.B. Nisbet, ed., German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, and Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 155–6. Originally in Von Deutscher Art und Kunst: Eine fliegende Blätter (Hamburg: Bode, 1773). For a brief discussion of the Ossian controversy, see James Buchan, Crowded with Genius – The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 141–72.

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we would call, anthropomorphically, their emotions – through cries and other sounds, and that this thus cannot be what is distinctive about human language. What is distinctive about human language is instead that we, unlike any other animals, express our awareness of the complexity of objects through sounds that are originally naturally associated with those objects but that we transform into artificial signs of the complex properties of those objects. Yet while we are different from all other animals in our capacity for consciousness of complexity, Herder recognizes that we are still animals, and that we too naturally express our emotions in cries and other animal sounds. He then argues that “In all original languages remains of these natural sounds still resound – only, to be sure, they are not the main threads of human language,”28 and that these remains are most evident in poetry: “And even in our case too, where, to be sure, reason often puts an end to the role of feeling and the artificial language of society to that of natural sounds, do not the loftiest thunders of oratory, the mightiest strikes of poetry, and the magical moments of accompanying gesture still often come close to this language of nature, through imitation?”29 In other words, poetry does not merely evoke the objects of natural signs through its own artificial signs; it uses natural as well as artificial signs, and the natural as well as artificial features of its signs, and achieves the fullness of its impact on our emotions precisely by the fullness of its resources. This seems to be what Herder means by emphasizing the “force” of poetry, which he claims eluded Lessing. Herder’s second main criticism of Lessing is hinted at in the first of the Groves of Criticism but more fully developed in the unpublished fourth Grove and in its successor, the essay on Sculpture. The fourth Grove is cast as a critique of Riedel’s Theory of the fine Sciences and Arts, as earlier noted, but also continues the debate with Lessing. Herder begins with several methodological objections to Riedel. First, although he admires Baumgarten in many ways, Herder criticizes Riedel’s acceptance of Baumgarten’s characterization of aesthetics as both a theory of beauty and “the art of thinking beautifully,” that is, a prescription of concrete rules and methods for artists to follow in order to produce beautiful or otherwise successful works:30 Herder is clear that there are no such rules, thus that aesthetics must confine itself to understanding the work of artists and our experience of their work without telling them how to do that 28 29 30

Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” in Herder, Philosophical Writings, p. 68. Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” p. 73. Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 267.

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work. Second, Herder objects to a tripartite classification of the methods of aesthetics, as such a theory, that Riedel proposes. According to Riedel, aesthetic theories can be divided into those employing the methods of Aristotle, Baumgarten, or Kames: The Aristotelian method aims to reach general principles from the analysis of particular masterpieces of art, the method of Kames tries to reach the same goal from the analysis of our sensations in response to aesthetic objects, and what Riedel characterizes as the “miserable dry” method of Baumgarten simply begins from definitions.31 In Herder’s view, these distinctions are artificial and the characterization of Baumgarten’s method in particular is unfair – here he defends Baumgarten. He writes: When I analyze the artwork of a master, a second Aristotle, can I not at the very same time observe, with the strength [of Kames], the sentiment that it arouses in me, and precisely thereby gather with exactitude, discrimination, and subordination Baumgarten’s determinations for a definition? Is it not the same soul and the same effect of the soul that a masterwork presupposes and discerns the art in it, that the sentiment of the beautiful in it presupposes, and that then analyzes this sentiment, not in order to presuppose a definition of beauty! but rather to gather it objectively from the artwork and subjectively from the sentiment?32

While the charge that Baumgarten simply began with definitions may seem a fair critique of his early Meditations on Poetry, Herder must have felt that in his larger and more mature Aesthetica Baumgarten was really supporting his definitions by his extensive examples. In any case, his own method is certainly to reach general conclusions only from close examination of examples of art and of our response to them – this is why he engages Lessing in such detail, for example, and why some of his most important claims in aesthetics are contained in the essays on Ossian and Shakespeare – and to end rather than begin with definitions.33 The main thrust of the fourth Grove, building upon Herder’s insistence that aesthetics must employ the methods of both Aristotle and Kames in order to reach Baumgartian conclusions, is that recognition of the distinctions among our senses will explain the variety of both forms

31 32 33

Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 262. Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 262–3. This was precisely the philosophical method that Herder would have learned from what Kant was teaching in 1762–64; see Kant’s Inquiry concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality, written in the fall of 1762 and published in 1764, especially its “Second Reflection”; in Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, ed. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 256–63.

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of art and forms of aesthetic response. The premise of Herder’s argument is that aesthetic response is not the disinterested reaction of a special internal sense to purely formal properties of objects but is really the heightened response of various of our senses to their appropriate objects. Aesthetic responses naturally emerge from our senses: The entire ground of our soul are obscure ideas, the liveliest, the most, the mass from which the soul prepares its finer ideas, the strongest incentives of our life, the greatest contribution to our happiness and unhappiness. One thinks of the integral parts of the human soul corporeally, and, if I may so express myself, its forces have more specific mass for a sensible creature than for a pure spirit: it is imparted to a human body; it is a human. As a human, in accordance with the mass of its inner forces, in the circle of its existence, it has formed a number of organs in order to feel that which it is and to draw things in into itself for its own enjoyment.34

Here Herder rejects the traditional distinction between mind and body, arguing that mind is essentially connected to the bodily organs of sense, as well as rejecting any suggestion that aesthetic pleasures are essentially distinct from the other sources of our happiness and unhappiness. In this connection, Herder scorns Riedel’s thesis that the beautiful is that “which can please without an interested aim and thus also please if we do not possess it”35 – thus prefiguring his later critique of Kant’s aesthetics. Instead, Herder argues that the phenomenon of distance that Riedel mistakenly characterizes as the general quality of disinterestedness in all aesthetic response is a specific feature of the visual perception of beauty, indeed that beauty is properly speaking a property only of the visual (as Addison long before and Kames quite recently had argued). This in turn leads him to distinguish between sight as a sense for mere appearance and touch as the sense for reality, and thus to the essential distinction between painting and sculpture which, he charges, Lessing failed to make. Thus, in the fourth Grove, Herder writes: Objects of sight are the clearest, the most distinct: they are before us; they are outside of and alongside of one another: they remain objects, as long as we want. Since they are also the easiest and clearest to know, if one wants to; since their parts are more able to be distinguished from one another than those of any other impression; thus in their case the unity and manifoldness that brings about gratification is most visible, and there is the concept of

34 35

Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 273. Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 291n.

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the word “beautiful, beauty”! This is in accordance with its etymology: for to intuit [schauen], appearance [Schein], beautiful [Schön], beauty [Schönheit] are related offspring of language: it is here that, if we pay proper attention to its particular application, . . . beauty is most originally found in everything that offers itself pleasingly to the eye.

Thus far, Herder’s statement might seem to belie my earlier claim that he subordinates beauty to truth, for he seems rather to be arguing that visual beauty is directly connected with clear, distinct, and therefore truthful perception of objects. However, he continues: In accordance with this first sense the concept of beauty is “a phenomenon” and thus to be treated as if it were an agreeable delusion [Trug], a delightful illusion [Blendwerk]. It is properly a concept of surfaces, since we properly cognize the bodily, the well-formed, and the solidly pleasing only with the help of filling, and with sight can see only planes, only figures, only colors, but not immediately corporeal spaces, angles, and forms.36

Here Herder insists that visible beauty arises only from the most superficial features of objects, not from their full reality, and that only feeling – by which he here means the sense of touch – can put us into direct contact with reality, or with the deeper truth about physical reality. Now we have a version of the theory that aesthetic experience provides access to truth that has left Platonism far beyond, or returned from the ideal world of Platonism to the physical world to find its truth. Herder expands upon this contrast in the essay on Sculpture : The term Schönheit [beauty] derives from the words Schauen [to behold] and Schein [appearance]. Beauty can most easily be understood and appreciated in terms of Schauen, that is, through schöner Schein [beautiful appearance]. Nothing is faster, more dazzlingly brilliant than the light of the sun and our eyes carried upon its wing. A world of external things ranged alongside one another is revealed in an instant. Since this world does not disappear as do sounds, but endures and invites contemplation, is it any wonder that our doctrine of psychology chooses to borrow many of its terms from this sense? For psychology, to know is to see, and its greatest pleasure is beauty. . . . If we succeeded in “deriving” from this sense alone a true phenomenology of the beautiful and the true, we should already have achieved a great deal. Nonetheless, we would not thereby have achieved everything and certainly not what is most fundamental, simple, and primary. The operation of the sense of sight is flat; it plays and glides across the surface of things with images and colors. . . . But we are entitled to ask whether the originary determination of the notion of beautiful form can in fact be derived from the

36

Herder, Fourth Grove, pp. 289–90.

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sense of sight. Does the concept of form recognize sight as its origin and as its highest judge. This should not merely be doubted, but vehemently denied.

Rather, Herder continues, The living, embodied truth of the three-dimensional space of angles, of form and volume, is not something we can learn through sight. This is all the more true of the essence of sculpture, beautiful form and beautiful shape, for this is not a matter of color, or of the play of proportion and symmetry, or of light and shadow, but of physically present, tangible truth. . . . Consider the lover of art sunk deep in contemplation who circles restlessly around a sculpture. What would he not do to transform his sight into touch, to make his seeing into a form of touching that feels in the dark. . . . With his soul he seeks to grasp the image that arose from the arm and the soul of the artist. Now he has it! The illusion has worked; the sculpture lives and his soul feels that it lives. His soul speaks to it, not as if his soul sees, but as if it touches, as if it feels37 –

which is why Herder subtitles his essay after the sculptor Pygmalion, who fell in love with the statue of the beautiful young woman he had created and was granted his wish that it come alive. Herder’s emphasis on the sense of touch and its centrality to the experience of sculpture, which has led him to a conception of the truth of aesthetic experience radically different from that of previous cognitivists, builds upon his interpretation of the great eighteenth-century debate about the relation between sight and touch in which Locke, Berkeley, and Diderot had all argued that we do not correlate the deliverances of the two senses innately but have to learn from experience that an object that looks a certain way also feels a certain way, or vice versa.38 But he takes this thesis a step further by arguing that it is touch that reveals the true form of objects, while sight merely reveals or plays with their superficial appearance. Thus, although sight initially seemed the paradigmatic vehicle of knowledge, Herder ultimately concludes that “in painting there is merely beautiful deception” while in sculpture there is “primary truth.”39 The passages from Sculpture also display what Herder thinks is the significance of the perception of the true form of objects through the tactile medium of sculpture: It communicates to us the feeling of life in the 37 38

39

Herder, Sculpture, pp. 39–41. See Herder, Sculpture, pp. 33–8. For a discussion of the debate, which however does not mention Herder’s contribution, see M.J. Morgan, Molyneux’s Question: Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 314.

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sculpture and in turn arouses our own feeling of being truly alive. In the case of sculpture, both the artist and the audience can fully feel the emotions and passions of life that made Pygmalion wish that his beautiful creation could come alive. Thus sculpture paradigmatically combines truth and emotion in art. This view of the potential power of art is what Herder finds missing in Riedel and perhaps even in Lessing himself, because he treats sculpture as if it were no different from painting. But now there is also a problem. In the first Grove, as we saw, Herder distinguished space, time, and force as the possible objects of art, and distinguished visual art, music, and poetry, respectively, as the arts that represent and communicate these three objects. In the fourth Grove, however, Herder distinguishes surfaces, tones, and bodies as the three possible objects of art, the senses of sight, hearing, and touch as the three senses that respectively represent these three objects, and thus painting, music, and sculpture as the three main forms of art. Has poetry simply dropped out of his classification of the arts? Or even worse, is there a contradiction between his two accounts, the earlier account claiming that poetry is the art of truth par excellence while the latter account assigns this honor to sculpture? Herder does not raise or address this problem, but we can use his own distinction between natural and artificial signs to resolve it. What he should have said is that while painting and music represent their objects and communicate emotions to us by natural signs, sculpture does not use signs at all and thus can communicate the truth about objects to us and thereby engage our emotions more directly than those other two arts, while through the “magical force” of its artificial signs poetry is capable of replicating the effects of any of the other arts, including even those of sculpture. How plausible such a claim will seem to one may well depend upon how powerfully moved one is by particular art forms, but it would at least grant Herder a coherent theory of the arts, one on which truth and emotional impact can be effectively combined by several different arts because of their different media. In the fourth Grove, Herder also has interesting things to say about arts we have not mentioned, namely, dance, architecture, and horticulture, and includes an important passage about music, which he analyzes as the “imitation of human passions,” arousing “a series of inner feelings, true, although not distinct, not intuitive, only extremely obscure.”40 But we will have to leave these arts aside and conclude our discussion of Herder with a comment on his supposed historical and cultural relativism, which, as 40

Herder, Fourth Grove, pp. 406–7.

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was earlier noted, has often been thought to be his central contribution to modern thought.41 Herder’s writings are certainly replete with observations connecting the different circumstances and mores of different cultures and times with differences in their arts and tastes. For example: “The Greek, the Gothic, the Moorish taste in architecture and sculpture, in mythology and in poetry, is it the same? And is [the difference] not to be explained from times, mores, and peoples?”42 And in his essay on Shakespeare, Herder attacks the rigid insistence on unity of time, place, and action in classical French theater by arguing that these ideals grew naturally out of the circumstances of both Greek theater and Greek life, but that it is absurd to make them into rigid rules in the very different circumstances of both modern theater and modern life: “In Greece drama developed in a way in which it could not develop in the north. In Greece it was what it could not be in the north. Therefore in the north it is not and cannot be what it was in Greece. . . . That simplicity of the Greek plot, that austerity of Greek manners, that sustained, buskined quality of expression, the music, the stage, the unity of place and time – all this lay so fundamentally and naturally, without any art or magic, in the origins of Greek tragedy – that it could come into being only in the sublimation of all these characteristics,”43 and is therefore not suitable, let alone mandatory, for the theater of another time and place. However, it would be a mistake to infer from such comments that Herder does not think that there are underlying commonalities in the arts and tastes of different times and places, or, more important, that people living in one time and culture cannot learn to appreciate deeply the art of another time and culture. On the contrary, the argument of the essay on Shakespeare is that the best art of different times and places – for example, the theater of Sophocles and that of Shakespeare – must differ superficially precisely because at the deepest level they are committed to the same principle – the truthful imitation of nature – but have different natures to imitate.44 Thus Herder writes that the unities of time, place, and action were not artificial for the Greeks at all, although they would 41

42 43

44

Nivelle’s approach to Herder’s aesthetics in particular takes these ideas to be his main concerns; see Kunst- und Dichtungstheorien, e.g., p. 147. Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 286. Herder, “Shakespeare,” trans. Joyce P. Crick in Nisbet, German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, pp. 162–3. As Robert Norton writes, “A careful examination will show . . . that the reason [Herder] so strongly emphasized the disparity between the dramas of Shakespeare and Sophocles was to allow the deeper, hidden similarity to appear with all the more force and persuasive effect” (Herder’s Aesthetics, p. 76).

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be for moderns: “the artificiality of their rules was – not artifice at all! it was Nature! Unity of plot was unity of the action before them which, according to the circumstances of their time, country, religion, manners, could not be other than single and simple.”45 But it is not merely because “everything in the world changes, so the Nature which was the true creator of Greek drama was bound to change also,” and “Their view of the world, their customs, the state of the republics, the tradition of the heroic age, religion, even music, expression, and the degrees of illusion changed,”46 that Shakespeare’s drama was bound to be different than that of Sophocles; it was bound to be different because while all these things changed, Shakespeare was committed to the same underlying principle of truthfully representing his own world that his drama, unlike that of the misguided French classicists (and their supporter, Gottsched), had to look and sound different. If Shakespeare’s “world did not offer such simplicity of history, traditions, domestic, political, and religious conditions, then of course it will not display it” in his work either. Instead, he will create his “drama out of [his world’s] own history, the spirit of its age, customs, views, language, national attitudes, traditions, and pastimes.”47 But in doing so, Shakespeare was in fact doing the same thing as Sophocles: “For Shakespeare is Sophocles’s brother, precisely where he seems to be so dissimilar, and inwardly he is wholly like him. His whole dramatic illusion is attained by means of this authenticity, truth, and historical creativity.”48 And just because the art of Sophocles and the art of Shakespeare rest on the same underlying principle, it is possible for people at any time to come to appreciate them both, although no doubt with the considerable effort it would take to appreciate fully their language, their customs, in short, their worlds. “There is thus an ideal of beauty for every art, for every science, for good taste in general, and it is to be found in [different] peoples and times and subjects and productions – though to be sure it is hard to find.”49 Herder is thus no straightforward historicist or cultural relativist; rather, his conviction that the best art reveals the truth about its world and that there are deep commonalities in human emotional responses to such truths allows him to defend the ideal of a standard of or paradigms for taste after all. In every age, great artists want to convey the 45 46 47 48 49

Herder, “Shakespeare,” p. 163. Herder, “Shakespeare,” p. 164. Herder, “Shakespeare,” p. 167. Herder, “Shakespeare,” p. 172. Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 286.

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truth about their world and their emotions about it, and in every age audiences want to understand those expressions, about their own world but about other worlds as well. Herder’s historicism is thus in fact a novel synthesis of two main approaches to aesthetics. However, throughout Herder’s aesthetics the notion of play has hardly figured at all; it has been mentioned only in connection with the superficial art of painting rather than with the deeper arts of sculpture, poetry, and even music. We will now see that Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1779), who was born a quarter-century before Herder but whose encyclopedic General Theory of the Fine Arts, first published from 1771 to 1774, was contemporaneous with such central works of Herder as the Treatise on the Origin of Language and the essays on Ossian and Shakespeare, emphasized the pleasurableness of mental activity in his psychology of pleasure, but did not quite transform that into a theory of the experience of beauty as free play in his aesthetic writings, focusing more on the combination of an aesthetics of truth with an aesthetics of emotional impact. Thus Sulzer came close to achieving a synthesis of all three approaches to aesthetics in a way that no one else in eighteenth-century Germany except Mendelssohn did, but did not quite introduce the concept of play into his synthesis.

2. Sulzer In his main work in aesthetics, Sulzer advocated a conventional view of the relation between aesthetic experience and truth: the experience of art – although not solely of beautiful art – can make moral truths vivid and efficacious for us, even though we can know those truths independently of art, and indeed must know the most fundamental principles of morality independently of art. In his earlier work in psychology, he laid the foundation for the view that aesthetic experience is an intrinsically enjoyable and therefore valuable experience of the unhindered activity of the mind. His conception of the mind originates in Leibniz, but his emphasis on the pleasure of its unhindered activity points the way toward Kant’s conception of aesthetic experience as the free play of the cognitive powers. But while this might have prepared the way for Kant’s synthesis of the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of play, Sulzer himself gave more emphasis to effecting a synthesis between the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of emotional impact.

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Sulzer was born in Winthertur, Switzerland, in 1720, the twenty-fifth child of his parents, who both died when he was fourteen.50 He had been destined for the clergy, and at sixteen he was boarded with a pastor in Zürich and attended the gymnasium there. But at eighteen, he became more interested in the study of mathematics, botany, and philosophy, and came under the influence of Bodmer and Breitinger. Sulzer was ordained on the completion of his studies in 1739, and in 1740 became a tutor in a wealthy Zürich household. The next year he became a village vicar and was able to devote himself to natural history and archaeology. His first publications, at twenty-one, were a “Short Guide for the Useful Consideration of Swiss Natural History” and “An Extensive Description of a Remarkable Discovery of Various Antiquities” found in a nearby village; further examples of works in this vein are a “Conversation on the Comets” (1742) and “An Investigation of the Origins of Mountains” (1746). In 1744 he took up a teaching position in Magdeburg, Germany, and in 1747 he became professor of mathematics at a gymnasium in Berlin. As early as 1745, he published a Short Concept of all the sciences and other Parts of Learning (Kurzer Begriff aller Wissenschaften und anderen Theile der Gelehrsamkeit, worin jeder nach seinem Inhalt, Nutzen und Vollkommenheit kürzlich beschrieben wird), which went through six German editions and was translated into Latin in 1790. Sulzer was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1750 and also married the same year. From that time on he regularly published philosophical work in the proceedings of the Academy, originally in French but translated into German in the two volumes of his Vermischte Philosophische Schriften in 1773 and 1781. These works include essays on reason, consciousness, language, materialism, the immortality of the soul, and the nature and existence of God as well as a lengthy “Investigation of the origin of agreeable and disagreeable sentiments” (1751) that first stated central themes of his aesthetics, and shorter treatments of such topics as genius (1757), the utility of drama, a reply to Rousseau’s attack upon the theater (1760), and “Energy in works of fine art” (1765). In 1755, Sulzer published a translation of 50

Biographical data for Sulzer comes from the editor’s introduction to Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 2nd ed., 4 vols. plus index volume (Leipzig: Wiedemann, 1792–1799; reprinted with introduction by Giorgio Tonelli, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1994). A selection of the articles on general issues in aesthetics from this work as well as a number of the articles on music can be found in Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 25–108.

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Hume’s first Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, and Hume’s theory of the imagination and of moral sentiments, although not his skepticism, would considerably influence the further development of Sulzer’s own philosophy. Although Sulzer himself remained at bottom a loyal Leibnizo-Wolffian, his introduction of Hume into German philosophical discourse prepared the way for Kant’s critique of that philosophy. After the death of his wife in 1761, which deeply affected him, Sulzer began work on his General Theory of the Fine Arts, which was originally planned as a revision of Jacques Lacombe’s Dictionnaire portraitif des beaux-arts (1752) but became a vehicle for the statement of Sulzer’s own general views about aesthetics and the moral significance of art as well as an outlet for his vast learning and energy. In 1763, Sulzer resigned his position at the gymnasium but was recalled by Frederick the Great to become professor of philosophy at his new École militaire in 1765. Sulzer finally published the General Theory in two volumes from 1771 to 1774; especially in the expanded editions by Friedrich von Blankenburg in 1786– 87 and 1792–94, it remains an invaluable source for aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, including extensive bibliographical notes. In 1775, after twenty-five years as a member, Sulzer became the director of the Philosophical Class of the Academy of Sciences. In declining health, he traveled to France and Italy in 1775–76 in hopes of improvement, but died of lung disease on February 27, 1779. Sulzer’s earliest works in aesthetics concerned nature rather than art but already demonstrated his lifelong concern for the moral significance of aesthetic experience.51 In his Conversations on the Beauties of Nature (Unterredungen über die Schönheiten der Natur, 1750), which was republished in 1770 together with his earlier Moral Thoughts on the Works of Nature (Versuch einiger moralischen Gedanken über die Werke der Natur, 1745), Sulzer analyzed the benefits of the enjoyment of natural beauty in a way that prefigured his subsequent complex analysis of the value of art. In the first conversation, he argued that the contemplation of natural beauty has a calming and moderating influence on our passions, 51

Older sources on Sulzer’s aesthetics include Robert Sommer, Grundzüge einer Geschichte der deutschen Psychologie und Aesthetik von Wolff-Baumgarten bis Kant-Schiller (Würzburg: Stahel, 1892), pp. 195–230; Anna Tumarkin, Der Ästhetiker Johann Georg Sulzer (Fraunfeld and Leipzig: Huber, 1933); and Nivelle, Kunst- und Dichtungstheorien, pp. 47–55. Engell discusses Sulzer’s theory of imagination in Creative Imagination, pp. 103–7; Gabriele Dürbeck in Einbildungskraft und Aufklärung: Perspektiven der Philosophie, Anthropologie, und Ästhetikum 1750 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1998), p. 307–16; and a rare recent article is Johan van der Zande, “Orpheus in Berlin: A Reappraisal of Johann Georg Sulzer’s Theory of the Polite Arts,” Central European History 28 (1995): 175–208.

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a thesis analogous to Hume’s position in his essay “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” although Sulzer’s text gives no sign of a direct influence of Hume at this point in his career. The remaining conversations argue that the contemplation of the order of nature proves to us that its existence cannot have been a matter of chance and that its beauty gives us palpable evidence of the wisdom and benevolence of its creator. This analysis foreshadows Sulzer’s later position that the enjoyment of art is of immediate moral value because it directly contributes to our happiness, which is the ultimate object of morality, and is also of indirect moral value because it can enliven and thereby make more effective our knowledge of the general precepts of morality, and is indeed the best instrument for that end. Sulzer’s mature aesthetics is grounded in his generally LeibnizoWolffian metaphysics and psychology as well as in his Wolffian moral philosophy. The central tenets of his metaphysics and psychology are that the human mind is essentially representational, so that desire and will as well as cognition are forms of representation, and that the ultimate source of all of our pleasurable sentiments is the unhindered activity of our capacity for representation. Conversely, the fundamental source of disagreeable sentiments is the restriction of our representational activity. Sulzer’s morality is a Wolffian form of utilitarianism, according to which the goal of the moral life is happiness. Thus whatever contributes to happiness is at least prima facie good. Aesthetic experience is a variety of free and unhindered activity of our representational capacity and therefore produces pleasurable sentiments which are a primary constituent of happiness. In that way, aesthetic experience is of direct moral value. But works of art also enliven our abstract knowledge of moral precepts and make them effective on our action, so aesthetic experience is also of indirect moral value. Sulzer’s morality might seem egocentric, but he forestalls such an objection by an argument that normal human beings naturally desire for others what they desire for themselves and naturally recognize the right of others to that for which they claim a right for themselves.52 Thus, Sulzer implies, those who desire happiness for themselves naturally desire it for others as well, and those who desire happiness in the form of the pleasure of aesthetic experience for themselves will naturally desire it for others as well. However, he also recognizes 52

See Johann Georg Sulzer, “Psychological Considerations on Moral Human Beings” (Psychologische Betrachtungen über den sittlichen Menschen, 1769), in Sulzer’s Vermischte Philosophische Schriften, vols. I and II (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1773, 1781, reprinted in one volume, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), vol. I, pp. 282–306, especially p. 287.

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that art can be put to perverse and immoral use as well as healthy and good use, and that while art can contribute to morality both directly and indirectly we must also have an independent grasp of and commitment to the fundamental principles of morality in order to make sure that aesthetic experience’s natural tendency to morally good outcomes is not perverted. Working within the tradition of Wolff and Baumgarten, Sulzer bases his aesthetics on the premise that the experience of beauty is founded on the sensuous perception of perfection. Perfection consists in the rich variety of a manifold on the one hand and its unity on the other – a formula, as we have seen, that was central to the aesthetics of Francis Hutcheson as well – but also in a third element, namely, the “complete agreement” of what a thing is “with what it ought to be, or of the real with the ideal.”53 Thus he allows for no conception of perfection without a concept of purpose. Kant, as we will see, subsequently rejects the assumption that we must have a conception of the purpose of an object in order to make a (pure) judgment of beauty about it, but Sulzer himself already departs from the purely Wolffian conception that the experience of beauty consists simply in a clear but obscure recognition of the perfection of an object relative to a conception of its purpose by holding that the experience of the beauty of an object is an awareness of its effect on our representational faculty rather than an awareness of the cause of that effect in the object: Thus the experience of beauty becomes the sensation or sentiment (Empfindung) caused by the perfection of the object rather than a clear but indistinct cognition of that perfection. The real object of pleasure then becomes the activity of one’s own representational state, manifested in the form of sentiment, that is caused by the perfection of the beautiful object. This is Sulzer’s decisive modification of the Leibnizo-Wolffian approach to aesthetics, not to be found in Baumgarten nor in Baumgarten’s admirer Herder, though certainly already found in Hutcheson and Hume. However, from this innovation Sulzer does not draw the conclusion that Hume had and that Kant subsequently would, namely, that there can be no general rules for beauty. On the contrary, in his view the causal relation between perfection in the object and the pleasurable sentiments of activity in the subject is precisely the sort of relation that gives rise

53

See Sulzer, “Vollkommenheit” (“Perfection”) in Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 2nd ed., vol. IV, pp. 688–9, at p. 688.

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to rules, although such rules will be fairly general rather than very specific. That the real source of our pleasure in beautiful objects is our sensation of our own representational activity actually leads Sulzer to identify aesthetically valuable forms of sentiment that are not caused by beauty at all, and to argue that the fine arts must arouse the full range of human sentiments, even sentiments of ugliness (although, unlike Lessing, he does not distinguish among the fine arts in this regard).54 But even before he reaches that conclusion, his theory of beauty makes the nature and aims of art more complex than they might initially seem. Sulzer employs a trifold division of things that please us that is not dissimilar to Kant’s subsequent distinction between the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful. He distinguishes between things that please us “even if we do not have the least conception of the constitution” or means by which they do that, things that please us only if we have “a distinct representation of their constitution,” and things that please us because “the constitution of the objects charms our attention,” but where we “sense a satisfaction in them before we cognize them distinctly, before we know what they ought to be.” The last of these is what comprises the “class of the beautiful properly speaking,” while the former obviously corresponds to Kant’s classes of the agreeable and the good, respectively.55 Then Sulzer makes a further distinction. Because of his inclusion of purposiveness in his conception of perfection, he argues that the perfect can please us “either because of its material, or because of its external form, or through its inner constitution, by means of which it is an instrument or means for the achievement of some final end.”56 Correspondingly, there is a distinction between the pleasure that we may take in superficial beauty of the form and matter of an object, and the deeper pleasure that we take when an object also has “inner worth.” “A higher species of beauty arises from the close unification of the perfect, the beautiful, and the good. This arouses not merely satisfaction, but true inner pleasure, which often empowers the entire soul, and the enjoyment of which is happiness.”57 On Sulzer’s account, a beauty that appeals to the full range of our cognitive and emotional capacities through its purposiveness as well as its form is a “higher species” of beauty than one that appeals to

54 55 56 57

See Sulzer, “Häßlich” (“Ugly”), Allgemeine Theorie, vol. II, pp. 457–9. Sulzer, “Schön” (“Beautiful”), Allgemeine Theorie, vol. IV, pp. 305–19, at p. 306. Sulzer, p. 307. Sulzer, pp. 309–10.

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our sense of form alone. Here Sulzer effects his synthesis of the Wolffian version of cognitivist aesthetics with the aesthetics of emotional impact of Du Bos and Kames. Sulzer’s conception of the two levels of beauty also leads him to an account of the “ideal of beauty” that may have been a source for Kant’s later discussion of that concept, which will in turn be criticized by Friedrich Schiller. According to Sulzer, “that the human form [Gestalt] is the most beautiful of all visible objects does not need to be proved. . . . The strongest, the most noble, and the most blessed sentiments of which the human mind is capable are effects of this beauty.”58 The “external form of the inner character of a human being”59 is the ideal of beauty, when the beauty of that external form expresses the goodness of the internal character; correspondingly, the external expression of inner evil is the most hateful form of appearance. Like Herder, Sulzer recognizes that the variety of human tastes in both form and more substantial matters of morality means that different individuals and peoples will find both different external forms beautiful and different characters good, thus leading to differences in their ideals of beauty, but he is confident of the general principle that “every human being holds that to be most beautiful whose form announces to the eye of the judge the most perfect and best human being.”60 This illustrates his general conception of the force of rules of taste: They express underlying commonalities in the etiology of human preferences without entailing complete agreement about particulars. Sulzer also develops a complex theory of the value of fine art. Fine art aims to produce pleasure both by setting our cognitive powers into activity through the formal and material beauties of its products and by arousing our deepest feelings. Since the aim of morality is human happiness, art has immediate moral value just because it sets our mental powers into enjoyable activity. But through its ability to arouse our emotions, art also has indirect moral value through its ability to enliven and make effective our otherwise abstract and not always efficacious acknowledgment of the general precepts of morality. Thus, in such a statement as “the essence” of art “consists in the fact that it impresses the objects of our representation with sensible force, its end is the

58 59 60

Sulzer, “Schönheit” (“Beauty”), Allgemeine Theorie, vol. IV, pp. 319–27, at pp. 319–20. Sulzer, p. 322. Sulzer, p. 320.

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lively affection [Rührung] of our minds, and in its application it aims at the elevation of the spirit and the heart,”61 Sulzer clearly indicates that art has immediate value in its vivification of our sensory and cognitive powers as well as the value of its power to elevate our spirit and heart and thereby make morality efficacious for us. To be sure, he often emphasizes the latter aspect of the value of art more than the former; for example, he writes “The fine arts also use their charms in order to draw our attention to the good and to affect us with love for it. Only through this application does it become important to the human race and deserve the attention of the wise and the support of regents.”62 In a time and place where Calvinism and Pietism still questioned the value of the fine arts, it may have been necessary for him to emphasize the value of art for enlivening our moral precepts over his theory that morality itself aims at a kind of happiness in which the pleasures of the fine arts play a direct and major rôle. But the latter is as much a part of his thought as the former. Sulzer’s more conventional view that the fine arts serve morality by enlivening our moral feelings explains his recognition of the value of the ugly as well as the beautiful in art: Our sentiments of ugliness need to be aroused in order to strengthen our aversion to the evil just as our sentiments of beauty need to be aroused in order to strengthen our attraction to the good. Thus, “the human being must . . . have a certain degree of sensitivity for the beautiful and the ugly, for the good and the evil; for the insensitive person is as badly off with regard to the moral life as he whose senses are dull is for the animal life.”63 But Sulzer also recognizes that the emotional power of art means that it can be made into a tool for evil as well as for good, especially in the political arena. For example, a leader “who does not have sufficiently secure power in his hands turns to the efforts of his artists in order to clothe his tyranny with agreeableness; and by this means the attention of that part of the populace which is merely passive is turned away from freedom and directed toward mere entertainment.”64 For this reason, the moral potential of art must be governed by a firm recognition of the fundamental principles of morality itself. “The charming force of the fine arts can readily be misused to the

61

62 63 64

Sulzer, “Künste; Schöne Künste” (“Arts; Fine Arts”), Allgemeine Theorie, volume III, pp. 72–95, at p. 75. Sulzer, p. 76. Sulzer, “Empfindung” (“Sentiment”), Allgemeine Theorie, vol. II, pp. 53–9, at p. 55. Sulzer, “Künste; Schöne Künste,” Allgemeine Theorie, vol. III, p. 83.

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detriment of humankind. . . . The refined sensibility can have dangerous consequences if it is not developed under the constant guidance of reason.”65 Sulzer does not make the mistake of thinking that the experience of fine art, valuable as it can be for sound morality and politics, can substitute for a direct grasp of sound principles of morality and politics. Although his emphasis on the moral potential of the heightened sensitivity (Empfindlichkeit) that can be developed through aesthetic education may have been an important source for Schiller, he would not have gone as far as the latter does in his Letters on Aesthetic Education in suggesting that aesthetic education is both a necessary and sufficient condition for moral regeneration. Like other eighteenth-century writers, Sulzer also discussed the concepts of taste and genius. He was not as obsessed with the possibility of agreement in judgments of taste as many others were and characterized taste merely as “the faculty for sensing [empfinden] the beautiful, just as reason is the faculty for cognizing the true, the perfect, and the correct.”66 He instead took his discussion of taste as an opportunity to argue that the artist needs taste in addition to understanding and genius67 and to anticipate his subsequent argument that a work of art needs more than mere taste if it is not to “leave the understanding and the heart idle” and therefore always be somewhat “empty”; rather, true taste requires that “every faculty of the soul, whether it belongs to the understanding, the imagination, or the heart, must contribute its part.”68 Genius, in turn, Sulzer analyzes primarily as an unusually heightened power of perception and expression: Genius carries with it a special facility to elevate representations to a high degree of clarity and liveliness or, depending on the nature of the matter, of distinctness.”69 A genius is one who “without laborious search perceives more” than others “rather than inventing” more.70 Such a conception of genius is perhaps a natural concomitant of the underlying rationalism of Sulzer’s perfectionism: Perfections are there to be apprehended by those especially capable of doing so and then communicated to others who are less capable of directly perceiving them, rather than being created ab novo. This was the predominant 65 66 67

68 69 70

Sulzer, p. 78. Sulzer, “Geschmack” (“Taste”), Allgemeine Theorie, vol. II, pp. 371–85, at p. 371. This anticipates an argument that Kant will make in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, §50. Sulzer, p. 373. Sulzer, “Genie” (“Genius”), Allgemeine Theorie, vol. II, pp. 363–8, at p. 363. Sulzer, p. 364.

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conception of genius not only in Germany but also in Britain prior to Kant.71 Sulzer was clearly significant for successors such as Kant and Schiller both for his emphasis on the free activity of the mind in aesthetic experience and for his complex rather than simplistic position on the relation between art and morality, though he did not equate his concept of unhindered activity with a conception of the free play of imagination and understanding, which would become the central notion for Kant and Schiller. Thus he almost but did not quite effect their synthesis of the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of play in the way that they would do. But as we will see, he certainly combined the aesthetics of truth with the aesthetics of emotional impact in a way that Kant at least did not. Sulzer thus deserves to be remembered, not merely for his vast reference work on eighteenth-century aesthetics, but for having at least come close to recognizing the full complexity of aesthetic experience.

3. Herz In the 1770s, another student of Kant published a book on aesthetics that would become an unstated target of Kant’s criticism. This is Marcus Herz (1747–1803), Herder’s junior by three years. Remembered by philosophers primarily as the respondent at the defense of Kant’s inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World in 1770 and as the recipient of Kant’s letters describing his progress on the Critique of Pure Reason in the following decade, Herz had a significant career of his own, as a physician and medical writer, as a lecturer on philosophy, and as the author not only of the earliest exposition of Kant’s philosophy but also of an independent and interesting work in aesthetics. Herz was born to a Jewish scribe and his wife in Berlin in 1747 and received a traditional Talmudic education. At the age of fifteen he was sent to apprentice with a Jewish merchant in Königsberg, but at nineteen he matriculated at the university in Königsberg (two years after Herder had left) as a medical student – the only university course open to Jews in Prussia. He was supported by Moses Friedländer, whose son David would become Herz’s lifelong friend and a leading figure in the Berlin Jewish community. Medical students were required to study modern languages, philosophy, and mathematics, and Herz became a loyal 71

See my article “Exemplary Originality: Genius, Universality, and Individuality,” in Values of Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 242–62.

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student of Kant, attending his lectures on logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, natural law, physics, and physical geography. Kant’s selection of the Jewish student for the defense of his inaugural dissertation in 1770 was not accepted happily by some other members of the faculty, but Kant supported Herz then and always remained loyal to him, even as the student’s views diverged from his own. Shortly after the defense of Kant’s dissertation, Herz left Königsberg without a degree but with an introduction from Kant to Moses Mendelssohn. He immediately became a member of Mendelssohn’s inner circle of intellectuals, and also resumed his medical studies in Berlin, and then from 1772 to 1774 in Halle, where he received his degree. He returned to Berlin, where he was appointed to the Jewish hospital and became a prominent physician not only in the Jewish community but for members of the German nobility as well. He attended Mendelssohn in his final illness in 1786 but was powerless against the stroke that killed Mendelssohn after several days of an ordinary cold. Most of Herz’s publications arose from his medical and scientific practice and included his Letters to Doctors in 1777 and 1784; Outline of All Medical Sciences in 1782, which was adopted as a textbook in Halle; a companion to his Berlin lectures on Experimental Physics; an Essay on Dizziness in 1786; and a controversial essay On Early Burial among the Jews in 1787, in which he argued on medical grounds against the current practice among Jews of burial on the day of death, holding that death could not always be conclusively determined within such a short period. In 1782, Herz also provided the German translation of Manasseh ben Israel’s Vindication of the Jews, to which Mendelssohn provided the preface that would in turn lead the way to his Jerusalem of the next year; Herz thus played a role in the genesis of what would become the central text of the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment. In 1777, in addition to his medical practice, he began offering private lectures on philosophy, which were well attended. In 1787, Friedrich Wilhelm II granted him the title of a “Royal Prussian Professor of Philosophy,” although this carried no institutional appointment or salary, and in 1792 the proposal for his membership in the Berlin Academy of Sciences was rejected, as the proposal of Mendelssohn had earlier been. In 1779 Herz married the daughter of another Jewish doctor; his wife’s salon would become one of the most prominent in the social scene of late eighteenth-century Berlin. Herz died of lung disease on January 19, 1803.72 72

A monograph on Herz is Martin L. Davies, Identity or History? Marcus Herz and the End of the Enlightenment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995).

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Herz’s two important philosophical works were his Considerations from Speculative Philosophy (Betrachtungen aus der spekulativen Weltweisheit) of 1771 and his Essay on Taste and the Causes of its Variety (Versuch über den Geschmack und die Ursachen seiner Verschiedenheit), first published in 1776 and then in an expanded edition in 1790 – the same year as Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. The contrast between the two works in aesthetics is interesting, because while some arguments in Kant’s work can be construed as subtle criticisms of some of Herz’s positions, Herz finished even the second edition of his book without any knowledge of Kant’s criticisms. In general, he remained closer to the Wolffian and Baumgartian theory of beauty and taste that had been transmitted to him through Mendelssohn than to the position of his erstwhile teacher Kant, but he also shared Sulzer’s emphasis on mental activity and Herder’s emphasis on the social dimension of art while introducing some novel positions of his own. Herz’s Considerations from Speculative Philosophy,73 published when he was twenty-four, does not purport to be more than a German paraphrase of Kant’s Latin dissertation, but it goes beyond Kant’s published work on a number of points in the treatment of space, time, and things in themselves; adds a Mendelssohnian argument about the simplicity of the soul; and, most surprisingly, includes a digression on aesthetic judgment that anticipates a central argument of his subsequent Essay on Taste. The central argument of this digression, which comes in Herz’s exposition of Kant’s new theory of space and time as the forms of sensibility, is that beauty is an objective property, not a mere sensation or sentiment (Empfindung) in the subject, especially connected to the form of an object, and that there are general principles of beautiful form. Here Herz resists the subjectivization of beauty typical of the British such as Hutcheson and Hume and, as we have just seen, introduced into the Wolffian framework by Sulzer. However, Herz also argues that form must always be realized in matter and that individuals differ more in their response to matter than to form, so these general principles are objective but not completely determinate, thus allowing for differences of taste even though beauty is objective. Kant would subsequently agree that individuals differ in their response to matter but not to form, but then restrict pure judgments of taste to form alone, thus attempting to 73

Markus Herz, Betrachtungen aus der spekulativen Weltweisheit (1771), ed. with introduction, notes, and bibliography by Elfriede Conrad, Heinrich P. Delfosse, and Birgit Nehren (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990).

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guarantee unanimity of judgments of taste instead of accepting variation as Herz did. Kant’s analysis of pure judgments of taste might thus be seen as an attempt to defend the objectivity of aesthetic judgment from Herz’s theory. Five years after the Considerations, Herz developed this conception of beauty as objective but yielding only indeterminate rules for taste into the far more extensive Essay on Taste.74 Herz begins with what he considers to be a Baumgartian definition of beauty as the appearance of perfection in an object, where perfection in turn consists in the unity of a manifold. However, he adds that a work of art also has a Haltung, or expresses an attitude, and that its beauty also depends upon the harmony between the attitude expressed in the work and the goal or purpose of the work. We do not attribute purposes to natural objects, he argues, so in their case beauty lies in manifoldness and unity alone, but in human productions and therefore in art we always expect a purpose and respond to the purpose. Here Herz’s analysis anticipates Kant’s differentiation between natural and artistic beauty. He next argues that as natural beauty consists only in manifoldness and unity, we respond to it with the play of our imagination, which apprehends manifoldness, and reason, which recognizes unity; but as artistic beauty consists in the objective factors of manifoldness, unity, and attitude, the response to artistic beauty depends upon imagination, reason, and the further element of feeling, for response to the attitude of the work. Here Herz at least sketches a threefold approach to aesthetic experience. In this analysis, Herz stresses that the perception of beauty is not passive, but because of the rôle of both imagination and reason it is active, and he argues that our pleasure in beauty is ultimately due to the activity of our mental powers in its perception, activity being the greatest source of our pleasure. Here Herz clearly aligns himself with Sulzer. Herz then argues that human beings share their basic capacities of imagination, reason, and feeling, but that there are numerous factors that affect how these general faculties function concretely in different individuals and populations, and thus explain differences of taste without undermining the metaphysical objectivity of beauty: These include differences in freedom of thought, religion, morality, material wealth, climate and regime. Here Herz’s thought parallels the contemporary thought of Herder. 74

Marcus Herz, Versuch über den Geschmack und die Ursachen seiner Verschiedenheit (Leipzig and Mitau: Hinz, 1776; 2nd, enlarged and improved ed., Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voß, 1790).

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Some of Herz’s most interesting points and his greatest differences with Kant’s theory of taste emerge in the discussion of the influence of morality on taste. Here Herz argues that the enjoyment of beauty contributes to morality in two ways, directly and indirectly. The enjoyment of beauty contributes to morality directly because as a source of mental activity it is a source of happiness, and happiness is nothing less than the aim of morality. Here again Herz adopts the same positions as Sulzer. Herz takes a different position from Sulzer on the indirect moral benefits of art, however, arguing not that the experience of art enlivens moral sentiments that we already have from our more abstract recognition of general moral precepts, but rather that the cultivation of taste, which happens only in society, contributes to morality indirectly because it generates feelings of sociability that can then support our attempts to be moral. Although Kant will not mention Herz’s name in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, this seems to be the kind of vindication of aesthetic experience that Kant criticizes under the name of an “empirical interest in the beautiful,” holding that morality requires an a priori principle rather than mere feelings of sociability and can therefore be supported only by an “intellectual interest in the beautiful.”75 In his later Metaphysics of Morals, however, Kant will offer an account of the moral significance of aesthetic feeling, as a feeling useful as at least part of the empirical disposition that intervenes between commitment to the fundamental principle of morality and the actions called for by that principle in the particular circumstances of human existence, that does not seem so different from Herz’s.76 Finally, in the appendix to the Essay Herz also argues against the position of Du Bos that critics have no better rules for arguing about the merits of works of art than cooks do for arguing about ragouts (ragu, or stews), a position that had been adopted from Du Bos by Hume and would later be endorsed by Kant.77 In spite of his recognition of the many factors that create variability in judgments of taste, Herz thus insisted to the end that we can have not just an a priori ideal of agreement in taste

75

76

77

See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (CPJ), ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), §§41–2. See Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, §17 in Immanual Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 564. For my account of Kant’s late theory of moral feelings, see “Moral Feelings in the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Lara Denis, editor, Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 130–51. See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §34.

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but rational means for arguing about judgments of taste, consisting in discussion of unity amid variety on the one hand and the identification of factors leading to disagreement on the other hand. In this regard, Herz remained within the ambit of Wolff, Baumgarten, and Meier rather than approaching the view of his contemporary Herder, although one might have expected his emphasis on the rôle of individual mental activity in aesthetic experience rather than Herder’s emphasis on truth as the basis of aesthetic experience to have led to the more radical denial of the possibility of determinate rules for art criticism. We will see in the next chapter how Kant ultimately combined the emphasis on the activity of our cognitive powers that he could have found in Sulzer and Herz with the emphasis on truth that he found in Herder – and in the British and German traditions that stood behind these two approaches – in his own theory of “aesthetic ideas,” while at the same time rejecting the emphasis on the emotional impact of art that is central to these two predecessors. Thus they came close to effecting a synthesis of the three main approaches to aesthetic experience in the eighteenth century, while Kant would step back, or indeed firmly resist, completing such a synthesis. But before we finally turn to Kant, we conclude this chapter with a look at one last writer who came to prominence during the 1780s, shortly before Kant, and after many years of work on his theoretical and practical philosophies, finally turned to his aesthetic theory. This is Karl Philipp Moritz, who introduced the concept of the “autonomy of art” or “art for art’s sake” that is often assigned to Kant, but which Kant in fact rejected.

4. Moritz Moritz (1756–1793) was another of the many German intellectuals of the eighteenth century who rose from unpromising beginnings to renown, although the scourge of lung disease shortened his career even more cruelly than those of its other victims such as Baumgarten and Herz. Moritz was the son of an army musician who sought refuge from his own circumstances in Quietism, an extreme sect of Pietism, and inflicted its religiosity upon his son. After several years as an apprentice to a hatmaker, Moritz was able to attend grammar school for a few years. He had a few years at the universities in Erfurt and Wittenberg, interspersed with attempts to become an actor and a stay at the seminary of the Moravian Brothers, another Pietist sect. At twenty-two, he became a schoolteacher in Berlin. In 1782 he made a trip to England and published a travelogue

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which won him some recognition, after which he returned to his school until 1786, when his publisher financed a trip to Italy in the hope of getting another popular travelogue out of him. In Italy Moritz became a friend of Goethe, who would write a much more famous account of his Italian journey, and learned enough classical art to become professor of aesthetics at the Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1789, the position he held until his death four years later. Moritz’s publications during his brief but intense literary career included, in addition to his Italian travelogue, eventually published in 1792–3, the novels Anton Reiser (1786– 90), a barely fictionalized autobiography, and Andreas Hartknopf: An Allegory; philological works including an Essay on German Prosody in 1786 and Lectures on Style in 1793; textbooks on grammar and logic for children, a German Grammar for the Ladies, English and Italian grammars for Germans, and an eventually very successful account of Greek mythology aimed at both children and adults; a Theory of Ornament; and a journal of “empirical psychology” (erfahrende Seelenkunde) that he edited for ten years. But what concerns us here are several essays in aesthetics that Moritz published between 1785 and 1791.78 These essays commence with the ambitiously entitled “Attempt at a Unification of all the Fine Arts and Sciences under the Concept of that which is complete in itself,” dedicated to Moses Mendelssohn and published in 1785 in an issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift which also contained an article (on astronomy) by Kant. In these essays Moritz argues that works of art please us because they have an “internal purposiveness” independent of any purpose external to them, a conception that is thought to have anticipated Kant’s own account of beauty as “purposiveness without a purpose” and the nineteenth-century conception of “art for art’s 78

A complete list of Moritz’s publications can be found in Karl Philipp Moritz, Werke, ed. Horst Günther, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1993), vol. III, pp. 806–12. Monographs on Moritz include Thomas P. Saine, Die ästhetische Theodizee: Karl Philipp Moritz und die Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971); Mark Boulby, Karl Philipp Moritz: At the Fringe of Genius (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); Hans Joachim Schrimpf, Karl Philipp Moritz (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1980); Alo Alkemper, Ästhetische Lösungen: Studien zu Karl Philipp Moritz (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1990); and Alessandro Costazza, Genie und tragische Kunst: Karl Philipp Moritz und die Ästhetik des 18. Jahrunderts (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999). Shorter contributions include Martha Woodmansee, “The Interests in Disinterestedness: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Emergence of the Theory of Aesthetic Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Modern Language Quarterly 45 (1984): 22–47, reprinted in her The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York, Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 11–22, and Simon Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Moritz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), pp. 131–62.

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sake.”79 Presumably Kant read Moritz’s essay, appearing as it did in an issue of the most important German literary journal that also contained one of his own essays, but Kant’s notion of “subjective” or “formal” purposiveness is probably a repudiation of Moritz’s conception of “internal purposiveness” rather than a successor to it, and Moritz’s view is also distinct from later conceptions of “art for art’s sake.” In fact, his brief “Outlines of a Complete Theory of the Fine Arts,” published in the journal of the Academy of Arts in 1789, makes clear that Moritz rejected the “subjectivist” view that our pleasure in artistic or natural beauty is due primarily to the way in which it freely engages our own mental powers – on which the theory of Kant and later advocates of “art for art’s sake” are based – in favor of an “objectivist” view: “The genuinely beautiful is not merely in us and in our manner of representation, but is to be found outside us in the objects themselves.”80 What Moritz actually held is that the “internal purposiveness” of a work of art is an intimation of the perfection of the world as a whole, and that we enjoy it precisely as such an intimation. Thus, just as Thomas Reid in Scotland rejected the theory of mental play that had been developed in British aesthetics over the previous thirty years, so too Moritz, and indeed in the very same year, actually attempted to stem the growth of such a theory in Germany by reverting to a theory of beauty as an intimation of the true order of the cosmos that has its roots in the views of Wolff and Shaftesbury. His aesthetic theory must therefore be seen as a reversion to a Platonic, cognitivistperfectionist approach, just as Reid was making the same reversion in Scotland. Both the essay on art as “that which is complete in itself” and a longer pamphlet “On the formative Imitation of the Beautiful” (Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen) that Moritz published in 1788 start off with a contrast between the beautiful on the one side and the useful and the good on the other in a way that does, as we will see, anticipate the opening stratagem of Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” in his Critique of the Power of Judgment in 1790. Moritz analyzes the useful in particular as a means to a perfection that lies outside of the useful object itself, namely, “the convenience or comfortableness that accrues to myself or another through the use of it . . . i.e., I consider it merely as a means, for which I myself, in so far as my perfection is thereby promoted, am the end. The 79 80

See, for example, Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market, pp. 18–20, 32. Moritz, “Grundlinien zu einer vollständigen Theorie der schönen Künste,” in Werke, vol. II, pp. 591–2, at p. 591.

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merely useful object is thus in itself nothing whole or complete.” Then he immediately assumes, as if this were the only alternative, that “In the contemplation of the beautiful I roll the end from myself back into the object itself: I consider it, as something that is complete not in me but rather in itself, that thus comprises a whole in itself, and that affords me pleasure on its own account.”81 Moritz continues that a beautiful object does not please us, like a clock or a knife, because it satisfies some need of our own, not even the need to be pleased, but says, remarkably, that “the beautiful needs us, in order to be cognized. We could subsist very well without the contemplation of beautiful works of art, but these, as such, cannot well subsist without our contemplation.” He then goes on to say that when we see a play put on before an empty theater, we are displeased, not for the sake of the author or actors, but for the sake of the play itself, as work of art whose need to be contemplated is going unfulfilled!82 While Wolff had ultimately grounded his cognitivist approach to aesthetics on the assumption that God needs to have the glory of his creation cognized by us, Moritz attributes the need to be cognized to the work of art itself, not to a divine or human artist, and puts the human audience for art in the position of its servant. This is the theory of the autonomy of art, but a far cry from the ordinary version of that theory as founded in the intrinsic value of human pleasure, satisfied by art apart from art’s satisfaction of any other human need. In a passage that might be seen as pointing the way not to Kant but, as we shall see, to Arthur Schopenhauer, Moritz next writes: The sweet astonishment, the agreeable forgetting of ourself in the contemplation of a beautiful work of art, is also a proof that our gratification here is something subordinate, that we voluntarily allow ourself to be determined through the beautiful, to which we for a while concede a sort of sovereignty over all our own feelings. While the beautiful draws our consideration entirely to itself, it draws us for a while away from our self, it is the highest degree of pure and unselfish gratification that the beautiful affords us. In the moment we sacrifice our individual, limited existence to a sort of higher existence. The gratification in the beautiful must thereby ever more approach that of unselfish love if it is to be genuine. . . . The beautiful in the work of art is not for me pure and unmixed until I completely think away its special relation to me and consider it is as something that has

81

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Moritz, “Über den Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten,” Werke, vol. II, pp. 543–8, at p. 543. Moritz, “Über den Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten,” Werke, vol. II, p. 544.

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been brought forth entirely for its own sake, so that it could be something complete in itself.83

As the popularity of Schopenhauer’s subsequent presentation of this view demonstrates, Moritz has surely here captured an aspect of the experience of artistic – or for that matter natural – beauty that many people have felt. But so far his conception of and argument for the idea of the beautiful as that which is perfect and complete in itself has been entirely negative; what is it in a beautiful object that can so please us and yet distract us completely from our ordinary concern with ourselves and our own pleasures? The answer to this question can be found in Moritz’s longer essay On the formative Imitation of the Beautiful. Here, after a more extended contrast between the beautiful, the useful, and the good, Moritz adds to his previous account that a beautiful object is something that seems to us to be “a whole subsisting for itself” insofar as it “strikes our senses or can be grasped by our imagination,” and that “to that extent our instruments of sensation prescribe its measure to the beautiful.”84 Here he aligns himself with the tradition of Wolff and Baumgarten by asserting that the perception of beauty is a perception of perfection by means of the senses or their extension through imagination. But he still owes us an explanation of what the internal and objective perfection of the beautiful object is. This comes next, when he states that it is actually the “interconnection of the whole of nature” insofar as we grasp it by means of the senses and imagination that we contemplate and admire in a beautiful work of art, or that it is intimated to us by such a work. “Every beautiful whole from the hand of the formative artist is thus a little impression of the highest beauty in the great whole of nature.”85 Or, as he puts it in another essay from 1789, “The complete concept of the beautiful presupposes . . . that the beautiful exhibits to us more order, harmony, and form (Bildung) in a small domain than we otherwise perceive scattered here and there in the great whole that surrounds us.”86 In other words, the beautiful intimates the true order of the world-whole to us in a way that the use of our ordinary powers of thought, imagination, and sense on particular pieces of

83 84 85

86

Moritz, “Über den Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten,” Werke, vol. II, p. 545. Moritz, Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen, Werke, vol. II, pp. 551–78, at pp. 558–9. Moritz, Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen, Werke, vol. II, p. 560. See also “Grundlinien,” p. 592. Moritz, “Bestimmung des Zwecks einer Theorie der schönen Künste,” Werke, vol. II, p. 593.

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the world-whole cannot do; only in the experience of the beautiful can we actually get a sense of the order of the world-whole. In a formulation that anticipates not Kant’s theory of the experience of beauty but rather his theory of the experience of the sublime, Moritz claims that “the sense for the highest beauty in the harmonious construction of the whole . . . lies immediately in the power of action (Tatkraft),” which exceeds the ordinary powers of thought (Denkkraft), imagination (Einbildungskraft), and outer sense (äußre Sinn).87 From the fact that “The nature of the beautiful consists precisely in the fact that its inner essence lies outside of the limits of the power of thought, in its origination, in its own coming-to-be,” Moritz infers that “in the case of the beautiful, the power of thought can no longer ask, why is it beautiful?”88 The essence of beauty thus escapes ordinary conceptual thought. This is the basis for Moritz’s argument, in another essay entitled “The Signature of the Beautiful,” that the beautiful cannot be described, that is, that although words themselves may be beautiful, they cannot provide a description of beauty – even such a brilliant description as Winckelmann’s description of the Apollo Belvedere “rips apart the wholeness of this work of art,” and “is more damaging than useful to the contemplation of this sublime work of art.”89 And for this reason, the artistic genius cannot be fully conscious of what he does when he creates a beautiful work of art, for its beauty cannot be reduced to any concept that he can state: “One could in this sense say that the most perfect poem is unconscious to its author, likewise the most perfect description of the highest masterwork of formative art, just as this is in turn the embodiment or realized exhibition of the masterwork of fantasy.”90 Here Moritz arrives at results that are superficially similar to those Kant will arrive at a few years later – that aesthetic judgments cannot be grounded in determinate concepts and that the process of creation by artistic genius cannot be guided and explained by determinate concepts – but for very different reasons: Kant will draw these conclusions from his subjectivist account of the origin of aesthetic pleasure in a play of the cognitive powers that is free rather than determined by concepts, but Moritz draws these conclusions from his conception that a beautiful object always intimates the order of the world-whole which is beyond our grasp through any of the ordinary powers of mind. In other words, 87 88 89 90

Moritz, Über die bildende Nachahmung, p. 561. Moritz, Über die bildende Nachahmung, p. 564. Moritz, “Die Signatur des Schönen,” Werke, vol. II, pp. 579–88, at p. 588. Moritz, “Die Signatur,” Werke, vol. II, p. 585.

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Moritz draws his conclusions from his version of an aesthetics of truth, while Kant will draw similar conclusions from an aesthetics based on the idea of the free play of mental powers. A further difference between Moritz’s account of genius and that which Kant will offer is that for Moritz the creative power – the Tatkraft – of the genius breaks down the ordinary limits of individuality, and indeed seems almost involuntary rather than intentional. First, Moritz writes that The formative genius will, where possible, himself grasp all of the relations to that great harmony that are slumbering in him, whose circumference is greater than his own individuality: he cannot do this otherwise than by creating, forming, as it were from his own limited individuality, different moments into one work, which exhibits outside of himself, exceeding [these limits], and with this work now grasping that which his selfhood previously could not grasp.91

Moreover, the genius is as it were driven to do this by a necessity not of his own choosing: “The born artist is not satisfied with intuiting nature, he must imitate it, strive after it, and form and create it, just like” nature itself.92 In Moritz’s view, the genius is not so much a voluntary agent who produces a representation of natural beauty by his own choice as he is an instrument of nature itself, by means of whose work nature can intimate to us its own true order and grandeur. Here nature, working through the artist, takes over the traditional rôle of God revealing his glory to humankind; just as the human audience has been treated as the servant of art, so too the artist is conceived of as a kind of servant. And in this connection, we can see that when Moritz speaks of the “imitation” of the beautiful, he does not mean merely that the artist strives to copy some particular beautiful thing in nature, but rather that the artist strives to realize in his own way the beauty of nature as a whole – as someone might strive, not to copy a virtuous act of another, but rather to realize the ideal of virtue in his own actions. (Since as we earlier saw, Batteux, the most famous eighteenth-century advocate of the theory of imitation, understood the artist’s task as that of imitating the spirit of nature rather than its letter, Moritz’s theory is not as far from Batteux’s as might initially appear.) As part of nature, the artistic genius has no choice but to play his part in the order of nature as a whole, which is precisely to intimate that order to the rest of us.93 91 92 93

Moritz, Über das bildende Nachahmung, p. 570. Moritz, “Grundlinien,” p. 592. Martha Woodmansee calls Moritz’s conception of the autonomy of art a “displaced theology” (The Author, Art, and the Market, p. 20) because the unselfish contemplation of

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In 1791, close to the end of his life, Moritz dedicated a review of the Essay on Taste by “our mutual friend” Herz to Salomon Maimon, another extraordinary Jewish intellectual who had arisen to prominence in Berlin from beginnings even more unpromising than those of Mendelssohn and Herz. Here he not only manifested his own allegiance to Wolff and Baumgarten, arguing that his conception of beauty as the internal perfection of a work of art as it strikes the senses and imagination is essentially the same as their conception of beauty as “sensible perfection” (he draws no distinction between Wolff and Baumgarten),94 but also tries to paper over any difference between himself and Kant, whose Critique of the Power of Judgment had also appeared the year before, by claiming that Kant’s concept of “purposiveness without purpose is nothing other than an ideal purpose,” and thus that Kant’s concept of beauty is essentially the same as Wolff’s and his own.95 I have suggested that this is not true, because Moritz’s conception of the beauty of an individual work of art is that it is an intimation of the true and objective order of nature as a whole, while Kant’s notion of purposiveness without purpose will point us toward a subjective state of mind in which our mental powers of imagination and understanding are in a free harmony that does not by itself represent anything at all; at least in what Kant calls the “pure” judgment of taste, the experience of beauty is pleasurable without meaning anything or conveying any truth. As we next see, that is in fact only the starting point of Kant’s aesthetics, and as he moves past his initial analysis of “pure” or “free” beauty he does add back into his view the beauties of truth that figured so prominently for so many of his German predecessors up through Herder and Moritz, as well as the beauty of utility that we saw to play a large rôle in the British tradition, for example, in Hume. But we cannot appreciate the complexity of Kant’s aesthetics unless we have seen the separate approaches that he ultimately combines, and which he rejects. As we saw in the previous chapter, Mendelssohn suggested a synthesis of the three main approaches to aesthetics in the eighteenth century: the cognitivist approach, particularly in its characteristically Wolffian perfectionist form; the theory of free

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art that Moritz prescribes mimics the Pietist conception of the worship of God; but she does not observe that in Moritz’s account of genius God himself is being displaced by the nature that creates the artistic genius and through that means allows the rest of us an intimation of her grandeur. See Moritz, “Über des Herrn Professor Herz Versuch über den Geschmack: An Herrn Salomon Maimon,” Werke, vol. II, pp. 923–7, at p. 525. Moritz, “Über des Herrn Professor,” p. 926.

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play; and the theory of emotional impact. In this chapter, we have seen that Herder synthesized the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of emotional impact, while Sulzer and Herz came close to synthesizing all three, although neither extensively developed the concept of free play. Moritz, for all of the interest in human emotions evidenced in his fiction and his work in empirical psychology, kept both the emotions and the idea of play out of his aesthetics and reverted to a purely cognitivist aesthetics, indeed one in which the human being as such plays a role strangely subordinate to the internal purposiveness. Kant will not follow Moritz down such a path but will instead develop his own conception of subjective purposiveness into the concept of the free play of imagination and understanding, and then he will synthesize that conception of aesthetic response with the aesthetics of truth to form the central conception of his theory of fine art, the conception of the “aesthetic idea”; but he will follow Moritz in excluding any rôle for the arousal of human emotion from the essential aims of art, even though the rational ideas that are at the heart of aesthetic ideas would seem to be those with the greatest impact on human emotions. And in this exclusion of emotion from our proper response to art, Kant would be followed by the next generation of German Idealists. A struggle to reintegrate its emotional impact into a complete theory of art and aesthetic response would in fact begin even among some of Kant’s own disciples and would continue among the disciples of the most influential of the subsequent idealists, namely Hegel, but as we will see in Volume II, this effort would not prove successful until the end of the nineteenth century.

Part Four

KANT AND AFTER

9 Kant

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment,1 published in 1790 as the last of his three great critiques, Immanuel Kant defined our feeling of pleasure in beauty as the “sensation of the effect that consists in the facilitated play of both powers of the mind (imagination and understanding), enlivened through mutual agreement.”2 Such pleasure, Kant insisted, does not yield any determinate knowledge about its object but expresses “nothing but its suitability to the cognitive faculties that are in play in the reflecting power of judgment, insofar as they are in play.”3 With such statements, Kant seems to have completely rejected the traditional analysis of aesthetic experience as a distinctive mode of access to truth and to have accepted without reservation the account of aesthetic experience as a form of intrinsically pleasurable mental activity, with no external reference to truth and no need of such reference to justify its value, that had been introduced by such British writers as Alexander Gerard and Lord Kames and at least hinted at by several Germans, in passing by Moses Mendelssohn and more explicitly by Johann Georg Sulzer. Indeed, by apparently analyzing the experience of beauty solely in terms of the free 1

2 3

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) (CPJ). This edition reproduces in its margins the pagination of the German text from Volume 5 of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Royal Prussian (later German, then Berlin-Brandenburg) Academy of Sciences (Berlin: Georg Reimer, later Walter de Gruyter, 1900–). The pagination of that edition is cited here, as is standard in Kant scholarship. The text of the Kritik der Urteilskraft in this edition, the so-called Akademie edition, was edited by Wilhelm Windelband. However, the best contemporary edition of the Kritik der Urteilskraft is that edited by Heiner F. Klemme (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001), which also provides the Akademie edition pagination. Kant, CPJ, §9, 5:219. Kant, CPJ, Introduction, §VII, 5:189–90.

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play of our cognitive powers and entirely rejecting the traditional aesthetics of truth, Kant seems to have introduced a new, distinctively modern epoch in aesthetic theory. He was thus interpreted, for example, by Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his famous charge that Kant had “subjectivized” modern aesthetics.4 Such an interpretation would be a simplification of Kant’s own theory and its reception. In fact, in aesthetics as elsewhere in his philosophy, Kant attempted to combine or, in one of his favorite words, synthesize two competing theories he found before him. So he combined the new theory of aesthetic experience as a form of free play with the traditional theory of aesthetic experience as a special conduit of truth, above all in his theory of fine art, which is by no means identical with his initial analysis of aesthetic experience but instead represents the work of artistic genius as inspired play with our deepest and most important ideas: A work of art adds to a concept such as “the kingdom of the blessed” or the “kingdom of hell” – think of Dante’s Divine Comedy – “a representation of the imagination that belongs to its presentation, but which by itself stimulates so much thinking that it can never be grasped by a determinate concept, hence which aesthetically enlarges the concept itself in an unbounded way,” and in this way “the imagination is creative, and sets the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into motion.”5 But even though the kinds of rational ideas that are at the heart of aesthetic ideas are the very ideas that would seem to have the most profound emotional impact on human beings, and even though in his moral philosophy Kant himself had argued that the very thought of the moral law itself directly produces the powerful feeling that he calls respect, at least in his theory of beauty Kant took pains to exclude any feelings other than pleasure itself, anything falling into the domain of what he called “charms and emotions,”6 from aesthetic response proper and the “pure” judgment of taste. Thus Kant, for reasons we will have to explore, consciously held back from the threefold synthesis of the aesthetics of truth, the aesthetics of play, and the aesthetics of emotional impact that we have found at least suggested in such predecessors as Kames and Mendelssohn. Kant may have made more room for the aesthetic experience of emotion in his theory of the sublime, but even here his acceptance of the emotional aspect of such 4

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Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd, rev. ed. (London: Sheed & Ward, 1989; reset, London: Continuum, 2004), p. 37. Kant, CPJ, §49, 5:314–15. Kant, CPJ, §13, 5:223.

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experience is hedged with reservations: For example, Kant thinks that the experience of the sublime is primarily a response to nature, not to art, and the emotions recognized in his account of the sublime by no means represent the full range of human emotions. Unlike Gadamer, some of Kant’s immediate successors did not understand him as having held that aesthetic experience is nothing but a form of free play. To be sure, his former student Johann Gottfried Herder, whom we have already encountered as a critic of Lessing, did think that Kant had reduced aesthetic experience to mere play, and in his last, bitter work he took Kant severely to task for this. But some of those who understood Kant best, such as Friedrich Schiller, realized that he had attempted to combine the modern aesthetics of play with the traditional aesthetics of truth, and attempted to accomplish a similar synthesis in their own work. Indeed, in his essays on tragedy if not in his main aesthetic treatises, Schiller clearly recognized the emotional impact of this form of art, so perhaps he can be considered to have accomplished, at least in his work as a whole if not in any one text, the threefold synthesis that eluded Kant. Others who thought of themselves as Kantians also attempted to make room for the emotional impact of art in their own work; one example of this tendency that we consider is Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, who was converted to Kantianism by reading the Critique of Pure Reason the year it came out, 1781, when he was just seventeen, and who issued his own System of Aesthetics in 1790, having written most of it before having seen Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, which was published just a few months earlier, and who made the emotional impact of art central to his own account. But more prophetic for the main direction of aesthetic theories after Kant was the response of someone like the Prussian statesman and founder of the royal university in Berlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who admired Kant and adopted much of Kant’s understanding of aesthetic experience, but without placing much emphasis on the idea of free play at all. Von Humboldt thereby initiated a revival of the traditional aesthetics of truth that was to dominate the next generation of German aesthetics, the aesthetics of German Idealism. Incorporating the aesthetics of emotional impact into Kant’s framework might have seemed the natural next step, but instead of doing this such philosophers as Friedrich Schelling, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel not only excluded the emotional impact of art from their thought but also rejected Kant’s conception of aesthetic experience as free play, thereby reverting to a monolithic aesthetics of truth. In the next volume, we shall

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see that both Schopenhauer and Hegel were quite explicit about this, though their reasons for taking this path were very different. Following them, there was a long struggle in the rest of the nineteenth century to reintroduce the other two approaches to aesthetics, the aesthetics of play and the aesthetics of emotional impact, and we shall see that it was not until the end of the century that any form of the threefold synthesis that had been achieved by a few of Kant’s predecessors was restored, for example, by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, and that even in the twentieth century only a few aestheticians also developed such a complex rather than reductive understanding of aesthetic experience. But all of that is the subject of the next two volumes. For now our task is to complete the present volume, first by considering Kant’s aesthetic theory and then, in the next and final chapter of this volume, examining the theories of such immediate successors to Kant as Heydenreich, Schiller, and von Humboldt.

1. The Task for Kant’s Aesthetics Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was born in Königsberg to a family of very modest means, and studied there first at the Collegium Fredericianum, a Pietist school, and then at the Albertina, the university there, where he was a student from 1740 to 1747. Classical literature was a large part of his curriculum at both schools, although exposure to any of the other fine arts, the visual arts or music, must have been extremely limited;7 classical literature as well as more contemporary literature, including the most important novels of the eighteenth century, would remain important to Kant throughout his life. Perhaps Kant had a little more exposure to other art forms such as painting and music in the years he spent as a household tutor for several landowners in the vicinity of Königsberg, although what was on offer in those homes must still have been very limited, before he returned in 1754 to complete his degrees and teaching qualifications. He began his teaching career as a Privatdozent, or lecturer supported only by student fees, in 1755; he was finally appointed as the salaried professor of metaphysics and logic only in 1770, at the age of forty-six. (Several years earlier, the administration had offered him the chair in poetry, which suggests that Kant’s knowledge of literature must 7

A fascinating account of the curriculm at Kant’s school can be found in Heiner F. Klemme, editor, Die Schule Immanuel Kants: Mit dem Text von Christian Schiffer über das Königsberger Collegium Fridericianum, Kant-Forschungen Band 6 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1994).

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have been recognized, but Kant had turned that chair down because he did not want the responsibility of composing Latin poems for every university occasion!) Kant would hold his chair until he retired from lecturing in 1797, although he continued to publish for several years after that and worked on an uncompleted restatement of his entire philosophical system until a few months before his death in 1804.8 Among Kant’s early works was a small book, published in 1764, entitled Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, a title obviously influenced by Burke’s book a half-dozen years earlier; but in spite of its title, this book offers little by way of analysis, focusing instead on what we might consider psychological, sociological, and anthropological matters, such as why women are more inclined to the beautiful while men are more inclined to the sublime.9 Indeed, the work seems to have been intended primarily as an advertisement for Kant’s popular lectures on “physical geography,” on which much of his income depended. When Kant started a second popular course of lectures on what he called “anthropology” in 1772–73, he used the chapter on “Empirical Psychology” from Baumgarten’s Metaphysica as his textbook, and since this chapter included a brief account of Baumgarten’s aesthetics, Kant’s lectures on anthropology henceforth always included some discussion of aesthetics under several headings, including, for example, the Dichtungsvermögen (“faculty of invention”), “genius,” and “taste.”10 The last part of his anthropology lectures, “Anthropological Characteristics,” took up the issues about the different aesthetic preferences of the two genders and various nations and races that had occupied his 1764 book. But for decades Kant did not publish anything more on aesthetics, and his views on the subject could not have been known to anyone who had not heard his lectures. And not even the auditors of those lectures could

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An informative and insightful account of Kant’s life and works is Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Karl Vorländer, Immanuel Kant: Der Mann und das Werk, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1924), and Steffen Dietzsch, Immanuel Kant: Eine Biographie (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 2003). See Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). This edition includes the notes that Kant wrote in his own copy of the Observations, which, however, show far more about the development of his moral philosophy than about that of his aesthetics. See, for example, the table of contents for the Anthropologie Collins, a transcription of Kant’s first series of lectures on anthropology from 1772–73, in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, 25: 3–4, and the handbook Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View that Kant finally published in 1798, only after he had ceased lecturing altogether.

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have guessed that Kant would one day completely outshadow such wellknown aestheticians of the day as Mendelssohn and Sulzer. Instead, Kant’s chief work in aesthetics, the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” that is the first half of Critique of the Power of Judgment, came only late in his career, at the end of the extraordinary decade in which he had published the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, revised 1787), the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783), the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and a host of important essays on history, science, and theology as well as philosophy, all of which had in a short period made Kant the dominant figure in German philosophy. Although we take its existence for granted now, Kant’s third Critique could only have struck its original audience as a surprising and puzzling work: surprising, because neither the Critique of Pure Reason nor the Critique of Practical Reason had given any clue that another critique was to follow;11 and puzzling, because the book not only gives an extended treatment to one topic, namely, aesthetic experience and judgment, that Kant had previously denied could be the subject of a science,12 but also links that topic with another, namely, the teleological judgment both of organisms within nature and of nature as a whole, to which Kant had never before linked it.13 Clearly there must have been some fundamental revolution in Kant’s conception of the tasks of philosophy as well in his assessment of the prospects of both aesthetics and teleology that both made it imperative for him and enabled him to write this book, linking two subjects that were not only disparate but that had also previously

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Although Kant’s long-time publisher, Johann Hartknoch, apparently announced a forthcoming Critique of Taste in his catalogue for the Easter book fair in 1787, none of Kant’s publications to that point had raised any expectation of a third critique. When Kant did finally publish the third critique, it was not with Hartknoch. For the story, see the Editor’s Introduction in CPJ, pp. xxxix–xlvi. Critique of Pure Reason, A 21/B 35–6; see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), which includes the “A” and “B” (first and second edition) pagination. Kant had addressed the subject of teleology in one of his first books, namely, The Only Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God of 1763. But in the Critique of Pure Reason, teleology was only mentioned in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, where it was assigned a purely heuristic role in the conduct of scientific inquiry. Kant’s first suggestion that there is a special connection between teleology and aesthetics came in a letter to Karl Leonhard Reinhold in December, 1787 (10:513–16). In that letter, Kant evinces great excitement at the discovery that there is a common a priori principle for both aesthetic and teleological judgment but gives no hint as to what that principle is supposed to be.

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been problematic for him, so soon after having completed his exhausting labors on the first two critiques.14 Kant does not immediately reveal a profound motivation for the new book in either the first draft of its Introduction, the so-called first introduction of 1789,15 or in the Preface or first section of the published

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Important works on the development of Kant’s aesthetics include Paul Menzer, Kants Ästhetik in ihrer Entwicklung, Abhandlungen der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Klasse für Gesellschaftswissenschaften Jahrgang 1950 Nummer 2 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1952); Giorgio Tonelli, “La formazione del testo della Kritik der Urteilskraft,” Revue internationale de Philosophie 8 (1954): 423–48, and Kant, dall’estetica metafisica all’estetica psicoempirica, Memorie dell’Accademia della Scienze di Torino, ser. 3, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Turin: Accademia della Scienze, 1955); Hans-Georg Juchem, Die Entwicklung des begriffs des Schönen bei Kant: Unter besonderen Berücksichtugung des Begriffs der verworrenen Erkenntnis (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1970); and Daniel Dumouchel, Kant et le Genèse de la Subjectivité esthétique (Paris: Vrin, 1999). My monograph Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979; 2nd, enlarged ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), provides an account of the development of Kant’s view as well as an interpretation and assessment of his mature view; my further essays on Kant’s aesthetics are included in Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); some of the material in the present chapter has been taken from chapter 8 of the last volume. Other valuable monographs on Kant’s aesthetics include Donald W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974); Anthony Savile, Aesthetic Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings of Lessing, Kant and Schiller, Aristotelian Society Series Volume 8 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Christel Fricke, Kants Theorie des reinen Geschmacksurteils (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990); Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Andrea Kern, Schöne Lust: Eine Theorie der ästhetischen Erfahrung nach Kant (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000); Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Birgit Recki, Ästhetik der Sitten: Die Affinität vom ästhetischem Gefühl und praktischer Vernunft bei Kant, Philosophische Abhandlungen Band 81 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001); Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature: Essays on the Aesthetics of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); James Kirwan, The Aesthetic in Kant: A Critique (London: Continuum, 2004); Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Paul Crowther, The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Collections of papers on Kant’s aesthetics include Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, eds., Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Herman Parret, ed., Kants Ästhetik – Kant’s Aesthetics – L’esthétique de Kant (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998); Paul Guyer, ed., Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); and Otfried Höffe, ed., Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008). Published in volume 20 of the Akademie edition, ed. Gerhard Lehmann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1942), pp. 193–251, and translated in the Cambridge edition of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, pp. 1–51.

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Introduction as well as several of its subsequent sections: These are focused on the distinctions among the several faculties of the mind and the divisions of philosophy, thereby making it seem as if Kant has been moved primarily by a pedantic desire for completeness to find a place in his system for two disciplines, aesthetics and teleology, that had been discussed by many of his German, British, and French predecessors but that thus far had no clear place in his system. Thus the main task of the third Critique seems to be that of introducing a new class of judgments or new use of the power of judgment, “reflecting” (reflektierend) judgment, subsuming both aesthetic and teleological judgment, in order to demonstrate both their affinities with and differences from the theoretical judgments analyzed and grounded in the first Critique and the moral judgments treated in the second Critique. However, Kant was driven to connect aesthetic and teleological judgment by a much more profound and powerful motivation than that of mere systematic housekeeping. This deeper motivation is first revealed in the second section of the published Introduction. Here Kant claims that there is a substantive and important problem that calls for a third Critique, namely, that Although there is an incalculable gulf fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible, so that from the former to the latter (thus by means of the theoretical use of reason) no transition is possible, just as if there were so many different worlds, the first of which can have no influence on the second: yet the latter should have an influence on the former, namely the concept of freedom should make the end that is imposed by its laws real in the sensible world; and nature must consequently also be able to be conceived in such a way that the lawfulness of its form is at least in agreement with the possibility of the ends that are to be realized in it in accordance with the laws of freedom.16

The problem that has apparently not been solved by the earlier two critiques is that of showing that our choice to act in accordance with the moral law, as the fundamental principle of all laws of freedom – a choice that can be free only if it is conceived of as taking place in a “supersensible” or noumenal realm that is not governed by the deterministic laws of “sensible” or phenomenal nature, where every event is fully determined by chains of causality extending far back beyond any particular choice by any particular individual – must nevertheless be efficacious within that phenomenal world, able to transform the natural world into a “moral 16

Kant, CPJ, Introduction, section II, 5:174–5; see also section IX, 5:195–6.

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world” where people really can act in accordance with the moral law and the ends that are set forth for us by that law really can be realized.17 And the reason for linking aesthetic and teleological judgment together in a third critique apparently must be that these two forms of human experience and judgment together somehow offer a solution to this problem. But what problem about the efficacy of the laws of freedom in the realm of nature could remain to be solved after the first two critiques? The Critique of Pure Reason had argued that although we can disprove the possibility of any breach in the determinism of the natural world and cannot have theoretical knowledge of the freedom of our will in the noumenal world, nevertheless we can coherently conceive of the latter, and then the Critique of Practical Reason had argued that we can each confidently infer the reality of our noumenal freedom to choose to do whatever morality requires of us from our immediate awareness of our obligation under the moral law combined with the principle that if we ought to do something then we must be able to do it.18 The second Critique had also argued that since morality imposes an end or goal upon us, namely, that of realizing the highest good, the greatest happiness consistent with the greatest virtue, we must believe this to be possible, and thus must postulate “a supreme cause of nature having a causality in keeping with the moral disposition.”19 If Kant has already established that on the basis of our awareness of our obligations under the moral law we can be confident that we have free will and that all of the laws of nature are at least consistent with our realization of the ends commanded by the moral law, what more needs to be done in order to erect a bridge between the theoretical cognition of nature and the laws of freedom? The answer to this question lies in Kant’s recognition that we are sensuous as well as rational creatures and need sensuous as well as rational presentation and confirmation of the conditions of the possibility of morality. He explicitly acknowledges this three years after the Critique of the Power of Judgment, when in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason 17

18

19

The idea that the task of morality is to transform the natural world into a “moral world” is already present in the Critique of Pure Reason; see A 809–10/B 827–8. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, §6, 5:30, and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), 6:62, 66–7, in Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 105, 108. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic, 5:125; translation from Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 240.

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he asserts “the natural need of all human beings to demand for even the highest concepts and grounds of reason something that the senses can hold on to, some confirmation from experience or the like.”20 The task of the third Critique is to show how both aesthetic and teleological experience and judgment provide sensuous confirmation of what we do already know in an abstract way but also need to feel or make palpable to ourselves, namely, the efficacy of our free choice of the fundamental principle of morality in the natural world and the realizability of the objectives which that choice imposes upon us, summed up in the concept of the highest good. Our focus here, of course, is only on Kant’s aesthetic theory, in which he will argue that although in its purest form, the free play of our understanding and imagination that constitutes the experience of natural beauty does not presuppose any judgment of moral value, the very fact of the existence of natural beauty appears to confirm that the world is hospitable to our goals, especially our moral goals, while our experiences of natural sublimity and artistic beauty both involve the free play of our cognitive powers with morally significant ideas, and thus are distinctively aesthetic yet morally significant. Kant’s account of fine art in particular, the traditional focus of aesthetic theory, is that it makes the most important ideas of morality, which are otherwise bare abstractions, palpable to us through the free and creative play of the imagination. He reaches this conclusion by progressively enriching what he takes to be the simplest case of aesthetic experience, namely, an experience of natural beauty that involves only the free play of the imagination within the limits set by the understanding, so it is a mistake to interpret that idea as the pinnacle rather than the mere starting point of Kant’s aesthetics. At the same time, it is part of Kant’s initial analysis of what he calls the “pure” judgment of taste and the free play of imagination and understanding on which such judgment depends that they have nothing to do with “charms and emotions,”21 and even once he has combined his aesthetics of free play with a more traditional aesthetics of truth in his account of fine art, he does not lift this restriction or make what would seem to be the obvious point that the kinds of ideas with which works of fine art typically deal do affect our emotions as well as our understanding and reason. Even Kant’s account of the sublime, which would seem to be an obvious place for him to incorporate the emotional dimension 20

21

Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:109; in Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, p. 142. Kant, CPJ, §13, 5:223.

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of aesthetic experience into his own theory, is hedged by the premise that the feeling of sublimity is more properly a response to nature than to fine art.

2. Kant’s Theory of Free Play and the Exclusion of Emotion Although Kant regarded Edmund Burke’s aesthetics as employing a merely “physiological” approach,22 Kant nevertheless adopted Burke’s reduction of aesthetic categories to the two of the beautiful and the sublime. Thus he divides the first half of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment,” into two main parts, the “Analytic of the Beautiful” and the “Analytic of the Sublime.”23 But Kant actually analyzes four main forms of aesthetic experience: the experience of natural beauty apart from any reference to the intended or possible use of an object; an experience of beauty in nature or human artifacts that is connected to the intended use or purpose of objects; the experience of the sublime, which is for Kant primarily a response to nature rather than works of art; and the experience of fine art. Each of these forms of aesthetic experience involves a free play of our cognitive powers, but all but the first also involve an interplay between this free play of our cognitive powers and specific concepts of understanding or reason, that is, theoretical concepts of nature or moral concepts. In his analysis of the latter three forms of aesthetic experience Kant thus synthesizes the aesthetics of play and the aesthetics of truth. But although the feeling of pleasure is central to Kant’s analysis of aesthetic response and judgment – judgments of taste are called aesthetic precisely because they are made on the basis of a feeling of pleasure24 and assert nothing more than the universal validity of that feeling25 – the feeling of pleasure in beauty does not involve any other “charms and emotions,” and even as Kant analyzes the more complex forms of aesthetic response and judgment he by no means suggests that the experience of art can involve the experience of the full range of human emotions.

22 23

24 25

Kant, CPJ, General Remark following §29, 5:277. There should have been at least three books, the third beginning at section 30 with the deduction of aesthetic judgments, and possibly a fourth, on the theory of fine art, beginning at section 43. Kant, CPJ, §1, 5:203–4. Kant, CPJ, §8, 5:213–16.

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In the “Analytic of the Beautiful” (§§1–22 of the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment”), Kant presents his analysis, explanation, and defense of judgments of taste, beginning with pure judgments of natural beauty, in a series of four “moments.” Starting from the point that Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had emphasized at the beginning of the century and that Mendelssohn had reemphasized in his 1785 Morning Lessons, Kant begins his analysis of the judgment of taste, a singular claim that a particular object is beautiful, from the premise that our pleasure in a beautiful object occurs independently of any interest in the existence of the object as physiologically agreeable26 or as good for some purpose expressed by a determinate concept of utility or morality.27 “Among all these three kinds of satisfaction,” he says, “only that of the taste for the beautiful is a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, neither that of the senses nor that of reason, extorts approval.”28 Kant also explains his conception of disinterestedness by saying that our pleasure in beauty has nothing to do with the existence of the object, or more precisely with the causes or the effects of the existence of the object – such as the sweat of the laboring masses who may be exploited in building palaces for the rich29 – but concerns only how the representation of the object “is related entirely to the subject, indeed to its feeling of life,” or what happens when the mind merely “holds the given representation . . . up to the entire faculty of representation.”30 The judgment of taste is thus subjective in the sense that it is grounded only on our feeling of pleasure in response to the representation of the object rather than in response to its practical use or moral value. Yet, Kant insists, a judgment of taste does not express a merely idiosyncratic or personal association of pleasure with an object; rather, to call an object beautiful is to speak with a “universal voice,” to assert that the pleasure one takes in the object is one that should be felt by anyone who responds to the object, at least under ideal or optimal circumstances – even though “there can also be no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful.”31 This is the second “moment” of the judgment of taste, what Kant calls its “subjective universal validity,”32 or the validity of the response of pleasure for 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Kant, CPJ, §3, 5:205–7. Kant, CPJ, §4, 5:207–9. Kant, CPJ, §5, 5:210. Kant, CPJ, §2, 5:204. Kant, CPJ, §1, 5:204. Kant, CPJ, §8, 5:216. Kant, CPJ, §8, 5:215.

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every subject who experiences that particular object in a properly disinterested frame of mind. (In real life, of course, this will hardly include everyone who does encounter the object; indeed, one may make an erroneous judgment of taste when one thinks that one’s own pleasure in the object is a disinterested pleasure in its representation when in fact it is not.)33 Since one’s properly disinterested pleasure is a response to the engagement of one’s cognitive powers with the representation of a particular object independent of any conception of its use or other value, indeed, Kant initially maintains, independent of any classification of it at all, a judgment of taste, while valid for all properly disinterested observers of that object, gives rise to no rule that is valid for any class of objects and is thus not “objectively universally valid.” While all objects do fall under numerous determinate concepts – for example, a particular statue certainly falls under the concepts physical object, stone, marble, bust, bust of Socrates, and so on – and indeed it is part of Kant’s own theory of experience34 that we can be conscious of an object only insofar as we subsume it under some such concepts, thus that we never have a conscious experience that is merely perceptual and not also conceptual – his thesis in aesthetics is that the beauty of a particular object does not follow from any of the determinate concepts that apply to it, and therefore that the beauty of any object cannot in turn give rise to any rule that would take the form of asserting that if some concept that applies to that object applies to any other objects, then they too must be found beautiful. But how can one’s pleasure in the representation of an object be independent of its subsumption under any determinate concept and its satisfaction of any determinate interest and yet be valid for all who properly respond to the object? Kant’s answer, which he begins to explain in the second “moment” and then continues in the fourth “moment”35 as well as in a later “Deduction of Judgments of Taste,”36 is that although our pleasure in a beautiful object is not a response to its subsumption under a determinate concept, it is an expression of the free play of the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding that such an object induces, and those cognitive faculties in fact work the same way in everyone. His underlying idea is that we experience a beautiful object as having the 33 34

35 36

See Kant, CPJ, §19, 5:237, and §38, 5:290 n. That is, the theory of knowledge that Kant expounded in the Critique of Pure Reason, or what H.J. Paton called Kant’s “metaphysic of experience”; see H.J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience, 2 vols. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936). Kant, CPJ, §§21–2, 5:238–40. Kant, CPJ, §§35–8, 5:286–91.

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kind of unity that we ordinarily find in objects only in subsuming them under a determinate concept but in this case independent of any such subsumption,37 and because finding such unity is our ultimate cognitive aim, we take pleasure in this discovery, especially since the unity we find must appear contingent, as it were unexpected, if it is not linked to any determinate concept.38 The heart of Kant’s theory, already stated in the introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, is this: [The] apprehension of forms in the imagination can never take place without the reflecting power of judgment, even if unintentionally, at least comparing them to its faculty for relating intuitions to concepts. Now if in this comparison the imagination . . . is unintentionally brought into accord with the understanding . . . through a given representation and a feeling of pleasure is thereby aroused, then the object must be regarded as purposive for the reflecting power of judgment. Such a judgment is an aesthetic judgment on the purposiveness of the object, which is not grounded on any available concept and does not furnish one. That object the form of which (not the material aspect of its representation, as sensation) in mere reflection on it (without any intention of acquiring a concept from it) is judged as the ground of a pleasure in the representation of such an object – with its representation this pleasure is also judged to be necessarily combined, consequently not merely for the subject who apprehends this form but for everyone who judges it. The object is then called beautiful.39

Or, as he also puts it, “The animation of both faculties (the imagination and the understanding) to an activity that is indeterminate but yet, through the stimulus of the given representation, in unison . . . is the sensation whose universal communicability is postulated by the judgment of taste.”40 The “animation” of both imagination and understanding to a harmonious but indeterminate activity is what Kant means by the “free play” of these powers. Kant thus appeals to the concept of free play in order to solve the problem of taste that was emphasized by British aestheticians such as Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, with whose works Kant was intimately familiar, and as his word “animation” (Belebung) 37

38

39 40

This is not to say that we do not subsume an object we find beautiful under any determinate concepts at all; we must if we are even to identify the object of our pleasure and judgment of taste in any determinate way. Kant’s theory must rather be that when we find an object beautiful we experience it as having a degree of unity that cannot be explained by any of the determinate concepts under which we do subsume it. Kant, see CPJ, Introduction VI, 5:186–7. For fuller accounts of Kant’s conception of the harmony of the faculties, see my Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd ed., pp. 60–105, and “The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited,” in Values of Beauty, pp. 77–109. Kant, CPJ, Introduction, §VII, 5:189–90. Kant, CPJ, §9, 5:219.

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suggests, his theory of free play is his development of the theory that we enjoy our own unhindered mental activity that we found suggested in such authors as Gerard, Kames, Mendelssohn, and Sulzer. In this account, Kant makes two striking assumptions. One is that the cognitive faculties of all human beings really do work the same way, that is, respond to particular objects in the same way, even when they are in “free play” rather than at serious work. We can leave this aside for a moment, and instead consider Kant’s other assumption, that in “pure” judgments of taste our pleasure in beauty is a response only to the perceptible form of an object, not to any matter or content it may have – for example, in pictorial arts, “the drawing is what is essential,” while the “colors that illuminate the outline . . . can . . . enliven the object in itself for sensation, but cannot make it . . . beautiful.”41 Kant introduces this claim in the third moment of judgments of taste, “concerning the relation of the ends that are taken into consideration in them,”42 in which he asserts that “The judgment of taste has nothing but the form of purposiveness of an object (or of the way of representing it) as its ground.”43 This statement is intelligible as long as it is just taken to mean that our pleasure in the beauty of an object is not due to our recognition that it serves any particular practical or moral purpose but is instead due only to the fact that our representation of the object stimulates our imagination and understanding to a free play which seems to satisfy our most general cognitive purpose – finding unity in our experience – in the very absence of satisfaction of any more particular purpose that we might have for an object. Or, in another way that Kant puts the point, in our experience of a beautiful object the free play of the imagination is in accord “with the lawfulness of the understanding in general” without the object being subsumed under the concept of any particular purpose.44 But Kant does not appear to be entitled to the assumption that it is only the form of an object or its representation in such a specific sense as the design or drawing (disegno) of a painting rather than its coloration that can set the imagination and understanding into a genuinely free play, thus to his rejection of the doctrine that we found in Pére André that it is precisely in its combination of design and color that the beauty of painting lies (and in similar combinations that the beauty of works in other media, such as music, lies). Although Kant seems drawn to this 41 42 43 44

Kant, CPJ, §14, 5:225. Kant, CPJ, §10, 5:219. Kant, CPJ, §11, 5:221. Kant, CPJ, General Remark following §22, 5:241.

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conclusion by the supposition that because space and time are “pure forms of intuition” people will agree more about the merits of particular spatial or temporal forms than they do about such secondary qualities or colors – in other words, Kant attempts to secure the universal subjective validity of judgments of taste by restricting their proper objects – formally speaking he reaches this conclusion by an equivocation, that is, by equating the “form of purposiveness” mentioned in the title of §11 with the much more specific concept of “the purposiveness of the form” of the beautiful object in §13,45 which leads immediately to his claim that it is drawing in painting or composition in music rather than the “charm of colors or of the agreeable tones of instruments” that is the proper object of judgments of taste, the genuine locus of beauty. Kant’s inference that the “charm” of colors contributes nothing essential to the beauty of paintings leads to his more general claim that “Taste is still always barbaric when it needs the addition of charms and emotions for satisfaction, let alone if it makes these into the standard for its approval.” Thus Kant claims that a “pure judgment of taste” is one “on which charm and emotion have no influence (even though these may be combined with the satisfaction in the beautiful), which thus has for its determining ground merely the purposiveness of the form.”46 He can hardly deny that people experience emotions in the presence of beautiful objects – that would be too much of an offense to common sense – but he makes the philosophical claim that such emotion is not any proper part of their experience of beauty, just something contingently connected with it. Kant is clearly committed to this claim, for he repeats it even more strongly in the next section, stating that “Emotion, a sensation in which agreeabless is produced only by means of a momentary inhibition followed by a stronger outpouring of the vital force, does not belong to beauty at all.” He continues that “Sublimity (with which the feeling of emotion is combined), however, requires another standard for judging than that on which taste is grounded; and thus a pure judgment of taste has neither charm nor emotion, in a word no sensation, as a matter of the aesthetic judgment, for its determining ground.”47 All of these claims are problematic: Kant’s definition of emotion here seems unusually narrow, and his concession that emotion is essential to the experience of the sublime will not turn out to be a concession that emotion is essential 45 46 47

Kant, CPJ, §13, 5:223. Kant, CPJ, §13, 5:223. Kant, CPJ, §14, 5:226.

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to the experience of art, for as has already been suggested and will be further explained later, Kant thinks that only nature and not art is capable of producing the experience of the sublime. Yet Kant’s entire argument for the exclusion of emotion from aesthetic experience seems to be based on nothing but his identification of his own abstract concept of the “form of purposiveness” with a conception of the “purposiveness of form” where form is understood in an everyday sense as spatiotemporal form, contrasted to anything else, including color, coloration, content, and any emotions that might in turn be aroused by those – since it seems unlikely that spatial structure (as in painting or sculpture) or temporal structure (as in music) alone could raise emotions such as fear, pity, sympathy, and so on, which writers from Du Bos to Kames and Mendelssohn thought to constitute a considerable part of our response to art. It seems unlikely that Kant would have been led to his striking exclusion of emotion from properly aesthetic experience by mere verbal imprecision; it is more likely that he was motivated by the thought that people differ more in their responses to colors and tones – some finding one color delicate and others finding it insipid, or some preferring the tone of a note on one musical instrument and others preferring the tone of a different instrument – than they do to shapes and compositions, and thus that the universal validity of judgments of taste could be better secured by excluding from pure beauty or the proper objects of taste such aspects of objects and the emotions they arouse, for example, by the kinds of associations being analyzed at the same time by Archibald Alison. But this seems a very dubious procedure, with all the advantages of theft over honest toil: Kant seems to be securing the universal validity of taste by arbitrarily limiting the proper objects of taste, rather than admitting, as others, such as Kames and Alison, did, that a certain amount of difference in tastes is just a fundamental feature of the human condition. In the end, perhaps Kant’s exclusion of emotion from the proper response to beauty is a reflection of the attitude evident in his moral theory, perhaps ultimately a reflection of his personality – that is, of his conviction that emotions are a threat to morally correct action and have to be kept under strict control by reason if not entirely suppressed – “unless reason holds the reins of government in its own hands, the human being’s feelings and inclinations play the master over him.”48 In 48

Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue, section XV, 6:408; translation modified from Kant, Practical Philosophy, p. 536.

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other words, far from affirming the unrestricted autonomy of aesthetic experience and judgment, if anything, Kant seems to be subordinating his analysis of beauty and taste to external constraints, denying the obvious fact that emotional impact is an essential part of our aesthetic experience, especially our experience of art, on epistemological and ultimately moral grounds. Kant will not explicitly lift this restriction on proper aesthetic experience even as he does recognize more complicated cases of such experience, and in particular as he argues that our experience of fine art is such a more complicated case. Nevertheless, no sooner has he stated this restrictive formalism than he does begin to complicate his account of the objects of taste in ways that make clear that although the free play of the imagination is always an essential element of any experience of beauty or other aesthetic properties, the imagination is not in fact stimulated only by the form of its objects but can also play with the material, sensory matter of its representations, with our recognition of the intended purpose of its objects, and with their intellectual content. Ultimately, Kant’s theory of fine art is that in works of genius the imagination of both the artist and the audience plays freely with all these elements, and this is the key to Kant’s synthesis of the aesthetics of play with the aesthetics of truth. He just will not take the further step of conceding that the emotions that such contents and their imaginative presentation might naturally be expected to raise are a proper part of our tasteful response to art. Kant begins his exposition of his more complicated but more plausible although still incomplete theory of the objects of taste even within the third “moment” of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” almost immediately following his exclusion of charms and emotions from our response to beauty. Thus, only two sections after the bald assertion of restrictive formalism just cited, Kant introduces a contrast between “free beauty” and “adherent beauty.”49 The former is the type of beauty Kant has been analyzing thus far, beauty that “presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be” and which is illustrated by such examples of natural beauty as flowers, “birds (the parrot, the hummingbird, the bird of paradise), and a host of marine crustaceans,” which “are beauties in themselves, which are not attached to a determinate object, but are free and 49

See Eva Schaper, “Free and Dependent Beauty,” in her Studies in Kant’s Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1979), pp. 78–98, and my “Beauty and Utility in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics,” Eighteenth Century Studies 35 (2002): 439–53, and “Free and Adherent Beauty: A Modest Proposal,” British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 357–66, both reprinted in Values of Beauty, pp. 110–28 and 129–40.

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please for themselves,” as well as such naturalistic artifacts as “designs á la grecque” and “foliage for borders or on wallpaper,” which “signify nothing by themselves: they do not represent anything, no object under a determinate concept.”50 Adherent beauty, however, which may be found in both natural objects and artifacts, “does presuppose” a concept of the intended or actual purpose of the object “and the perfection of the object in accordance with it.” For example, “the beauty of a human being (and in this species that of a man, a woman, or a child), the beauty of a horse, of a building (such as a church, a palace, an arsenal, or a garden-house) presuppose such a concept of the end that determines what the thing should be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus merely adherent beauty.”51 Now Kant does not spell out exactly how adherent beauty “presupposes” a concept of the purpose of an object and the features by means of which an object can satisfy this purpose. In fact, his comments suggest a number of different possibilities: Sometimes the intended purpose of an object seems simply to restrict what forms and features we can find beautiful in the object but does not otherwise contribute to our sense of its beauty; sometimes we seem to take independent pleasures in the function and in the form of the object and, so to speak, merely add them up; but sometimes we seem to have a sense that the form and the function of an object are inexplicably but perfectly suited to each other, as in a brilliant piece of decorative or industrial design. In the first of these cases, we might say that the imagination plays freely within the limits set by the purpose of the object, while in the last the imagination seems to play with or between both the purpose and the form (and other aesthetically interesting aspects) of the object. In fact, there is no need to choose between these different relations between form and function: They all seem to be real possibilities for our experience of objects. Kant’s concept of adherent beauty is his version of the concept of the beauty of utility that we found in Hume and so many other British writers, as well as in German writers all the way back to Wolff; to go back even further, Kant’s conception of adherent beauty is where he can make space for the Vitruvian conception of the beauty of architecture as consisting in both venustas and utilitas. And while Kant does not go as far as Hume in suggesting that the majority of cases of beauty are actually cases of adherent beauty, neither does he ever deny that adherent beauty is a genuine kind of beauty. His thought seems to be that even though 50 51

Kant, CPJ, §16, 5:229. Kant, CPJ, §16, 5:230.

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we are cognizant of the intended purpose of the object and even though our awareness of that purpose places constraints on what forms we can find satisfying it, the purpose still does not fully determine the form of the object and leaves room for the free play of the imagination, even for the free play of the imagination with our concept of the purpose of the object. Free play is a necessary condition for beauty, but it can still take place even when conceptualization is also a necessary part of our experience (as indeed, according to Kant’s own theory of knowledge, in some form or other it always is). Kant ultimately constructs his theory of fine art along the lines suggested by his account of adherent beauty, in which concepts are involved but are not incompatible with the free play of the imagination, indeed may be part of what it plays with, rather than along the lines of his account of free beauty. Before he comes to the case of fine art, however, Kant introduces some other more complicated cases of aesthetic experience, namely, our experience of what he calls the “ideal of beauty” and of the sublime. In his discussion of the first of these, which may be an adaptation of Sulzer’s treatment of human beauty although he does not mention Sulzer’s name, Kant raises the question of what sort of beauty is fit to be an “archetype” or “highest model” of beauty.52 This might seem a puzzling question for him to ask, because there is nothing in the logic of judgments of taste as he has thus far analyzed it to suggest that there should be an answer to such a question: The analysis thus far has claimed only that any object that is genuinely beautiful for one person should be found beautiful by all, not that there is some one object or type of object that should be found maximally beautiful by all. Kant soon reveals the source of the question, however, by stating that the idea of an archetype of taste “rests on reason’s indeterminate idea of a maximum,” not on taste’s own demand. Kant then argues that such an ideal can be grounded only on something that is uniquely and maximally valuable in the eyes of reason, which can be nothing other than human morality itself, and then concludes that the ideal of beauty can consist only in the “human figure . . . as the expression of the moral.”53 What is central to his account, however, is that there is no rule by means of which any particular kind of human figure can be found to be the perfect expression of the idea of human morality – rules can lead only to aesthetic “correctness,” not true beauty – so there must always be a free play of imagination in interpreting the human figure as an expression 52 53

Kant, CPJ, §17, 5:232. Kant, CPJ, §17, 5:236.

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of human morality and in finding some particular human figure to be especially beautiful in a way that somehow conveys the inner beauty of human morality. Kant’s theory of the ideal of beauty thus depends on the possibility of a free play between the imagination and a moral idea. Yet once again, it should be noted, Kant says nothing about the emotion that the aesthetic manifestation of human virtue might be thought to raise – he does not say that the ideal of beauty would “touch the heart,” as Sulzer had. Instead, Kant seems interested only in fixing a standard for maximal beauty as a matter of logic or epistemology. Both the strengths and the weakness of this analysis prefigure those of Kant’s theory of fine art, although here he is talking about the beauty of the human figure itself rather than the beauty of any artistic representation of it. But before we can discuss Kant’s theory of fine art, we must complete our account of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” and then discuss his “Analytic of the Sublime.” In the fourth “moment” of the judgment of taste, concerning its “modality,” Kant claims that the “necessity that is thought in an aesthetic judgment . . . can only be called exemplary, i.e., a necessity of the assent of all to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that one cannot produce.”54 It is not obvious what the difference between the idea of the necessary assent of all to a judgment of taste and the earlier idea of the universal subjective validity of such a judgment is supposed to be, although perhaps Kant’s use of the term “exemplary” in the fourth moment is supposed to suggest that in publicly uttering a judgment of taste we do not merely express our expectation that others will find the same pleasure in its object that we do but are in some sense demanding that they do – we are offering our judgment not just as a prediction but as a model for the judgment of others.55 Kant’s further argument in the fourth moment, however, is aimed only at showing that our expectation of agreement to a properly made judgment of taste is reasonable; only later, after he has shown how a judgment that is based in free play and hence not dictated by a moral concept can nevertheless have moral significance, will he add that we actually have a right to demand agreement in taste from others.56 Kant’s argument in the fourth moment 54 55

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Kant, CPJ, §18, 5:237. This aspect of the “normativity” of the judgment of taste has been taken to be central to Kant’s account, notably by Hannah Ginsborg, in her The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition (New York: Garland, 1990). See Kant, CPJ, §40, 5:296, and §59, 5:353. For further discussion, see Kant and the Experience of Freedom, pp. 12–17.

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extends only as far as claiming that we have “good reason to presuppose a common sense” in matters of taste just because, through the theory of aesthetic response as a free play between imagination and understanding, judgments of taste have been shown to be grounded in the same mental powers as cognition in general, and since cognitions are certainly able to be “communicated” or shared, so must the special state of our cognitive powers “in which this inner relationship is optimal for the animation of both powers of the mind” which “cannot be determined except through the feeling (not by concepts)” – in other words, our feeling of pleasure in beauty – also be able to be communicated or shared.57 With minor variations, the same argument is repeated later as the official “Deduction of judgments of taste.”58 In this argument, Kant treats the assumption that all human beings have the same cognitive powers as an a priori principle of the faculty of judgment rather than as the empirical generalization that it was for the British theorists of taste from Hutcheson through Kames. Thus he claims that even though my simple judgment that an object pleases me is always empirical, my attribution of my pleasure to the free play of my imagination and understanding induced by that object entitles me to make “an a priori judgment that I find it beautiful, i.e., that I may require that satisfaction of everyone as necessary.”59 Even if we grant Kant that every normal human being has both imagination and understanding – although this may just be a tautology, that is, part of what we mean by calling a person normal – and that every normal person is capable of enjoying a free play of his or her imagination and understanding, it simply does not follow that everyone must enjoy this state in response to the very same objects. So Kant’s position that we can reasonably claim subjective universal validity for singular judgments of taste – judgments that are always about particular objects – is not demonstrated after all. However, while this may undermine Kant’s pretension to have solved the eighteenth-century problem of taste once and for all, this failure does not seriously undermine the interest and importance of his theory of fine art nor of his conception of the moral significance of aesthetic experience, neither of which actually depends upon the alleged universal validity of judgments of taste.

57 58 59

Kant, CPJ, §21, 5:238. Kant, CPJ, §38, 5:289–90. Kant, CPJ, §37, 5:289.

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Before we turn to those topics, however, we must consider Kant’s analysis of our experience of the sublime, the great alternative to beauty in eighteenth-century aesthetics. We have already noticed Kant’s concession that emotion is an essential part of our response to the sublime.60 This might seem to undercut my claim that Kant does not recognize the importance of emotion in our response to art. But, as we shall see, Kant’s theory is that we experience the sublime in response to nature, while art can represent the objects – or more precisely, the views – of nature that trigger the experience of the sublime but does not itself induce this experience. Thus, while Kant allows that emotion is an essential part of the aesthetic experience of nature, he does not concede that it is an essential part of the experience of art. Further, even in the experience of nature as sublime Kant recognizes only an emotion closely akin if not identical to the moral feeling of respect; he does not allow that aesthetic experience might include experience of the full range of emotions, as, for example, Mendelssohn had suggested in arguing that it might be quite right for us to experience emotions in response to art that we should not experience under the moral constraints of real life. For Kant, while there are formal similarities between judgments on the beautiful and the sublime, there are fundamental differences between the experiences of the beautiful and the sublime. While the experience of the former (the beautiful) directly brings with it a feeling of the promotion of life, and hence is compatible with charms and an imagination at play, . . . the latter (the feeling of the sublime) is a pleasure that arises only indirectly, being generated, namely, by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital powers and the immediately following and all the more powerful outpouring of them; hence as an emotion it seems to be not play but something serious in the activity of the imagination . . . the satisfaction in the sublime does not so much contain positive pleasure as it does admiration or respect, i.e., it deserves to be called negative pleasure.61

The feeling of the sublime is not a simple feeling of pleasure at all, as is the feeling of the beautiful, but a mixed state in which pain is a necessary precursor of pleasure (Kant’s characterization of this as a “negative pleasure” seems to be borrowed from Burke);62 Kant also suggests that the feeling of the sublime does not originate from a free play of the imagination at all. Further, Kant claims that the property of sublimity 60 61 62

Kant, CPJ, §14, 5:226. Kant, CPJ, §23, 5:244–5. See Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Part I, section IV.

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should not properly be attributed to the objects in nature that stimulate it but only to our own minds, which experience it. Part of the reason for his insistence upon this difference seems to be his view that although beauty too depends upon a human response to objects (this was an idea that Kant would have found explictly stated in such British predecessors as Hutcheson and Hume but that was also implicit in the German rationalist conception of beauty as objective perfection as perceived clearly but obscurely through human pleasure) since it requires no conceptualization of its object, it is such a natural and immediate response that we think of beauty as if it were a property of the object,63 whereas we can experience the sublime only if we approach the world with certain ideas, ultimately moral ideas, and thus our feeling of the sublime cannot be triggered by external objects alone. Thus he writes: What is properly sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form, but concerns only ideas of reason, which, though no presentation adequate to them is possible, are provoked and called to mind precisely by this inadequacy, which does allow of sensible presentation. Thus the wide ocean, enraged by storms, cannot be called sublime. Its visage is horrible; and one must already have filled the mind with all sorts of ideas if by means of such an intuition it is to be put in the mood for a feeling which is itself sublime, in that the mind is incited to abandon sensibility and to occupy itself with ideas that contain a higher purposiveness.64

Kant’s insistence upon these differences inevitably raises the question of why he considers the experience of the sublime to be an aesthetic experience at all. The fact that the experience involves pleasure or pain, indeed pleasure and pain, cannot be a sufficient reason for classifying it as aesthetic, since for Kant moral judgments produce a similar mix of pleasure and pain,65 yet they are not aesthetic. Indeed, why does Kant not consider the sublime as simply a moral rather than an aesthetic phenomenon? The answer to this question may be that even though the imagination may not seem to be at play in the experience of the sublime, its activity is nevertheless essential to this experience. This is clear in Kant’s detailed exposition of the sublime. Adopting a distinction that we earlier found in Baumgarten and Mendelssohn, Kant distinguishes two forms of the sublime, in his terminology the “mathematical” and the “dynamical.” 63 64 65

See Kant, CPJ, §6, 5:211. Kant, CPJ, §23, 5:245–6. See Kant’s account of the feeling of respect in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), “On the incentives of pure practical reason,” especially 5:71–5.

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Our experience of both is a mixture of pain and pleasure, a moment of pain due to an initial sense of the limits of our imagination followed by pleasure at the recognition that it is our own power of reason that challenges and reveals the limits of our imagination. The mathematical sublime involves the relationship between imagination and theoretical reason, which is the source of our idea of the infinite; our experience of this form of the sublime is triggered by the observation of natural vistas so vast that our effort to grasp them in a single image is bound to fail, but which then pleases us because the very effort of the imagination to grasp them in a single image reminds us that we have a power of reason capable of formulating the idea of the infinite and which has set the imagination the task of representing this idea.66 A key reason for his classification of this experience as aesthetic seems to be that Kant holds that in this experience we do not just infer that we have such a faculty, but actually experience “a feeling that we have pure self-sufficient reason.”67 In the case of the dynamical sublime, what we experience is a harmony between our imagination and practical reason. This experience is induced by natural objects that seem not just vast, but overwhelmingly powerful and threatening – volcanoes, raging seas, and the like.68 Here we experience fear at the thought of our own physical injury or destruction followed by the satisfying feeling, not that we are in fact merely physically safe from these forces in our particular circumstances of observation, but that we have “within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature,” namely, “our power (which is not part of nature) to regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health, and life) as trivial, and hence to regard its power (to which, to be sure, we are subjected in regard to these things) as not the sort of dominion over ourselves and our authority to which we would have to bow if it came down to our highest principles and their affirmation or 66

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Kant, CPJ, §26, 5:254–5. It is important to note here that Kant does not say that it is our attempt to grasp nature by the ordinary means of theoretical cognition, that is, the reiteration of some unit some number of times, which fails. Although of course we could not complete the synthesis of something that is actually infinite, the vast vistas of nature that trigger the experience of the sublime are not actually infinite – they just seem that way. What fails in the case of the mathematical sublime is not “logical comprehension,” but “aesthetic comprehension” (5:251–2). But it is precisely imagination’s failure to do the bidding of reason that makes the existence of reason palpable to us. Kant, CPJ, §27, 5:258. Kant, CPJ, §28, 5:261. Kant’s examples were all commonplaces in the eighteenth century, going back to Addison’s illustrations of “grandeur” in Spectator 412.

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abandonment.”69 It is not our physical safety from nature that we enjoy in the experience of the dynamical sublime, although that may be a necessary condition for this experience, but our moral superiority to nature, the fact that our moral choices are not determined solely by merely natural forces. What is central to both of these forms of the experience of the sublime is that although it is moral ideas that are revealed to us, and we may already have to have a certain level of moral cultivation to enjoy these experiences,70 nevertheless it is an act of the imagination to interpret our complex emotions when faced with the vast and mighty in nature as a representation of our own powers of reason: There is no rule that tells us to do that, just as there is no rule that tells us to interpret a paragon of human beauty as an expression of morality. Only the imagination makes this connection; and although this connection may seem to be too serious to be called a matter of mere play, it nevertheless fits within Kant’s most abstract characterization of free play, as an activity of the imagination that seems to satisfy an objective of a higher power of the mind, or to be purposive for such a power, without following any determinate rule. Thus what is sometimes presented as an objection to Kant’s explication of the sublime, that it seems unjustifiably moralistic,71 seems in fact to be what makes it part of aesthetics, namely, that there is a leap of imagination involved in giving moral significance to natural phenomena. It is clear, however, that the only emotion Kant introduces into his account of the sublime is a morally grounded emotion, a feeling akin to respect for our own power to be free and therefore moral; again, Kant does not use his account of the sublime to suggest that aesthetic experience may include a wide range of ordinary human emotions, morally relevant or appropriate or not. Further, the objection that not everyone may make the same imaginative leap may stand, as part of the general objection to Kant’s confidence in the universal validity of judgments of taste, but this would not undermine his explanation of why this experience is aesthetic for those who do experience it thus.

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Kant, CPJ, §28, 5:262. As Kant suggests not only in the passage already quoted from §23, but also at §29, 5:265, where he suggests that uncultivated savages and peasants may find merely fearful what the cultivated person finds sublime. This fact would not, however, undermine the subjective universal validity of the experience of the sublime, if that could be defended on other grounds, because such validity is ideal, not actual, and presumably the savage or peasant would feel this experience if he were properly cultivated. See Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, pp. 83–4.

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3. Kant’s Theory of Fine Art The experience of the sublime is clearly an emotional experience, but this does not seem to contradict the thesis that Kant does not recognize the emotional impact of art, or more precisely allow it to be a part of the properly aesthetic experience of art.72 At least in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant explicitly denies that art can produce the experience of the sublime. He writes that “the sublime must not be shown in products of art (e.g., buildings, columns, etc.), where a human end determines the form as well as the magnitude, nor in natural things whose concept already brings with it a determinate end (e.g., animals of a known natural determination), but rather in raw nature (and even in this only insofar as it by itself brings with it neither charm nor emotion from real danger), merely insofar as it contains magnitude.”73 The problem with works of human art, even if they are “colossal,” is that they are always evidently the product of human intentions and can be grasped as wholes by the human imagination, thus they do not suggest to us an idea of infinitude that is due to our own reason but exceeds the grasp of our imagination. To be sure, Kant illustrates several points about the genuinely sublime in nature by comparison with great works of human art: thus, just as with the great pyramids of Egypt, “in order to get the full emotional effect of the magnitude . . . one must neither come too close to them nor be too far away,” so it is with the mighty vistas of land and sea that trigger the experience of the (mathematical) sublime, and likewise the experience of “bewilderment or sort of embarrassment” that is the first stage of the experience of the sublime (either mathematical or dynamical) can be illustrated by what seizes “the spectator on first entering St. Peter’s in Rome.”74 But these are just analogies, because even though colossal, these works are only “almost too great for all presentation,”75 not actually too great to be grasped by us in one image, and thus they cannot sustain the tension between pleasure and pain that is essential to the experience 72

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See Uygar Abacı, “Kant’s Justified Dismissal of Artistic Sublimity,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (2008): 237–51. Kant, CPJ, §26, 5:252–3. Kant, CPJ, §26, 5:252. Kant never traveled to Egypt or even to Rome, so he never had these experiences himself; his examples are just stock examples drawn from literature such as Kames’s Elements of Criticism. Kant himself provides no source for his example of St. Peter’s but does attribute the example of the pyramids to Nicolas Savary (1750– 1788), author of Lettre sur l’Égypte où l’on offre le parallèle des moeurs anciennes et modernes de ses habitants (Paris, 1787). Kant, CPJ, §26, 5:253.

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of the sublime, allowing instead an experience that is ultimately purely pleasurable. In other words, ultimately we experience these works of human art as beautiful, not sublime. In his later textbook on anthropology in 1798, one of his last publications, Kant does seem to allow that a work of architecture such as St. Peter’s may actually be sublime, although even so its sublimity must be combined with beauty and only insofar as it is so combined is it an object of taste: “Splendor can be joined with true, ideal taste, which is therefore something sublime that is at the same time beautiful (such as a splendid starry heaven, or, if it does not sound too vulgar, a St. Peter’s church in Rome).”76 (What does Kant mean “if it does not sound too vulgar”? – is this the German brought up in the Pietist branch of Lutheranism apologizing for even mentioning the capital of Catholicism?) But in any case, architecture is not a representative art, for it is not a representational art, and when it comes to representational – mimetic – arts such as painting, sculpture, and literature, Kant’s view still appears to be that art is beautiful but not sublime, so even if it represents the sublime it must do so beautifully and gives us the experience of beauty even if it also conveys the thought of sublimity: Beauty alone belongs to taste; it is true that the sublime belongs to aesthetic judgment, but not to taste. However, the representation of the sublime can and should nevertheless be beautiful in itself; otherwise it is coarse, barbaric, and contrary to good taste. Even the presentation of the evil or the ugly (for example, the figure of personified death in Milton)77 can and must be beautiful whenever an object is to be represented aesthetically, and this is true even if the object is a Thersites.78 Otherwise the presentation produces either distaste or disgust, both of which include the endeavor to push away a representation that is offered for enjoyment; whereas beauty on the other hand carries with it the concept of an invitation to the most intimate union with the object, that is, to immediate enjoyment.79

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Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, §71A, 7:245–6; translation from Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 349. On the exemplary status of Milton for Kant, see Sanford Budick, Kant and Milton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). In Homer’s Iliad, “the ugliest man who came beneath Ion” (2.216); trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), quoted from Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, p. 521n85. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, §67, 7:241; Anthropology, History, and Education, p. 345.

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As we saw previously, for Kant the dependence of taste on emotion is barbaric, so if the representation of the sublime in art without beauty is barbaric, that would be precisely because it would raise rather than temper emotion. But in any case, no work of fine art is vast or mighty enough to give us a true experience of the sublime; art can at most beautifully represent that which is sublime in nature. But even though works of art cannot give us the raw emotional experience of sublimity, for Kant works of fine art do typically have moral content without that undermining the genuinely aesthetic and tasteful character of our experience of them. This is because in works of fine art the imagination – of both the artist and the audience – clearly plays with the moral content of the work, adding both form and content in a way that cannot be dictated by any rule. Kant’s concept of the “aesthetic idea,” which captures this play between content, form, and matter and is the heart of his theory of fine art, represents his ultimate synthesis between the aesthetics of play and the aesthetics of truth. But perhaps just because this experience is one of play, Kant breathes no hint that the presentation of moral ideas through the imaginative means of art causes any emotional response in us, or any response other than the refined rather than barbaric pleasure of good taste. For Kant, all art is intentional human production, as opposed to mere instinct, which requires skill or talent, as opposed to mere knowledge of rules, yet fine or “beautiful art” (schöne Kunst) is produced with the intention of doing what anything beautiful does, namely, promoting the free play of the cognitive powers.80 That a work of fine art must be the product of intention and yet produce the free play of the mental powers seems like a paradox, that “beautiful art, although it is certainly intentional, must nevertheless not seem intentional.”81 Further, Kant also assumes that although our pleasure in beauty should be a response to the form of an object alone, fine art is paradigmatically mimetic, that is, has representational or semantic content.82 This too seems like a paradox. Kant aims to resolve both of these apparent paradoxes through his theory that successful works of fine art are products of genius, a gift of nature that gives the rule to art.83 A work of genius must have “spirit,” which it gets through its content, typically – as Kant assumes without argument, although perhaps in his time, long before the invention of any nonobjective fine art other 80 81 82 83

See Kant, CPJ, §§43–4, 5:303–6. Kant, CPJ, §45, 5:306–7. Kant, CPJ, §48, 5:311. Kant, CPJ, §46, 5:307.

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than music “without a theme,” this assumption did not need an argument – a rational idea, indeed an idea relevant specifically to morality. But in order to be beautiful, a work of art must still leave room for the freedom of the imagination, and therefore cannot present such ideas to us directly and didactically (indeed, it is part of Kant’s theory of moral ideas that they cannot be directly and adequately presented in sensible form, because they concern demands of pure reason). Instead, a work of art succeeds when it presents an “aesthetic idea,” a representation of the imagination that “at least strive[s] toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek[s] to approximate a presentation of the concepts of reason,” but also “stimulates so much thinking,” such a wealth of particular “attributes” or images and incidents, “that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept”84 – thereby stimulating a pleasurable feeling of free play among the imagination, understanding, and, now, reason, while at the same time satisfying the demand that a work of art have both a purpose and a content. Here is the heart of Kant’s account of fine art, which he illustrates with examples from poetry above all: The imagination (as a productive cognitive faculty) is, namely, very powerful in creating, as it were, another nature, out of the material which the real one gives it. . . . in this we feel our freedom from the law of association . . . in accordance with which material can certainly be lent to us by nature, but the latter can be transformed into something entirely different, namely that which steps beyond nature. One can call such representations of the imagination ideas: on the one hand because they at least strive toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek to approximate a presentation of concepts of reason (of intellectual ideas) . . . on the other hand, and indeed principally, because no concept can ever be fully adequate to them. . . . The poet ventures to make sensible rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, etc., as well as to make that of which there are examples in experience, e.g., death, envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love, fame, etc., sensible beyond the limits of experience, with a completeness that goes beyond anything of which there is an example in nature, by means of an imagination that emulates the precedent of reason in attaining to a maximum. . . . Now if we add to a concept a representation of the imagination that belongs to its presentation, but which by itself stimulates so much thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept, hence which aesthetically enlarges the concept itself in an unbounded way, then in this case the 84

Kant, CPJ, §49, 5:314–15.

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imagination is creative, and sets the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into motion, that is, at the instigation of a representation more to think about than can be grasped and made distinct in it..85

The creation of a work of art takes genius. No genius may be required to think of a moral idea as the abstract content of a work of art – for Kant, all genuine moral ideas must be self-evident to all human beings, at least those with a proper education – but to form the idea of a concrete work, with a wealth of detail that will stimulate but not exhaust the imagination, takes genius. For example, to think of writing a play to illustrate the fatal consequences of uncontrolled jealousy may not have required genius, but to plot Othello, imagine its central characters, and give them their glorious words, certainly did. What Kant means by the aesthetic idea as the work of genius is something like that: the imagination of a vehicle and all its details that conveys a central idea in a way that stimulates rather than confines the imagination. Kant stresses that while artistic genius “presupposes a determinate concept of the product, as an end, hence understanding, but also a representation (even if indeterminate) of the material, i.e., of the intuition, for the presentation of this concept,” it “displays itself not so much in the execution of the proposed end in the presentation of a determinate concept as in the . . . expression of aesthetic ideas, which contain rich material for that aim” and in the “unsought and unintentional . . . free correspondence of the imagination to the lawfulness of the understanding . . . that cannot be produced by any following of rules.”86 He also stresses that because the essence of the experience of art is the free play of the imagination with the intellectual content of art, originality is essential to art,87 and thus works of artistic genius must always be stimuli to the originality of successive artists rather than models for them merely to copy or “ape.”88 But neither can mere idiosyncrasy be confused with genuine originality – the attempt to seem original merely by being idiosyncratic is what Kant calls “mannerism”89 – for a genuine work of genius must be able to appeal to all in spite of being original. It must have what Kant calls “exemplary originality.”90

85 86 87 88 89 90

Kant, CPJ, §49, 5:314–15. Kant, CPJ, §49, 5:317–18. Kant, CPJ, §46, 5:308. Kant, CPJ, §47, 5:309; §49, 5:318. Kant, CPJ, §49, 5:318. Kant, CPJ, §46, 5:308.

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Kant does not say this explicitly, but it seems to follow from his basic account of aesthetic experience that just as the work of one genius must be exemplary for but not aped by other artists, so the freedom of the imagination of the artistic genius which leads to his aesthetic idea must not merely be appreciated by his audience but must set the imagination of the audience into their own free play – that is where the pleasure of aesthetic experience lies, after all. The audience must be able to understand the artist’s aims and appreciate how his imagination realized them but yet must somehow at the same time be stimulated to their own free play without losing sight of the artist’s aims and accomplishments. As we will shortly see, some of Kant’s immediate successors, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, firmly grasped this implication of Kant’s theory, and later in the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Dilthey, of all the so-called Neo-Kantians the one who grasped Kant’s enterprise most fully, did so as well.

4. The Moral Significance of the Aesthetic Kant’s conception of the full range of aesthetic experience is thus much richer than the simple model of concept-free play with natural forms, even though he has throughout kept the full emotional impact of art at arm’s length. We can now see how Kant exploits the breadth of his theory to suggest how our aesthetic experiences and judgments can bridge the gulf between our abstract, intellectual understanding of morality and a palpable, sensuous representation of its demands and our potential to fulfill them. Here too there is little recognition of the emotional impact of art, although this hardly seems surprising in the context of Kant’s moral theory. As Kant makes clear in both the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in order to act morally we need to (i) understand the moral law and what it requires of us; (ii) believe that we are in fact free to choose to do what it requires of us rather than to do what might be suggested to us by any desire under the rubric of mere self-love; (iii) believe that the objectives that morality imposes upon us can actually be achieved; and (iv) have an adequate motivation for our attempt to do what morality requires of us in lieu of the mere desirability of particular goals it might happen to license or even impose in particular circumstances. All of these together constitute the conditions of the possibility of morality. Kant also thinks that at one level all these conditions are satisfied by pure practical reason

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itself: (i) the very form of pure practical reason gives us the moral law; (ii) the first “fact” of pure practical reason, namely, our consciousness of our obligation under this law, implies the reality of our freedom to be moral (“ought implies can”); (iii) we can postulate by pure practical reason alone that the laws of nature are compatible with the demands of morality because both laws ultimately have a common author; and finally (iv) pure respect for the moral law itself can be a sufficient motivation for us to attempt to carry it out (and attempts to do so have “moral worth” only when that is our motivation).91 What aesthetic experience in its various forms can do is to make the satisfaction of these conditions concrete and palpable to us rather than abstract and merely intellectual. Kant suggests at least six ways in which aesthetic experience can do this. First, as we have now seen, Kant believes that aesthetic experiences can present morally significant ideas to us without sacrificing what is essential to them as objects of aesthetic response and judgment, namely, scope for the free play or activity of the imagination. This is obvious in the theory of aesthetic ideas, where Kant indeed assumes that works of art always have some morally relevant content. But this view takes other forms as well. In “The Ideal of Beauty,” as we saw, Kant also maintains that beauty in the human figure can be taken as “the visible expression of moral ideas, which inwardly govern human beings”; here he argues that only human beauty can be taken as a unique standard for beauty, because it is the only form of beauty that can express something absolutely and unconditionally valuable, namely, the moral autonomy of which humans alone are capable, but at the same time that there is no determinate way in which this unique value can be expressed in the human form, thus that there is always something free in the outward expression in the human figure of the inner moral value of the human character.92 Indeed, at one point Kant goes so far as to maintain that all forms of beauty, natural as well as artistic, can be regarded as expressions of aesthetic ideas: Even natural objects can suggest moral ideas to us although such suggestion is not the product of any intentional human activity.93 91

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Although at least at the end of his career, almost another decade after the third Critique, Kant did recognize that pure reason works through a variety of “moral feelings” in order to produce actions in the phenomenal world of our actual experience; see my “Moral Feelings in the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Lara Denis, editor, Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 130–51. Kant, CPJ, §17, 5:235–6. Kant, CPJ, §51, 5:319.

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The second link is Kant’s claim that the aesthetic experience of the sublime, particularly the dynamical sublime, is nothing other than a feeling of the power of our own practical reason to accept the pure principle of morality and to act in accordance with it in spite of all the threats or inducements to do otherwise that nature might place in our way. It is precisely because the experience of the dynamical sublime so centrally involves an intimation of our own capacity to be moral that Kant insists that “the sublime in nature is only improperly so called, and should properly be ascribed only to the manner of thinking, or rather its foundation in human nature.”94 And while he does not want to claim that this experience is identical to explicit moral reasoning but only a “disposition of the mind that is similar to the moral disposition,”95 he does in at least one place argue that the complex character of the experience of the sublime makes it the best representation in our experience of our moral situation itself: The object of a pure and unconditioned intellectual satisfaction is the moral law in all its power . . . and, since this power actually makes itself aesthetically knowable only through sacrifices (which is a deprivation, although in behalf of inner freedom . . .), the satisfaction on the aesthetic side (in relation to sensibility) is negative . . . but considered from the intellectual side it is positive. . . . From this it follows that the intellectual, intrinsically purposive (moral good), judged aesthetically, must not be represented so much as beautiful but rather as sublime.96

Again, it must be remembered that while for Kant the experience of the sublime is genuinely aesthetic, it is not an experience triggered by art. However, and third, Kant argues that there are crucial aspects of our moral condition that are symbolized by the beautiful rather than the sublime. Specifically, he claims that the beautiful is the “symbol” of the morally good because there are significant parallels between our experience of beauty and the structure of morality, and indeed that it is only insofar as the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good that we have any right not merely to predict that under ideal circumstances others should agree with our appraisals of beauty but actually to demand that they do so.97 Kant adduces “several aspects of this analogy,” the most important of which is that “The freedom of the imagination (thus of the sensibility of our faculty) is represented in the judging of the beautiful 94 95 96 97

Kant, CPJ, §30, 5:280. Kant, CPJ, General Remark following §29, 5:268. Kant, CPJ, General Remark following §29, 5:271. Kant, CPJ, §59, 5:353.

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as in accord with the lawfulness of the understanding (in the moral judgment the freedom of the will is conceived as the agreement of the latter with itself in accordance with universal laws of reason).”98 Because the experience of beauty is an experience of the freedom of the imagination in its play with the understanding, it can be taken as a palpable symbol of the freedom of the will to determine itself by moral laws that is necessary for morality but not itself something that can be directly experienced.99 In other words, it is the very independence of aesthetic response from direct determination by concepts, including moral concepts, that makes the experience of beauty an experience of freedom that can in turn symbolize moral freedom. Presumably this can be reconciled with Kant’s earlier claim that the sublime is the most appropriate symbol of morality by observing that while the experience of beauty makes the freedom of the will palpable to us, it is only the mixed experience of the sublime that brings home to feeling that this freedom must often be exercised in the face of resistance offered by our own inclinations.100 As we will see, Kant’s paradoxical idea that it is the very freedom of the imagination from the direct constraints of morality in the experience of beauty that makes it a fitting symbol of morality was taken up by Schiller, and directly or through Schiller influenced subsequent thinkers as well. Kant’s fourth connection between the aesthetic and the ethical lies in his theory of the “intellectual interest” in the beautiful. Here Kant argues that although our basic pleasure in a beautiful object must be independent of any antecedent interest in its existence, we may add a further layer of pleasure to that basic experience if the existence of beautiful objects suggests some more generally pleasing fact about our situation in the world. What Kant then argues is that since in the case of morality “it also interests reason that the ideas (for which it produces an immediate interest in the moral feeling) also have objective reality, . . . reason must take an interest in every manifestation in nature of a correspondence similar to this; consequently the mind cannot reflect on the beauty of nature without finding itself at the same time to be interested in it.”101 Kant’s claim is that since it is of supreme interest to us that nature be hospitable to our moral objectives, we take pleasure in evidence that nature 98 99 100

101

Kant, CPJ, §59, 5:354. See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:29. See my “The Symbols of Freedom in Kant’s Aesthetics,” in Hermann Parret, editor, Kant’s Ästhetik – Kant’s Aesthetics – L’esthétique de Kant (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 338–55, reprinted in Values of Beauty, pp. 222–41. Kant, CPJ, §42, 5:300.

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is amenable to any of our objectives, even when those are not specifically moral; and the natural existence of beauty is such evidence, because the experience of beauty is itself an unexpected fulfillment of our most basic cognitive objective. Kant’s fifth claim is that aesthetic experience can actually promote moral conduct. In his concluding comment on his analyses of both the beautiful and the sublime he states that “The beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest; the sublime, to esteem it, even contrary to our (sensible) interest,”102 where being able to love without any personal interest and to esteem even contrary to our own interest are necessary preconditions of proper moral conduct. Kant makes a similar point in his later Metaphysics of Morals (1797) when he argues that “a propensity to wanton destruction of what is beautiful in inanimate nature,” even though we do not owe any moral duties directly to anything other than ourselves and other human beings, nevertheless “weakens or uproots that feeling in [us] which, though not of itself moral, is still a disposition of sensibility that greatly promotes morality or at least prepares the way for it: the disposition, namely, to love something (e.g., beautiful crystal formations, the indescribable beauty of plants) even apart from any intention to use it.”103 Because Kant famously insists that the only truly estimable motivation for the conduct required by morality is respect for the moral law itself, these claims that aesthetic experience can be conducive to proper moral conduct would be problematic for Kant if they meant that aesthetic experience can substitute for that pure respect for the moral law as our fundamental motivation to be moral. Kant can only mean to suggest that aesthetic experiences can prepare us for successful moral conduct without substituting for pure moral motivation. But in the Metaphysics of Morals he argues that naturally occurring feelings of sympathy and benevolence toward other human beings are means that nature itself affords us, as creatures who are sensuous as well as rational, for the implementation of the moral law, although the latter can only be considered our own end freely chosen out of respect for the idea of duty or the moral law or humanity as an end in itself. And of course acting upon such feelings will not only be a means toward the end of implementing the moral law but will also be subject to the condition that acting on such feelings in any particular circumstances is indeed 102 103

Kant, CPJ, General Remark following §29, 5:267. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue §17, 6:643; Kant, Practical Philosophy, p. 564.

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consistent with the requirements of the moral law.104 He must mean that naturally occurring feelings of the beauty and sublimity of nature can play a similar rôle, that is, that out of our underlying commitment to respect the moral law we can use and cultivate these feelings as more immediate springs to actions in particular circumstances. Finally, in the brief “Appendix on the methodology of taste,” Kant suggests that the cultivation or realization of common standards of taste in a society can be conducive to the discovery of the more general “art of the reciprocal communication of the ideas of the most educated part” of a society “with the cruder, the coordination of the breadth and refinement of the former with the natural simplicity and originality of the latter,”105 where this art is apparently necessary to the realization of the goal of “lawful sociability,” or the establishment of a stable polity on the basis of principles of justice rather than sheer force. Thus, aesthetic experience can be conducive to the development of sound politics as well as personal ethics, although the two are of course not unconnected, since Kant is a political moralist who believes that we have a moral duty to establish a just state, not merely a prudential interest in doing so.106 This idea too would have a powerful influence upon Schiller. These six links between aesthetics and morality can be seen as satisfying the four conditions that need to be met in order to bridge the gulf between nature and freedom by making our abstract grasp of the contents and conditions of morality palpable to our sensuous nature: (i) the presentation of moral ideas in objects of natural and artistic beauty and especially in beautiful human form itself provides sensuous illustration of moral ideas, above all the foundational idea of the unconditional value of human freedom itself; (ii) the experiences of the dynamical sublime and of the beautiful in their different ways both confirm our abstract recognition of our own freedom always to choose to do as morality requires; (iii) the intellectual interest in the beautiful provides 104

105 106

See above all Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” §§34–5, 6:456–7, where Kant describes the “indirect duty to cultivate the compassionate natural (aesthetic) feelings in us, and to make use of them as so many means to sympathy based on moral principles and the feeling appropriate to them.” Kant, CPJ, §60, 5:356. See my “Kant’s Deductions of the Principles of Right,” in Mark Timmons, editor, Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 23–64. However, Hannah Arendt obviously went too far in trying to ground an interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy in its entirety on the Critique of the Power of Judgment; see her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

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sensuous confirmation of nature’s amenability to our objectives, which is otherwise only a postulate of pure practical reason; and (iv) the claims that the experiences of the beautiful and the sublime and the sharing of these feelings among different strata of highly diversified societies are conducive to the realization of morality reveal ways in which our natural sensuous dispositions can be used as means to the realization of the goal set by our purely rational disposition to be moral. These links were possible for Kant because in our experiences of the sublime and the fine arts, moral ideas could be part of the object of the free play of the imagination, and even in the case of the purest free play with natural forms, with no overt moral content, the very freedom of the imagination itself can be taken as a symbol of moral freedom. Kant asserted these benefits of aesthetic experience for morality without compromising what made such experience aesthetic in the first place: aesthetic experience serves morality without losing its own freedom, thus without being constrained by morality. This is what I have elsewhere called Kant’s conception of the “interest of disinterestedness.”107 But in all these connections, Kant made no mention of the emotions we might connect with morality and with the representation of moral images in art, either positive emotions directed at positive moral examples or negative emotions engendered by negative moral examples. Perhaps this is not surprising in an author who generally seems hostile to any role for emotions in morality, who sees the essence of virtue in the control or suppression of emotions rather than in action upon emotions. But in comparison to what we have seen in Kames and Mendelssohn, for example, Kant’s attitude toward emotions seems to give an incomplete account of aesthetic experience. At least some of his immediate contemporaries and successors seem to have been cognizant of that fact. Let us now look at five of them: Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, the much better-known Friedrich Schiller and his great friend, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Wilhelm von Humboldt, a profound philologist and political theorist as well as one of the leading statesmen of his time; and, once again, Johann Gottfried Herder, one of whose last works was a radical critique of the aesthetic theory of his one-time teacher.

107

See Kant and the Experience of Freedom, chs. 2 and 3. A similar phrase was earlier used by Martha Woodmansee in “The Interests of Disinterestedness,” The Author, Art, and the Market (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 11–33.

10 After Kant

In this chapter, we consider five writers whose work in aesthetics came on the heels of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, whose own System of Aesthetics appeared just a few months after Kant’s third Critique; the great playwright and poet Friedrich Schiller, who, stimulated by Kant, was intensely engaged with philosophy during the first half of the 1790s; his great friend and patron Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian aristocrat who was an intimate of both Schiller and Goethe, who would later become the Prussian minister of education and moving spirit behind the establishment of the royal university in Berlin that now bears the name of Wilhelm and his brother, the renowned naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, and where so much of the development of aesthetics in the first decades of the nineteenth century would take place; and finally, for a second time, Johann Friedrich Herder, who in one of his very last works addressed a scorching critique at Kant’s aesthetics and, by extension, at those of Schiller as well. (The chapter concludes with a brief postscript on the philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart.) With the exception of Herder, each of these figures accepted some elements of Kant’s philosophy but revised his aesthetics in other directions. Schiller was the only one of these authors to take Kant’s notion of free play seriously, while Heydenreich, the least well known of these authors, emphasized what Kant had tried to keep at arm’s length, namely, the importance of the emotional impact of art. Goethe and von Humboldt pushed back in the direction of a more traditional emphasis on the aesthetics of truth and thereby paved the way for the aesthetics of nineteenth-century German Idealism that we consider in the next volume. Herder, meanwhile, attacked Kant’s distinction between the mere agreeableness of sensory stimulation and the purer satisfaction afforded 459

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by the free play of the higher cognitive powers, a theme touched upon in passing by Goethe but not seriously developed until some of the twentieth-century responses to the Neo-Idealist Benedetto Croce, such as those of Samuel Alexander and Richard Wollheim. That is a matter for Volume 3, however.

1. Heydenreich Karl Heinrich Heydenreich (1764–1801), born near Dresden, was a student at the Thomasschule in Leipzig, and at seventeen was inspired by the appearance of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, just before he started his studies at the university in Leipzig. He was appointed professor of philosophy there in 1789 and published voluminously until he was forced by debt and drink to resign his position in 1798, dying a broken man three years later. He published numerous articles on aesthetics before publishing his System of Aesthetics in August 1790. He alludes to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment in his Foreword, noting agreement between Kant’s approach to the sublime and his own, but also says that he had been writing his System for two years, so the bulk of it was clearly completed before Kant’s book appeared.1 Heydenreich’s overarching concern is with the moral and political benefit of aesthetic experience – in this he paves the way for Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind five years later – and he accepts some of the most fundamental premises of Kant’s moral philosophy but draws the connection to aesthetics differently than did Kant himself. During his brief but remarkably prolific career, Heydenreich also made other contributions to aesthetics, including a translation of Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste in 1792; a four-volume Dictionary of the Visual Arts, based on French sources, in 1793–95; and even a work entitled Principles of a Critique of the Ridiculous in 1797. In 1794 Heydenreich also published a volume of his poetry. Outside of aesthetics, Heydenreich demonstrated his concern with moral and political issues with two volumes of Considerations on the Philosophy of Natural Religion (1790–91), a Propaedeutic to Moral Philosophy 1

Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, System der Ästhetik, Band I (Leipzig: Georg Joachim Göschen, 1790), pp. xxxiii, xxxvi. Although Heydenreich provides a table of contents for the proposed second volume in detail (pp. 389–92) and states that it “will appear without fail by next Easter” (p. xxxv), it never did. The modern facsimile edition of the book, edited by Volker Deubel (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1978), in addition to including contemporary reviews of Heydenreich’s book, also provides a list of all his other publications in aesthetics.

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(1794), and, also in two volumes, a System of Natural Right in accordance with Critical Principles (1794–95); the works on both natural religion and natural right were popular enough to receive second editions after Heydenreich’s death. His final book, also published posthumously, was Considerations on the Dignity of Man in the Spirit of the Kantian Doctrine of Morals and Religion (1803). In the System of Aesthetics, Heydenreich respectfully criticizes the rationalist definition of beauty as perfection sensuously perceived as both vague and not sufficient for all cases of beauty, thereby revealing his suspicion of all attempts to reduce beauty to a single source: About “whether perfection sensuously cognized is found in every beauty in general,” “nothing but experience can decide, and this tells us that many objects are held to be beautiful without our being conscious of having found perfection in them.”2 Heydenreich thus shares Kant’s critique of perfectionism in aesthetics,3 and after their double-barreled attack, aesthetic perfectionism would not revive, although as we shall see when we turn to the aesthetics of German Idealism that was hardly the end of the aesthetics of truth more generally. Heydenreich also and mercilessly criticizes Moritz’s conception of the beautiful as that which is “complete in itself”4 and has no dependence on the ends of artist and/ or audience. He claims instead that “every work of art obviously has its end outside itself, in a being who is to be affected by it, whether this be the artist himself . . . or others.”5 The basis for this claim is his view that “the influence of an object on gratification [Vergnügen]” is implicit in the very word “beauty” itself – he appeals to the supposed etymological connection between schön and scheinen, “to appear,” which presupposes a subject to whom something appears or who is affected by it6 – and argues that “I therefore cannot conceive of any object as beautiful without at the same time representing a being that is receptive to it [ihn empfinde],” so that “if I talk of the beauty of things in themselves then I delude myself in every case and introduce a whole series of circular explanations.”7 For example, “Set before yourself the most beautiful sonata of a Handel or Mozart and consider if, if this is possible, without relation to your sensibility [Empfindsamkeit] or that of any other, without regard to any being, 2 3 4 5 6 7

Heydenreich, System, p. 135. See Kant, CPJ, §15. Heydenreich, System, p. 137. Heydenreich, System, p. 143. Heydenreich, System, p. 89. Heydenreich, System, p. 141.

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which is interested in the imitation [Nachahmung] of feelings, in harmony and rhythm in the series of tones, what sort of beauty would then be left for you to conceive?”8 Heydenreich is not explicitly interested in ontology, but it is clear that he thinks that beauty can be understood only as a relational property, the disposition of certain kinds of objects to raise pleasure in us in certain ways – indeed, a multiplicity of ways, as this passage already implies, including both formal features such as harmony and rhythm but also the arousal of feelings through imitation or association. In spite of its polemical excesses, however, the goal of Heydenreich’s work is constructive. His aim is to demonstrate that in contemporary life the fine arts can have the beneficial moral and social effects that (contrary to Plato) he believes that they did enjoy in antiquity. The key to this benefit is that the arts can have a “relation to the higher [human] powers, particularly to a noble sensibility that is subordinated to understanding and practical reason.”9 Sensibility, above all to the feelings of others, is essential to morality, and exposure to beautiful works of art heightens that sensibility. The trick is for Heydenreich to argue for this claim without denying his Kantian loyalties in moral philosophy and without reducing beauty in art solely to the expression of human feelings (although, as we have just seen, he holds that there can be no form of beauty that does not have an effect on human feelings, at least on the feeling of pleasure itself). The first challenge for Heydenreich is that he accepts the Kantian claim that, as he puts it, “A completely morally good action must be independent from all influence of sensible incentives; that means that it must be generated solely by insight into the truth of the law that lies in reason, not by a hope of any advantage or even by any noble, agreeable sentiment [Empfindung].”10 However, this Kantian premise must be qualified in two ways. One, while it describes an ideal for the fundamental motivation to be moral, in fact human beings are not purely rational creatures, and their rational insight does need the support of the kind of noble sentiments that art can induce after all; and two, even if people are motivated to be moral by reason alone, “the fine arts are effective means for making the exercise of the laws of practical reason easier and more secure.”11 But further, perhaps less controversial, even if a moral agent 8 9 10 11

Heydenreich, System, p. 142. Heydenreich, System, pp. 38–9. Heydenreich, System, pp. 51–2. Heydenreich, System, p. 55.

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can be motivated to do the right thing by rational insight alone, in practice doing the right thing for others means being able to see particular situations from their point of view, understanding concretely what they might be suffering that you could remedy or how what you have in mind to do might cause them to suffer, and this requires empathy with them, a sense of their feelings, of a kind that can be sharpened through the experience of art, above all of course by the persuasive representation of human feelings and emotions in art: Just as we have now seen that [the fine arts] can really interest the spirit in pure, true morality through their works, so will we now also see that they can advance the application of the laws of morality in particular cases presented in experience. In order for this to happen, the object must be represented fully, truly, and in a lively fashion, for how else would the application, indeed the correct, purposive application of the moral law be possible?12

But representing particular human feelings in concrete situations is just the sort of thing that the fine arts can do, and by doing this they can heighten our sensitivity to human feelings outside of art, which is in turn a necessary condition for our successful application of the moral law. The second challenge for Heydenreich, however, is to argue this point without equating the beauty of fine art solely with its expression of human emotion and the effect of such expression on its audience. He does this by enumerating a multiplicity of kinds of beauty or sources of pleasure in fine arts, indeed not just fine arts, of which the pleasure that we take in the expression of emotions is only a part. Specifically, Heydenreich recognizes four kinds of beauty: “1) Beauties, where the satisfaction is aroused by the immediate impact of certain objects on our senses, without the intervention of any judgment,” for example, the beauty of “individual colors,” “certain shapes and modifications of the surfaces of bodies,” and so on;13 “2) Beauties, the charm of which is grounded solely on contingent associations of certain images [Bilder] and representations with certain objects,” of the kind that hold for particular persons or particular nations14 (perhaps Heydenreich had already read Alison when he wrote this); “3) Beauties whose efficacy rests on an essential relation of certain forms and tones with certain states of the human being as a being sensitive to weal and woe,” that is, on aspects of objects that have an immediate impact on our sense of well- or ill-being, such as the “beauties of nature in its landscapes,” like 12 13 14

Heydenreich, System, p. 55. Heydenreich, System, p. 97. Heydenreich, System, p. 100.

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“a laughing, cheerful stream” or “terrifying groups of massive cliffs,” all of which “possess similarity to certain situations of our heart,”15 a kind of beauty that we presumably also find in pictures of or poems about landscapes; and finally “4) Beauties that arouse gratification through the relation of certain objects, images, representations, thoughts, and actions to the laws of understanding, of speculation or of practical reason,”16 that is, beauties that lie directly in certain “characters and actions” and, presumably, again, in the artistic representation thereof. The point is that beauty can lie in all of these things, in the effects on our feelings of pleasure of material and formal properties of objects, contingent associations, and more universal associations that we have with the appearance of both nature and human beings, and art can draw on all these sources of beauty. Heydenreich makes no argument that every work of art must draw on each of these sources of beauty, nor an argument that any particular work is necessarily more beautiful than another if it draws on more of these sources of pleasure than the other; the suggestion is rather that these sources are all available to us and that we can draw on any and all of them in order to heighten our sensitivity to the feelings of our real fellows. “I can presuppose as generally accepted,” Heydenreich writes, that sentiment and fantasy are set into activity through works [of art]. And from this single indubitable principle arises the whole deduction of their influence on the well-being of individual human beings and of the whole of society. Whether we think of the human being as a being that unconditionally strives for happiness, or as one that strives for a more noble happiness in the fulfillment of its duties, or as one that remains true to the laws of morality without regard to its own gratification, we find that in every respect the development [Bildung ] of these powers is extremely important, and thus the means by which this development is promoted and can be brought to the highest degree must be partaken of by every rational being.17

In other words, regardless of what moral theory one holds (although as we saw Heydenreich himself prefers Kant’s, the third option in this passage), the development of sensitivity and imagination, Empfindung und Phantasie, is necessary for its application, and exposure to the fine arts can assist in that development, through the experience of those beauties that are not directly connected to the expression or representation of human feelings as well as of those beauties that are.

15 16 17

Heydenreich, System, pp. 100–1. Heydenreich, System, p. 103. Heydenreich, System, p. 43.

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On the basis of this general approach, Heydenreich develops a classification of the various fine arts that focuses on the particular ways in which, in virtue of their different media, they can develop our imagination and our sensitivity to human emotions. There is no space here to examine the details of this account, although it is worth noting his point that in general art can either “copy” or “paint” “my feeling or passion, its nature, course, mixtures, alterations and gradations” directly, “without at the same time providing or describing the objects that may have aroused them,”18 or “can merely portray the object that has acted upon my sensitivity without painting the feeling” itself, or that “both ends can be united in one work.”19 Different media may exploit one or the other of these possibilities, for example, painting may depict the objects that arouse our emotions while music comes closer to describing our emotions themselves, and some media, such as poetry, may avail themselves of both possibilities. Once again, Heydenreich sees no reason to take a restrictive rather than inclusive approach to the sources of aesthetic experience. Heydenreich uses the idiom of mental activity as well as the idiom of emotional impact to explain the full effect of art upon us, although, perhaps because he had not yet seen Kant’s third Critique when he wrote his own System of Aesthetics, he does not follow Kant in transforming the idiom of mental activity, which can be traced back to Sulzer, into the idiom of free play. As we saw, he rejects the aesthetics of perfectionism of Wolff and Baumgarten, and he does not explicitly use the more general idiom of the aesthetics of truth – although it is clearly crucial to his theory of the beneficial effect of art on our moral development that art’s depiction and expression of human emotions be truthful, true to the nature of human emotions, he does not explicitly make this point. So perhaps we should not see Heydenreich as directly adding the emotional impact of art to Kant’s twofold synthesis of the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of play, but rather as insisting upon the importance of the emotional impact of art in conjunction with a theory of aesthetic experience as pleasurable mental activity. A fully threefold synthesis is yet to come. We next consider whether Friedrich Schiller advanced that project. But one thing that is clear is that Schiller was profoundly committed to the idea of the contribution of aesthetic experience to our moral development, or in his own term “education” (Erziehung), that we have found 18 19

Heydenreich, System, pp. 154–5. Heydenreich, System, p. 156.

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in Heydenreich. Indeed, Schiller himself may have found this idea in Heydenreich, for he is reported to have purchased a copy of the System in 1792, just as he was setting aside all other work to focus intensively on philosophy and aesthetics for the next three years.20

2. Schiller Perhaps now best known to the world as the author of the “Ode to Joy” (An die Freude) that provides the text for the fourth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) was not only a poet but also a dramatist, historian, and during the first half of the 1790s, aesthetician and philosopher. Born in Marbach, son of a medic in the military service of the Duke of Württemberg, Schiller learned Greek and Latin from the local pastor and then studied at the Karlsschule, the duke’s military college, where he trained as a physician. However, his teachers included the well-trained philosopher and psychologist Jakob Friderich Abel (1751–1829), author of a work On the Question: Whether Genius Is Born or Educated? (1776) and, after Schiller’s years at the Karlsschule, a work On the Sources of Human Representations;21 among Schiller’s own earliest writings, his thesis on the mind-body relationship shows Abel’s influence as well as prefiguring some of his later interests in aesthetics. While still at school, Schiller wrote the play The Robbers (Die Räuber), a radical critique of current social arrangements, which was produced in Mannheim in 1781, while Schiller was still in service in Stuttgart as a military doctor. Schiller was briefly imprisoned for the play and, more important, forbidden to publish further, so he fled Württemberg in 1782 in order to continue writing plays. Between 1783 and 1787, he wrote Fiesko, Intrigue and Love (Kabale und Liebe), and Don Carlos. All of these plays established his reputation as Germany’s leading playwright, taking over the mantle of the recently deceased Lessing, although writing the last of these plays proved so difficult for Schiller that for some years he turned to writing history and then philosophy. Schiller’s historical work, which included histories of the Crusades, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Dutch revolt against Spain, earned him an appointment as professor of history at the university in Jena, the university of the Duchy of Saxony-Weimar, whose chief minister, Johann 20

21

See Frederick Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 52 n17. Jakob Friedrich Abel, Über die Frage: Wird das Genie geboren oder erzogen? (Stuttgart, 1776) and Über die Quellen der menschlichen Vorstellungen (Stuttgart, 1787).

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Wolfgang Goethe, supported the appointment, although the intense friendship and correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, which would reinvigorate the literary careers of both, would not begin until several years later. After 1790, Schiller devoted several years to an intensive study of Kant, which then led to a series of essays including “On the Pathetic” and “On Grace and Dignity” (both 1793), Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795), and “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (1795–6), as well as the unpublished Kallias letters on aesthetics (1793). Having given up the chair in history and moved from Jena to Weimar, and with the encouragement of Goethe, Schiller returned to his original calling, writing the historical dramas Wallenstein (1798–9), Maria Stuart (1800), The Maiden of Orleans (Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 1801), The Bride of Messina (1803), and Wilhelm Tell (1804). Like so many of the other eighteenth-century German authors we have discussed, Schiller’s health was undermined by tuberculosis, and he was only forty-five when he died in 1805.22 Schiller made the concept of freedom even more central to his aesthetics than did Kant, but, in spite of his famous statement in the Letters on Aesthetic Education that “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays,”23 this work does not actually offer an analysis of aesthetic experience and does not generally give as much emphasis as might be expected to the creative rôle of the imagination, which might be thought to be 22

23

A brief account of Schiller’s life and work is T.J. Reed, Schiller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); a fuller life is Henry Burnand Garland, Schiller (London: Harrap, 1949). Books on Schiller’s theoretical work include S.S. Kerry, Schiller’s Writings on Aesthetics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); John M. Ellis, Schiller’s Kalliasbrief and the Study of His Aesthetic Theory (The Hague: Mouton, 1969); and Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher. See also Patrick T. Murray, The Development of German Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Schiller: A Philosophical Commentary on Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994). Briefer treatments of Schiller’s aesthetics can be found in Michael Podro, The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), chs. III and IV, pp. 36–60; Savile, Aesthetic Reconstructions, pp. 195–254; Yvonne Ehrenspeck, Versprechungen des Ästhetischen: Die Entstehung eines modernen Bildungsprojekts (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1998), pp. 113–77; Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, ch. 3, at pp. 116–30; and Guyer, “The Ideal of Beauty and the Necessity of Grace: Kant and Schiller on Ethics and Aesthetics,” in Walter Hinderer, editor, Friedrich Schiller und der Weg in die Moderne (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), pp. 187–204. The interpretation of Schiller’s famous essay “On Grace and Dignity” in what follows is based on the latter article. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), Fifteenth Letter, §9, p. 107. The emphasis is Schiller’s.

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crucial to an aesthetics of play. Further, while in several famous essays on tragedy Schiller certainly recognized the emotional impact of works in that genre, Schiller did not integrate this dimension of the experience of art into his most analytical work on aesthetics, the letters outlining a book to be called Kallias on the nature of the beautiful. In fact, in the Kallias letters Schiller’s initial impulse seems to have been to reject altogether the aesthetics of play that characterized the opening sections of Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” and to insist upon an “objectivist” aesthetics that represents a return to an aesthetics of truth in which freedom is supposed to be the content of the aesthetic experience rather than the subjective character of the experience itself. As these letters continue, however, the idea of free play looms larger, and we can thus regard them as attempting to synthesize the aesthetics of truth with the aesthetics of play, as Kant had done in his theory of aesthetic ideas. But since Schiller did not integrate his writings on tragedy with his main theoretical work in aesthetics, the Kallias letters and Letters on Aesthetic Education, his work as a whole may synthesize all three approaches to aesthetics, but no single work synthesizes more than two. Let us begin with Schiller’s essay “On the Art of Tragedy,” based on a lecture given in the summer of 1790, when Schiller must have been fresh from his first reading of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, then completed in the winter of 1791 and published in 1792 in Schiller’s journal Neue Thalia.24 In this essay Schiller begins by claiming that the experience of emotion is in general “enchanting,” but then he argues that such experience is most satisfying when it can be interpreted as an experience of the power of our own moral capacity, and that we can get such an experience through the sympathetic experience of tragic heroes depicted as themselves engaged in a struggle that represents the triumph of their moral power over unfortunate circumstances. The essay thus represents an application of Kant’s analysis of the “dynamical sublime,” a Kantian solution to the paradox of tragedy. Schiller begins by asserting that There is something about a state of emotion, all by itself and independent of any relation of its object to our betterment or detriment, that enchants us. We strive to put ourselves in such a state, even if it should involve some sacrifice. This urge lies at the bottom of our most ordinary pleasures; it scarcely even comes up for consideration whether in the process the emotion be

24

See “On the Art of Tragedy,” in Friedrich Schiller, Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993), pp. 1–21, at p. 1n*.

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directed at something desirable or abhorrent and whether by its nature it be pleasant or painful. . . . It is a universal phenomenon in human nature that what is said, what is terrible, and even what we dread captivate us with an allure in itself irresistible.25

This makes it sound as if any and all experience of emotion is enjoyable, and thus that insofar as art in particular arouses any emotion, it is thereby enjoyable – as broad an endorsement of the emotional impact of the experience of art as could be found. However, Schiller quickly qualifies this opening assertion in two ways. First, he adopts the idea of an appropriate distance for the experience of pleasure in emotion, which we have already found for example in Mendelssohn, arguing that what he has claimed actually “holds only for the emotion communicated or felt afterwards,” for otherwise “the close relation of the original emotion to our instinct for happiness usually concerns and preoccupies us too much to leave room for the pleasure imparted by the emotion of itself.”26 This implies that emotions aroused by the artistic representation of the actions and passions of depicted characters can be more enjoyable than those raised by events in our own lives, but only once we have distanced ourselves from the latter. But second, Schiller argues that “we are not acquainted with more than two sorts of sources of pleasure: the satisfaction of the urge to be happy and the fulfillment of moral laws.” He then argues that a pleasure that does not arise from the first source – and the pleasures of the emotions generated by the artistic depiction of events that do not actually concern us cannot directly satisfy our own urge to be happy – must have their “origin necessarily in the second source,” thus “It is from our moral nature, then, that the pleasure emanates by means of which painful emotions captivate.”27 In particular, our experience of tragic characters exercising their moral powers to the utmost to overcome or at least accept great difficulty gives us a sympathetic experience of the power of our own moral capacities, and this is what makes our emotional experience of tragedy so pleasurable: “The tragic emotion transports us into such a state and the pleasure of that emotion must surpass the pleasure of joyful emotions precisely to the degree that the moral capacity within us is elevated above the sensuous capacity.”28 As Aristotle had originally ranked most highly those sorts of characters and plots that were best suited to arouse the emotions of fear 25 26 27 28

Schiller, “On the Art of Tragedy,” p. 1. Schiller, “On the Art of Tragedy,” p. 2. Schiller, “On the Art of Tragedy,” p. 4. Schiller, “On the Art of Tragedy,” p. 6.

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and pity in us in order to purge them, so in the remainder of the essay Schiller considers what sorts of characters and plots best yield a sympathetic experience of our own moral capacities. He writes that “Our sympathy ascends to a much higher level when both the person suffering and the person causing the suffering become objects of sympathy. This can only happen when the person causing the suffering arouses neither our hate nor our contempt,” but when he too “is brought to a point where he becomes the origin of the misfortune”29 but struggles to the best of his ability to overcome the circumstances that have forced him to the action that has in turn triggered the tragedy. However, as one who never thought we could simply return to the intellectual and moral world of antiquity – as he would make clear in the essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” to which we will come – Schiller observes that “the most splendid pieces of the Greek stage leave something to be desired, since in all these pieces appeal is made to necessity, and our reason, demanding reason as it does, is always left with some untied knot.” For us moderns, “allied with our pleasure in moral harmony there” must be “the most perfect purposiveness in the entire expanse of nature,” and “Its apparent violation, which in a single case caused pain, becomes simply a goad to our reason to search out general laws for a justification of this particular case and to resolve the isolated dissonance within the grand harmony.”30 Schiller thus starts off by celebrating the emotional impact of art, at least of the art of tragedy, but ends up by moralizing our experience of tragedy, turning our sympathetic experience of the emotions of the characters into an affirmation of the rationality and rectitude of nature. Our pleasure is ultimately not in art’s arousal of emotion as such, but in our insight into the rationality of nature or our own moral power to make it rational. We might thus say that Schiller here subordinates the aesthetics of emotional impact to an aesthetics of truth, in this case an aesthetics of moral truth, and that he does so far more emphatically than Kant ever did, who after all at least in the case of art simply rejected emotion as a proper part of our experience rather than transforming it into a response to moral insight – here is where Schiller follows the model of Kant’s analysis of the dynamical sublime, a response to nature, rather than anything Kant had said about art. Schiller thus seems to miss the opportunity to make the emotional impact of art a part of aesthetic 29 30

Schiller, “On the Art of Tragedy,” p. 8. Schiller, “On the Art of Tragedy,” p. 9.

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experience in its own right. We shall now see that in his main treatises on aesthetics, the Kallias letters of 1793 and the Letters on Aesthetic Education of 1795, Schiller does not so much transform the emotional impact of art into a form of insight as he simply ignores it. Schiller wrote the Kallias letters to his friend Gottfried Körner in January and February of 1793 in order to outline a projected book on beauty – hence the name of the letters, coming from the Greek καλον, the “fine” or “beautiful.” These letters were not historically influential, since they did not lead to the planned book and were not published in their original form for another half-century,31 but they are important because they attempt to provide something that is missing from the more famous and influential Letters on Aesthetic Education, namely, an account of beauty itself. Schiller begins by classifying theories of beauty into four kinds that arise from the intersection of the two distinctions between the objective and the subjective and the rational and the sensual. Not surprisingly, he classifies the theory of Baumgarten and Mendelssohn, “the whole crowd of men who esteem perfection,” as “rational objective,” and the theory of Burke as “subjective sensual” (although as we saw there is a strong emotional dimension in the theories of the former, which makes Schiller’s description of them as strictly rationalistic unfair); and he rejects both of these sorts of theories. More surprisingly and misleadingly, he characterizes Kant’s theory as “subjective rational,” by this term accurately capturing Kant’s view that beauty is not a determinate property of objects independent of our own response to them, but misleadingly suggesting that Kant thought that our response to beautiful objects involved only reason as opposed to a free play between imagination, understanding, and, in the case of works of artistic genius, ideas of reason. Perhaps at this point Schiller’s suspicion of the idea of free play was so strong that he did not even allow it a place in his conception of Kant’s own aesthetics. Whatever the reason for this strange characterization of Kant’s theory, Schiller nevertheless claimed that Kant’s theory had to be replaced by a “sensuous objective” theory, and aimed to develop that himself.32

31

32

The letters were first published in Schillers Briefwechsel mit Körner, 4 vols. (Berlin: Veit, 1847), and reviewed by Friedrich Theodor Danzel in the Wiener Jahrbûuer für Literatur in 1848; the review is reprinted in Danzel, Zur Literatur und Philosophie der Goethezeit, pp. 218–46. Schiller, letter to Gottfried Körner of 25 January 1793; trans. Stefan Bird-Pollan in J.M. Bernstein, ed., Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 146.

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Schiller’s proposal in these letters was to derive an a priori “deduction” of beauty and then to confirm it through experience.33 His “deduction” consists of the assertion that just as purposiveness, the object of teleological judgment, is the appearance of theoretical rationality, so beauty, the object of aesthetic judgment, is the appearance of practical rationality; and since the essence of practical rationality is freedom, beauty is the appearance of freedom.34 Schiller also interprets beauty as the “analogue” or “similarity” (Ähnlichkeit) of freedom, thus substituting freedom in the place of reason in Baumgarten’s idea of the analogon rationis. The account of beauty as the appearance of freedom presumably satisfies Schiller’s demand for a “sensuous objective” conception because freedom is an objective property of practical reason but the appearance of it in an object is apprehended by our senses. The empirical confirmation of this a priori analysis presumably lies simply in the fact that it will strike us as the right way to describe our experience of paradigmatic cases of beauty. Schiller interprets the appearance of freedom as the appearance of self-determination in an object, or of its form being due to its own nature rather than external forces acting upon it: “A form is beautiful, one might say, if it demands no explanation, or if it explains itself without a concept.”35 Although Schiller does not mention his name, his theory could also be interpreted as an attempt to refine Moritz’s conception of beauty as that which is complete within itself,36 and thus to defend Moritz’s idea of the intrinsic purposiveness of a work of art against the tacit critique of this idea by Kant and its explicit critique by Heydenreich. Schiller then finds the appearance of self-determination in beautiful objects: for example, a beautiful vase is one on which gravity does not appear to act as an “alien force,” resulting in a “broad belly,” but in which gravity instead appears to “be modified, i.e., specifically determined and made necessary through [the] specific form” of the vase, which will be taller and more elegant than one that had, as it were, given in to the force of gravity; and a beautiful horse, like a “light Spanish palfry,” is one whose movements appear to be “an effect of its nature that has been left

33 34 35 36

Schiller, letter of 25 January 1793, p. 145. Schiller, letter of 8 February 1793, pp. 150, 152. Schiller, letter of 18 February 1793, p. 155. The influence of Moritz on Schiller has been pointed out by Frederick Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, p. 200. Moritz had been close to Goethe, and Schiller certainly knew his work.

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to itself” rather than a result of external forces acting upon it, such as the load that a workhorse has to pull.37 Having initially eliminated any reference to free play in his initial characterization of Kant’s theory, however, Schiller subsequently tries to appropriate that concept in his own way. He has argued, like Kant, that “Purposefulness, order, proportion, [and] perfection” have nothing to do with beauty if they can be perceived only if we bring some external concept to our perception of an object, and then, in his own more “objectivist” terms, that if the purposefulness and proportion of an object seem to come from itself, we find it beautiful because it seems like an analogue of freedom or self-determination. But Schiller then introduces the language of play in characterizing this phenomenon: He says that “The form of beauty is a loose [freier] contract between truth, purposefulnesss and perfection.” For example, “A pot is beautiful if it resembles the free play of nature without contradicting its concept. The handle of a pot is caused merely by its use and thus its concept,” but “if the pot is to be beautiful, its handle must spring from it so unforced and freely that one forgets its purpose.”38 In the end, then, Schiller’s “objective sensuous” account of beauty seems to be simply the insistence that free play has an appearance that is to be found in an object by our senses and is not only the response of our imagination and understanding to the appearance of the object. Schiller points toward a theory of artistic rather than merely natural beauty by arguing that in the case of a beautiful thing produced by means of some technique “The technique itself must again appear as determined by the nature of the thing, which one can call the free consent of the thing to its technique.”39 “I could pile up examples to show that everything which we call beautiful merits this predicate only by gaining freedom through its technique.”40 For Kant, a work of artistic genius is one in which nature seems to work through the artist to produce something that goes beyond any determinate intention of the artist; for Schiller in the Kallias letters, a successful work of art is one in which the nature of the object seems to surpass the technique and conscious intentions of the artist. This thought is developed in a brief essay entitled “Beauty in Art” that Schiller appended to the last of his letters to Körner. Here, following the assumption of Kant (and everyone else of 37 38 39 40

Schiller, letter of 23 February 1793, pp. 163–4. Schiller, letter of 19 February 1793, pp. 169–70. Schiller, letter of 19 February 1793, p. 165. Schiller, letter of 19 February 1793, p. 173, translation modified.

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his time) that a beautiful work of art typically depicts something, Schiller claims that what it depicts is freedom itself. Thus, “A product of nature is beautiful if it appears free in its artfulness,” while “A product of art is beautiful if it depicts a product of nature as free.”41 But he then adds that a beautiful work of art must also appear to be free from constraint by the intentions and techniques of its artists, and from the constraints of the matter of and medium in which it is made: But it is merely the nature of the imitated object which we expect to find in the product of art; and this is the meaning of the phrase that it should be presented to the imagination as self-determining. But as soon as either the nature of the material or that of the artist enters, the depicted object is no longer determined through itself and instead there is heteronomy. The nature of the depicted thing suffers violence from the depicting matter as soon as the latter makes use of its nature in depicting the thing. An object may thus only be termed freely depicted if the nature of the depicted object has not suffered from the nature of the depicting matter. The nature of the medium or the matter must thus be completely vanquished by the nature of that which is imitated. . . . it is thus form which must win over the matter in artistic depiction.42

A work of art is thus a twofold appearance of freedom: It must appear to depict freedom in some way, but it must also appear to have a selfdetermined form independent of the constraints of its matter, its medium and techniques, and presumably all other constraining intentions of the artist. That art must have freedom as its content but also appear to be free from constraint by even that content can be taken as Schiller’s way of synthesizing the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of free play, his version of Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas. Schiller insists that his account is objective rather than subjective, and in this way essentially different from Kant’s. The element of content in Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas gives it some claim to be objectivist as well as subjectivist, and Schiller’s language frequently belies his claim that his own theory is strictly objectivist. One of his key statements is that “a form appears free as soon as we are neither able nor inclined to search for its ground outside of it”:43 the beautiful object merely triggers a certain response on our part, namely, a disinclination to search for an external explanation of its form, just as for Kant a beautiful object triggers a certain response on our part, namely, a free play of imagination 41 42 43

Schiller, letter of 28 February 1793, p. 178. Schiller, letter of 28 February 1793, p. 179. Schiller, letter of 18 February 1793, p. 155.

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and understanding. Similarly Schiller says that a beautiful object, “in its objective constitution, invites us, or rather requires us to notice its quality of not-being-determined-from-the-outside,”44 or, in the case of the “light Spanish palfrey,” that in perceiving its movements we are “not reminded that it is a body at all.”45 The essence of beauty is still a matter of how we human beings respond to certain objects, as Heydenreich had just argued. This failure of Schiller’s abstract ambition to provide an objectivist alternative to the purportedly subjectivist aesthetics of Kant and others by no means undermines the interest of the Kallias letters at a more concrete level. At that level, Schiller’s account of beauty as the appearance of self-determination is an interesting account of the content of beauty, and his point that a successful work of art appears to overcome its own materials and techniques is a substantive addition to Kant’s more general point that a genius is able to find a successful form for communicating his ideas. But the claim that works of artistic beauty have the depiction of freedom from their content as well as freedom from technique as their characteristic form remains vague. Without any explicit reference to the unpublished work from early 1793, the essay “On the Pathetic” that Schiller published later in that year takes up the task of rendering the abstract idea of the artistic depiction of freedom more concrete. Although brief, this essay has a complicated agenda. It begins with a contribution to the theory of tragedy, a subject that Schiller had already addressed in the earlier essays we have discussed. Here, now using unmistakably Kantian concepts, he maintains that “The ultimate purpose of art is to depict what transcends the realm of the senses, and the art of tragedy in particular accomplishes this by displaying nature’s independence, its freedom, in the throes of passion, from nature’s laws.” On Schiller’s analysis, a tragic hero is one who has to make manifest his freedom not in overcoming insuperable external forces, but rather in overcoming his own emotions produced by insuperable external forces: Even when those forces physically destroy the tragic hero, they do not destroy his moral superiority over his own emotions of fear of them. As Schiller puts it, “The sensuous being must suffer deeply and vehemently, the pathos must be present, so that the rational being can testify to its independence.”46 “Portraying moral resistance” rather 44 45 46

Schiller, letter of 23 February 1793, p. 161. Schiller, letter of 23 February 1793, p. 164. Schiller, “On the Pathetic,” trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, in Schiller, Essays, p. 45.

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than physical resistance to suffering is the essence of tragedy.47 Schiller also uses this thesis to make his own contribution to the debate between Winckelmann and Lessing about the aesthetic impact of the Laocoön statue, still very much alive in German culture although both of the original principals were now dead. For Schiller, the difference between the poetic and the sculptural representation of the serpents’ destruction of the priest and his sons does not come from either the noble stillness of the central figure, as Winckelmann had held, nor from the differences between pictorial and poetic media, as Lessing had argued, but from the fact that in the Aeneid Virgil is using the incident not to bring out the inner feelings and character of Laocoön but only to reveal the wrathful nature of the divinity who sends the serpents, while the aim of the statue is to depict “the intellect’s battle with the suffering of the sensuous nature,” to reveal both “animality and humanity, nature’s coercion and reason’s freedom.”48 In the particular case of Laocoön, it is his fully moral love of his children that triumphs over all concerns for his own safety – instead of fleeing the monsters like all the other Trojans, in his futile attempt to save his sons “It is now as though he freely chooses to surrender himself to the disaster and his death becomes an action of his will,”49 an assertion of his freedom even at the cost of his physical destruction. In this interpretation of tragedy, whether presented on the stage or in a statue (but not in Virgil’s epic), Schiller can be regarded as transforming Kant’s analysis of the dynamical sublime into an account of the depiction of freedom in the highest forms of art: While in the Kantian dynamical sublime it is the observation of forces in nature that threaten our physical destruction that reveals the power of our own practical reason and freedom over determination by mere nature, in Schiller’s account of tragedy it is the will and action of the depicted character that reveal the power of his moral being, and perhaps by implication of our own as well. The fact that Schiller’s concrete illustration of the depiction of freedom in art is so clearly modeled on Kant’s own account of the sublime makes it all the more surprising that at least earlier in 1793 he had presented his “objective” aesthetics as an alternative to Kant’s supposedly “subjective” aesthetics rather than recognizing that in both his analysis of the sublime and his account of fine art Kant had sought to combine rather than contrast the aesthetics of play and the aesthetics of truth. In 47 48 49

Schiller, “On the Pathetic,” p. 48. Schiller, “On the Pathetic,” pp. 54–5. Schiller, “On the Pathetic,” p. 59.

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fact, Schiller’s interpretation of tragedy in “On the Pathetic” can be interpreted as an illustration of Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas rather than an alternative to it: Schiller shows how the most fundamental rational idea of all, namely, the idea of the freedom of the moral will, is illustrated in works of artistic genius without those works losing what is essential to their beauty. And as Kant himself had done, Schiller also shows how art represents ideas with such great emotional resonance without acknowledging the emotional impact of such art on its audience. Where we might have expected Schiller to add the third element of emotional impact to his Kantian twofold synthesis of the aesthetics of truth and of play, he does not. The two theoretical works by Schiller with which philosophers have most concerned themselves have been the 1793 essay “On Grace and Dignity” and the epistolary series On the Aesthetic Education of Man, first written as an actual series of letters to Schiller’s new patron, the Danish Duke of Augustenberg, in 1793 and then rewritten for publication in 1795 (after Augustenberg lost the originals in a fire).50 These have been read primarily as responses to Kant’s moral philosophy, inspired by Kant in their general concern for autonomy as the essence of morality but criticizing Kant for giving inadequate consideration to the rôle of sensibility in morality. “On Grace and Dignity” is often read to argue, in supposed opposition to Kant, for the necessity of developing feelings as part of what it takes to comply fully with the demands of morality, while Aesthetic Education has been read to argue that only the cultivation of aesthetic experience can transform individuals and their society as morality demands; the first of these could be considered a constitutive claim about the proper character of moral motivation, and the second a causal claim about the conditions under which such motivation can occur. In fact, Kant may actually make greater claims for the significance and contribution of both moral sentiments and aesthetic responses to the individual achievement of morality than Schiller does. Specifically, while “On Grace and Dignity” argues that the moral determination of the will should be accompanied with certain moral sentiments on what are essentially aesthetic grounds that are separate from morality, Kant argues that the virtuous determination of the will should be accompanied by certain sentiments on moral grounds. And while Aesthetic Education asserts that the development of taste is a necessary condition for the development of individual morality and social justice, which Kant never does, the variety 50

See Beiser, Schiller, p. 141.

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of links that Kant recognizes between aesthetics and morality, described in the previous chapter, show that the cultivation of taste can actually make a broader contribution to the realization of morality than Schiller claims. In these essays Schiller thus does not clearly go beyond Kant in emphasizing the emotional impact of aesthetic experience. In fact, “On Grace and Dignity” does not begin as an essay in moral theory at all, but as an essay in aesthetics, that is, an essay about the expression of moral qualities in the appearance of actual human beings; and in this regard it is not a critique of Kantian moral theory but a critique of an aspect of Kantian aesthetics, namely, Kant’s theory of the “ideal of beauty” in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (which we saw can in turn be traced back to Sulzer). Schiller’s use of the expression “ideal of beauty” very early in his essay signals that this is his primary target.51 The essay can also be interpreted as a further contribution to the debate over the Laocoön statue, which as we have just seen Schiller also broached in “On the Pathetic,” although the names of Winckelmann and Lessing are not mentioned in this essay. Lessing, as we saw, had argued against Winckelmann that it is not the conditions of the possibility of beauty in general but rather the character of visual media in particular that limits the expression of pain in a work like a statue, in contrast to the expression of pain that is possible in literature. In “On the Pathetic” Schiller argued against both Winckelmann and Lessing that the real reason for the difference between the statue’s presentation of the priest and the poem’s is that the latter is using the incident only to convey the awful power of the gods while the former is depicting the sublimity of the human capacity for morality; “On Grace and Dignity” can be read as taking the further step of associating this sublimity with the moral quality of dignity rather than with the aesthetic quality of grace, thereby supplementing the argument that it is the conditions for representing a moral quality rather than any limitation of an artistic medium that is responsible for the depicted appearance of Laocoön. But we will focus here on Schiller’s more obvious disagreement with Kant’s aesthetics. Kant introduced the concept of the “ideal of beauty” in the third moment of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” which discusses the various 51

“On Grace and Dignity,” NA 253; Curran 126. In the citations of Schiller, the first reference (“NA”) is to the National Ausgabe der Werke Schillers, vol. 20, Philosophische Schriften, Teil 1, with cooperation by Helmut Koopman, ed. Benno von Wiese (Weimar: Böhlau, 1962); the second reference, “Curran,” is to the translation I have used, Schiller’s “On Grace and Dignity” in Its Cultural Context: Essays and a New Translation, ed. Jane V. Curran and Christopher Fricker (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005).

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relations that obtain between beauty and purposiveness. Kant began the third moment by arguing that in its purest form the judgment of taste is a response to the mere appearance of the form of purposiveness in an object, as opposed to any actual purposiveness, in either of the senses of that concept, namely, actually serving some specific purpose or having been designed to serve some purpose; correspondingly, Kant equates pure beauty with the mere form or appearance of purposiveness rather than with actual purposiveness. However, as we saw, Kant complicated his analysis by recognizing forms of beauty that are not pure but are connected with although not reducible to the recognition of actual purposiveness. The first of these forms was “adherent beauty,” a beauty of form that is compatible with or appropriate for the actual purpose of an object that clearly has a purpose that constrains its possible form in various ways, such as an arsenal or a racehorse. Then Kant came to the “ideal of beauty,” “the highest model, the archetype of taste . . . in accordance with which [anyone] must judge everything that is an object of taste,” a representation of an individual object or particular type of object that is maximally beautiful.52 Kant signaled that the search for an ideal of beauty is not something initiated by the logic of taste as such but by something external to taste, namely, the faculty of reason: the “archetype of taste . . . rests on reason’s indeterminate idea of a maximum.” He argued that “the beauty for which an idea [or ideal] is to be sought cannot be a vague beauty, but there must be a beauty fixed by a concept of objective purposiveness, consequently it must not belong to the object of an entirely pure judgment of taste, but rather to one of a partly intellectualized judgment of taste,”53 which means that the ideal of beauty is a species of adherent rather than free beauty. Kant then argued that there are two elements in such an ideal, namely a uniquely valuable purpose or end and a uniquely appropriate aesthetic expression of this purpose or end. “The human being alone is capable of an ideal of beauty,” Kant had claimed, because “the humanity in his person, as intelligence, is alone among all the objects in the world capable of the ideal of perfection,”54 that is, according to (practical) reason the human being is the only thing of unconditional value. But for this ideal to be an ideal of beauty, the unique moral value of humanity must find an outward expression which is somehow appropriate for it although it is not connected to it in 52 53 54

Kant, CPJ, §17, 5:232. Kant, CPJ, §17, 5:232–3. Kant, CPJ, §17, 5:233.

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accordance with any rule. This expression is found in the beauty of the “human figure,” which is associated “with the morally good in the idea of the highest purposiveness – goodness of soul, or purity, or strength, or repose, etc.” – not in accordance with any rule but simply by “great force of the imagination.”55 Imagination is in fact doubly involved, first, because there is no way to derive what counts as beauty in the human figure from mere concepts or by any mechanical process (that could yield only “correctness in the presentation of the species”), so the ideal of maximum beauty can only be created by an act of the aesthetic imagination, and second, because there is no rule that says that moral value must be expressed in outward appearance or that outward appearance can be interpreted as an expression of moral value at all, but that association too must be created by the imagination. Schiller’s first goal in “On Grace and Dignity” is to show that Kant’s account of the ideal of beauty is not sufficiently precise in its account of what aspects of human beauty can be taken as an expression of the moral condition of a human being and that it does not offer an adequate explanation of why any features of outward appearance should be taken as an expression of moral condition. Schiller argues that there are two different moral conditions of human beings that naturally find different external expressions in their appearance and by implication in the artistic representation or mimesis of them, namely, grace and dignity, and thus the ideal of beauty is more complicated than Kant recognized; and he further argues that there are good reasons that these moral conditions should find external expression, thus that the connection between moral condition and aesthetic result is much less arbitrary than Kant makes it seem. On Schiller’s account, Kant’s first mistake is to locate the ideal of beauty vaguely in the human figure rather than specifically in the bodily accompaniments of intentional actions that are the products of the human will, which, according to Kant himself, is the primary locus of moral value; this also means that it is a mistake for Kant to suggest, if that is what he means, that the ideal of beauty can be found in a general type of human being than in particular human beings, for actions are always done by particular human beings. Kant is of course committed to the general thesis that beauty is always a property of a particular, but it might be argued that he has lost sight of that commitment when he locates the ideal of beauty in something as general as “the human figure” as the expression 55

Kant, CPJ, §17, 5:235.

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of human morality. Schiller, the one-time doctor, argues the “architectonic beauty of the human form,” that is, the fixed configuration of the features of a person’s appearance, “comes directly from nature and is formed by the rule of necessity,”56 and thus cannot plausibly be taken as an expression of the moral character or condition of a person, which is determined by the person’s will or free choice. Any aspect of beauty that can be interpreted as an expression of moral condition must thus be found in the voluntary actions of particular persons rather than in their fixed features. More specifically, grace, as a condition in which a person is not merely committed to doing what morality requires as a matter of principle but is also so committed to doing this that it has become part of his character and thus seems as much natural as voluntary, is revealed in the motions that accompany a person’s directly willed actions but are not themselves consciously willed.57 For example, “one can deduce from a person’s words how he would like to be viewed, but what he really is must be guessed from the mimic gestures accompanying the speech, in other words, from the unconstrained movements.”58 It is in the unintentional accompaniments of intentional actions that we can discern people’s real commitment to what they are doing and the ease with which they make that commitment; the latter is grace, and thus the movements that express that are the expression of grace. Grace can be expressed in the “rigid and restful features” of an individual’s physiognomy only insofar as those features themselves “were originally nothing other than movements that through frequent repetition became habitual and left lasting traces.”59 The next part of Schiller’s aesthetic argument against Kant is that dignity is a different moral condition than grace, and that it therefore naturally finds a different outward expression. While grace is the expression of a condition in which there is no tension between a person’s moral commitments and his desires, and where there is thus harmony between the explicitly willed aspects of his intentional motions and the instinctive aspects of them, dignity is the sensible expression of successfully willing

56 57 58

59

Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” NA 255; Curran 127. Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” NA 167; Curran 136. Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” NA 268; Curran 137 (replacing “uncontained” with “unconstrained” as a translation of Bewegungen, die er nicht will (“movements that he does not will”). Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” NA 264; Curran 134. Frederick Beiser takes this to be an argument against Kames’s analysis of grace rather than Kant’s conception of the ideal of beauty; see Schiller, p. 98.

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to act in accordance with moral principles even at the cost of the suppression of conflicting desires and feelings, and is therefore manifest in quite different aspects of appearance than grace is. As Schiller writes in a passage that clearly seems like another reference to the Laocoön debate, in a person expressing dignity rather than grace, while his veins swell, his muscles become cramped and taut, his voice cracks, his chest is thrust out, and his lower body pressed in, his intentional movements are gentle, the facial features relaxed, and the eyes and brow serene. . . . this contradiction of signs demonstrates the existence and influence of a power independent of suffering and above the impressions to which we see the sensuous succumb. And in this way, peace in suffering, in which dignity actually consists, becomes the representation of intelligence in human beings and the expression their moral freedom.60

As Schiller sums up, “Grace, then, lies in the freedom of intentional movements, dignity in the mastery of instinctive ones.”61 Grace expresses a tendency to act as morality requires that has become instinctive, while dignity expresses mastery grounded on moral principles over instincts that are not harmonious with morality. These are two different moral conditions and thus must find two different forms of sensible or aesthetic expression. Although Schiller’s illustrations of both grace and dignity refer to our perceptions of actual human beings rather than to artistic representations of them, that is not an objection to reading his account as a critique of Kant’s conception of the ideal of beauty, for in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” Kant himself is talking primarily about the beauty of nature rather than art, and in the section on the ideal of beauty he is clearly talking about a special feature of human beauty itself rather than of the artistic representation of human beauty. Any implications of either Kant’s account or of Schiller’s critique of it for the case of artistic representation would have to be inferred. But of course many of the features in which Schiller locates both grace and dignity could be represented in artistic depictions of human beings, and that is why it is not implausible to suggest that his account may be directed against Lessing as well as Kant. Schiller’s contrast between swelling veins, cramped muscles, and out-thrust chest on the one hand and serenity of eye and brow on the other could be taken as a plausible description of the central figure of the famous statue, and thus Schiller could be read as suggesting that the 60 61

Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” NA 295–6; Curran 159–60. Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” NA 297; Curran 160.

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statue should be understood as an expression of dignity in the face of suffering rather than as a symbol for the differences between pictorial and verbal depiction. As earlier mentioned, “On Grace and Dignity” has traditionally been read as a critique of Kant’s moral theory rather than of his aesthetics, arguing for greater moral significance for feelings in line with our principled commitment to morality than Kant acknowledges. It looks as if Schiller holds that the ideal for moral conduct is that complete attunement between the determination of the will by moral principles and our natural and instinctive desires and inclinations that is expressed in grace, and that is only because he recognizes that this will not always be possible for human beings that he admits that there is sometimes a need for that mastery over refractory feelings that expresses itself in dignity – but only as a fall-back or second-best state of character, rather than, as Kant seems to suppose, the norm for the human moral condition. This is a misreading of the positions of both Schiller and Kant, however. For Schiller, that complete attunement of principle and feeling that expresses itself in grace is indeed an imperative, but an aesthetic demand rather than a strictly moral demand. Thus Schiller writes, “Human beings, as appearance, are also an object of the senses. Where the moral feeling finds satisfaction, the aesthetic feeling does not wish to be reduced, and the correspondence with an idea may not sacrifice any of the appearance. Thus, however rigorously reason demands an ethical expression, the eye demands beauty just as persistently. . . . both these demands are made of the same object, although they come from different courts of judgment.”62 But as far as morality alone is concerned, the mastery of will over inclination that is expressed in dignity is all that is required. For Kant, however, it is morality itself that demands a complete harmony between principle and inclination, because any tension between them is a sign that one’s commitment to the principle of morality is not yet complete, one’s goodwill or virtue not yet perfected. The self-mastery that is expressed in dignity may often be all that human beings can achieve under natural circumstances and certainly satisfies the demand for legality in our actions; but as Kant sees it morality requires that perfection of virtue or of the goodwill that he calls holiness.63 Thus Kant’s conception of morality actually demands a greater attunement of principles and 62 63

Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” NA 277; Curran 144–5. See Kant’s response to Schiller in a note added to the second edition of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:23–4n.

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feelings than does Schiller’s – although Schiller’s might be the more plausible account of morality, that is, the one that better accommodates the reality of the human condition, precisely for that reason. “On Grace and Dignity” thus turns out to concern chiefly the aesthetic representation of moral character, and in this regard seems to continue the traditional project of characterizing art as an especially effective medium for the communication of important truth without any reference to the modern conception of the free play of the imagination at all. The letters On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, however, assert the importance of play for the full realization of human potential and argue that aesthetic experience is crucial for the development of human moral and political freedom, but again seems to leave little room for the free play of the imagination itself in aesthetic creation and response. The Letters also seem to make a much bolder claim for the moral importance of aesthetic experience than Kant would ever have countenanced, namely, that “it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom” and thus to the achievement of morality and its external realization in political justice.64 Here Schiller implies that the cultivation of taste through aesthetic education is a necessary as well as sufficient condition for the achievement of compliance with the ethical and political demands of morality, rather than, as Kant held, merely something that may contribute to moral development. But when we turn from Schiller’s rhetoric to the details of his argument, we will see that he actually grants aesthetic education a narrower rôle in the realization of morality than Kant does. Schiller presents the problem to be solved by aesthetic education in several ways, but primarily as a political rather than a moral problem. In his Sixth Letter, he offers an influential diagnosis of alienation or fragmentation as the characteristic problem of modernity: “we see not merely individuals, but whole classes of people, developing but one part of their potentialities, while of the rest, as in stunted growths, only vestigial traces remain.”65 Although this is a problem for human flourishing generally, and might therefore be considered a moral rather than specifically political problem, Schiller’s diagnosis of the source of this problem gives a prominent role to a specifically political cause: “Once the increase of empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of thought, made sharper 64 65

Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Second Letter, p. 9. Aesthetic Education, p. 33. As Frederick Beiser points out, Schiller’s diagnosis of alienation is inherited from the Scottish author Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), author of the Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767); see Schiller as Philosopher, p. 161.

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divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once the increasingly complex machinery of state necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance.” Schiller claims that the complex machinery of the state necessitated the separation of ranks and occupations, rather than claiming, as a Marxist diagnosis of alienation would, that a separation of ranks and occupations that has its source in the conditions of production necessitates the complex machinery of the state. In another famous passage, Schiller presents the problem as that of effecting the transition from a less just to a more just state without killing the patient in the operation: “The state should not only respect the objective and generic character in its individual subjects; it should also honor their subjective and specific character, and in extending the invisible realm of morals take care not to depopulate the sensible realm of appearance.”66 The latter passage leads more directly to Schiller’s most general characterization of the problem: striking the right balance between the universal and the particular, that is, not realizing an abstract political or moral ideal at the cost of individual lives nor so focusing on individuals as they currently are that all concern for the ideal is lost. Schiller characterizes the tension he is concerned with through a number of contrasts: person and condition, the atemporal and the temporal, noumenon and phenomena, form and matter, and so on (Eleventh Letter). He posits that we are driven in one direction, that of abstraction and generalization, by the “form drive” and in the other, that of concrete, empirical detail, by the “sensuous drive” (Twelfth Letter) – here Kant’s distinction between intuitions of sensibility and concepts of understanding and reason is transformed into a distinction between drives or inner forces affecting our conduct, a conception that Schiller may have adopted from Karl Leonhard Reinhold.67 He then claims that we need to cultivate a new drive, the “play drive” (Fourteenth Letter), to bring these two drives, and thus person and condition, universal and particular, and so on, into proper balance with each other, “to preserve the life of sense against the encroachments of freedom; and second, to secure the personality against the forces of sensation” (Thirteenth Letter). Schiller’s claim is then that it is the experience of beauty that will induce this balance in us, and thus what we need is to be educated to experience beauty. In practice, since individuals tend to 66 67

Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Fourth Letter, p. 19. See Beiser, Schiller, p. 139.

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err in one direction or the other, that is, to be driven by principles at the cost of ignoring particulars or to be absorbed in particulars and thus inadequately attentive to principles, there will be two types of beauty, “energizing” beauty and “relaxing” or “melting” beauty, which will either strengthen an individual’s commitment to principle or relax the grip of principle on an individual, whichever is needed (Seventeenth Letter). This characterization of the physiological effects of the two forms of beauty recalls not only Schiller’s own early training in physiology but also Burke’s physiological account of the effects of the beautiful and sublime in Part IV of his Enquiry. These claims are grandiose and abstract. What is striking is how little Schiller actually says about what play is and in what sense the experience of beauty is an experience of play. He says that the drive for sense or matter and the drive for form both “need to have limits set to them and, inasmuch as they can be thought as energies, need to be relaxed, the sense-drive so that it does not encroach upon the domain of law, the formal drive so that it does not encroach upon that of feeling.”68 He claims that establishing such a “reciprocal relation between the two drives is indeed merely a task enjoined upon us by reason, which man is capable of solving only in the perfect consummation of his existence.”69 He then says that the “play-drive would be directed toward annulling time within time, reconciling becoming with absolute being and change with identity,”70 or making us aware of both general and timeless law and concrete and time-bound, therefore changing particulars. More fully, he says that The play-drive . . . will make our formal as well as our material disposition, our perfection as well as our happiness, contingent. It will, therefore, just because it makes both contingent and because with all constraint all contingency also disappears, abolish contingency in both, and, as a result, introduce form into matter and reality into form. To the extent that it deprives feelings and passions of their dynamic power, it will bring them into harmony with the ideas of reason; and to the extent that it deprives the laws of reason of their moral compulsion, it will reconcile them with the interests of the senses.71

Reaching this state in which we can both see that general laws must always be made consistent with the concreteness of particulars and yet recognize the presence of those general laws in the particulars is supposed to 68 69 70 71

Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Thirteenth Letter, §6, p. 93. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Fourteenth Letter, §2, p. 95. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Fourteenth Letter, §3, p. 97. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Fourteenth Letter, §6, p. 99.

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be the key to allowing us to make moral and political progress beyond the condition of social fragmentation described in the earlier letters. Yet two problems plague Schiller’s argument. One is that he seems to be inconsistent, sometimes suggesting that it is the experience of beauty that activates the play drive and allows us to enjoy its beneficial effects which are necessary for all moral and political progress, but sometimes suggesting that it must be a sheer act of the will that keeps both the form and the sense-drives within their proper limits, thereby creating the space within which both aesthetic experience but also moral and political progress can take place: It must be an act of freedom, an activity of the person which, by its moral intensity, moderates that of the senses and, by mastering impressions, robs them of their depth only in order to give them increased surface. It is character which must set bounds to temperament. . . . Personality must keep the sensuous drive within its proper bounds, and receptivity, or nature, must do the same with the formal drive.72

In other words, Schiller’s theory seems circular: Moral progress is said to presuppose aesthetic experience, but the possibility of aesthetic experience itself seems to presuppose a moral decision. The second problem is that Schiller says remarkably little about what beauty is or how it actually transports us into the happy state of equilibrium between excessive rationality and excessive sensuality. Schiller himself worries that the proposition that “there must be a state midway between matter and form, passivity and activity, and that it is into this middle state that beauty transports us,” may seem “absurd and contradictory.”73 But to dispel this worry, Schiller seems to retreat into greater and greater abstraction himself: “This middle disposition, in which the psyche is subject neither to physical nor to moral constraint, and yet is active in both these ways, pre-eminently deserves to be called a free disposition; and if we are to call the condition of sensuous determination the physical, and the condition of rational determination the logical or moral, then we must call this condition of real and active determinability the aesthetic,” a condition in which a thing “can relate to the totality of our various powers without being a determinate object for any single one of them.”74 And further, “aesthetic determinability . . . has no limits, because it embraces all reality. . . . aesthetic freedom of determination . . . must be regarded 72 73 74

Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Thirteenth Letter, §6, p. 93. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Eighteenth Letter, §2, p. 123. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Twentieth Letter, §4 and note, pp. 141–3.

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as an infinity filled with content.”75 These grand statements seem to be inspired by Kant’s conception of the work of art as an aesthetic idea suggesting more than can be captured by any determinate concept, but here any suggestion that a work of art has a core of meaning through which it does this and any illustration of works of art that actually do this are missing. In particular, Schiller does not appeal to his earlier suggestions that works of art may be depictions of freedom (as in the final Kallias letter) or even more precisely depictions of the free will overcoming sensuous feelings (as in his analysis of the tragic hero in “On the Pathetic”) in order to make these abstract statements somewhat more concrete. A fortiori, he does not suggest that we can learn from the depiction of freedom in art the possibility of our own freedom, whether that be the freedom of the imagination itself or the freedom of our moral and political will. In a crucial footnote to the Thirteenth Letter, however, Schiller comes down to earth and reveals that what he expects from aesthetic education is something quite specific, although for that reason all the more plausible. What he worried about is “the pernicious effect, upon both thought and action, of an undue surrender to our sensual nature” on the one hand and “the nefarious influence exerted upon our knowledge and upon our conduct by a preponderance of rationality” on the other. To counter these threats, we need to develop both “maximum changeability and maximum extensity” but also “maximum autonomy and maximum intensity.” The more multi-sided receptivity becomes, the more mobile it is, and the more surface it offers to phenomena, so much more world does a person apprehend, and all the more potentialities does he develop in himself; the more power and depth the personality achieves, the more freedom reason wins, all the more world does the person comprehend, and all the more form does he create outside himself.76

Even more concretely, in the realm of scientific inquiry what we need to learn and what we can learn from aesthetic experience is not to “thrust ourselves out upon [nature], with all the impatient anticipations of our reason,” without having collected adequate data to support our theorizing, while in the realm of conduct, thus of the moral generally and not just the realm of politics, what we need to learn is to be specifically attentive to the particular circumstances, needs, and feelings of others, and

75 76

Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Twenty-First Letter, §§2–3, p. 145. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Thirteenth Letter, §3, p. 87.

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not just to impose our own views upon others without taking all this into account. In the latter case, for example, If we are to become compassionate, helpful, effective human beings, feeling and character must unite, even as wide-open senses must combine with vigor of intellect if we are to acquire experience. How can we, however laudable our precepts, how can we be just, kindly, and human toward others, if we lack the power of receiving into ourselves, faithfully and truly, natures unlike ours, of feeling our way into the situation of others, of making other people’s feelings our own?77

What Schiller’s argument comes down to is the claim that through the cultivation of our aesthetic sensibility we can learn to be attentive to detail and particularity as well as to principle and generality, and that being so attentive is a necessary condition for both theoretical and practical success. And it seems plausible to suppose that this claim is true, thus that aesthetic education may play a valuable rôle in the theoretical and practical development of human beings, in modern society as much as in any other; but this is a far cry from any claim that aesthetic education is sufficient for either theoretical or moral development, or even that it is necessary for such development, as the only or even one indispensable way to cultivate the necessary combination of sensitivities. In the case of the natural sciences, surely both their general principles and their particular techniques of observation must be taught directly, and presumably a well-managed scientific education could also teach the student not to project the principles unchecked by the data. In the case of morals and politics, surely the general principles must be clearly fixed in the mind of those being initiated into the relevant community, as well as a proper empathy for the actual circumstances of others; but while perhaps the latter could be cultivated by aesthetic education, presumably it could also be cultivated directly by suitably edifying moral discourses, and certainly the general principles of morality will still have to be directly taught or elicited. As we saw, Kant recognized these limits on the significance of the cultivation of taste for moral development but also described a wider variety of ways in which the former could be beneficial for the latter. The contribution to moral development that Schiller hopes to derive from aesthetic education is essentially cognitive: Through the sensitivity to particularity that we acquire from aesthetic education we learn to recognize the circumstances, needs, and feelings of others and thereby to apply 77

Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Thirteenth Letter, p. 89n.

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our principles to them appropriately. Kant, however, held that aesthetic experience could give us sensible confirmation of the moral truths we already know through pure reason but also give us emotional support in our attempt to act as we know we should, although in no case does he argue that the support that morality can get from aesthetic experience is indispensable. First, Kant held that dispositions to enjoy certain aesthetic phenomena, to which we have a natural tendency but which we can intentionally cultivate (or injure), can support our disposition to act as morality requires, although, as in the case of naturally occurring but more directly moral sentiments, such as the feeling of sympathy, we must only act upon such dispositions when so doing will in fact lead to the actions that morality commands or permits. Kant invoked this supporting rôle of aesthetic dispositions when he stated that the experiences of the beautiful and the sublime “are purposive in relation to the moral feeling”: “The beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest; the sublime, to esteem it, even contrary to our (sensible) interest.”78 Second, Kant claimed that aesthetic experience can provide us with palpable evidence of the fact of our freedom, which otherwise we postulate only as a condition of the possibility of our moral obligation, and thereby presumably help to prevent our commitment by morality from being undermined by the thought that perhaps we cannot do what we ought to do. This claim was suggested both by Kant’s analysis of the experience of the dynamical sublime, which is an aesthetic experience of the power of our will to resist the threats and blandishments of purely natural forces and to instead determine itself by pure practical reason, and by Kant’s thesis that the beautiful is a symbol of morally good in part because we recognize an analogy between the freedom of the imagination that is essential to the experience of beauty and the freedom of the will that is the condition of the possibility of morality. Third, Kant held that we can interpret the mere existence of natural beauty as evidence that nature is hospitable to our own concerns, and thus take it as evidence that nature will be receptive to the realization of our moral objectives as well, which will again strengthen our commitment to attempting to do what morality requires of us or at least prevent our commitment to do so from being weakened by fear of nature’s hostility rather than hospitality to our moral goals. Finally, Kant noted that the communication of judgments of taste can help us to “discover the art of the reciprocal communication of the ideas of the most educated part” of society “with the 78

Kant, CPJ, General Remark following §29, 5:267.

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cruder, the coordination of the breadth and refinement of the former with the natural simplicity and originality of the latter, and in this way to discover that mean between higher culture and contented nature which constitutes the correct standard” for society in general as well as for taste in particular.79 This suggests that the cultivation of common standards and objects of taste in a society can contribute to the development of feelings of community across the separations of ranks and occupations, as Schiller put it, that can otherwise divide a society. But once again, Kant hardly suggests that the cultivation of a common aesthetic experience is the only way to do this. Thus, although Schiller’s essay “On Grace and Dignity” appears to argue for a greater rôle for feelings in fulfillment of the demands of morality than Kant allows, actually it is only Kant who insists upon moral grounds for striving to realize grace and not just dignity. And while Schiller’s letters On Aesthetic Education insists that aesthetic education is a necessary condition for social justice, Kant, while he certainly does not make the cultivation of taste a necessary let alone sufficient condition for the realization of morality, actually has a broader conception of the contributions that aesthetic experience may make to moral and political development. Further, it may be Kant’s emphasis on the free play of the imagination that saves him from placing excessive demands upon aesthetic experience and education. While Schiller, as we have seen, asserts that human beings are only truly themselves when they play, his conception of play seems remarkably serious and intellectual: the aesthetic condition is one in which the human sensibility and mind are freed from excessive constraint by both matter and form, and in that strictly negative sense it can be described as a state of play. Schiller does not emphasize the creativity of the artist or the creativity of the audience in responding to a work of art, and even when he is at his most concrete about art, as in the 1793 essays, he treats the aesthetic experience more like a cognition of the idea of freedom than as an imaginative experience that is itself an experience of freedom, one that precisely because it is an experience of freedom even from the constraints of moral concepts themselves may be a symbol of and conducive to the development of moral freedom but can be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for it. Nor does he emphasize the emotional impact of art and use that as preparation for a proper rôle for the emotions in the moral life. 79

Kant, CPJ, §60, 5:356.

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Others among Kant’s early readers did adopt Kant’s idea that the free play of the imagination on the part of the artist must be mirrored by a free play on the part of the audience, even though that implies that the artist himself can never be fully in control of the reception of his work. Before we turn to evidence of that, however, we should take a brief look at the last of Schiller’s critical works before he returned to his original calling as a dramatist. This is the profoundly influential essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” published in the final months of 1795. This title of this essay might make it sound as if Schiller will here undertake the integration of the emotional experience of art into his synthesis thus far of the aesthetics of truth and play, but that is not what he does. Rather, Schiller describes the difference between “naïve” art that is an expression of an immediate emotional response to nature, where nature is thought of as “the subsistence of things on their own, being there according to their own immutable laws” – a conception of nature that is reminiscent of the conception of beauty in the Kallias letters – and “sentimental” art, which self-consciously expresses a sense of our own separation from nature and a feeling that the self-subsistent things in nature “are what we were” and “what we should become once more,”80 or a longing for a wholeness with nature that we think humans once had but that we have lost. Although the essay is a veiled description of the difference between his own sensibility and that of Goethe, an understanding between the two that made possible their enduring union of opposites,81 Schiller also identifies naïve poetry with antiquity and sentimental poetry and the sense of alienation from nature from which it begins with modernity; but he does not think that the modern poet could ever simply return from the sentimental to the naïve, because modern man cannot simply return to an earlier, more “natural” form of life. This is by no means entirely bad: The very fact that modern man cannot simply live unreflectively in nature is what allows and forces him and his representative poets to strive for spirituality or the ideal:

80

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Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom in Schiller, Essays, pp. 180–1. See T.J. Reed, “Weimar Classicism: Goethe’s alliance with Schiller,” in Lesley Sharpe, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 101–15, at 108–9. Accounts of the relationship between Schiller and Goethe include Rüdiger Safranksi, Goethe und Schiller: Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Munich: Hanser, 2009), and Katharina Mommsen, Kein Rettungsmittel als die Leibe: Schillers und Goethes Bündnis im Spiegel ihrer Dichtungen (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010).

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Once the human being has entered into the condition characteristic of culture and art has laid its hands on him, that sensuous harmony within him is overcome and he can only express himself as a moral unity, that is to say, as someone striving for unity. The agreement between his feeling and thinking, something that actually took place in his original condition, now exists only ideally. . . . In the original condition of natural simplicity, where the human being still acts as a harmonious nature with all his powers at once, and where consequently his entire nature fully expresses itself in actuality, the most complete possible imitation of the actual is what necessarily makes someone a poet. On the other hand, here in the condition of culture, where the harmonious cooperation of the human being’s entire nature is merely an idea, the elevation of actuality to the ideal, or, what comes to the same, the portrayal of the ideal is what necessarily makes the poet.

For this reason, “The ancient poets touch us through nature, through sensuous truth, through living presence; the modern poets touch us through ideas.”82 “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” is thus an important complement to the letters on Aesthetic Education: It makes clear that even if we accept the previous work’s grand claim that aesthetic education will put us on the path to healing the wounds of modern society, we must also recognize that fully healing those wounds always remains an ideal that we can approach but never fully attain. The Golden Age, if it ever really existed, cannot be completely recaptured. Schiller’s final essay thus tells us not to confuse his view with the nativism of Rousseau, that is, with the idea that the modern arts and sciences bring nothing but unhappiness that we can avoid by reverting to a “natural” form of life. But what “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” is not is an account of sentiments in the response to art, or an account of the emotional impact of art. This essay does not remediate Schiller’s Kantian suppression of this topic in his main aesthetic writings. This essay is a model for the genre of philosophical histories of aesthetics that then flourished for several decades, beginning with Friedrich Schlegel’s On the Study of Greek Poetry of 1797,83 continuing with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s lectures on The Philosophy of Art of 1802–3,84 and culminating in the lectures on “Philosophy of Art or

82

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Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, in Schiller, Essays, p. 201. Friedrich Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, trans. Stuart Barnett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

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Aesthetics” that Hegel gave in Heidelberg in 1817–18 and then Berlin from 1820 to 1829 – lectures that decisively changed the sense of the name “aesthetics” itself from its original meaning of a general science of sensibility that included responses to nature as well as art to its modern meaning as the philosophy of art.85 We will consider all these authors in the next volume. The influence of “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” may also have reached far beyond the next generation of Romantics and idealists, too: In the twentieth century, Theodor Adorno’s view that art always holds nature out as something to which we long to but cannot return seems a direct appropriation of Schiller’s analysis, while conversely, Martin Heidegger’s idea that in aesthetic experience we simply open ourselves up to Being seems like an attempt to return to the naïve, with Being standing in for nature, thus flouting Schiller’s advice. But these too are matters for later chapters, to come in Volume 3.

3. Goethe and Humboldt Goethe It would be difficult to leave Schiller without some comment on the great friend of his final decade, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Although hardly a philosopher – after all, he wrote the immortal lines “Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,/Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum” (“Gray, dear friend, is all theory, and green life’s golden tree”) for Mephistopheles in the greatest of all his works, Faust I,86 and in Der Sammler und die seinigen (The Collector and his Circle) also wrote What a strange thing this philosophy is, especially the new philosophy! To drive into one’s own self, to spy upon the operations of one’s own soul, to shut oneself up inside oneself in order better to understand the world? Is 85

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A compilation of materials from Hegel’s lectures was first edited by H.G. Hotho in 1835 and revised in 1842; the latter is the basis for G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Recently, transcriptions of the original lectures have appeared, including the lectures of 1802–1, in G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesung über Ästhetik, ed. Helmut Schneider (Berlin: Peter Lang, Main, 1995), the lectures of 1823 in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Seifert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003) and the lectures of 1826 in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst oder Ästhetik, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Seifert and Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, “Studierzimmer,” lines 2038–9; in Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. III, ed. Erich Trunz, 8th ed. (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1967), p. 66.

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this the way? Does the hypochondriac see things better because he is always mining and undermining himself? Truly this philosophy seems to me to be a sort of hypochondria, a spurious tendency which has been given a highsounding name.87

Goethe was nevertheless an intimate of not only Schiller but also, previously, Karl Philipp Moritz, and not only gave expression to some of the leading ideas about art of his time in his own work but also both gave a twist to the traditional idea of beauty as a form of truth and also suggested his own form of synthesis between the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of play. But as in his friend Schiller and in Kant, standing behind them both, there is little overt emphasis on the emotional impact of art in his critical writings, although his own works, beginning with the play Götz von Berlichingen and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, both of which had made him famous by the age of twenty-five, certainly had great emotional impact. Goethe was the son of a patrician Frankfurt lawyer, and after an early education in a home filled with painting, he too studied law first at Leipzig and then at Strassburg. After completing his degree, he practiced law with his father for several years, including a stay at the Imperial Court of the Holy Roman Empire in Wetzlar. But he spent much of his time in Leipzig studying literature and listening to Gottsched, while in Strassburg he wrote about the great Gothic cathedral, leading to one of his first publications, an essay “On German Architecture” which he published in a 1773 volume Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (“On German Ways and Art”) edited by Herder, whom Goethe met for the first time during his Strassburg years. Also in 1773, he published the play Götz von Berlichingen, followed the next year by The Sorrows of Young Werther, the two works that made him famous throughout Germany and also brought him to the attention of the young Duke Karl August of SaxonyWeimar, who brought Goethe to his court in 1775. With the exception of a famous trip to Italy in 1786–88 and a few briefer trips, Goethe would remain in Weimar the rest of his life, serving the duke in many capacities, as chief minister, theater director, and even aide-de-camp when the duke commanded a Prussian regiment in a campaign against revolutionary France in 1792. In spite of his court duties, Goethe wrote 87

Goethe, The Collector and His Circle, from John Gage, editor, Goethe on Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 33. The German text of Der Sammler und die seinigen can be found in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, in 40 vols. Division I, vol. 18, Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, ed. Friedmar Apel (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), pp. 676–733.

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constantly, in literature, on art and natural science, and autobiographically, becoming the most famous and probably most prolific man of letters in German history – the late nineteenth-century edition of his complete works ran to 143 volumes.88 In addition to Götz, Werther, and Faust I (1808), Goethe’s most famous literary works included the novels Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–96), the prototype for all later German novels about the relation between the artist and society and more generally for the genre of the Bildungsroman, and Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809); his autobiographical works, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth, or Fiction and Truth, 1811–14, 1833) and Die Italienische Reise (The Italian Journey, 1816–18); and his scientific works On the Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and Theory of Colors (1810). Goethe also published two journals on the visual arts, the Propyläen of 1798–1800 and Kunst und Altertum (Art and Antiquity) from 1816 to his death in 1832. Much of his writing about art appeared in those journals, as well as in his famous correspondence with Schiller, which he finally published in 1829, sharing the proceeds with Schiller’s widow.89 Of course we can here touch upon only a sliver of this vast output. In a detailed study of Goethe’s aesthetics, his scientific writings would be a good place to begin, because his Theory of Colors, an unsuccessful rejection of Isaac Newton’s analysis of white light into the seven-colored

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Goethes Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrag der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, 143 vols. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919). The indispensable biography of Goethe is Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991–2000). A valuable background for Goethe and his associates is W.H. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar 1775–1806 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). A large-scale survey of the literature of Goethe and his period is Hermann August Korff, Geist der Goethezeit: Versuch einer ideellen Entwicklung der klassisch-romantischen Literaturgeschichte, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Weber and Koehler & Amelang, 1923–53). Monographs by several aestheticians who are discussed in their own right later in this work are Benedetto Croce, Goethe (London: Methuen, 1923) and Georg Lukács, Goethe and His Age, trans. Robert Anchor (London: Merlin Press, 1968). See also the essay by Ernst Cassirer, “Goethe and the Kantian Philosophy,” in his Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe, trans. James Gutmann, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), pp. 61–98, as well as his extended treatment of Goethe in Freiheit und Form, pp. 171–268. See also Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, Models of Wholeness: Some Attitudes to Language, Art and Life in the Age of Goethe, ed. Jeremy Adler, Martin Swales, and Ann Weaver (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), and the anthology Goethe und die Kunst, ed. Sabine Schulze (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1994). A special issue of the Goethe Yearbook: Publications of the Goethe Society of North America XVIII (2011) on “Goethe and Idealism” includes Luke Fischer, “Goethe contra Hegel: The Question of the End of Art,” pp. 127–57.

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spectrum revealed by a prism in favor of a theory mirroring the way that different colors are produced out of pigments in the primary colors plus white and black, shows his basic empiricism, his trust of what can be directly presented to the senses, while his theory that all plants (and later animals) have evolved by metamorphosis or evolution from a few basic forms (although Goethe did not add to the general idea of evolution the Darwinian specifics of natural selection from among random mutations) is allied to his idea that art should capture what is “characteristic” in individuals rather than on individuality as such.90 Goethe makes the connection between his approach to nature and his approach to art clear in a passage in the introduction to the Propyläen, his first journal on the arts: “Comparative anatomy has prepared a general concept of organic nature: it leads us from form to form, and by observing organisms closely or distantly related, we rise above them to see their characteristics in an ideal picture.”91 Art is like comparative anatomy, perhaps even just the illustration of comparative anatomy when it comes to the simplest paintings of plants and animals, but still depending upon something like comparative anatomy when it comes to the depiction of human characters, feelings, thoughts, and actions: The artist must portray what is characteristic in these. Goethe’s allegiance to the characteristic is why he rejected the attempt many readers made to correlate the details of Werther’s famous affair with details of his own life, even though the story was suggested to him by an infatuation with a married woman he did experience while at Wetzlar: for Goethe, art was to capture a characteristic or an ideal-type, not simply report particular facts. And Goethe’s commitment to the characteristic is why even his autobiography could be entitled “poetry” or “fiction” as well as “truth”: The work is replete with particular details from his own life up until the time of his relocation to the Weimar court, yet Goethe also shapes the episodes from his own life – crucial moments in his education, his uncertainties about his career, his early infatuations and failures in love – in ways that make them accessible to and representative for many others beyond himself. The idea that art should aim to express what is characteristic in its subject may be taken as Goethe’s version of the aesthetics of truth as modified by his basic empiricism or naturalism: art strives to find something universal in the particular, but a universally valid form that can be manifested directly in experience, not 90

91

For discussion of Goethe’s approach to biology, see Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), Part Three. Goethe on Art, p. 7; Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, p. 463.

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a metaphysical reality lying somewhere beyond immediate experience. The characteristic is Goethe’s idea of the truth expressed by art but is directly opposed to the Platonic idea of the truth pointed to by art or natural beauty as something lying beyond the sensible realm. (And for this reason Goethe’s idea of the characteristic would be rejected by a subsequent Platonist such as Hegel.)92 There might appear to be a Platonic tension between nature and the characteristic in art. In the introduction to the Propyläen, Goethe writes that “From the moment the artist lays his hand to any natural object, that object no longer belongs to nature; indeed, it may be said that in that moment the artist creates it, since he extracts from it the significant, the characteristic, the interesting, or, rather, first confers their value on them.”93 But Goethe does not conceive of anything that lies beyond nature, like a Platonic form but rather conceives of it as an essential form within nature, like an Aristotelian form, that manifests itself in multiple ways and needs the focus of the artist to distinguish what is essential in it from what is accidental. He makes this clear by explaining that the “spiritual” work of the artist is clarifying the characteristic while the artist’s “sensible” work is making this accessible and pleasing to the senses: The spiritual treatment elaborates the subject with reference to its inner coherence, picks out the subordinate themes, and, as the choice of subject generally gives the best criterion of the depth of artistic feeling, so the development of the themes is the measure of its richness, breadth, fullness and human interest. By sensible treatment we mean what makes the work comprehensible and satisfying to the senses, which cannot do without its charms.94

The artist must use his mind to discover what is characteristic in his subject and his talent to present it in a pleasing way to our senses, although the translation does not render the full Kantian flavor of Goethe’s conception of “sensible treatment” – what Goethe actually writes is “faßlich, 92

93 94

See Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, pp. 17–20. Hegel, perhaps choosing not to attack the prestigious Goethe directly, instead attacks an essay on the beauty of art as characteristic by Aloys Hirt (1759–1837) that appeared in Die Horen (“The Graces”) in 1797, one of Schiller’s journals; as we will see, Hirt’s view may have been close to Goethe’s first conception of the characteristic, but Goethe may have subsequently put some distance between his view and Hirt’s. Hirt had become interested in art by the work of Winckelmann and would become the first professor of art history at the university in Berlin upon its founding in 1810. He was thus Hegel’s colleague when Hegel later gave the Lectures on Fine Art. Goethe on Art, pp. 8–9. Goethe on Art, p. 9; Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, p. 466.

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angenehm, erfreulich und durch ein milden Reiz unentbehrlich,” Kantian terms all, although bridging Kant’s gulf between the merely agreeable and the truly beautiful, in a way that as we shall shortly see Goethe could have learned from his anti-Kantian friend Herder rather than from his more Kantian friend Schiller. We could thus take Goethe’s characterization of the twofold spiritual (geistige) and sensible (sinnliche) treatment in art as his version of Kant’s conception of the aesthetic idea as the essence of art and the product of artistic genius gifted at both the discovery and the presentation of profound content, although with Kant’s assumption that the content of an aesthetic idea is a rational idea replaced by Goethe’s conception of the characteristic and Kant’s conception of the presentation of the content of the aesthetic idea as a product of free play replaced by Goethe’s conception of it as immediately agreeable and charming to the senses. Goethe’s distance from Kant’s conception of free play in this introduction is clear in a remarkable passage a few pages after what has just been quoted, where he writes that The worst picture can speak to our perception [Empfindsamkeit, perhaps better translated “sensibility”] and imagination, for it sets them in motion, makes them free, and leaves them to themselves. The best also speaks to our perception, but in a higher language, one, certainly, which has to be understood, but which chains our feelings and our imagination and robs us of our will-power, for we cannot do what we please with the perfect, we are compelled to surrender to it in order to receive ourselves again, raised and ennobled.95

Here Goethe suggests that leaving free play for the imagination of the audience, which presumably would be a response to the free play of the imagination on the part of the audience, is a sign of artistic weakness, not artistic strength, and gives a twist to the aesthetics of perfection that goes back to Leibniz, Wolff, and his Leipzig teacher Gottsched by suggesting that the perfection of a work necessitates the audience’s particular response to it. In all of this Goethe is treating cognition or insight into the characteristic or the essence of natural and human subjects as the primary source of art, with the presentation of such insight in a sensibly pleasing way reduced to the level of “manner” in contrast to deeper “style”: thus in an earlier essay, Goethe wrote that “Just as simple imitation depends upon a quiet existence [Dasein] and comfortable surroundings [Gegenwart], and manner is a facility for grasping superficial appearances, 95

Goethe on Art, pp. 10–11; Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, p. 468.

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so style is based on the profoundest knowledge, on the essence of things insofar as we can recognize it in visible and tangible forms.”96 Even while contrasting “style” to “manner” as insight compared to mere pleasing presentation, however, Goethe continues to make it clear that artistic knowledge is insight into the essential forms of nature as appearance, not insight into anything lying beyond nature. In The Collector and His Circle, however, even though it was published in the second volume of the Propyläen, in 1799, thus only a year after the introduction to the first volume, Goethe seems somewhat friendlier to the Kantian conception of fine art and suggests that artistic success requires a balance – or interplay – between the characteristic and beauty, rather than suggesting that beauty is just the appearance of the characteristic. Like Mendelssohn’s Letters on the Sentiments and his own Werther, this work takes the form of an exchange of letters, and some of those in turn report conversations between two speakers, so it is by no means easy to determine exactly which passages represent Goethe’s own views and which do not. But this exchange does seem to represent Goethe’s rejection of a simplification. First a guest “who has the reputation of a skilful connoisseur” (in fact, the critic Aloys Hirt)97 is reported as stating the equation of beauty with the characteristic without qualification: “Before we go on this quest,” said he, “it will be necessary to examine this word ‘beauty’ more closely, with its derivation. ‘Beauty’ (Schönheit) comes from ‘Appearance’ (Schein): it is simply an appearance, and not worthy to be the object of art. Only the perfectly characteristic deserves to be called beautiful: without character there is no art.”

But the author of the letters, his biological imagery putting beyond doubt that he is speaking for Goethe himself, answers with a subtler conception of the relation between the characteristic and beauty: Struck by this way of expressing it, I answered: “Granted (though it has not been proved) that beauty must be characteristic, it follows nevertheless from this only that character lies at the root of beauty, and by no means that they are identical. Character bears to the beautiful the same relation as the skeleton to the living man. No one will deny that bone-structure is the foundation of all highly organized forms of life. It consolidates and defines the form, but it is not the form itself, still less it is the cause of that final manifestation, which as both the concept and the outer clothing of an organized unity we call beauty.”98 96 97 98

Goethe on Art, p. 22, translation modified; Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, p. 227. See Gage’s note in Goethe on Art, p. 72. Goethe on Art, pp. 48–9; Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, pp. 701–2.

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Here Goethe suggests that more than insight into essences in appearance is necessary for beauty in art, but also a relation between “the concept and the outer clothing,” thus a harmony between them. Here Goethe seems to come closer to the Kantian synthesis, although he does not retract his earlier animadversion against the Kantian concept of the freedom of the imagination. The exchange between the guest speaking for Hirt and the narrator speaking for Goethe continues in the next letter. Here the guest asserts that “What I cannot grasp with my understanding does not exist for me,” but the narrator responds “Yet man is not only a creature of thought, but also of feeling. He is a whole, a union of various intimately connected powers, and the work of art addresses itself to this whole, to this rich unity, this simple variety in him.”99 Here it seems as if Goethe is insisting upon the emotional impact of art, thus now pointing the way to a synthesis of knowledge, beauty, and feeling in our experience of art, not just a synthesis of knowledge and beauty, thus, while without accepting the notion of free play, nevertheless coming to the threefold approach to aesthetic experience that only a few others had reached. In what follows, however, he seems again to stress only the necessity of both insight into character and beauty for the senses, thus to back off from a threefold synthesis: The human soul is exalted when it reverences and adores, when it elevates an object and is in its turn elevated. But it cannot long remain in this state. The concept of character leaves it cold. The Ideal raises it above itself, but now it must return to itself again, and would gladly enjoy again the affection it felt for the individual, without returning to some limited view; and it will no longer forgo the significant which elevates the spirit. What would become of it now, if beauty did not step in and successfully solve the riddle? First she warms and animates knowledge, then breathes her softening influence and heavenly charm over the significant and elevated, and brings them back to us again. A beautiful work of art has completed the circle; it becomes an individual again, and we can embrace [it] with affection and make it our own.100

Here Goethe complicates matters by now shifting between two senses of “character” and “ideal,” his own special sense of the characteristic as essential form and the ordinary sense of character as a person’s moral disposition. But the message seems clear enough: since we are, as Kant would say, both intelligible and sensible beings, art needs to appeal to 99 100

Goethe on Art, p. 54; Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, pp. 708–9. Goethe on Art, pp. 56–7; Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, pp. 711–12.

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both our intellect and our senses, thus needs to present a harmony between content and form, or between universal and individual, as Schiller would say. This seems more like Kant’s twofold synthesis than like a threefold synthesis – Goethe is stressing the necessity of beauty as what appeals to our senses, not what appeals to our heart – though again without any concession that beauty requires a free play of our mental powers; instead, beauty seems to be a matter of more direct effect on our senses. A natural response to Goethe’s position could thus have been to argue that beauty requires not just a direct effect of objects on our senses but the play of our imaginations with their appearances, and to emphasize the effect of art on our hearts as well as our senses. But Goethe’s position would be more generally accepted than amplified: Goethe’s hostility to the idea of free play would be shared by the German Idealists Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, and while Hegel would reject Hirt’s version of the characteristic as sufficient for beauty, he would accept something like Goethe’s refined conception of beauty as the Ideal in sensible appearance – although his would lead him to his famous thesis of the “end of art,” to which it certainly did not lead Goethe. Schopenhauer, who moved at least briefly in the older Goethe’s Weimar circle, was also deeply influenced by Goethe, and we will see that Schopenhauer’s conception of “Platonic Ideas” as the basis of beauty is at least as much influenced by Goethe’s idea of the characteristic as it is by anything in Plato. But before we can turn to these figures, we must first look at the work of another intimate of Schiller and Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and then look at the critique of Kant and Schiller by one other denizen of late eighteenth-century Weimar, none other than Herder, now at the end of his career rather than, as when we first encountered him, at the beginning.

Von Humboldt In 1798, the Prussian diplomat and polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), brother of the equally talented explorer, naturalist, and geophysicist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), completed a lengthy essay on Goethe’s 1797 poem Hermann und Dorothea of love across social boundaries set against the background of the 1792 invasion of the Rhineland by revolutionary French forces, which stood in for the treatise in aesthetics that he had planned but never wrote. Von Humboldt had been educated in Göttingen, visited Paris in the immediate aftermath

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of the Revolution of 1789, served in the Prussian legal service, and had already written his great essay on The Limits of State Action that would provide the model for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty when it was finally published in complete form, posthumously, in 1854,101 all before moving to Jena in 1794, where he became intimate with Schiller and facilitated Schiller’s friendship with Goethe. Following his years in Jena, von Humboldt and his family would live in Paris, with trips to Spain where he researched the culture of the Basques, the subject of one of his later works;102 from 1802 to 1808 von Humboldt was the Prussian ambassador to the Vatican; in 1809 and 1810 he was Prussian minister for culture and education, during which period he reformed Prussian schools and established the royal university in Berlin; and from 1810 to 1819 he was Prussian ambassador to Austria, where he was heavily involved in engaging the Austrians in the Grand Coalition against Napoleon and in the Treaty of Vienna that ended the Napoleonic era. After 1819, von Humboldt lived privately at his family estate at Tegel, outside of Berlin, devoting himself to scholarship, above all to his great work on “The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind.”103

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Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, ed. J.W. Burrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); parts of the book had appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1792 and in Schiller’s Neue Thalia in the following years; see p. vii. Die Vasken: Bemerkungen auf einer Reise durch Biscaya und das französische Basquenland im Frühling des Jahres 1810, nebst Untersuchungen über die Vaskische Sprache und Nation, und eine kurze Darstellung ihrer Grammatik und ihres Wörtervorraths (“Remarks on a Journey through Biscaya and the French Basque Country in the Spring of 1801, with Investigations of the Basque Language and Nation, and a Brief Presentation of its Grammar and Vocabulary”), in Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schriften zur Altertumskunde und Ästhetik, Werke in Fünf Bänden, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel, vol. II (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), pp. 418–627. Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, trans. Peter Heath with an introduction by Hans Aarsleff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); this work is the introduction to a three-volume work On the Kawi Language on the Island of Java, published, again posthumously, by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences from 1836 to 1839 (see p. vii). In this paragraph I have drawn biographical information from Tilmann Borsche, Wilhelm von Humboldt (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1990), pp. 19–29 and 171–3. Borsche devotes a chapter of his book to von Humboldt’s aesthetics (pp. 122–35). Classical works on von Humboldt include Rudolf Haym, Wilhelm von Humboldt: Lebensbild und Charakteristik (Berlin: R. Gaertner, 1856), and Eduard Spranger, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Humanitätsidee (Berlin: Reuter & Reichardt, 1909) and Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Reform des Bildungswesens (Berlin: Reuter & Reichardt, 1910).

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Von Humboldt wrote to Schiller that his “entire definition of art” in the essay on Hermann und Dorothea,104 “indeed the point of view itself, is your indisputable property.”105 The essay gives more emphasis to the imagination than Schiller does but shares the objectivist ambitions of Schiller’s Kallias letters to Körner and the educational ambitions of Schiller’s letters on Aesthetic Education. For von Humboldt, the function of the imagination (Einbildungskraft) is to capture the truth or essence of reality in an image (Bild) or an ideal; von Humboldt’s conception of the imagination is thus indicative of the resurgence of the aesthetics of truth, which we also saw in Goethe and which would dominate German aesthetics in the Romantic and Idealist periods. But although von Humboldt does not emphasize the potentially complementary idea of free play, one thing that von Humboldt clearly does adopt from Kant is the idea that the imagination of the artist – Kant’s genius – must be a stimulus to the imagination of the audience for art, that there must be activity on the part of the audience as well as of the artist. Nobody else in the period kept this Kantian principle so firmly in view, perhaps because so many of the other theorists of the time either were or at least fancied themselves to be creative artists, typically poets, or were so closely allied with the artists that they took their point of view more than that of the audience. Von Humboldt began the essay with the Schillerian pronouncement that the aim of art is the “education of the human being,” die Bildung des Menschen. The untranslatable term Bildung also means “cultivation” and “formation,” and is of course connected to the terms Bild and Einbildungskraft, and von Humboldt’s theory is essentially that art contributes to Bildung by presenting the essence of the possibilities for human character in a Bild that is isolated out of all the messy and often irrelevant details of real life by the Einbildungskraft; for him the imagination is therefore not so much a power of sheer invention as a power of heightened perception, the ability to grasp what is essential in reality, in particular “what is characteristic of the human mind in its possible situations and in the real variations which experience displays,”106 combined with a power of expression to stimulate others to their own grasp of this essence or idea. This is what Goethe achieves in his poem, von Humboldt 104

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Originally Über Göthes Hermann und Dorothea (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1799), reprinted in von Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, vol. II, pp. 125–356. Letter from von Humboldt to Schiller of 12 July 1798, cited from von Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, vol. 5, p. 405. Von Humboldt, Über Goethes Hermann und Dorothea, Introduction, in Werke, vol. 2, p. 128.

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argues: “In the mere depiction of a simple action we recognize the true and complete image of the world and of humanity”; for the reader of the poem, “Life in its greatest and most important relationships and the human being in all the significant moments of its existence suddenly stands before him, and he sees through them with living clarity.”107 The idea that the experience of the work of art arouses in the reader a state of mind analogous to but not dictated by the state of mind of the artist is Kantian, but the idea that this state of mind is one of heightened perception of what is essential to mankind rather than one of invention reflects von Humboldt’s commitment to an aesthetics of truth rather than play, indeed an aesthetics of truth close to Goethe’s own aesthetics of the “characteristic.” Von Humboldt’s designation of the source of the artist’s Bild as imagination rather than insight is only a verbal difference between him and Goethe. Von Humboldt stresses repeatedly (perhaps not surprisingly, Schiller found the essay, twice as long as Goethe’s poem itself, somewhat “too exhaustive” and “scholastic”)108 that the task of art is to transform reality into a clear image and that the imagination is the faculty by means of which the artist does this. The “simplest concept of art” is thus that “The field that the poet cultivates as his property is the field of the imagination. . . . Nature, which otherwise provides only an object for sensible intuition, he must rework into material for the fantasy. To transform the actual into an image is the most general task of all art, to which every other must be brought back more or less directly.” He says that the artist “must eradicate every recollection of reality in our soul and preserve only the fantasy alone,”109 but what he means is that the artist must strip away the irrelevant details of quotidian reality in order to allow what is essential to his characters and therefore instructive for us to shine forth. What the imagination or fantasy does is to “exhibit clearly pure forms of character, mere figures which bear their nature undistorted by particular, changing circumstances.” Through the imagination, “Nature is first beautified and ennobled by art, the concept of the ideal first receives its higher significance of that which no reality can attain and no expression can exhaust.”110 Here von Humboldt’s language is clearly reminiscent 107 108

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Von Humboldt, Über Goethes Hermann und Dorothea, in Werke, vol. 2, section I, p. 134. Letter of Schiller to Goethe, 27 June 1798, cited in von Humboldt, Werke, vol. 5, p. 407. Von Humboldt, Über Goethes Hermann und Dorothea, in Werke, vol. 2, section III, pp. 136–7. Von Humboldt, Über Goethes Hermann und Dorothea, in Werke, vol. 2, section V, pp. 140–1.

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of Kant’s description of aesthetic ideas but without any suggestion that we play with these ideas; through the imagination we simply perceive or cognize them in their purest form. Von Humboldt’s claim that art “beautifies” and “ennobles” nature is also reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s rejection of Batteux’s thesis that art imitates nature; its point is rather to bring out the ideal form that lies behind or beneath all the details of mere nature. Von Humboldt also makes his allegiance to Schiller’s objectivist ambitions unmistakable when he says that “every artist must without exception be objective,” thus that what we find in art is “a higher level of objectivity; we glimpse the pure forms of sensible objects.”111 Indeed, in a section on “The Imitation of Nature” that suggests that refuting the simple theory of imitation that Batteux was supposed to have defended is one of his aims – although as we saw Batteux actually held that art should imitate the spirit but not the letter of nature – von Humboldt goes so far as to suggest that his conception of the imagination or fantasy as grasping the ideal behind the details of actual nature should supersede the traditional conception of beauty: One has recommended that the artist imitate only beautiful nature and that he only do this beautifully. But the concept of the beautiful causes much misunderstanding, it is of thoroughly indeterminate extension. . . . That of the ideal, by contrast, is thoroughly determinate. For everything is ideal that the fantasy generates in its pure self-activity, which thus possesses complete fantasy-unity. Now this is always a closed magnitude, although, since no artist can hope to attain it entirely, the strength of fantasy in particular individuals also admits of innumerable degrees – although only in the execution, not in the demand.112

Here von Humboldt seems to reject the entire eighteenth-century project of defining the beautiful as hopelessly indeterminate rather than accepting Kant’s idea that the definition of the beautiful is that it is essentially indeterminate; on his view the concept of the ideal is determinate, although of course individuals vary in their ability to grasp it. With the latter claim, von Humboldt may also mean to leave behind the entire eighteenth-century project of establishing the universal validity of judgments of taste, or establishing a standard of taste. Von Humboldt continues his attack upon a traditional conception of imitation by claiming that imagination “must not be a passive imitation but rather a self-active transformation of nature.”113 But here his view is 111

112 113

Von Humboldt, Über Goethes Hermann und Dorothea, in Werke, vol. 2, section XIV, pp. 159, 161. Von Humboldt, Über Goethes Hermann und Dorothea, in Werke, vol. 2, section VII, p. 144. Von Humboldt, Über Goethes Hermann und Dorothea, in Werke, vol. 2, section VII, p. 144.

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the Kantian one that the imaginative activity of the artist must stimulate the imaginative activity of the audience, even though his conception of this imaginative activity is more purely cognitive than creative. Thus he writes that “The secret of the artist is to inflame the imagination through the imagination. For in order to necessitate our imagination to generate the object that he depicts purely from itself it must come forth freely from his own.”114 He also makes this Kantian point with a scientific metaphor, perhaps a rare instance of influence from his younger brother: However incomprehensible the procedure of the artist is, something – and precisely what is essential – always remains therein that the artist himself cannot understand and the critic can never pronounce; yet it is always certain that the artist starts with nothing else in mind but to transform something real into an image, but that he soon learns that this is only possible by means of a sort of living communication, that he as it were lets an electrical spark flow from his fantasy into the fantasy of others.115

While reconceiving of the imagination as a power for cognition of the essence or ideal of nature, above all human nature, von Humboldt also fully accepts the Kantian idea of the genius as one whose imagination can spark the imagination of others. On both points, von Humboldt’s position is indicative of what is to follow. It was suggested earlier that von Humboldt adopts Schiller’s educational ambitions. We saw earlier that Schiller’s grand claim that moral progress can come about only through aesthetic education comes down to the more mundane although therefore more plausible claim that the development of the capacity for aesthetic experience is a way to heighten sensitivity to the particular objects, that is, particular human beings, to which general moral principles must be applied. However, von Humboldt’s position that Einbildungskraft is the key to Bildung depends upon more of an emphasis on the emotional impact of art than we have seen in Schiller or for that matter Goethe, for it comes down to the claim that the experience of art heightens the capacity for emotion, or for being touched by the portrayal of others, which is in turn a necessary condition of human development, especially moral development: All the threads of human feelings come together in us. . . . The completion and harmony that we glimpse before us come over into ourself and reveal 114

115

Von Humboldt, Über Goethes Hermann und Dorothea, in Werke, vol. 2, section IV, pp. 138–9. Von Humboldt, Über Goethes Hermann und Dorothea, in Werke, vol. 2, section VI, p. 143.

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themselves through repose (Ruhe) and emotion (Rührung) – both of which may perhaps be regarded as the most general effect of every great work of art: through repose, because in this condition nothing disturbing, nothing jarring can take place; through emotion, because whenever we look into a certain depth of nature or humanity the heart is always seized. . . . Both together prove that we never more clearly penetrate and more energetically connect humanity and fate, these two enormous objects that comprehend everything that can touch (rühren) a human heart than in these moments. But the spirit cannot be transposed into such a wonderful and incomprehensible mood . . . except when, leaving all reality behind, it is entranced into a world of ideals, in which it recognizes nature only in its elements and its powers.116

By stripping away all that is unessential and presenting human characters to us in their purest forms, art allows us to feel an empathy with fictional characters that must carry over into our relations with real characters. Once again, against Plato’s insistence that art typically arouses morally inappropriate emotions it is insisted that art arouses the morally most appropriate emotions. So while von Humboldt does not emphasize the emotional impact of art in his cognitivist analysis of beauty itself as the presentation of an idealized Bild or image of reality, he does emphasize it in his account of the effect of art on our Bildung or development. In this way, von Humboldt may be regarded as having at least implied a synthesis of the aesthetics of truth, in its Goethean form, with the aesthetics of emotional impact. But, again, and in this regard unlike Schiller, there is not even a breath of the idea of free play in his work, and in this way von Humboldt would be followed by the next generation of philosophers from Jena and Weimar, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, all of whom would omit or explicitly reject the idea of play from their analyses of aesthetic experience. The concept of free play was not merely rejected but drew the ire of one more figure in findesiècle Weimar, namely, the now aging Herder, still occupying his official positions but eclipsed by the younger stars such as his one-time protegé Goethe and the popular Schiller. One of his very last works was a blast against Kantian aesthetics. So we need to turn to Herder again before we can start our discussion of nineteenthcentury aesthetics.

116

Von Humboldt, Über Goethes Hermann und Dorothea, in Werke, vol. 2, section XI, p. 154.

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4. Herder II: Herder’s Critique of Kant Herder, who as we saw had done the bulk of his work in aesthetics long before Kant published the Critique of the Power of Judgment, had been embittered against his former teacher ever since Kant’s critical review of the first volumes of his own magnum opus, the Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity (1784–91).117 Herder expressed his displeasure with two hostile works on Kant’s first and third critiques, A Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason (1799) and Kalligone (1800), that is, “The Birth of Beauty.”118 Kalligone, published only three years before Herder’s death and after his renown had been eclipsed by the new generation of stars in Weimar and Jena, Fichte and Schelling as well as Goethe and Schiller, sometimes just rants. Yet it also makes some important criticisms of Kant. The theme of Kalligone may be summed up with this statement from its table of contents: “Nothing harms immature taste more than if one makes everything into play.”119 Herder’s critique came too late for the now elderly Kant, who was desperately but ultimately unsuccessfully trying to finish a restatement of his entire philosophy before his powers gave out,120 to respond to it. If he had been able to respond, he would have had no good reply to some of Herder’s criticisms; but if Herder had had more sympathy for Kant’s expository method in the third Critique, he might have realized that on some of the central substantive points of his criticism the distance between himself and Kant is not as great as it initially seems. In particular, Herder’s representation of Kant’s aesthetics as a pure theory of mental play mistakes Kant’s initial analysis of the simplest form of natural beauty for his whole theory of natural and artistic beauty. If Herder had recognized the complexity of Kant’s analyses of our experiences of adherent and artistic beauty, that is to say, of our experiences of the decorative and fine arts, and even of Kant’s theory of 117

118

119 120

Kant’s review of the first two volumes of Herder’s work is translated by Allen Wood in Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, pp. 121–42. Both in Herder, Schriften zur Literature und Philosophie 1792–1800, ed. Hans Dieter Irmscher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998); Kalligone is at pp. 641–964. Neither book has been translated into English. Herder, Kalligone, p. 660. The manuscripts of Kant’s attempt to write a “transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics” that was gradually turning in a restatement of all of transcendental idealism are preserved in volumes 21 and 22 of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften; an abridged translation is Immanuel Kant, Opus postumum, ed. Eckart Förster, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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natural beauty itself after it had been complicated by the addition of his theories of intellectual interest and aesthetic ideas, he might have been able to see that Kant was in fact attempting to bridge the gulf between the aesthetics of free play and the more traditional theory of aesthetic experience as the sensory apprehension of truth that Herder was himself defending. At the same time, it should be recognized that Herder’s pervasive attack on the Kantian idea of the disinterestedness of aesthetic experience and judgment also represents a recognition of the emotional impact of art that Kant had not been prepared to allow. Herder’s criticisms of Lessing and Riedel from thirty years earlier prefigure several of his objections to Kant: he objects to Kant’s abstract method in aesthetics, to his failure to emphasize adequately the rôle of the senses and the differences among them in his account of aesthetic experience and in his classification of the arts, to an inadequate recognition of the importance of truth, indeed truth in several senses, in our experience of art, and to what he sees as Kant’s inadequate emphasis on the way in which aesthetic experience gives us a feeling of being alive, a charge that stands in for the claim that Kant excludes the emotions in general from our responses to both natural and artistic beauty. But what is missing from Herder’s early critique is an objection to the aesthetics of play, for the simple reason that this had not yet become prominent in Lessing and Riedel (although as we saw it had been hinted at by Mendelssohn and would soon be made more prominent by Sulzer). In turning now to Herder’s criticisms of Kant in Kalligone, we will have to add that objection to his list of charges. Kalligone is a polemic against Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, more precisely against its first half, the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment,” loosely structured in parallel with Kant’s work, although with numerous digressions, sometimes even in dialogue form, and statements of Herder’s own positions. Like Herder’s polemic with Lessing in the Groves of Criticism, his response to Kant’s work is longer than its target and we can only touch upon some of its highlights here. Kalligone attacks Kant’s methodology and his neglect of the concrete rôle of the senses in a discipline which, as defined by Baumgarten, whom Herder admired, is supposed to focus precisely on that. In an expression of the naturalism that pervades his work, Herder also attacks Kant’s appeals to the “supersensible” in his interpretation of aesthetic experiences, especially the experience of sublimity. But Herder’s most vehement objections are to Kant’s insistence upon the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment and his exclusion of a rôle for determinate concepts in the free play of

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the mental powers in aesthetic experience, which Herder sees as excluding any rôle for the knowledge of truth in aesthetic experience. After a comment on Herder’s attack on Kant’s methodology, we can consider Herder’s criticisms of the disinterestedness and nonconceptuality of aesthetic judgment, and then note his criticisms of the nonsensual and transcendent rather than immanent character of Kant’s aesthetics. Herder prefaces Kalligone with an attack upon what he calls “transcendental influenza” and its infection of the young, thinking no doubt not only of Kant but also of the influence of Schiller in Weimar and of Fichte and Schelling at the university a few miles down the road in Jena. Herder blames Kant for opening the door to “a realm of endless chimerae, blind intuitions, fantasms, empty spelling-words, so-called transcendental ideas and speculations,”121 a made-up philosophical language which ignores real human speech and thus the real structure of human thought, since, according to Herder’s deepest belief, “The language of human beings carries their forms of thought in it; we think, sometimes abstractly, only in and with language.”122 (Had Herder been able to see the later work of von Humboldt, that would have remained immune from his criticism.) In Herder’s view, “We should, without all ‘Transcendental taste, whose principle resides in the supersensible substratum of mankind in absolute unconsciousness,’ form our taste here below in consciousness, learn to know the laws and analogies of nature, and use neither the art nor the science of the beautiful for a game [Spiel] or for idolatry, but should use them with joyful seriousness for the cultivation [Bildung] of mankind.”123 From the outset of his work, Herder rejects a transcendental method in aesthetics and shows his hostility to any reduction of aesthetic experience to a form of play rather than to a completely serious experience of truth that is essential to human development. In the body of the text, Herder’s rejection of transcendental aesthetics often remains beneath the surface of his specific objections to Kant’s various claims. But one place where it clearly emerges is at the end of of Kalligone, which deals with the “Agreeable and the Beautiful.” Here Herder summarizes his polemic by expounding Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the form of thirteen “postulates,” and then questioning each. The last of these postulates sums up Kant’s view in the thesis that “The power of judgment for taste consists in judgments, rests on the 121 122 123

Herder, Kalligone, p. 644. Herder, Kalligone, p. 647. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 653–4.

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common sense, and operates with universal validity toward universal communication; otherwise, a free play of the powers of the human soul.” To this summary, in what is supposed to be Kant’s voice, Herder replies in his own voice: That this empty, hollow, pernicious theory, which has arisen from need, a critique without any critique, has not originated in any serious study of the beautiful, whether in objects or in sentiments thereof, needs no proof. It has come about a priori from a supposedly empty spot; a play of wit and acuity that is purposelessly-purposive and purposively-purposeless.124

By saying that Kant’s theory has arisen a priori from “need” and to fill a “supposedly empty spot,” Herder presumably refers to Kant’s suggestion in the Introduction to the third Critique that since there are a priori principles for understanding and (practical) reason, there should be one for the power of judgment, the third of the higher powers of cognition, as well.125 He takes Kant to have decided in advance of and without any serious study of aesthetic objects and experience – the two prerequisites for any useful definitions in aesthetics according to Herder’s earlier criticism of Riedel – that there is an a priori foundation for aesthetics, and that it lies in a free play of mental powers that are universal among human beings and therefore yield universally valid judgments of beauty or other judgments of taste. Herder scorns Kant’s theory of free play by saying that it is itself a mere play of wit, and jeers Kant’s claim that this free play is purposive but without a specific purpose by suggesting that it is itself as purposeless as it is purposive. It is no doubt unfair of Herder to accuse Kant of arriving at his theory completely a priori; Kant’s language in the Introduction suggests rather that he is merely asking whether there is an a priori principle for aesthetic judgment analogous to the a priori principles of understanding and reason – he says that “one has reason to presume, by analogy, that [the power of judgment] too should contain in itself a priori, if not exactly its own legislation, then still a proper principle of its own for seeking laws”126 – and that this question will be answered only in the following body of the work. As far as Kant’s subsequent attempt to answer his question is concerned, however, it is fair of Herder to claim that Kant proceeds with little, indeed virtually no, detailed criticism of particular works of art and of our experiences of them, though it could 124 125 126

Herder, Kalligone, pp. 747–8. See Kant, CPJ, Introduction, section III, 5:177. Kant, CPJ, Introduction, section III, 5:177.

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be argued that this is work for critics like Lessing or Herder himself, not for a philosopher like Kant. It is less clear that Kant proceeds without any close examination of our sentiments (Empfindungen) in aesthetic experience. This charge may be a response to Kant’s exposition of his aesthetic theory in the form of an analysis of the logic of judgments of taste rather than in the form of a direct description of the feelings or experiences on which such judgments are supposed to be based, but Kant’s theory as a whole certainly combines a logic of aesthetic judgments with a phenomenology of aesthetic experiences. Whether Kant’s restriction of the sentiments that are proper foundations of judgments of taste to pleasure and pain to the exclusion of all charms and emotions is reasonable is of course another, a substantive rather than methodological, question. Having objected to Kant’s supposedly a priori method in aesthetics, Herder also objects to Kant’s attempts to read transcendent rather than immanent significance into aesthetic experience. This objection is central to Herder’s critiques of Kant’s accounts of the sublime and of the beautiful as the symbol of the morally good. In his own interpretation of the experience of the sublime, Herder stresses that what is central is not the incompletable effort to grasp something that exceeds the boundaries of human imagination and reason alike, but rather the effect on our own feelings of admiring something high and mighty. Herder locates the significance of the experience of the sublime in the feelings of empowerment it brings to us, not in any intimations of a supersensible realm it might be thought to yield. There is a similar thrust to Herder’s critique of Kant’s explanation of why the beautiful is a symbol of the morally good. Herder interprets Kant to argue that the beautiful is such a symbol because our experience of it “is related to something in the subject itself and outside of it which is not nature, also not freedom, but yet connected with the ground of the latter, namely the supersensible, in which the theoretical faculty is unified with the practical in a common and unknown way.” He responds: “The correspondence of objects with our powers, the harmony of our powers with the objects, does not refer us beyond but keeps us firmly within the boundaries of nature; and where is the moral in this supersensible-arrogant feeling?” – that is, within Kant’s “supersensible-arrogant” interpretation of the moral significance of aesthetic feeling? And in the conclusion of this passage, Herder cannot refrain from reiterating his underlying view that Kant’s theory of an “understanding- and conceptless but yet universally valid judging,

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grounded in an objectless play of imagination and communication,” is the “grave of all genuine knowledge, critique, and sentiment.”127 Herder’s criticism of Kant’s introduction of the supersensible into his explication of the moral significance of the experiences of the sublime and the beautiful cannot be assessed separately from the general critique of Kantian moral philosophy that he also intimates in Kalligone.128 Kant certainly thought that in his account of the experiences of the sublime and of the beautiful as a symbol of the morally good he had succeeded in describing experiences that would have a positive and uplifting, not a cramping and restricting effect on our psychology and moral development, because he thought it would be uplifting for us to realize that we have a theoretical reason whose ambitions exceed the boundaries of our sense-based imagination, a practical reason capable of formulating the moral law in all its purity, and a freedom of the noumenal will that allows us to act in accordance with that moral law no matter what our prior history may seem to imply. Herder’s objection is not really to Kant’s account of the psychological impact of an aesthetic presentation of the elements of this moral theory, but to the moral theory itself. We cannot adjudicate that dispute here. But we should note that in Herder’s own account of the experience of the sublime, he intimates that the observation of something objectively elevated has a subjectively uplifting effect on us, thus that in this aesthetic experience there is a parallel between the structure of the object of the experience and the emotional effect of the experience itself. This is a crucial premise of Herder’s general theory of aesthetic experience as an experience of well-being arising from a perception of the true order of nature, which he opposes to his interpretation of Kant’s theory of the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment as an insistence upon the complete detachment of aesthetic experience from all feeling of life. Before we turn to that central issue, however, we may note Herder’s objection that Kant’s aesthetics does not pay sufficient attention to the concrete rôle of the senses in aesthetic experience. The charge of insensitivity to the specificity of the senses was at the heart of Herder’s early aesthetics, beginning with his critique of Lessing, and it manifests itself in various ways in his critique of Kant. One point at which it is particularly clear is in his objection to Kant’s scheme for the classification of the fine arts, a scheme based on the differing capacities of different media for 127 128

Herder, Kalligone, pp. 954–5. See Herder, Kalligone, pp. 908–12.

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meaning, tone, and gesture that Herder claims “throws us back into the old chaos.” Kant’s basic division is between the verbal (redende) and the formative or visual (bildende) arts, and Herder says that Kant’s account of the “so-called verbal arts [is] built upon a word-play, which makes them both129 into play, and not in the technical sense of this word; and about the formative arts as well as about the arts that effect sentiments nothing is said that serves for the essence of each and the essence of all.”130 In contrast, Herder argues that any division of the arts as well as any account of the way in which different arts need to be cultivated and contribute to our overall cultivation and development must attend to the specificity of our senses. For Herder, any classification of the arts as well as any theory of aesthetic education and the contribution of aesthetic education to general education must be based upon a firm grasp of the differences as well as the similarities among sight, hearing, touch, speech, and song (for that too is among the arts of the tongue), and in his view Kant does not have that grasp. We may now turn to the two main topics of Herder’s criticism, Kant’s theory of the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment and of the conceptand purposeless play of imagination and understanding as the basis of such judgment. Herder had already expressed doubt about disinterestedness as a fundamental aesthetic category in his polemic with Riedel in the Fourth Grove. There he had rejected Riedel’s definition of the beautiful as “that which can please without an interested aim [interessierte Absicht] and which also can please if we do not possess it.”131 At that time, however, Herder’s objection seemed to be only that the concept of disinterestedness is not “original,” that is, that disinterestedness by itself cannot explain our pleasure in the beautiful and thus could at best be a consequence of some more fundamental explanation of beauty. In Kalligone, however, he argues much more broadly that our pleasure in beauty is not disinterested, but rather that it is intimately connected with our most fundamental interest, our interest in life itself. He does this by rejecting Kant’s distinction between the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, arguing that all of these notions are intimately connected and that they all reflect our fundamental interest in enjoying a harmonious, well-adapted life. Since for Kant the exclusion of charm and emotion from proper aesthetic response depends on the assumption that they are 129

130 131

The referent of Herder’s “both” is unclear; he could be referring to Kant’s division of the verbal arts into poetry and oratory. Herder, Kalligone, p. 939. Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 291.

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merely agreeable, Herder’s rejection of Kant’s rigid distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable is also a rejection of Kant’s exclusion of emotional impact from the proper responses to natural and artistic beauty. The first step in Herder’s argument is to reject Kant’s identification of agreeableness with sensory gratification narrowly understood. For Herder, the agreeable (angenehm) is what actually liberates and strengthens him and gives him a feeling of liberation and strength, of not merely being alive but of living freely and strongly. This feeling can come through the engagement of any or all of the senses: “whatever preserves, promotes, expands, in short is harmonious with the feeling of my existence, each of my senses gladly accepts that” – Herder’s verb here is nimmt . . . an, for he derives angenehm from annehmen, and thus equates the “agreeable” with that which we “accept” – “appropriates that to itself, and finds it agreeable.”132 What gives us such feelings is moreover universally pleasing, because “well-being, welfare, health” are the “ground and end of the existence of every living thing. . . . We all desire well-being, and whatever promotes this well-being in any way is agreeable.”133 With the agreeable so broadly conceived, it is then easy for Herder to suggest the beautiful cannot be rigidly separated from it, but must rather be more like a species of it, namely, that which gives us such agreeable feelings of well-being through the “noble senses,” through figures, colors, tones, and the re-creation of all of these through the artificial signs of literary language. To be sure, there are specific contexts in which we might call something that is disagreeable good, or something that is beautiful disagreeable, but these are the exceptions, not the rule – a medicine that is good for one, for example, may be disagreeable.134 But although the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, which Kant construed as three fundamentally “different relations of representations to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure,”135 do have to be distinguished in certain contexts, they nevertheless are all expressions of our pleasure in a free and healthy life. Given this assumption, it is then not hard for Herder to argue that so far from being disinterested, our pleasure in beauty is necessarily of the greatest interest to us:

132 133 134 135

Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 291. Herder, Kalligone, p. 668. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 672–3n. Kant, CPJ, §5, 5:209.

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Beauty however has interest; indeed everything good has interest only through it. . . . Interest is the soul of beauty as it is of the good and the true. Take away from it that through which it attracts and binds us, or, what is the same, that through which it communicates to us; what then do you have to do with it? Give it interest, and a tale of Mother Goose pleases more than a boring epic of heroism. Interest in the beautiful; is there are purer interest? In contrast to that, what is cold self-interest, philosophical pride, arrogant self-love?136

Now in this passage, while arguing that the beautiful necessarily interests us, Herder also insists that the beautiful does not appeal to self-interest or self-love: the pleasure and interest in the genuinely beautiful as well as the agreeable and good is universal, not personal or idiosyncratic. It could well be argued that this is all that Shaftesbury had originally meant when he introduced the concept of disinterestedness into modern moral and aesthetic discourse – for him, the opposite of disinterested is mercenary, that which one wants or does just for a personal reward137 – and it is arguably all that Riedel meant when he said that the beautiful is that which can please us “without possession.” It would not be reasonable, however, to claim that all that Kant meant by saying that the pleasure in beauty is disinterested is that it must be able to please anyone apart from personal possession and use or consumption of the beautiful object; he certainly seems to insist that the source of our pleasure in the beautiful has nothing to do with the sources of our pleasure in the agreeable and the good, and thus to be open to Herder’s criticism if Herder’s claim is that our pleasures in the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good all ultimately rest on our pleasure in the feeling of free and healthy life. Before we consider whether the distance here between Kant and Herder is as great as Herder thinks, however, let us consider one last charge in Herder’s indictment of Kant, namely, his objection to Kant’s theory that the experience of beauty is an experience of a free and conceptless play of the mental powers of imagination and understanding. As we saw, Herder’s antipathy to Kant’s central notion of the free play of our cognitive powers is evident from the outset of Kalligone. In his Preface, Herder writes bitterly that “the self-named only possible philosophy” has transformed the arts “into a short or long, boring apelike play.”138 In the body of the text, Herder argues both generally that all responses to objects, feelings, and sentiments as well as judgments, are accompanied with a concept of the object, and more specifically that our pleasure 136 137 138

Herder, Kalligone, p. 730. See Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, Part II, section III; in Characteristicks, vol. I, p. 55. Herder, Kalligone, p. 648.

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in beautiful objects is always a pleasure in a sensed or felt recognition of their adaptation to their environment, whether natural or artificial, that is impossible without the application of a concept to the object. Herder launches his general attack immediately following his critique of Kant’s first moment. Kant’s second moment, Herder says, asserts that the “beautiful is what pleases without a concept,” and the third speaks of a “Form of purposiveness without representation of an end.” In Herder’s view, however, “That something could please without a concept, and indeed please universally, is contrary to nature and experience.”139 Depending on how we take this claim, of course, Herder may not be saying anything with which Kant would disagree: Kant more than anyone else argued that all experience of an object requires consciousness of a concept as well as of empirical intuitions of that object, the matter of which is sensation. But he did hold that we could have a feeling of pleasure in an object without considering what concepts apply to it, and on the basis of such a feeling make the judgment that it is beautiful. Herder is specifically rejecting that claim. On what basis does he do so? He does so by means of the more particular argument that our pleasure in beauty is in fact a pleasure in our sensed or felt recognition of an object’s adaptation to its environment, and the premise that such a pleasure cannot be felt without a recognition of the application of a relevant concept to the object. Herder argues for this by going through a series of cases, precisely the kinds of particular examples that he accuses Kant of neglecting. First he considers figures (Gestalten), then colors and tones, and then a series of kinds of natural things, from stones and crystals to a series of living things ranging from flowers to human beings themselves. In all of these cases, he argues, we respond to a recognition of the character of a thing and its relation to its environment that is necessarily mediated by our application of a concept to it. For example, he argues that a child’s pleasure in a colorful pebble and a mineralogist’s pleasure in stones and crystals are not different in kind, but only in degree, that concepts lie at the basis of all these pleasures, and that “each of these concepts contains something purposive, for the apparent excellence or perfection of the thing in a harmonious relation to the perceiver.”140 “The beauty of flowers,” further, “is thus (to stay with our language) the maximum of their particular existence and well-being; they are beautiful to us, if our feeling appropriates this maximum to itself harmoniously 139 140

Herder, Kalligone, p. 675. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 710–11.

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and gladly. As with flowers, so with trees.”141 He goes on to argue that we find animals beautiful when we find them, “in a way that is intuitable for us, to be gifted with an undamaged natural perfection, to live happily, harmoniously with themselves in their particular way.”142 Finally, a human being is found to be beautiful “when he shows himself in his figure and in his gestures as active to whomever may perceive him.”143 All of these perceptions, Herder argues, depend upon perceiving the object through or under an appropriate concept, indeed a concept of its purpose, whether that is the concept of a child or an expert: “The result of our conversation is therefore this, that without concepts and the representation of an end the word[s] beautiful and beauty are never in place.”144 Before we consider whether this is a fair objection to Kant, more generally whether there is as much distance between Kant’s views and Herder’s as Herder himself believes, let us ask why Herder thinks such perception of an object’s essence and its well-being in its environment is so pleasing to us and so important for our own sense of well-being. The answer to this question is what we might call a harmonic or sympathetic theory of the connection between pleasure in well-being and truth: Herder thinks that the perception of true harmony and well-being in the things around us generates a parallel harmony and feeling of it in ourselves: “May we not rejoice that we live in a world of good order and good form, where all results of the laws of nature in gentle forms reveal to us as it were a band of rest and motion, an elastic-effective constancy of things, in short beauty as the bodily expression of a corporeal perfection that is harmonious both within itself and to our feeling?”145 The key idea here is not that we take pleasure in the direct consumption of the fruits of a harmonious nature but rather that there is a kind of resonance between harmony and well-being in nature and our own sense of well-being: the perception of harmony in nature makes our own being feel well-ordered, just as the perception of disharmony in nature inevitably although painfully attracts our attention. Herder uses physical language, suggesting strings vibrating in harmony with each other, a page later: The being or the constancy of a thing depends upon its active forces being in equilibrium, hence on its being within limits. Motion and rest constitute a maximum in it, and in several members or aspects several maxima, exponents 141 142 143 144 145

Herder, Kalligone, p. 712. Herder, Kalligone, p. 719. Herder, Kalligone, p. 721. Herder, Kalligone, p. 722. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 687–8.

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of its constancy. If this confirmation to an enduring whole is palpably sensible to us, and if this found maximum is harmonious with my own feeling, then the constancy of thing, as such, is agreeable to us; if not, then it is ugly, fearsome, repulsive. The self-constancy, i.e., the well-being of the thing thus stands in relation to my own well-being, whether as friend or foe.146

This is the underlying vision of Herder’s mature aesthetics: Our feeling of beauty does not arise from a free play with forms that might be triggered by something in the objective world but is not constrained by it; rather the feeling of beauty is a subjective response to the perception of objective harmony, a subjective feeling of well-being triggered by empathy with the well-being of other things in the world. We might regard this theory as a naturalization of the original German theory of beauty as ultimately an expression of the perfection of the creation, as found in Wolff, for example, a naturalization that was indeed already suggested by Mendelssohn: Instead of taking pleasure in our knowledge of the perfection of the world that God has created and that is revealed to us in beautiful objects, we simply feel pleasure in our well-being in such a world. This is a transformation of the aesthetics of free play that brings it into conjunction with the aesthetics of the emotional impact of beauty at least, although decidedly not into contact with the aesthetics of free play; and there is no hint of the paradox of tragedy here, no theory of our enjoyment of emotions engendered by disharmonies in the world. Because Kant’s aesthetic theory was more complicated than Herder recognized, however, the differences between Kant and Herder are not always as great as the latter supposed. First, Kant himself interpreted the feeling of the free play of the cognitive powers in aesthetic experience as a feeling of life; perhaps Kant does not adequately emphasize this point, but at the deepest level his conception of the source of aesthetic pleasure is not entirely different from Herder’s. Second, although Kant began his analysis with the simplest case of the free judgment of natural beauty, which is supposedly not dependent upon our conceptualization of its object, as he complicated his analysis of aesthetic experiences to include the cases of the adherent beauty of works of nature as well as of human art in the general sense and of fine art in particular, he clearly recognized the rôle of conceptualization in our response to the work, and in the case of art in the production as well as the reception of the work, and transformed his conception of free play with the mere form of an object into a conception of felt harmony between the form and the 146

Herder, Kalligone, pp. 688–9.

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concept of the object which is not so different from Herder’s conception of the harmony in a beautiful object. Finally, when Kant complicated his initial conception of the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment to take account of our intellectual interest in the existence of natural beauty, he recognized that our experience of beauty is an experience of wellbeing and being at home in the world that is not unrelated to Herder’s conception of our experience of beauty, although as Kant’s terminology suggests, his conception of this interest may have remained more intellectual and moralistic than Herder himself would prefer. However, it certainly remains true that Kant rigidly separates the beautiful from the merely agreeable and has no intention of allowing charms and emotions more generally into our experience by relaxing this distinction. The second of these points should already be clear from our prior discussion of Kant, so here we may focus on Kant’s own treatment of the feeling of life and his ultimately complex attitude toward disinterestedness. Kant mentions the feeling of life explicitly only twice in the third Critique, each time suggesting that all feelings of pleasure or displeasure are related to the subject’s feeling of life, indeed that representations please or displease because of how they affect the feeling of life.147 These remarks leave any connection between the free play of the cognitive powers and the feeling of life unexplained. In the central passage on the free play of the faculties that he calls the “key to the critique of taste,” however, in which he argues that only the explanation of the experience of beauty as due to the free play of imagination and understanding stimulated by a given representation can justify the claim of the judgment of taste to be disinterested, not based on a concept, and yet universally and necessarily valid, Kant does suggest a connection between free play and the feeling of life when he describes the condition of the imagination and understanding as one of the “animation” (Belebung) of both faculties.148 This is still quite gnomic, though, and it would not have been unreasonable of Herder not to have paid much attention to it. However, in his lectures on anthropology – which, to be sure, he began offering only in 1772–73, thus a decade after Herder had studied with him – Kant had made the connection between the free play of the faculties and the feeling of life clear and central to his aesthetic theory. In lectures from 1775–76, for example, Kant argued that “Gratification or pleasure is the feeling of the promotion of life,” indeed that life itself “is the consciousness of a 147 148

Kant, CPJ, §1, 5:204, and General Remark following §29, 5:270. Kant, CPJ, §9, 5:219.

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free and regular play of all the powers and faculties of human beings.” He equated the free play of our powers and faculties with their unhindered activity, and thus found the ultimate source of all pleasure in the unhindered activity of our powers: “The play of the powers of the mind must be strongly alive and free if it is to animate. Intellectual pleasure consists in the consciousness of the use of freedom in accordance with rules. Freedom is the greatest life of the human being, through which he exercises his activity without hindrance.”149 Kant completed this discussion, which opens his lectures on the second part of psychology, on the faculties of approval and disapproval, with the remark that “All gratifications are related to life. Life, however, is a unity, and in so far as all gratifications aim at this, they are all homogeneous, let the sources from which they spring be what they are.”150 Herder could have included these sentences in the footnote from Kalligone151 in which he objects to Kant’s supposedly complete separation of the beautiful from the agreeable and the good. To be sure, in the passages from his anthropology lectures thus far quoted, Kant connected “activity without hindrance” with “the use of freedom in accordance with rules,” and said that he is explaining “the intellectual pleasure that tends toward the moral.”152 It might therefore be thought that this connection between life and the unhindered activity of our mental powers has nothing to do with the case of aesthetic pleasure. However, in his earlier discussion of “the concept of the poet and of the art of poetry” in these lectures, Kant had used the same language. The harmonious play of thoughts and sentiments is the poem. The play of thoughts and sentiments is the correspondence of subjective laws: if the thoughts correspond with my subject then that is a play thereof. Second, it is to be observed of the thoughts that they stand in relation to the object, and the thoughts must be true, and that the course of thoughts must correspond with the nature of the mental powers, thus with the subject and thus the succession of thoughts with the powers of the mind.153

In the case of the experience of poetry, the feeling of the free play and unhindered activity of the mental powers is consistent with the existence of laws for both the contents of the poetry and the workings of the mind. Here Kant clearly intended his explanation of our pleasure in poetry to 149 150 151 152 153

Kant, Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, 27:559–60. Kant, Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, 27:561. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 672–3. Herder, Kalligone, p. 560. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 525–6.

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be a special case of his general explanation of pleasure as the feeling of free play which is nothing less than the feeling of life itself. This connection between free play and the feeling of life was a constant in Kant’s thought. To be sure, in his mature theory of the free play of imagination and understanding he would emphasize that this harmony cannot manifest itself in the application of determinate laws to beautiful objects, but only in a general sense of the lawfulness of the forms designed or apprehended by the imagination.154 But this does not change the basic point that Kant thought that the feeling of pleasure in the free play of the mental powers is a feeling of free, unhindered life itself. In this regard, Herder’s theory is not as different from Kant’s as he thought, though there does remain a difference between Herder’s and Kant’s conceptions of the rôle of the imagination in generating this feeling of life: For Herder, as we saw, the subjective faculty of the imagination is like a string that vibrates in harmony with some objective harmony outside of itself, while for Kant the imagination, certainly of the artist but even of the spectator, is a more creative faculty that creates its own forms in lawful harmony with the understanding’s general requirement of unity, and therefore is actively rather than passively responsible for the feeling of life. This difference is reflected in a statement by Herder that initially sounds much like Kant’s definition of a poem in the anthropology lectures, but then insists upon a crucial difference: Whereas Kant had said that a poem is a harmonious play between thought and sentiments, Herder’s claim is “That poetry expresses sentiments, [but] that it may not play with the sentiments, is already said by its name.” This is because “Every word, accent, glimpse of a sentiment is holy; nothing is more contrary to it than a play with it. . . . it misuses its image for a carnival mask.”155 In spite of their similar emphasis on the feeling of life, Herder is ultimately repulsed by the thought of aesthetic experience as play and thus rejects the idea of a play with sentiments. Herder’s rejection of Kant’s conception of free play is certainly connected to his attack upon the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment, his insistence that there is a continuum rather than discontinuity between our responses to the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good. But on the matter of disinterestedness too Kant began with a simple statement of a position that then turned out to be more complicated than it initially appeared. There can be no question that Kant wanted to distinguish 154 155

Kant, CPJ, General remark on the first section of the Analytic, following §22, 5:240–1. Herder, Kalligone, p. 785.

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genuinely aesthetic experience from merely physiological gratification of the senses, from the approval of utility, or from moral approval, and that he did this by saying that aesthetic judgment neither presupposes nor gives rise to any interest in the existence of its object. But numerous factors complicate this picture. First, Kant always defined pleasure as a state of mind that is connected with a disposition toward its own continuation, and in the first draft of the Introduction to the third Critique he adds that pleasure is a ground “for producing its object.”156 There are reasons that Kant did not want to speak here of an interest in the continuation of pleasure and/or the production of its object,157 but it is certainly reasonable to say that on Kant’s own account any pleasure, including even the purest pleasure in beauty, is accompanied with some form of attachment to the possibility of its own continued and future experience, and therefore ordinarily to the availability of the objects that trigger that pleasure. Further, Kant explicitly argued that the properly aesthetic pleasure in beautiful objects enters into combination with interests, also properly so called, in the existence of those objects. Under the rubric of the “empirical interest” in the beautiful, he argued that there are societal reasons for taking interest in the availability and possession of beautiful objects; and although he denied that there is any a priori relation of these reasons to the experience of beauty,158 this was not to deny the existence of such attachments. Under the rubric of the “intellectual interest in the beautiful,” Kant then described a reason for attachment to the beautiful that is apparently supposed to be a priori, namely, that the existence of beauty is a “trace” or “sign” that nature is amenable to the satisfaction of our moral interests.159 Kant’s conception of an intellectual interest in the beautiful does not seem entirely remote from Herder’s view that our sense of well-being in an object is accompanied with a corresponding sense of our own well-being, although there are two key differences. For one, Herder insists upon a recognition of an objective well-being to which our subjective feeling of well-being is a response, while for Kant wellbeing is always subjective, that is, our own, and the satisfaction of our aesthetic aims and of our moral aims may be parallel, but are both subjective. Our aesthetic pleasure in natural beauty is a sign of the possibility of our moral well-being in nature, not a direct response to a harmony in nature 156 157

158 159

First Introduction to Kant, CPJ, section VIII, 20:230–1. See my “Disinterestedness and Desire in Kant’s Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36 (1978): 449–60, reprinted in Perspectives on Kant, vol. 4, ed. Ruth Chadwick and Clive Cazeaux (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 232–48. Kant, CPJ, §41, 5:297. Kant, CPJ, §42, 5:300.

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that has nothing to do with us. Second, Kant clearly wanted to keep the connection between the satisfaction of our aesthetic aims and the satisfaction of our moral interests separate although connected, thus not collapsing aesthetic pleasure into moral satisfaction, and further, Kant seemed to suggest that a sound moral interest in nature’s amenability to our objectives is a condition of the intellectual but aesthetic interest in the existence of (natural) beauty. From Herder’s point of view, that might seem to be an excessive moralization of an interest in the beautiful that should be entirely natural, although from Kant’s point of view Herder’s insistence on the continuity of the beautiful and the good might actually run the risk of an excessive moralization of aesthetic experience. So no doubt there are differences between them, but it is misleading of Herder to suggest that Kant simply fails to recognize that we have a real attachment to the interest in the beautiful. Kant did recognize that, but wanted to keep that attachment somewhat complicated and indirect in order to avoid the risk of an excessive moralization of the aesthetic but at the same time, I might suggest, also to avoid the risk of an excessive aestheticization of the moral. In the end, perhaps it is Herder the Lutheran pastor who objects so violently to the Kantian idea of aesthetic experience as a disinterested play, all the more so if that might be a play with our own emotions. In the section on the “Poetry of human sentiments” from which I quoted a few pages ago, Herder continues that “Real [wirkliche] sentiment produced the first poetry . . . as the naïve, heartfelt poetry of all natural peoples shows. . . . The language of tones, insofar as they express passion, knows throughout no hypocrisy; it says what it has to say to every feeling breast with expressive significance.”160 The effect of such primitive but genuine expression, the origin of art, can be called play in the sense in which “play” just means “light movement,”161 in other words, it is fair to say that the emotions expressed in art play over or lightly move the heart strings of the audience; but in another sense of “play,” more like artifice or pretense, then the play of art becomes something merely artificial: “Insofar as the poet also plays with our thoughts and passions, i.e., he has it in his hand to arouse these, to hold them firm, to make them disappear, and so on, everything from the power of his genius, in accordance with his art; if this fails him, if he oversteps them, then he is a bad player with art [Kunstspieler].”162 In other words, the idea of play is morally 160 161 162

Herder, Kalligone, p. 785. Herder, Kalligone, p. 786. Herder, Kalligone, p. 787.

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ambiguous: art can play lightly over our heartstrings, which is good, or it can toy with our emotions, which is bad. But to reject the concept of play altogether because it might sometimes degenerate into merely toying with our emotions, which is what Herder mostly seems to do, is precisely what might seem from Kant’s point of view an excessive moralization of the aesthetic, an excessive reaction to the somewhat limited autonomy that Kant himself was prepared to grant to aesthetic experience. Published in 1800, Kalligone could well end our survey of eighteenthcentury aesthetics. In fact, as we will shortly see, the nineteenth century began in aesthetics before the calendar turned to 1801; it began with the Romantics such as Friedrich and Wilhelm Schlegel and their philosopher friends such as Friedrich Schelling in Jena in the middle of the 1790s, while Schiller, Goethe, and von Humboldt were still in full flower. And to some extent, at least from a theoretical point of view, the difference between the “classicists” on the one hand and the Romantics on the other, apart from their particular preferences for ancient or medieval art, is a matter of degree, turning on how exclusive their commitment to the aesthetics of truth turns out to be. For what we will now see is that early nineteenth-century aesthetics in Germany, which is pretty much to say early nineteenth-century aesthetics, becomes almost entirely an aesthetics of truth or insight. But before we turn to this development, we can conclude our survey of eighteenth-century aesthetics with a brief look at one figure who, though his chief work in aesthetics came a few years after the turn of the nineteenth century, kept the spirit of Kant, Schiller, and von Humboldt alive during the heyday of German Idealism.

5. Herbart I refer to Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841). Herbart was a student of Fichte in Jena from 1794 to 1796, but subsequently defended a modified form of Kantianism against the absolute idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and is often mentioned in histories of philosophy as a bridge to the Neo-Kantianism of the later nineteenth century. Indeed, Herbart held what had been Kant’s chair in logic and metaphysics at Königsberg, now the chair in philosophy and pedagogy, from 1809 to 1833 (when, perhaps not surprisingly, he was not invited to be Hegel’s successor in Berlin but instead moved to Göttingen for the final years of his career). A theory of pedagogy was central to his philosophical work, however, and aesthetic education played a central role in his conception of pedagogy. In this regard Herbart can be considered an heir to Schiller

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and von Humboldt, indeed as the closest inheritor of their conception of aesthetic education. He can thus be discussed here before we leave the eighteenth century behind.163 Herbart directly addressed aesthetics in one of his earliest works, an 1804 essay “On the Aesthetic Presentation of the World as the Chief Aim of Education” that was printed as an appendix to the second edition of his 1802 book on Pestalozzi’s Idea of an ABC of Intuition, a discussion of the Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s 1801 book How Gertrude Taught Her Children.164 Pestalozzi emphasized the development of a harmony among intellectual powers, moral and religious principles, and physical capabilities for handicraft as the goal of education, while Herbart argued for the development of primarily intellectual and moral powers, without the emphasis on either religion or handicraft, and to be achieved through the medium of the refinement of the aesthetic sensibilities of the developing child. The connection between moral and aesthetic education seemed particularly natural to him because of the unusual way in which he used the word “aesthetic” itself in this period, between Baumgarten and Kant on the one hand and Hegel on the other, when its meaning was still fluid. In fact, Herbart used the term in a way that captured the underlying idea of the British “moral sense” school, although none of its proponents from Shaftesbury to Adam Smith had themselves used the word: He used the term to designate all areas of human thought in which judgment is based on immediate feelings of approbation and disapprobation and held that this was the case in both the moral sphere and what others considered the aesthetic sphere proper, that is, the judgment of both natural and artistic beauty. The core of his argument for aesthetic education is that although moral judgments are based on feelings of approbation and disapprobation, not any a priori process of reasoning, to have sound feelings and thus to make sound judgments people must be fully sensitive to the feelings of others and to all the circumstances around them and must also be able to distance themselves from their own desires in order to empathize with others, and then that maturing children most naturally learn both sensitivity to their environment and the practice of distancing themselves from their own desires in the aesthetic context: Sensitivity to the beauties of the world comes naturally and early to children, and wanting to share 163 164

Herbart’s aesthetics is discussed in Podro, The Manifold in Perception, pp. 61–79. The 1804 edition of the book on Pestalozzi with its appendix is reproduced in Johann Friedrich Herbart, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Karl Kehrbach and Otto Flügel (Langensalza, 1887), vol. I. The essay on “Aesthetic Presentation” is at pp. 259–74.

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their responses to beauty and thus to overcome whatever idiosyncrasies stand in the way of that also comes naturally to children and comes easily to them in situations that are not fraught with self-interest, as moral situations so often are. It is through aesthetic experience, in other words, that the child first learns that “the world is a rich, open circle of manifold life” and also learns that “the aesthetic apprehension of the surrounding world” is an alternative to egoism.165 Further, in the aesthetic sphere the child learns to judge individual cases on their own merits rather than through abstract concepts,166 a skill that is also crucial to moral judgment – here Herbart has clearly been influenced by Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment as a particular, reflective judgment rather than a determinate judgment based on general concepts. Herbart emphasized both the attraction and the value of stories of all kinds for this role.167 But in so doing, he clearly recognized the efficacy of art in communicating the emotions of others to us and made this capability central to the importance of aesthetic education. Herbart went on to publish numerous treatises, including General Pedagogy, Main Points of Metaphysics, and Logic (all 1806), General Practical Philosophy (1808), a Textbook of Psychology (1816), Psychology as Science (1824–5), and a General Metaphysics (1829), but he never returned to write a full-scale treatise in aesthetics. However, in his Textbook for the Introduction to Philosophy, which was first published in 1813 and reached a fourth edition by 1837, he featured aesthetics prominently, discussing it immediately after his chapter on logic and before his chapter on metaphysics. He continued to use the word “aesthetics” in his unusually broad sense and thus discussed in the same chapter both moral philosophy and aesthetics in the by now more customary sense of the philosophy of beauty and art. Here, however, he was not interested as much in aesthetic education as the key to moral education as in the analysis of moral and aesthetic experience and judgment in their own right. In several ways his treatment of aesthetics in this chapter was more purely Kantian than it had been in the earlier essay; in other ways it struck a distinctively non-Kantian theme. He began by stressing the immediate and disinterested character of aesthetic pleasures, starting from the simplest cases such as our pleasure in the fragrance of a flower.168 Following Kant, he 165 166 167 168

Herbart, Sämtliche Werke, vol. I, pp. 266, 268. Herbart, Sämtliche Werke, vol. I, p. 269. Herbart, Sämtliche Werke, vol. I, pp. 271–2. Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie, rev. ed., ed. Wolfhart Henckmann (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1993; the text itself is a reprint of the Meiner edition of 1912, ed. K. Häntsch), §82, pp. 131–4.

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stressed that “Every work of beautiful nature and art elevates us above the commonplace; it interrupts the customary course of the psychic mechanism,” although in a non-Kantian vein he maintained that this often happens through the special “arousal of affects” by works of art.169 On this basis he also argued that Kant’s binary division of aesthetic quality into the beautiful and the sublime needs to be replaced by a more refined enumeration, including the pretty, the charming, the graceful, the decorative, the great, the noble, the festive, the magnificent, the pathetic, the touching, and the wonderful170 – Herbart always insisted on beginning philosophical analysis with a careful review of ordinary usage (although perhaps not in the case of the word “aesthetic” itself!), and in his insistence on the variety of aesthetic qualities he anticipated a theme to be stressed in the Anglo-American “analytical aesthetics” of a century and a half later, which we consider in Volume 3.171 He also stressed that in order to arouse such a range of feelings, art, particularly poetry, “considers human beings not merely as active, as willing, but also as passive” (or “suffering,” leidend). Only by arousing such a range of feelings in its audience could art possibly acquire such a range of qualities as Herbart recognized, and thus a recognition of the full range of the emotional impact of art is presupposed by Herbart’s broadening of the traditional list of aesthetic qualities. At the same time, Herbart’s emphasis on the emotional effects of art was based on the Kantian point that aesthetic response is immediate and particular, not mediated by generalizations: “The abstract is the exact contrary of poesy; poesy seeks to transpose the hearer into the state of intuiting; so that out of the intuiting sentiment [das Empfinden] develops.”172 And Herbart’s discussion concludes with a point that emphasizes his continuity with Kant and indeed with the Scottish tradition on which Kant had drawn, namely, that the ultimate basis of our pleasure in artistic beauty is not any cognition that we might derive from a work of art but the lively stimulation of our mental powers that such beauty affords, and to which its mimetic function might be quite incidental: The inadequacy of the principle of imitation for aesthetics betrays itself immediately – if one notices that in the imitation there lies a stimulus to lively activity [Lebenstätigkeit]. Here the art of the lowliest joker can often 169 170 171 172

Herbart, Einleitung, §85, p. 137. Herbart, Einleitung, §87, pp. 139–40. See especially the discussions of Arnold Isenberg and Frank Sibley in vol. 3. Herbart, Einleitung, §97, p. 154.

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approach the art of the noblest poet; and common dance music shows even more clearly than the most sublime fugue what music imitates – namely, the flow of human movements, representations, and sentiments. In a word: it is the psychic mechanism, which all artists should study for the same reason on account of which the painter and sculptor must devote themselves to the study of anatomy – in order to learn to bring forth not the beautiful but the natural. For this art of naturalness, which imitates the course of the psychic mechanism, corresponds to it, and precisely through that arouses it – this is what one demands of every work of art above all, and what is popularly expressed thus: The work of art should be alive and have a lively effect.173

Herbart does not refer to the Kantian idea of the free play of our mental powers, and in particular he does not discuss the creative role of the imagination; in a passage like this one, his account of aesthetic experience seems to go back directly to Kames. But his connection of our pleasure in imitation to its stimulation of our sense of being alive rather than to its cognitive content certainly puts him on the side of the aesthetics of play rather than the aesthetics of truth; indeed, what Herbart has done is to point to the possibility of a synthesis of the Kantian aesthetics of play with the aesthetics of emotional impact. Had he emphasized that Kant himself had synthesized the aesthetics of play with the aesthetics of truth, Herbart himself would have been on the way to a threefold synthesis of the aesthetics of truth, play, and feeling. As we are now about to see, however, Herbart’s development of Kantian and Schillerian themes did not point the way to the next epoch in aesthetics. Instead, what we will find in the aesthetics of the half-century or longer following Kant and Schiller, dominated by the German Romantics and Idealists, is a massive return to the traditional aesthetics of truth, although in a variety of new dresses. Above all in his theory of aesthetic ideas as the locus of the spirit in fine art, Kant had synthesized the aesthetics of truth, especially moral truth, represented by the Wolffians, with the aesthetics of play initated by Du Bos, developed by Scots such as Gerard and Kames, and represented in Germany by Mendelssohn and Sulzer, while keeping the emotional impact of art, certainly recognized by those last two figures, at arm’s length. Perhaps it would have been natural for others to follow Herbart’s lead in adding emotional impact into the mix, or to have followed Herder in his conception of the “poetry of human sentiments.” But that is not what happened; instead, the German Idealists followed Herder in his violent 173

Herbart, Einleitung, §115, p. 178.

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rejection of the aesthetics of play and thus in their rejection of Kant’s synthesis of truth with play in his theory of aesthetic ideas. As we will now see, the leading philosophers of art in the next generation, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, retained the letter of Kant’s conception of aesthetic ideas, but not its spirit.

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Index

a priori method, Herder’s attack on Kant’s supposed, 511–13 Abel, Jakob Friderich, 466 Aberdeen, University of, 158 absolute (original) beauty art, 107–11 Hutcheson’s account of, 104 nature, 106 theorems, 106–7 acoustic beauty, André’s account of, 250–1 active mind, importance of. See mental activity actors D’Alembert’s reaction to Rousseau’s attack on, 300–1 Diderot’s depiction of, 301–2 Rousseau’s attack upon, 299–300 Addison, Joseph, 8, 32 general discussion, 63–73 influence on work of Hutcheson, 100–1 adherent beauty in Crousaz’s account, 76–7 Kant’s theory of, 438–40, 479 Advancement of Learning (Bacon), 23–4 aesthetic certitude, 330, 331, 336–7 aesthetic education Herbart’s account, 527–8 Schiller’s account, 484–91 aesthetic idea, Kant’s account of, 449–52 aesthetic judgment autonomy of, 307 Kant’s theory of, 426–31 aesthetic life of cognition, 319, 331–2, 337–9 aesthetic light, 336 aesthetic magnitude, 330–1, 333–5 aesthetic truth, 335–6 aesthetic wealth, 329–30, 332–3

Aesthetica (Baumgarten), 5–6, 320–1 aesthetic certitude, 336–7 aesthetic light, 336 aesthetic magnitude, 333–5 aesthetic truth, 335–6 aesthetic wealth, 332–3 definition of aesthetics in, 327–8 list of categories of aesthetic perfection, 329–32 perfection of sensitive cognition, 328–9 Aesthetica in nuce (Hamann), 377 aesthetics, philosophical. See also specific philosophers by name Baumgarten’s definition of, 327–8 causes of rise of modern discipline, 20–1 central approaches of, 22–9 defining, 2–6 evolution of modern discipline, 6–9 introduction of term “aesthetics” by Baumgarten, 318–19, 321–2 origins of, 30–3, 93–4 overview, 1–2 Plato’s criticism of the arts, 10–20 agreeable, in Herder’s critique of Kant, 515–17 agreeable arts, Batteux’s theory of, 256–7 alienation, in Schiller’s account of aesthetic education, 484–6 Alison, Archibald, 176, 225–35 American aesthetics, 1 analogon rationis (analogue of reason) concept, 326–7, 328 The Analysis of Beauty (Hogarth), 140–7 “Analytic of the Beautiful” (Kant), 432–42, 478–80 “Analytic of the Sublime” (Kant), 443–6

555

556

Index

anatomy, comparative, in Goethe’s account, 497 ancient art, Winckelmann’s account of, 365–70 ancients, in Falconet’s account of sculpture, 277 André, Yves-Marie de L’Isle, 248–53 anthropology lectures by Kant, 425–6 “Appendix on the methodology of taste” (Kant), 457 approval, Mendelssohn’s faculty of, 353–5 arbitrary beauty, André’s account of, 249–53 arbitrary signs, Mendelssohn’s account of, 359–61 archetype of beauty. See ideal of beauty architecture Addison’s account of, 71 in André’s account of beauty, 251 Batteux’s account of, 259 in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 76–7 D’Alembert’s account of, 264 Diderot’s account of, 283–4 Hutcheson’s account of, 108 Kant’s account of, 447–8 in Reynolds’s account of imagination, 212–14 Wolff’s account of, 56–9 Aristotle response to Plato’s criticism of art, 17–19 Riedel’s classification of aesthetic theories, 389 Arouet, François-Marie (Voltaire), 267–8 art. See also fine art; specific arts by name aesthetic magnitude concept, 333–5 aesthetic wealth concept, 332–3 aesthetics as philosophy of, 4–6 in André’s account of beauty, 251 for art’s sake, 372 autonomy of, 353, 413 Batteux’s account of, 247, 253–4 Baumgarten’s account of, 328–9 in Beattie’s account of taste, 204 in Burke’s account, 154–5, 156–7 calm passions as induced by, 137–8 D’Alembert’s account of, 264–6, 273–4 Diderot’s account of emotional impact of, 285–9 Discourses of Reynolds, overview of, 206 division of, by Mendelssohn, 359–61 Du Bos’s comparison of different forms of, 85–7 effect on cognitive powers, Kames’s account of, 184–5

emotional impact of, 214–15 genius in, 173–4 in Gerard’s account, 165–6, 168–9 Goethe’s account of, 497–502 Harris’s account of, 121–3 in Herder’s critique of Kant, 514–15 Herder’s first main criticism of Lessing, 381–8 Herder’s relativism, 393–6 Herder’s second main criticism of Lessing, 388–93 Herz’s account of, 408 Heydenreich’s account of, 462–5 Hogarth’s account of beauty, 142–3 Hutcheson’s account of beauty, 107–11 ideal beauty in, Reynolds’s account of, 206–8 Kames’s account of, 179–80, 185–90 Lessing’s account of, 371–5 life of aesthetic cognition concept, 337–9 Mendelssohn’s account of imitation, 351–3 Montesquieu’s theory of aesthetic pleasure, 271, 272 Moritz’s account of, 411–14 philosophical theories of, 28–9 Plato’s criticism of, 10–16 pleasure in as alleviation of boredom, 79–82 in Reid’s approach, 224–5 Rousseau’s attack upon, 293–302 Schiller’s account of beauty in, 473–4 Schiller’s account of tragedy, 475–7 Shaftesbury’s viewpoint on, 46–7 Smith’s account of, 195–9 in Stewart’s account of beauty, 239 in Stewart’s treatment of imagination, 235–6 Sulzer’s account of, 402–4 superiority of beauty of nature over, 69 taste in, 267–8 truth in, Reynolds’s account of, 208–11 Turnbull’s account of, 113–20 in von Humboldt’s account, 504–8 Winckelmann’s account of, 364–70 Wolff’s account of, 48–9, 55–9, 61–2 Art of Poetry (Horace), 19 artificial passions raised by artistic representations, 81–2 artistry, perfection of, 357–9 association of emotional effects with sounds, 157 association of ideas Alison’s account of, 228–9, 230–1

Index in Burke’s account, 150 Gerard’s account of, 160, 164, 173–4 Hume’s account of, 130–1 Hutcheson’s account of, 111–12 in Reynolds’s account of imagination, 212–14 in Stewart’s account of beauty, 237–8 sympathy and imagination playing with appearance of utility, 135 astonishment, in Burke’s account of sublime, 152–3 “Attempt at a Unification of all the Fine Arts and Sciences under the Concept of that which is complete in itself” (Moritz), 411–14 attentiveness, in Schiller’s account of aesthetic education, 488–9 attractiveness, in Burke’s account of beauty, 155–6 audience in Kant’s account, 452 in Rousseau’s attack upon theater, 297–9 in von Humboldt’s account, 504, 506–7 autonomy of aesthetic judgment, 307 autonomy of art, 353, 413 aversion, in Kames’s account of paradox of tragedy, 179 awe, in Mendelssohn’s account of sublime, 362 axes of potential perfection, Mendelssohn’s overview, 347–8 perfection of artistry, 357–9 perfection of bodily condition, 355–7 perfection of objects, 348–9 perfection of perceptual capacities, 349–51 Babbitt, Irving, v Bacon, Sir Francis, 23–4 Batteux, Charles, 247, 253–61 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 5–6 aesthetic certitude, 336–7 aesthetic light, 336 aesthetic magnitude, 333–5 aesthetic truth, 335–6 aesthetic wealth, 332–3 Aesthetica, 327–37 background of, 318–21 definition of aesthetics by, 327–8 Herder’s defense of, 389 Herder’s invocation of, 385–6 introduction of term “aesthetics” by, 318–19, 321–2

557

life of aesthetic cognition concept, 331–2 list of categories of aesthetic perfection, 329–32 Meditations on Poetry, 321–4 Mendelssohn’s opinion of, 341–2 Metaphysics, 325–7 overview, 306 perfection of sensitive cognition, 328–9 Riedel’s classification of aesthetic theories, 389 synthesis of aesthetic theories in work of, 339–40 Beattie, James, 199–204 beautiful arts, Batteux’s theory of, 256 beautiful sciences, Mendelssohn’s account of, 359–61 beauty. See also specific types of beauty by name Addison’s account of, 66–7 Alison’s account of, 227–8 André’s essay on, 248–53 Baumgarten’s account of, 326 Burke’s account of, 151, 153–6 connection between utility and, 39–42 Crousaz’s account of, 74–8 Diderot’s account of, 280–2, 283–4 disagreements about, 45–6 disinterestedness of pleasure in, 30–1, 35–8 Encyclopédie entry on, 278, 280–2 Gerard’s account of, 161–3 in Goethe’s account, 500–2 Gottsched’s description of, 314–15 Herder’s account of, 381–3, 390–2 in Herder’s critique of Kant, 513–14, 515–17 Herz’s account of, 407–8 Heydenreich’s account of, 461–2, 463–4 Hogarth’s account of, 140–7 Hume’s basic account of, 129–33 Hutcheson’s account of response to, 101–3 Kames’s account of, 190–1 in Kant’s account of art, 448–9 Kant’s theory of, 432–42, 453, 454–6 Lessing’s account of, 371–2 Mendelssohn’s account of, 345–8, 358–9 Montesquieu’s theory of, 269–70, 271–2 Moritz’s account of, 411–16 natural sense of, 100–1 non-conceptuality of aesthetic judgment, Herder’s criticism of, 517–20 objective nature of, 103–5 perfection of objects, 348–9

558

Index

beauty (cont.) as perfection of sensitive cognition, 328–9 in Plato’s Symposium, 15–17 in Reid’s approach, 222, 223–4 Reynolds’s account of, 206–9 in Schiller’s account of aesthetic education, 485–6 in Schiller’s Kallias letters, 471–5 Shaftesbury’s theory of, 38–44 Stewart’s account of, 236–40 subjective nature of, 103 Sulzer’s account of, 398–9, 400–2 uniformity amidst variety, 104–9 in von Humboldt’s account, 506 Winckelmann’s account of, 364–70 in Wolff’s account of art, 55–9 Wolff’s definition of, 54–5 “Beauty in Art” (Schiller), 473–4 Beiser, Frederick C., 17, 55, 88, 308–9, 373–4 Betrachtungen aus der spekulativen Weltweisheit (Considerations from Speculative Philosophy), Herz, 407–8 Bildung concept, in von Humboldt’s account, 504–5, 507–8 bodily condition, perfection of, 355–7 bodily dimension of aesthetic experience, 17 Bodmer, Johann Jacob, 305–6, 308–9, 316–18 body, human in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 77 in Kant’s account of beauty, 440–1, 479–80 Schiller’s critique of Kantian ideal of beauty, 480–1 in Sulzer’s account of beauty, 402 boredom (ennui), pleasure in art as alleviation of, 79–82 Breitinger, Johann Jacob, 305–6, 308–9, 316–18 British aesthetics, 1–2, 97–8, 140–1, 176. See also specific philosophers by name Bullough, Edward, v Burke, Edmund, 22 general discussion, 140–1 Stewart’s discussion of, 237 calm passions, as induced by art, 137–8 “Cambridge Platonists,” 33, 34 canon of exemplary objects, standard of taste as, 127–9, 135–8 capacities, free play of. See free play theory

catharsis of emotions, in Du Bos’s approach, 83 Cavell, Stanley, 26–7 censorship, Plato’s advocacy of, 12 certitude, aesthetic, 330, 331, 336–7 chains of associations, Alison’s account of, 228–9, 230–1 challenge overcome, enjoyment of art as enjoyment of, 196 character of poets, Gottsched’s description of, 311–13 characteristic (ideal-type), in Goethe’s account, 497–9, 500–2 Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (Shaftesbury), 34, 51–2. See also specific essays by name Christianity, art in, 21 circularity of Hume’s specification of qualifications of competent critics, 128–9 Stewart’s objection to accounts of beauty involving, 237–8 clarity, Baumgarten’s account of, 325 clear thoughts, and sensory perception, 53–4 climate, influence on Greek culture and art, 366 cognition aesthetic life of, 319, 331–2, 337–9 Baumgarten’s account of, 325, 326–7 beauty of theorems, 106–7 in Diderot’s account of beauty, 280–1, 282–4 effect of art on, Kames’s account of, 184–5 enjoyment of engagement of powers of knowing and desiring, 351–5 in Goethe’s account, 499–500 ideal presence theory, 188 improvement of taste and, 168 in Kant’s account of free play, 433–6 Leibniz’s conception of, 49 perfection of sensitive, 306, 328–9, 349–51 in Reynolds’s account of imagination, 212 Wolff’s conception of, 53–4 cognitive value of uniformity amidst variety, 112–13 cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience. See also Shaftesbury, Earl of; synthesis of aesthetic theories; Wolff, Christian Alison’s approach, 227, 230–1

Index Batteux’s account of art, 257, 258, 259–61 Baumgarten’s account, 323–4, 339–40 Breitinger and Bodmer’s account, 318 British aesthetics, 97–8, 140–1 in Burke’s account, 148 D’Alembert’s account of taste, 273 free play of imagination and, 24–5 German aesthetics, 305–8, 417–18, 422–4 Goethe’s account, 495, 497–8, 499–500, 501–2 Gottsched’s Critical Poetics, 311 Harris’s account, 114, 120–4 in Herder’s account, 383, 391–3, 395–6 in Herder’s critique of Kant, 511 in Heydenreich’s account, 465 Hogarth’s account of beauty, 147 Hutcheson’s rejection of, 101–3 Jaucourt’s account of painting, 275–6 in Kames’s account, 179–80, 193 in Kant’s account, 421–3, 431, 438, 449–52 Meier’s account of emotional impact, 324–5 in Mendelssohn’s account, 341–2, 363 Moritz’s account, 412, 415–16 origins of modern aesthetics, 30–3 overview, 9, 11 in Plato’s Symposium, 16–17 Reid’s approach, 217–26 responses to Plato, 18–19 revival of, 176 Reynolds’s account, 209–11, 212 in Rousseau’s work, 291–2, 297 Schiller’s synthesis of aesthetic theories, 467–8, 470, 474 Sulzer’s account, 396, 401–3, 405 Turnbull’s account, 113–20 von Humboldt’s account, 504, 505 Winckelmann’s account, 365 The Collector and his Circle (Der Sammler und die seinigen), Goethe, 494–5, 500–2 Collingwood, R.G., 26 color in André’s account of beauty, 250–1 application to sculptures, Smith’s account of, 197 beauty of, in Gerard’s account, 163 Goethe’s account of, 496–7 coloration, in André’s account of beauty, 250–1 columns, tapering of, 110 common sense in matters of taste, 441–2

559

commonality of feeling, universality of taste as, 276–7 comparative (relative) beauty Diderot’s account of, 281 Hutcheson’s account of, 104, 108–11 Kames’s account of, 190 comparative anatomy, in Goethe’s account, 497 comparison in Addison’s account of imagination, 68–9, 71–3 in Du Bos’s description of taste, 90–1 remote, in Hutcheson’s account of representational art, 109–10 competent critics, determination of standard of taste by, 127–9, 135–8, 170–2 complexity of aesthetic experience in André’s account of beauty, 253 in Batteux’s account of art, 261 German aesthetics, 307–8, 417–18 Kames’s account of, 193 in Mendelssohn’s account, 341–2, 363 overview, 243 Stewart’s account of, 234–43 Sulzer’s account of, 405 comprehensibility, in aesthetic light concept, 336 conceptless play of mental powers, in Herder’s critique of Kant, 517–20 confused knowledge, sensory perception as, 49–50, 53–4 Considerations from Speculative Philosophy (Betrachtungen aus der spekulativen Weltweisheit), Herz, 407–8 content of art in Baumgarten’s aesthetic concepts, 333–4, 335–7 in Meier’s concept of life of aesthetic cognition, 337–8 Conversations on the Beauties of Nature (Unterredungen über die Schönheiten der Natur), Sulzer, 398–9 Cooper, Anthony Ashley. See Shaftesbury, Earl of Correspondance littéraire newsletter, 279 creation, in genius, 173–4 creativity, in Stewart’s account of taste, 241–2. See also genius Critical Poetics (“Essay toward a Critical Poetics for the Germans”), Gottsched, 310–16

560

Index

Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music (Du Bos), 8, 32 comparison of arts, 85–7 empiricist methodology in, 79 genius, 92–3 moral sense, 83–5 overview, 78 paradox of tragedy, 82–3 pleasure in art as alleviation of boredom, 79–82 taste, 87–92 criticism Herz’s account of, 409–10 Kames’s defense of value of, 180–2 versus philosophical aesthetics, 2–3 critics, determination of standard of taste by, 127–9, 135–8, 170–2 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 429, 452–3 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 429 “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment.” See Critique of the Power of Judgment Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant), 349. See also Kalligone “Appendix on the methodology of taste,” 457 beauty, 432–42, 478–80 fine art, 447–52 overview, 421–3, 431 reason for linking aesthetic and teleological judgment together, 426–31 sublime, 443–6, 447–8 Critische Dichtkunst (Breitinger), 316–18 Croce, Benedetto, 10–11 Crousaz, Jean-Pierre de, 32, 73–8 cultural relativism, of Herder, 393–6 curiosity, Montesquieu’s theory of pleasure of, 270–1 D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond general discussion, 261–7 reaction to Rousseau’s attack, 300–1 Rousseau’s attack upon, 295–302 taste, 273–4 D’Alembert’s Dream (Diderot), 278–9 dance, Smith’s account of, 198 danger, in Burke’s account of sublime, 151–2 deception, in Rousseau’s attack upon actors, 299–300 Defence of Poetry (Sidney), 19–20 deformity, Hume’s account of, 129–31 delight, in Burke’s account, 151–3

Der Sammler und die seinigen (The Collector and his Circle), Goethe, 494–5, 500–2 desire, as criterion for distinguishing between emotions and passions, 186 desiring, enjoyment of engagement of powers of knowing and, 351–5 development, effect of art on, 504–5, 507–8 A Dialogue concerning Art (Harris), 121 Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (Hume), 125 Dickie, George, 160 didactic conception of value of art, Turnbull’s, 115–18 Diderot, Denis background of, 278–9 editing of Encyclopédie, 261–2 emotional impact of aesthetic experience, 285–9 Encyclopédie entry on beauty, 278, 280–2 interconnected responses to aesthetic experience, 282–4 Die Discourse der Mahlern (“The Discourse of the Painters”) weekly, 316 Die Räuber (The Robbers), Schiller, 466 dignity Kames’s account of, 192 Schiller’s account of, 478, 481–2 disagreements about beauty, Shaftesbury’s viewpoint on, 45–6 discourse, Baumgarten’s definition of, 322 A Discourse concerning Music, Painting, and Poetry (Harris), 121–2 Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (First Discourse) and Polemics (Rousseau), 293–5 Discourses (Reynolds) genius, 215–17 ideal beauty, 206–8 imagination, 211–15 overview, 206 truth, 208–11 discovery, and genius, 173–4 disinterestedness of aesthetic experience Burke’s account of, 154 in Herder’s critique of Kant, 515–17, 523–6 Kames’s distancing from, 186 Kant’s account of, 432–3 Shaftesbury’s account of, 30–1, 35–8 dispositional property of beauty, 103 dispositions, aesthetic, 490 dissimilitude, Kames’s account of, 191 distance, psychological D’Alembert’s idea of, 263–4

Index Jaucourt’s account of, 275 Mendelssohn’s account of, 351–3 Rousseau’s attack upon theater, 298–9 in Schiller’s “On the Art of Tragedy,” 468 divinity in Addison’s account of imagination, 70 in André’s account of beauty, 251–3 Hutcheson’s account of, 113 in Kames’s Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, 178–9 Leibniz’s conception of, 51–2 in Mendelssohn’s account, 358–9 in Reid’s approach, 222–3 in Shaftesbury’s writings, 39, 42–3 Wolff’s religious teleology, 60–2 domination, exploitation of arts to achieve, 294 Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste, 8, 22 background of, 78–9 basic concepts of aesthetic theory, 79–87 genius, 92–3 overview, 32 taste, 87–92 versus Wolff, 59 dynamical sublime Baumgarten’s anticipation of concept, 333–4 Kant’s account of, 444–6, 454 Schiller’s account of tragedy, 468, 470, 476 Eagleton, Terry, 9–10, 184 education aesthetic, Herbart’s account of, 527–8 aesthetic, Schiller’s account of, 484–91 as aim of art, in von Humboldt’s account, 504–5, 507–8 Plato’s exclusion of arts from, 14–15 in Rousseau’s attack upon arts, 295 Turnbull’s account of value of arts in, 115–18 Einführung in die Ästhetik (GethmannSiefert), 10 Elements of Criticism (Kames), 22–3 beauty, 190–1 complexity of aesthetic experience, 193 dignity, 192 dissimilitude, 191 effect of art on cognitive powers, 184–5 emotional impact of aesthetic experience, 185–90 general claims of, 179–84 grace, 192 grandeur, 190–1

561

overview, 177 poetic language, 192–3 resemblance, 191 sublime, 190–1 uniformity, 191 variety, 191 Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Stewart), 235–6 eloquence, in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 78 Émile, or Education (Rousseau), 291 emotional impact of aesthetic experience. See also Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste; mixed sentiments, theory of; synthesis of aesthetic theories Addison’s position on, 73 Alison’s approach, 226–34 in André’s account of beauty, 252 artificial passions raised by artistic representations, 81–2 Batteux’s account of art, 258, 259–61 Baumgarten’s account of, 323–4 in Beattie’s account of poetry, 201 British aesthetics, 97–8, 140–1 in Burke’s account of aesthetic response, 148, 150 in Burke’s account of art, 157 in Burke’s account of beauty, 153–4, 155–6 in Burke’s account of sublime, 151–3 Crousaz’s position on, 78 D’Alembert’s account of, 263–6 Diderot’s account of, 285–9 Falconet’s account of sculpture, 276–7 Gerard’s account of, 160, 164–6 German aesthetics, 305–8, 339–40, 417–18, 422–4 in Goethe’s account, 495, 501–2 Gottsched’s Critical Poetics, 311 Harris’s account, 114, 120–4 Herbart’s account, 528, 529 Herder’s account of, 387–8, 392–3, 395–6 in Herder’s critique of Kant, 510, 514, 515–16, 520, 525–6 in Heydenreich’s account, 462–5 in Hogarth’s account of beauty, 147 Hume’s avoidance of idea, 138–9 introduction of, 63 Jaucourt’s account of, 274–6 Kames’s account of, 178–80, 185–90, 191, 193 Kant’s rejection of, 422–3, 430–1, 436–8, 443–4, 458 in Lessing’s account, 371, 375

562 emotional impact of aesthetic experience (cont.) life of aesthetic cognition concept, 319 Meier’s account of, 324–5, 337–40 Mendelssohn’s account, 341–2, 351–5, 363 moral sense, 83–5 as novel idea, 22–3 origins of modern aesthetics, 32–3 overview, 9, 11 paint versus poetry, 85–7 paradox of tragedy, 82–3 in Reid’s approach, 225 responses to Plato, 19–21 in Reynolds’s account of imagination, 214–15 Schiller’s lack of acknowledgement of, 477 in Schiller’s “On the Art of Tragedy,” 468–71 Schiller’s synthesis of aesthetic theories, 467–8 in Smith’s account, 195 in Stewart’s account of beauty, 239 Sulzer’s account, 396, 400–4, 405 taste, 87–92 Turnbull’s account, 113–20 Voltaire’s account of aesthetic response, 268 in von Humboldt’s account, 507–8 Winckelmann’s account, 369–70 emotions in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 75–6 Kames’s distinction between passions and, 186–8 empathy, in Rousseau’s attack upon theater, 298–9 empirical interest in beautiful, Kant’s account of, 524 empiricist methodology, Du Bos’s commitment to, 79 Encyclopédie beauty, 278, 280–2 D’Alembert, 261–7, 273–4 Diderot, 280–2 “Geneva” entry, Rousseau’s attack upon, 296–7 Montesquieu, 269–73 overview, 260–2 painting, 274–6 Preliminary Discourse, 262–7 sculpture, 276–8 taste, 267–74 Voltaire, 267–8

Index energizing beauty, Schiller’s account of, 486 enjoyment of engagement of powers of knowing and desiring, 351–5 ennui (boredom), pleasure in art as alleviation of, 79–82 entasis, 110 erotic aspect in aesthetic experience, 17 Essai sur le Beau (Essay on Beauty), André, 248–53 Essay concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 79 An Essay on Genius (Gerard), 158–9, 173–4 Essay on Taste and the Causes of its Variety (Versuch über den Geschmack und die Ursachen seiner Verschiedenheit), Herz, 407, 408–10 An Essay on Taste (Gerard), 140–1, 158 basic theory, 159–61 beauty, 161–3 genius, 172–4 moral sense, 164–6 paradox of tragedy, 163–4 taste, 166–72 Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions (Hutcheson), 102 An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (Beattie), 200 Essay on the Origin of Languages (Rousseau), 292–3 “Essay toward a Critical Poetics for the Germans” (Critical Poetics), Gottsched, 310–16 Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (Hume), 125, 138 Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (Alison), 226–34 Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (Kames), 178–9 essential beauty, André’s account of, 249–53 Ethics (Baumgarten), 320 excellences in objects, in Reid’s aesthetic approach, 219–21, 225 execution of intention, art as, 110–11 exemplary objects, standard of taste as canon of, 127–9, 135–8 experience, in Diderot’s account of emotional impact of art, 288–9 expertise, Plato’s criticism of poets’ claim to, 13–14 expression Diderot’s account of, 286–7 in Winckelmann’s account of art, 369

Index Extract from the Foundations of all fine Arts and Sciences (Mendelssohn), 341–2 fables Breitinger and Bodmer’s account of, 317–18 in Gottsched’s Critical Poetics, 315–16, 317 Falconet, Étienne-Maurice, 276–8 fantasy. See imagination fastidiousness of taste, Stewart’s account of, 242 feeling. See emotional impact of aesthetic experience feeling of life Herder’s concept of, 514, 516, 519–20 Kant’s treatment of, 521–3 female beauty, male response to, 271–2 Ferry, Luc, 9–10 fiction. See also paradox of tragedy Breitinger and Bodmer’s account of, 317–18 in Gottsched’s Critical Poetics, 315–16 ideal presence theory, 187–8 in Turnbull’s account of art, 117 figure, as form of beauty, 161–2. See also human body final causes of standard of taste, 183–4 fine art. See also specific arts by name aesthetics as philosophy of, 4–6 in André’s account of beauty, 251 Batteux’s account of, 256–7, 258–60 Burke’s account of, 156–7 D’Alembert’s account of, 264–6 genius in, 173–4 Harris’s account of, 121–3 in Herder’s critique of Kant, 514–15 Heydenreich’s account of, 462–5 Kant’s theory of, 438, 447–52 Mendelssohn’s account of, 359–61 philosophical theories of, 28–9 Sulzer’s account of, 402–4 Wolff’s account of, 48–9 “The Fine Arts reduced to a single principle” (Les Beaux-Arts réduit à un même principe), Batteux, 247, 253–60 fitness beauty of utility in Gerard’s account, 162–3 in Burke’s account of beauty, 154–5 in Hogarth’s account of beauty, 143–5 flattery, in Rousseau’s attack upon theater, 298 force, in Herder’s account of poetry, 384–8

563

form Alison’s account of, 230 intricacy in, in Hogarth’s account of beauty, 146 in Kant’s account of beauty, 435–6, 437 unity of, in André’s account of beauty, 250 form drive, Schiller’s account of, 485, 486, 487 formal beauty Diderot’s approach, 280–2 Hogarth’s account of, 143, 144, 145–7 in Reid’s approach, 223 in Wolff’s account of architecture, 56–8 Foundations of Architecture (Wolff), 56–9 Four Dissertations (Hume), 125 Fourth Discourse, Reynolds, 214 fragmentation, in Schiller’s account of aesthetic education, 484–6 free beauty, Kant’s theory of, 438–9 free choice, as determinant of moral character, 481 free play theory. See also Du Bos, JeanBaptiste; synthesis of aesthetic theories Addison’s position on, 63–73 Alison’s approach, 227, 229–30 Batteux’s account of art, 257, 258, 259–61 in Beattie’s account of poetry, 200–2 Breitinger and Bodmer’s account, 318 British aesthetics, 97–8, 140–1, 176 in Burke’s account, 148, 155–6 Crousaz’s position on, 73–8 D’Alembert’s account of aesthetic response, 265 Diderot’s account of beauty, 281, 282–4 Gerard’s account of, 159–61, 164 German aesthetics, 305–8, 315, 339–40, 417–18, 422–4 in Goethe’s account, 495, 499, 501–2 in Herbart’s account, 530 in Herder’s critique of Kant, 509–10, 511, 517–20, 525–6 Hogarth’s account of beauty, 145–7 Hume’s account of, 124, 131–3 in Hutcheson’s account, 105, 109–10 introduction of, 63 in Kames’s account, 179–80, 184, 193 in Kant’s account of art, 449–52 in Kant’s account of beauty, 433–6, 438, 439–42 in Kant’s account of sublime, 444–6

564

Index

free play theory (cont.) in Kant’s aesthetic theory, 421–3, 430, 431 in Kant’s treatment of feeling of life, 521–3 Lessing’s account of, 373–4, 375 Mendelssohn’s account, 342, 346, 355–6, 363 Montesquieu’s theory of aesthetic pleasure, 270–3 Moritz’s rejection of, 412 origins of modern aesthetics, 32–3 overview, 9, 11, 23–5 in Reid’s approach, 221 Rousseau’s dismissal of, 297 in Schiller’s account of morality, 484, 491 in Schiller’s Kallias letters, 473 Schiller’s synthesis of aesthetic theories, 467–8, 474 in Smith’s account, 195, 199 Stewart’s account of, 236, 237, 240 Sulzer’s account, 396, 405 sympathy and imagination playing with appearance of utility, 131–5 Turnbull’s rejection of, 115 as valuable aspect of aesthetic experience, 23–7 Winckelmann’s account, 370 freedom in Kant’s aesthetic theory, 428–30, 454–5, 457–8, 490 in Schiller’s account of beauty, 472–4 in Schiller’s account of tragedy, 475–7 French aesthetics, 1–2, 247–8. See also Encyclopédie; specific philosophers by name functionality. See fitness Garve, Christian, 159 General Theory of the Fine Arts (Sulzer), 398 “Geneva” entry, Encyclopédie, 296–7 genius in Batteux’s account of art, 255, 256–7 D’Alembert’s account of, 265–6, 273–4 Du Bos’s opinions on, 92–3 Gerard’s account of, 172–4 Kant’s account of, 449–50, 451–2 Mendelssohn’s account of perfection of artistry, 357–9 Moritz’s account of, 415–16 Reynolds’s account of, 205, 207 Rousseau’s attack upon arts, 294 Stewart’s account of, 241–2 Sulzer’s account of, 404–5

geographical account of genius, 92–3 Gerard, Alexander background of, 157–9 basic theory of, 159–61 beauty, 161–3 genius, 172–4 moral sense, 164–6 overview, 140–1 paradox of tragedy, 163–4 taste, 166–72 German aesthetics. See also specific philosophers by name increasing eclecticism in, 377–8 overview, 1–2, 305–8, 376 responses to Kant, 459–60 synthesis of aesthetic theories in, 417–18, 422–4, 530–1 “German Metaphysics” (Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man), Wolff, 52–4, 55–6 “German teleology” (Rational Thoughts on the Aims of Natural Things), Wolff, 61 Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie, 10 God. See divinity Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 459, 494–502 good in Herder’s critique of Kant, 515–17 morally, beauty as symbol of, 454 goodness, beauty as connected to, 283 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 305–6, 308–17 grace Kames’s account of, 192 Schiller’s account of, 478, 481–2 grandeur Kames’s account of, 190–1 in Reid’s approach, 222 in Winckelmann’s account of Greek art, 367–8 greatness, Addison’s account of, 65 Greek art Herder’s relativism, 394–5 Lessing’s account of, 371–5 Winckelmann’s account of, 365–8 Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant), 452–3 Groves of Criticism (Kritische Wa͘lder), Herder first volume, 381–6 fourth volume, 388–91, 393 overview, 379–80 Guyer, Paul, 9–10 Hamann, Johann Georg, 377

Index harmony in Batteux’s account of art, 258–9 in Baumgarten’s account of art, 328–9, 340 in connection between pleasure in wellbeing and truth, 519–20 in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 76–7 Shaftesbury’s concept of, 38–42 Harris, James, 114, 120–4, 385 hearing in André’s account of beauty, 250–1 Kames’s account of, 180–1 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 25, 60, 308, 423, 498, 502 Henrich, Dieter, v Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 526–31 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 308, 459–60. See also Kalligone background of, 378–81 beauty, 381–3, 390–2 critique of Riedel by, 388–9, 390 first main criticism of Lessing by, 381–8 overview, 377–8 poetry, 381, 383, 384–8, 393 relativism of, 393–6 sculpture, 390–3 second main criticism of Lessing by, 388–93 visual arts, 381–4 Herz, Marcus, 378, 405–10 Heydenreich, Karl Heinrich, 423, 459, 460–6 historical causes for rise of modern aesthetics, 21 historical pictures, in Turnbull’s account of art, 120 historical relativism of Herder, 393–6 History of Aesthetics (Tartakiewicz), 7 History of Ancient Art (Winckelmann), 368–70 History of England (Hume), 125 “History of Modern Aesthetics” (Guyer), 9–10 Hogarth, William, 140–7 Home, Henry. See Kames, Lord Horace, 19 human action, in Turnbull’s account of art, 120 human body in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 77 in Kant’s account of beauty, 440–1, 479–80 Schiller’s critique of Kantian ideal of beauty, 480–1 in Sulzer’s account of beauty, 402 Hume, David, 74–5

565

background of, 123–6 beauty, 129–33 emotional impact of aesthetic experience, 138–9 influence on Sulzer, 397–8 sympathy and imagination playing with appearance of utility, 131–5 taste, 126–9, 135–8 Hutcheson, Francis art, 107–11 association of ideas, 111–12 background of, 98–9 cognitive value of uniformity amidst variety, 112–13 divinity, 113 forms of uniformity amidst variety, 105–9 influence of Shaftesbury on, 99–101 objective nature of beauty, 103–5 response to beauty, 101–3 Smith’s response to theory of imitation, 195 subjective nature of beauty, 103 hypothetico-deductive method, 342

ideal of beauty Kant’s account of, 440–1, 453 Reynolds’s account of, 206–9 Schiller’s critique of Kantian theory of, 478–81 Sulzer’s account of, 402 ideal presence theory, 187–9 ideal-type (characteristic), in Goethe’s account, 497–9, 500–2 ideas, in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 75–6. See also association of ideas imagination. See also free play theory Addison’s account of, 64–73 Alison’s account of, 228–30 in Batteux’s account of art, 256–7 Breitinger and Bodmer’s account of, 316–18 in Burke’s account, 150 in D’Alembert’s account, 263, 266–7 differences between Kant and Herder’s concepts of, 523 and genius, 173–4 in Goethe’s account, 499 in Herder’s critique of Kant, 517–20 in Heydenreich’s account, 464 Hume’s account of, 124, 131–5 in Kant’s account, 433–6, 444–6, 480 in Lessing’s account of art, 372–4 Reynolds’s account of, 211–15

566

Index

imagination (cont.) Stewart’s account of, 235–6, 237, 238–40 Turnbull’s account of, 116–18 in von Humboldt’s account, 504–7 imitation in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 18 Gerard’s account of, 161, 163–4 Harris’s account of art, 121–3 Mendelssohn’s account of, 351–3, 357–8 in Moritz’s account of genius, 416 of nature, Batteux’s account of, 247, 254–60 of nature, in D’Alembert’s account, 263–5 of nature, in Winckelmann’s account, 364–5 pleasure in representational art, 108–11 by poets, Gottsched’s description of, 311–13, 314–16 Smith’s account of, 195–9 in Stewart’s treatment of imagination, 236 as “third remove” from reality, 13–14 of tragic events, Hume’s account of, 139 in Turnbull’s account of art, 118–20 in von Humboldt’s account, 506 immensity, in Mendelssohn’s account of sublime, 361–2 indeterminacy, in Winckelmann’s account of beauty, 369–70 indistinct knowledge, sensory perception as, 49–50, 53–4 individuality Rousseau’s attack upon arts, 294 in Stewart’s account of taste, 241–2 An Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit (Shaftesbury), 33–4 An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Hutcheson), 99–100 insight, in Goethe’s account, 499–500 instantaneousness of taste, Stewart’s account of, 240–1 instinctive beauty, 223 intellect. See also cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience apprehension of beauty by, 250–1 in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 75–6 in Reynolds’s account, 209–11 intellectual interest in beautiful, Kant’s account of, 455–6, 524–5 intention, art as execution of, 110–11

interconnected responses to aesthetic experience, Diderot’s account of, 282–4 interest. See also disinterestedness of aesthetic experience in Addison’s account of imagination, 71 in Herder’s critique of Kant, 516–17 in Kant’s account, 524–5 internal purposiveness of art, 411–12 intricacy in form, in Hogarth’s account of beauty, 146 intrinsic beauty, Kames’s account of, 190 “Introduction on Taste,” A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Burke), 149–50 intuitive cognition of perfection, pleasure as, 54, 59–60 invention as quality of genius, 172, 173–4 in Stewart’s account of taste, 241–2 The Invention of Art (Shiner), 28–9 involuntary nature of genius, Moritz’s account of, 416 Ion (Plato), 14 Jaucourt, Louis de, 274–6 je-ne-sais-quoi in aesthetic theory, 220 Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (Mendelssohn), 344–5 Jewish religion, Mendelssohn’s efforts to preserve, 344–5 judgment aesthetic and teleological, Kant’s connection of, 426–31 Baumgarten’s account of, 325–6 judgments of taste. See also taste in Burke’s account, 149–50 in Gerard’s account, 167–8 Gottsched’s description of, 313–15 Kant’s account of, 432–42, 490–1 Kallias letters (Schiller), 468, 471–5 Kalligone (Herder) attack on Kant’s methodology, 511–13 charge of insensitivity to senses, 514–15 disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment, 515–17 non-conceptuality of aesthetic judgment, 517–20 objection to theory of free play in, 509–10, 511, 517–20, 525–6 overview, 508–11

Index rejection of transcendental aesthetics in, 511–14 similarities between Kant and Herder’s viewpoints, 520–6 Kames, Lord (Henry Home), 22–3, 97–8 background of, 177 beauty, 190–1 complexity of aesthetic experience, 193 dignity, 192 dissimilitude, 191 effect of art on cognitive powers, 184–5 emotional impact of aesthetic experience, 185–90 Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, 178–9 general aesthetic theory, 179–84 grace, 192 grandeur, 190–1 overview, 176 poetic language, 192–3 resemblance, 191 Riedel’s classification of aesthetic theories, 389 sublime, 190–1 uniformity, 191 variety, 191 Kant, Immanuel, 23, 25. See also Kalligone acceptance of Mendelssohn’s account by, 362–3 background of, 424–7 beauty, 432–42, 453, 454–6 complexity of aesthetics of, 417–18 connection of aesthetics and teleology, 349 defense of Herz’s theory of beauty by, 407–8 feeling of life, 521–3 fine art, 438, 447–52 Gerard’s account and, 173, 174–5 Herder’s attack on, 380 Herz’s relationship with, 405–6 Kantian flavor of Goethe’s conception of art, 498–9 mathematical and dynamical sublime, 333–4 morality, 409, 452–8, 489–91 Moritz’s account in comparison to, 415–16 overview, 410, 421–4, 431 reason for linking aesthetic and teleological judgment together, 426–31 responses to, 459–60 Schiller’s critique of, 474–5, 476–84

567

sublime, 436–7, 443–9, 454 synthesis of aesthetic theories by, 306–8, 421–3, 438 taste, 432–42 King’s College, 158 knowledge. See also cognition; cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience beauty of theorems, 106–7 D’Alembert’s account of, 262–3, 266–7 enjoyment of engagement of powers of knowing and desiring, 351–5 of human conduct, in acting, 301–2 in Reynolds’s account of imagination, 212 sensory perception as, 49–50, 53–4 of truth, relation to experience of beauty, 16–17 König, Johann Ulrich, 314 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 28 Kritische Wa͘lder (Groves of Criticism), Herder first volume, 381–6 fourth volume, 388–91, 393 overview, 379–80

language art as form of, 115–16 Herder’s account of, 387–8 Kames’s account of, 192–3 Rousseau’s account of, 292–3 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Lessing), 370, 371–5 Laocoön statue Lessing’s account of, 370, 371–5 Schiller’s account of, 476, 478, 482–3 Winckelmann’s account of, 367–8, 369 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 31, 49–52 Les Beaux-Arts réduit à un même principe (“The Fine Arts reduced to a single principle”), Batteux, 247, 253–60 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim general discussion, 370–6 Herder’s first main criticism of, 381–8 Herder’s second main criticism of, 388–93 overview, 306 Schiller’s argument against, 478 “Letter concerning the Art, or Science of Design” (Shaftesbury), 46 Letter to D’Alembert on the Theater (Rousseau), 295–302 life, feeling of Herder’s concept of, 514, 516, 519–20 Kant’s treatment of, 521–3

568

Index

life of aesthetic cognition concept, 319, 331–2, 337–9 Life of Malebranche (André), 248 light, aesthetic, 336 The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Reynolds), 205 literature Diderot’s account of, 285 Gottsched’s Critical Poetics, 310–16 in Kames’s account of art, 189 Plato’s criticism of, 11–15 Shaftesbury’s viewpoint on, 46–7 Wolff’s lack of attention to, 60 liveliness, Baumgarten’s account of, 325 Locke, John, 8, 79, 105 love in Burke’s account of beauty, 153–4, 155 Leibniz’s conception of, 51 luxury, in Rousseau’s attack upon arts, 294–5 magnitude, aesthetic, 330–1, 333–5 “Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences” (Mendelssohn) division of arts in, 359–61 intrinsic perfection of objects in nature, 349 perfection of artistry, 357–9 male response to female beauty, 271–2 Mandeville, Bernard, 99 manifoldness, in Herz’s account of beauty, 408 manner, in Goethe’s account, 499–500 Marischal College, 158 mathematical sublime Baumgarten’s anticipation of concept, 333–4 Kant’s account of, 444–6 mechanical arts, Batteux’s account of, 256 Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (“Philosophical meditations pertaining to some matters concerning poetry”), Baumgarten, 5, 321–4 “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas” (Leibniz), 49–50 Meditations on Poetry (Baumgarten), 321–4 Meier, Georg Friedrich, 318 aesthetic certitude, 330, 331 aesthetic magnitude, 330–1 aesthetic wealth, 330 emotional impact of aesthetic experience, 324–5, 337–40 life of aesthetic cognition concept, 331–2, 337–9

list of categories of aesthetic perfection, 330–2 overview, 306 touching nature of art, 330, 331 works in or relevant to aesthetics, 321 melting beauty, Schiller’s account of, 486 memory, D’Alembert’s account of, 266 Mendelssohn, Moses, 27 axes of potential perfection, 347–8 background of, 343–5 basic aesthetic theory of, 345–8 complexity of theory by, 363 division of arts, 359–61 enjoyment of engagement of powers of knowing and desiring, 351–5 Herz’s relationship with, 406 overview, 306, 341–2 perfection of artistry, 357–9 perfection of bodily condition, 355–7 perfection of objects, 348–9 perfection of perceptual capacities, 349–51 sublime, 361–3 mental activity. See also free play theory in Du Bos’s account, 79–82 in Gerard’s account, 159–61, 162–3, 164 in Heydenreich’s account, 465 in Hogarth’s account, 145–7 Mendelssohn’s account of, 350–1, 354–5 mental beauty, Winckelmann’s account of, 367–9 mental representations, Mendelssohn’s account of, 349–51. See also representations Metafisica Tedesca, con le Annotazione alla Metafisica Tedesca. See Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man metaphorical taste, Gottsched’s description of, 313–15 Metaphysics (Baumgarten), 320, 325–7 metaphysics, Sulzer’s, 399 Metaphysics of Morals (Kant), 456–7 methodology, Herder’s attack on Kant’s, 511–13 Michelangelo, 288–9 mimetic representations Harris’s account of art, 121–3 Hutcheson’s account of beauty, 108–11 Shaftesbury’s viewpoint on, 46–7 as “third remove” from reality, 13–14 Miscellaneous Reflections (Shaftesbury), 39–40 mixed arts, Batteux’s account of, 256, 258–9

Index mixed sentiments, theory of, 164 artistic imitation, 351–3 artistic representation of unpleasant or tragic objects, 348 overview, 345–6 modern aesthetics. See also specific philosophers by name causes of rise of, 20–1 central approaches of, 22–9 defining, 2–6 evolution of, 6–9 origins of, 30–3, 93–4 overview, 1–2 Plato’s criticism of art, 10–20 modernity, in Schiller’s “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 491 moderns, in Falconet’s account of sculpture, 277 moments, in Lessing’s account, 372–4 monism, v Montesquieu, Baron de La Brède et de (Charles-Louis de Secondat), 267, 269–73 “Monument to Baumgarten” (Herder), 385 moral aesthetic magnitude, 333–4 moral beauty, Diderot’s account of, 282 moral pictures, in Turnbull’s account of art, 120 moral sense in Du Bos’s account, 83–5 Gerard’s account of, 164–6, 168–9 overview, 97–8 Shaftesbury’s account of, 33–4 and universality of taste, 111 moralistic conception of value of art, Turnbull’s, 113–20 The Moralists (Shaftesbury), 8, 35–7 disinterestedness of pleasure in beauty, 30–1 divinity, 42–3 harmony, 38–9 taste, 44–6 virtue, 43 morality versus aesthetic judgments, 131–3 Alison’s account of benefits of aesthetic response, 231–4 in André’s account of beauty, 251–2 Baumgarten’s aesthetic magnitude concept, 335 in Beattie’s account of poetry, 200–4 Breitinger and Bodmer’s account of poetry, 317–18 debate over effect of aesthetics on, 302

569

in Du Bos’s approach, 83–5 effect of practice of criticism on, 181–2 Falconet’s account of sculpture, 276 free play of imagination and, 24 Gottsched’s Critical Poetics, 311, 312–13, 316 Herbart’s account of, 527–8 Herder’s critique of Kant’s theory, 513–14 in Herz’s account, 409 in Heydenreich’s account, 462–3, 464 implications of Wolff’s position, 60–2 intellectual interest in beautiful and, 524–5 Kames’s Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, 178–9 in Kant’s account of art, 449–52 in Kant’s account of beauty, 440–1 in Kant’s aesthetic theory, 428–30, 437–8 Kant’s theory of, 452–8 Rousseau’s attack upon arts, 293–5, 296–300 in Schiller’s “On Grace and Dignity,” 477–84 in Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 477–8, 484–91 in Schiller’s “On the Art of Tragedy,” 468 in Sulzer’s account, 399–400, 402–4 morally good, beauty as symbol of, 454 morally significant emotions, beauty as connected to, 283–4 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 378, 410–18 Morning Lessons (Mendelssohn), 354–5 multilayered character of pleasure in art, 111 music in André’s account of beauty, 252–3 D’Alembert’s account of, 264–5 Harris’s account of, 122, 123 in Herder’s account of art, 383–4 Mendelssohn’s account of, 360 Plato’s criticism of, 11–15 in Reid’s approach, 224–5 Rousseau’s account of, 292, 293 Smith’s account of, 198–9 naïve art, Schiller’s account of, 492–4 natural aesthetic magnitude, 333–4 natural beauty André’s account of, 249–53 Herz’s account of, 408 natural sense of beauty, 100–1

570

Index

natural signs Herder’s account of, 383–4 Mendelssohn’s account of, 359–61 nature art conformable to, 184–5 beauty of, 106 in Goethe’s account, 497–8 versus human artistry, 358–9 imitation by poets, Gottsched’s description of, 311–12, 314–16 imitation of, Batteux’s account of, 247, 254–60 imitation of, D’Alembert’s account of, 263–5 imitation of, in Winckelmann’s account, 364–5 in Kant’s account of sublime, 443, 445–6 in Kant’s aesthetic theory, 428–30, 457–8, 490 Montesquieu’s theory of aesthetic pleasure, 271 in Moritz’s account of genius, 416 painting of, in Turnbull’s account of art, 119–20 perfection of objects in, 348–9 in Reid’s approach, 222–3, 224 in Reynolds’s account of truth, 210 in Schiller’s “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 491 Sulzer’s account of, 398–9 superiority of beauty of over art, 69 in von Humboldt’s account, 505–6 necessary assent of all to judgment of taste, 441–2 necessary condition for beauty, fitness as, 144–5, 162–3 necessity, in Batteux’s account of art, 258–9 Neo-Platonism, 27–8, 31–2, 34, 37 Ninth Discourse, Reynolds, 210–11 nobility, in Winckelmann’s account of Greek art, 367–8 non-conceptuality of aesthetic judgment, in Herder’s critique of Kant, 517–20 non-representational arts. See also specific arts by name Hutcheson’s account of beauty, 107–8 Shaftesbury’s viewpoint on, 46 “Notes on Painting” (Diderot), 284, 285–8 novel ideas, role of in rise of modern aesthetics, 21–9 novelty Addison’s account of, 65–6 Breitinger and Bodmer’s account of, 308–9, 317–18

in Burke’s account, 150–1 Gerard’s account of, 160–1 in Reid’s approach, 221–2 Nugent, Thomas, 79 objective nature of beauty Herz’s account of, 407–8 Hutcheson’s account of, 103–5 Moritz’s account of, 412 “objective sensuous” conception of beauty, Schiller, 471–3, 474–5 objective source of aesthetic responses, 219–21 objective wealth, Baumgarten’s account of, 332–3 objects, perfection of, Mendelssohn’s account of, 348–9 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (Kant), 425 oddity, Gerard’s account of, 161 “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” (Hume), 138 “Of the Nature of That Imitation which Takes Place in What are Called the Imitative Arts” (Smith), 195–9 “Of the Standard of Taste” (Hume), 126–9, 135–8 “Of Tragedy” (Hume), 139 “On Dramatic Poetry” (Diderot), 285 On Early Burial among the Jews (Herz), 406 On German Style and Art (Herder), 386–7 “On Grace and Dignity” (Schiller), 477–84 “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (Schiller), 492–4 On Sentiments (Mendelssohn), 348–9, 352–3, 356 On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (Schiller), 467–8, 477–8, 484–91 “On the Aesthetic Presentation of the World as the Chief Aim of Education” (Herbart), 527–8 “On the Art of Tragedy” (Schiller), 468–71 “On the Capacity for the Sentiment for the Beautiful in Art, and on Instruction in it” (Winckelmann), 364–5 “On the enjoyment that one can derive from the cognition of truth” lecture (Wolff), 53, 58, 61–2 “On the formative Imitation of the Beautiful” (Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen), Moritz, 414 “On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks” (Winckelmann), 365–8 “On the Pathetic” (Schiller), 475–7, 478

Index “On the Pleasures of the Imagination” (Addison), 32, 63, 64–73 “On the Sublime and Naïve in the Fine Sciences” (Mendelssohn), 361–2 oratory Batteux’s account of, 259 in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 78 order in André’s account of beauty, 251–2 in Crousaz’s account of unity, 76 in Moritz’s account of beauty, 414–15 Shaftesbury’s concept of, 38–42 in Turnbull’s account of art, 118–19 Wolff’s conception of truth as, 52–3 original (absolute) beauty art, 107–11 Hutcheson’s account of, 104 nature, 106 theorems, 106–7 originality in Kant’s account of art, 451 in Stewart’s account of taste, 241–2 Ossian, Herder’s essay on, 386–7 “Outlines of a Complete Theory of the Fine Arts” (Moritz), 412 overridingness of morality, 165 pain in Burke’s account, 150, 151–3 in Hume’s account of deformity, 129–31 in Kames’s account of paradox of tragedy, 179 in Kant’s account of sublime, 444–6 painted sculptures, Smith’s account of, 197 painting Batteux’s account of art, 259–60 D’Alembert’s account of, 264 Diderot’s account of, 285–9 in Du Bos’s account, 81, 85–7 Encyclopédie entry on, 274–6 Falconet’s comparison of sculpture and, 278 Harris’s account of, 122 in Herder’s account of art, 383–4 in Kames’s account of art, 189 Mendelssohn’s account of, 360–1 Shaftesbury’s viewpoint on, 46 Smith’s account of, 197 as “third remove” from reality, 13–14 Turnbull’s account of imitation in art, 119–20 Wolff’s account of, 55–6 paradox of tragedy Addison’s solution to, 71–3 in Burke’s account, 156

571

in Du Bos’s approach, 82–3 Gerard’s account of, 163–4 Hume’s account of, 139 Hutcheson’s resolution of, 109 Kames’s account of, 178–9 Schiller’s account of, 468–71, 475–7 “Paradox on Acting” (Diderot), 301–2 passions. See also emotional impact of aesthetic experience Burke’s theory of, 150–1 calm, as induced by art, 137–8 Kames’s distinction between emotions and, 186–8 in Meier’s concept of life of aesthetic cognition, 338–9 paradox of tragedy, 82–3 raised by artistic representations, 81–2 in Rousseau’s account, 292, 293 perception. See also sensory perception of beauty, physical effects of, 355–7 perfection of perceptual capacities, 349–51 sensible, Mendelssohn’s account of, 345–6 Wolff’s conception of, 53–4 perfection. See also axes of potential perfection, Mendelssohn’s in Batteux’s account of art, 257–8 Baumgarten and Meier’s list of categories of aesthetic, 329–32 in Baumgarten’s account of judgment, 325–6 in Baumgarten’s account of poetry, 322–3 in Falconet’s account of sculpture, 277 Heydenreich’s criticism of definition of beauty as, 461 in Mendelssohn’s account of sublime, 362 pleasure as intuitive cognition of, 54, 59–60 pleasure as sensory perception of, 50–2 of sensitive cognition, 306, 328–9, 349–51 sensitive cognition of, 305 in Sulzer’s account of beauty, 400–1 in Wolff’s account of art, 55–9 Wolff’s notion of, 52, 305 in Wolff’s religious teleology, 60–2 personal morals, deleterious effects of theater on, 297–9 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 527 Phaedo: or on the Immortality of the Soul (Mendelssohn), 344

572

Index

Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria (A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy), Hutcheson, 102 philosophical aesthetics. See also specific philosophers by name causes of rise of modern discipline, 20–1 central approaches of, 22–9 defining, 2–6 definition of by Baumgarten, 327–8 evolution of modern discipline, 6–9 introduction of term “aesthetics” by Baumgarten, 318–19, 321–2 origins of, 30–3, 93–4 overview, 1–2 Plato’s criticism of the arts, 10–20 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Burke), 140–1, 147–57 Philosophical Essays (Stewart), 235, 236–42 “Philosophical meditations pertaining to some matters concerning poetry” (Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus), Baumgarten, 5, 321–4 physical causes of genius, 92–3 physical effects of perception of beauty, 355–7 physiological explanations of delight in astonishment, 152–3 of pleasure in beauty, 156 physiological responses, aesthetic responses as, 287–8 Plato criticism of art, 10–16 discipline of aesthetics as response to philosophy of, 9 responses to philosophy of, 16–20 play. See free play theory play drive, Schiller’s account of, 485–6 “Plays and especially tragedies are not to be banished from a well-ordered republic” (Gottsched), 311 pleasure. See also emotional impact of aesthetic experience in Addison’s account of imagination, 64–73 as aim of poetry, 19 in André’s account of beauty, 250–1 in art as alleviation of boredom, 79–82 in Baumgarten’s account of art, 328–9 in beauty, in Hutcheson’s account, 101–3 in Burke’s account, 150, 151–3 in D’Alembert’s account of aesthetic response, 263–4

in Diderot’s account of beauty, 280–1 in exercise of imagination, 228–30 in Gerard’s account, 159–61, 162–3, 164–6 in Heydenreich’s account, 463–4 Hume’s account of beauty, 129–33 implications of Wolff’s position on, 59–63 as intuitive cognition of perfection, 54, 59–60 in Jaucourt’s account of painting, 274–5 in Kant’s account, 431–5, 444–6, 524 in Meier’s concept of life of aesthetic cognition, 338–9 Mendelssohn’s account of, 345–8, 355–9 in Montesquieu’s theory of taste, 269–73 non-conceptuality of aesthetic judgment, Herder’s criticism of, 517–20 in representational art, 108–11 in response to perception of uniformity amidst variety, 104–5 in Schiller’s “On the Art of Tragedy,” 468–71 as sensory perception of perfection, 50–2 in Stewart’s account, 236, 237–8, 239–40 subjective nature of beauty, 103 in Sulzer’s account of beauty, 400–2 sympathy and imagination playing with appearance of utility, 131–5 Poetics (Aristotle), 17–18 poetry Aristotle’s justification of, 17–18 Baumgarten’s account of, 322–4 Beattie’s account of, 199–204 Breitinger and Bodmer’s account of, 316–18 Burke’s account of, 157 combining instruction with pleasure, 19–20 D’Alembert’s account of, 264 in Du Bos’s approach, 81, 85–7 free play of imagination in, 23–4 Gottsched’s Critical Poetics, 310–16 Harris’s account of, 122–3 Herder’s account of, 381, 383, 384–8, 393 Jaucourt’s comparison of painting and, 274–5 Kames’s account of, 189, 192–3 Kant’s treatment of feeling of life, 522–3 Lessing’s account of, 374–5 Meier’s concept of life of aesthetic cognition, 339

Index Mendelssohn’s account of, 359–60 Plato’s criticism of, 11–15 Schiller’s “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 492–4 Turnbull’s account of art, 117 poets, Gottsched’s description of, 311–16 politics in Schiller’s account of aesthetic education, 484–8 in Sulzer’s account of art, 403–4 polity, costs of theater to, according to Rousseau, 299 Porter, James, 10–11 powerful, exploitation of arts by, 294 practical needs, beauty as connected to, 283–4 practical reason, in Kant’s account of morality, 452–3 practical value of standard of taste, 183–4 Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General (Wolff), 48–9 Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia (D’Alembert), 262–7 primary pleasures of imagination, Addison’s account of, 64–7 of taste, Stewart’s account of, 242 primitive peoples, Herder’s account of poetry of, 386–7 proportion in Burke’s account of beauty, 154–5 in Crousaz’s account of unity, 76 propriety. See fitness Propyläen (Goethe), 497, 498 Psychologia Empirica (Wolff), 54 psychological distance D’Alembert’s idea of, 263–4 Jaucourt’s account of, 275 Mendelssohn’s account of, 351–3 Rousseau’s attack upon theater, 298–9 in Schiller’s “On the Art of Tragedy,” 468 psychology, in Sulzer’s account, 399 public, in Du Bos’s description of taste, 90–2 pure practical reason, in Kant’s account of morality, 452–3 purposiveness in Herz’s account of beauty, 408 internal, of art, 411–12 in Kant’s account of beauty, 435–6, 437, 439–40, 478–80 in Sulzer’s account of beauty, 400, 401–2

573

qualified critics, determination of standard of taste by, 127–9, 135–8, 170–2 qualified public, in Du Bos’s description of taste, 90–2 quantitative conception of aim of poetry, 323–4 rational beauty, in Reid’s approach, 223–4 “rational objective” conception of beauty, 471 Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man (“German Metaphysics”), Wolff, 52–4, 55–6 Rational Thoughts on the Aims of Natural Things (“German teleology”), Wolff, 61 real beauty, Diderot’s account of, 281 reality, transformation of by artists, 505–6 reason analogue of, Baumgarten’s concept of, 326–7 D’Alembert’s account of, 266 reasoning, as unnecessary in taste, 89–90 reductive theories of beauty, Stewart’s critique of, 236–8 reflex senses, 102 regularity in Crousaz’s account of unity, 76 in Hogarth’s account of beauty, 144 Reid, Thomas, 193, 204–5, 217–26 relational property of beauty, 103, 461–2 relations, in Diderot’s account of beauty, 280–2 relative (comparative) beauty Diderot’s account of, 281 Hutcheson’s account of, 104, 108–11 Kames’s account of, 190 relativism, of Herder, 393–6 relaxing beauty, Schiller’s account of, 486 religion art in, 21 demands of on visual art, 372 implications of Wolff’s position, 60–2 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Kant), 429–30 remote comparisons, in Hutcheson’s account of representational art, 109–10 representational arts. See also specific arts by name Batteux’s account of, 259–60 Hutcheson’s account of beauty, 108–11 Kant’s account of, 448–9 Shaftesbury’s viewpoint on, 46–7 Smith’s account of, 195–9

574

Index

representations in Baumgarten’s aesthetic concepts, 333–4, 335–7 in Kant’s account of beauty, 432 Mendelssohn’s account of, 345–6, 349–51, 357–8 sensible, Baumgarten’s account of, 322–4, 325, 326–7, 328 in Sulzer’s account, 399, 400–1 repression of women, 300–1 The Republic (Plato), 11–15 resemblance, 191, 195–6, 357–8 Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Rousseau), 229 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 193–4 background of, 205 Discourses by, overview of, 206 genius, 215–17 ideal beauty, 206–8 imagination, 211–15 overview, 204–5 truth, 208–11 Rhapsody, or addition to the Letters on Sentiments (Mendelssohn), 349–51, 352, 356–7 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 18–19 rhetoric, Mendelssohn’s account of, 359–60 ridicule, Gerard’s account of, 161 Riedel, Friedrich Justus, 388–9, 390 The Robbers (Die Räuber), Schiller, 466 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 229 background of, 289–90 cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience, 291–2 Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, 293–5 Essay on the Origin of Languages, 292–3 Letter to D’Alembert, 295–302 overview, 248 Royal Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, 205. See also Discourses rules in Batteux’s account of art, 254–5 in D’Alembert’s account of aesthetic response, 265, 266–7 in D’Alembert’s account of taste, 273 in Gottsched’s description of taste, 313–15 safety, in Burke’s account of sublime, 151–2 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 9–10 Schelling, Friedrich, 25 Schiller, Friedrich, 423 On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, 467–8, 477–8, 484–91

background of, 465–7 Kallias letters, 468, 471–5 “On Grace and Dignity,” 477–84 “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 492–4 “On the Art of Tragedy,” 468–71 “On the Pathetic,” 475–7, 478 synthesis of aesthetic theories by, 467–8 Schlegel, Johann Adolf, 253–4, 260 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 25, 502 scientific genius, 173–4 Scottish aesthetics. See British aesthetics sculpture D’Alembert’s account of, 264 Encyclopédie entry on, 276–8 Herder’s account of, 390–3 Mendelssohn’s account of, 360–1 Smith’s account of, 197 Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream (Herder), 379–80, 391–3 Second Characters or the Language of Form (Shaftesbury), 34, 46 secondary pleasures of imagination, Addison’s account of, 67–9, 71–3 peculiar to taste, Stewart’s account of, 242 secondary qualities, 105 Secondat, Charles-Louis de (Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu), 267, 269–73 self-determination in beautiful objects, 472–3 self-preservation, in Burke’s account, 151 senses apprehension of beauty by, 250–1 Herder’s account of, 389–93 Herder’s critique of Kant’s insensitivity to, 514–15 in Mendelssohn’s account of art, 360 sensible discourse, Baumgarten’s definition of, 322 sensible perception, Mendelssohn’s account of, 345–6 sensible representations, Baumgarten’s account of, 322–4, 325, 326–7, 328 sensible treatment, in Goethe’s account of art, 498–9 sensibly perfect discourse, Herder’s account of, 385–6 sensitive cognition of perfection, 305 perfection of, 306, 328–9, 349–51 sensitivity, in Heydenreich’s account, 464

Index sensory experience, in aesthetics, 4–5, 10–11 sensory perception in Burke’s account, 150 in Hogarth’s account of beauty, 144 Hutcheson’s account of response to beauty, 101–3 Leibniz’s conception of, 49–52 Wolff’s conception of, 53–4 sensory responses, in taste, 88–9 sensual taste, 267–8 sensuous confirmation of conditions of possibility of morality, 429–30 sensuous drive, Schiller’s account of, 485, 486, 487 “sensuous objective” conception of beauty, Schiller, 471–3, 474–5 Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (Shaftesbury), 37–8, 40 sentimental art, Schiller’s account of, 492–4 sentiments, in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 75–6 serpentine line, as foundation of visually beautiful forms, 141–2, 146–7 Seventh Discourse, Reynolds, 210, 214–15 sexual attractiveness, in Burke’s account of beauty, 155–6 sexual dimension of aesthetic experience, 17 Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 8, 25 background of, 33–4 cognitivist aesthetics of, 33–47 disinterestedness of pleasure in beauty, 30–1, 35–8 influence on work of Hutcheson, 99–101 taste, 44–6 theory of beauty, 38–44 viewpoint on art, 46–7 “Shakespeare” (Herder), 394–5 sharing, appreciation for as reason for standard of taste, 136–7 Shiner, Larry, 28–9 A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria), Hutcheson, 102 Sidney, Sir Philip, 19–20 sight Addison’s description of, 64–5 in André’s account of beauty, 250–1 in Du Bos’s comparison of arts, 85–7 Herder’s account of, 390–3

575

Kames’s account of, 180–1 “The Signature of the Beautiful” (Moritz), 415–16 signs, natural versus arbitrary, 359–61, 383–4 Sikka, Sonia, 378, 382 simplicity, in figure form of beauty, 161 Sixth Discourse, Reynolds, 215–17 Smith, Adam, 194–9 society, in Burke’s account, 151 sociological causes for rise of modern aesthetics, 21 solidarity, from works of art enjoyed in common, 183–4 Soliloquy: Or Advice to an Author (Shaftesbury), 46–7 soul, Montesquieu’s theory of pleasures of, 270–3 sounds, association of emotional effects with, 157 space, in Herder’s account of visual arts, 383–5 Sparshott, Francis, 10 spiritual treatment, in Goethe’s account of art, 498–9 standard of taste Alison’s account of, 232–3 Gerard’s account of, 169–72 Hume’s account of, 127–9, 135–8 Kames’s account of, 182–4 statuary, Smith’s account of, 197 Stewart, Dugald, 225–6, 234–43 style, in Goethe’s account, 499–500 subjective nature of beauty Herz’s dismissal of, 407–8 Hutcheson’s account of, 103 Kant’s account of, 432 Schiller’s critique of Kant’s theory, 474–5 “subjective rational” conception of beauty, 471 “subjective sensual” conception of beauty, 471 subjective universal validity of judgment of taste, 432–6, 437, 442 subjective wealth, Baumgarten’s account of, 332–3 sublime Addison’s account of, 65 aesthetic magnitude concept, 333–5 Alison’s account of, 227–8 Burke’s account of, 148–9, 151–3 in Falconet’s account of sculpture, 278 Gerard’s account of, 161 in Herder’s critique of Kant, 513–14

576

Index

sublime (cont.) Kames’s account of, 190–1 Kant’s distinction between mathematical and dynamical, 333–4 Kant’s theory of, 436–7, 443–9, 454 Mendelssohn’s account of, 361–3 in Reid’s approach, 222–3 Stewart’s account of, 236, 240 suicide, Mendelssohn’s discussion of, 352–3 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 25 aesthetic theory of, 396–405 overview, 306, 378 supersensible, in Herder’s critique of Kant, 513–14 surprise, Montesquieu’s theory of pleasure of, 271–2 symmetry in Hogarth’s account of beauty, 144 identification of beauty and utility with, 41 sympathy Hume’s account of, 131–5 in Kames’s account of paradox of tragedy, 179 as requirement for good taste, 203–4 The Symposium (Plato), 15–16 synthesis of aesthetic theories by Baumgarten and Meier, 339–40 German aesthetics, 307–8, 417–18, 422–4, 530–1 in Goethe’s account, 501–2 by Kames, 193 by Kant, 306–8, 421–3, 438 overview, 25–9, 243 by Schiller, 467–8 by Stewart, 234–43 in Sulzer’s account, 405 System of Aesthetics (Heydenreich), 460, 461–5 tapering of columns, 110 Tatarkiewicz, Władysław, 7 taste Alison’s account of, 226–34 in André’s account of beauty, 251–2 Baumgarten’s account of, 326 Beattie’s account of, 202–4 in Burke’s account, 149–50 Diderot’s account of, 287–9 and disinterestedness of pleasure in beauty, 36 Du Bos’s opinions on, 87–92 Encyclopédie entry on, 267–74 Falconet’s comment on, 276–7

Gerard’s account of, 166–72 Herder’s relativism, 393–6 Herz’s account of, 408–10 Hume’s account of, 126–9, 135–8 Kames’s account of, 181–4 Kant’s theory of, 432–42, 457, 490–1 König’s description of, 314 of poets, Gottsched’s description of, 313–15 in Reynolds’s account, 207 Shaftesbury’s viewpoint on, 44–6 Stewart’s account of, 240–2 Sulzer’s account of, 404 Turnbull’s account of, 116–17 universality of, 111–12 teleological judgment, Kant’s theory of, 426–31 teleology, Wolff’s religious, 60–2 temporal immediacy of taste, Stewart’s account of, 240–1 terror, in Burke’s account of sublime, 151–2 Textbook for the Introduction to Philosophy (Herbart), 528–30 theater Gottsched’s Critical Poetics, 310–16 in Kames’s account of art, 189 Rousseau’s attack upon, 295–302 Theodicy (Leibniz), 51–2 theological theories. See divinity theorems, beauty of, 106–7 Theoretical Doctrine of the Emotions (Meier), 324–5 Theory of Colors (Goethe), 496–7 The Theory of the Arts (Sparshott), 10 Third Discourse, Reynolds, 206–8, 209 “third remove” from reality, imitations as, 13–14 Thirteenth Discourse, Reynolds, 211, 212–14 time in Herder’s account of visual arts, 381–2, 383–5 in Lessing’s account, 372–4 touch, Herder’s account of, 390–3 touching nature of art, 330, 331, 334, 337–40. See also emotional impact of aesthetic experience tragedy, paradox of Addison’s solution to, 71–3 in Burke’s account, 156 in Du Bos’s approach, 82–3 Gerard’s account of, 163–4 Hume’s account of, 139 Hutcheson’s resolution of, 109

Index Kames’s account of, 178–9 Schiller’s account of, 468–71, 475–7 trains of associations, Alison’s account of, 228–9, 230–1 Traité du Beau (Crousaz), 73–8 transcendental aesthetics, Herder’s rejection of, 511–14 Treatise Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design. See Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue Treatise of Ancient Painting (Turnbull), 116–17 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume) account of beauty in, 129–31 free play, 131–3 overview, 125 sympathy and imagination playing with appearance of utility, 133–5 Treatise on the Origin of Language (Herder), 387–8 truth. See also cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience aesthetic, 335–6 in Batteux’s account of art, 259–61 in Beattie’s account of poetry, 200–2 concept of in Wolff’s aesthetics, 52–3, 58–9 Goethe’s account of, 497–8 in Herder’s account of beauty, 391–3 identification of beauty and utility with, 41 implications of Wolff’s position on, 59–63 knowledge of, relation to experience of beauty, 16–17 Reynolds’s account of, 208–11 Turnbull’s account of art, 115–16, 117–18 Turnbull, George, 113–20 Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen (“On the formative Imitation of the Beautiful”), Moritz, 414 Über Goethes Hermann und Dorothea (von Humboldt), 504–8 understanding in Herder’s critique of Kant, 517–20 in Kant’s account of free play, 433–6 uneasiness, as fundamental motivation of human action, 79 uniformity in figure form of beauty, 161 in Hogarth’s account of beauty, 144 Kames’s account of, 191

577

of taste, 182–4 uniformity amidst variety association of ideas, 111–12 cognitive value of, 112–13 in Hogarth’s account, 146 perception of, 104–9 unity in Batteux’s account of art, 258–9 in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 76–7 of form, in André’s account of beauty, 250 in Herz’s account of beauty, 408 universal order, Shaftesbury’s concept of, 38–42 universal validity of judgment of taste, subjective, 432–6, 437, 442 universality of taste, 111–12, 276–7 University of Aberdeen, 158 unspecifiability, in Winckelmann’s account of beauty, 369–70 useful, versus beautiful, Moritz’s account of, 412–13 utility in Addison’s account of imagination, 70–1 in Batteux’s account of art, 258–9 in Batteux’s division of arts, 256 beauty of, in Gerard’s account, 162–3 connection between beauty and, 39–42 in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 76–7 Diderot’s account of, 283–4 in Kames’s account of relative beauty, 190 in Kant’s account of beauty, 439–40 in Montesquieu’s theory of beauty, 269–70 as requirement for perfection in architecture, 56–7 sympathy and imagination playing with appearance of, 131–5 validity of judgment of taste, subjective universal, 432–6, 437, 442 variety in Crousaz’s account of beauty, 76 in figure form of beauty, 161–2 Kames’s account of, 191 in taste, Alison’s account of, 232–3 variety, uniformity amidst association of ideas, 111–12 cognitive value of, 112–13 in Hogarth’s account, 146 perception of, 104–9

578

Index

Vermischte Philosophische Schriften (Sulzer), 397 Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen (“Essay toward a Critical Poetics for the Germans”), Gottsched, 310–16 Versuch über den Geschmack und die Ursachen seiner Verschiedenheit (Essay on Taste and the Causes of its Variety), Herz, 407, 408–10 virtue in Beattie’s account of poetry, 200–2 Falconet’s account of sculpture, 276 Gottsched’s Critical Poetics, 312–13 in Reid’s approach to art, 224–5 Rousseau’s attack upon theater, 298 Shaftesbury’s viewpoint on, 37–8, 43–4 visible beauty, André’s account of, 250–1 vision. See sight visual arts. See also specific arts by name Herder’s account of, 381–4 Hogarth’s account of beauty, 142–3 Lessing’s account of, 372–3 Mendelssohn’s account of, 360–1 Turnbull’s account of art, 117 Wolff’s account of, 55–6 Vitruvius, 57–8 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 267–8

voluntary action, as determinant of moral character, 481 Von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 423, 459, 502–8 waving lines, as foundation of visually beautiful forms, 141–2, 146–7 wealth, aesthetic, 329–30, 332–3 well-being, in Herder’s critique of Kant, 514, 516, 519–20, 524–5 will, as determinant of moral character, 481 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim general discussion, 363–70 Schiller’s argument against, 478 Wolff, Christian, 8, 25 account of art, 55–9 background of, 47–52 basic concepts of aesthetic theory, 52–5 cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience, 31–2 versus Du Bos, 59 Gottsched’s exposure to, 309–10 implications of position of, 59–63 influence of, 305 women, repression of, 300–1 Woodmansee, Martha, 416–17 words, pleasures of imagination proceeding from, 67–9

A History of Modern Aesthetics Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle’s defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato’s famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact – precisely what Plato criticized – and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. The three volumes tell how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by both the best-known and lesser-known aestheticians of modern times, focusing on Britain, France, and Germany in the eighteenth century (Volume 1); Germany and Britain in the nineteenth (Volume 2); and Germany, Britain, and the United States in the twentieth (Volume 3). Paul Guyer is the Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Brown University. He is author of nine books and editor of six collections on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, including four focusing on Kant’s aesthetics. He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and prizes, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize. A History of Modern Aesthetics was facilitated by a Laurance Rockefeller Fellowship at the Princeton University Center for Human Values. Professor Guyer is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been president of both the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and the American Society for Aesthetics.

A History of Modern Aesthetics Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century

Paul Guyer Brown University

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107038042 © Paul Guyer 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Guyer, Paul, 1948– A history of modern aesthetics / Paul Guyer. volumes cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-03803-5 (hardback) 1. Aesthetics, Modern – History. I. Title. BH151.G89 2014 111′.850903–dc23 2013050046 978-1-107-03803-5 Volume 1 Hardback 978-1-107-03804-2 Volume 2 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-03805-9 Volume 3 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-64322-2 Three-Volume Hardback Set ISBN ISBN

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Contents

Acknowledgments

page vii

Introduction

1

Part One German Aesthetics in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century 1 Early Romanticism and Idealism: Schlegel and Schelling 1. Back to Kant 2. Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Romanticism 3. Schelling

11 11 18 38

2 High Romaticism in the Shadow of Schelling 1. Jean Paul 2. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley 3. Mill 4. Emerson

57 58 63 84 91

3 The High Tide of Idealism: Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Schleiermacher 1. Schopenhauer 2. Hegel 3. Schleiermacher

106 106 119 144

4 In the Wake of Hegel 1. Solger 2. Vischer 3. Rosenkranz 4. Lotze

153 154 159 172 179

v

Contents

vi

Part Two (Mostly) British Aesthetics in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

187

5 Ruskin 1. Ruskin, Turner, and Truth 2. Truth as Sincerity 3. Conclusion, with an Excursus on Arnold

191 191 215 225

6 Aestheticism: The Aestheticist Movement 1. Moralism and “Art for Art’s Sake”: From Cousin to Baudelaire 2. “This hard, gem-like flame”: Pater 3. Wilde

229 230 244 257

7 Bosanquet and Tolstoy 1. Bosanquet 2. Tolstoy

270 270 290

Part Three German Aesthetics in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century 8 In the Shadow of Schopenhauer 1. Nietzsche: Introduction 2. Nietzsche: “The Dionysiac World View” 3. Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy 4. Nietzsche after The Birth of Tragedy 5. Von Hartmann

299 300 304 306 315 320

9 Neo-Kantian Aesthetics 1. Fechner 2. Cohen 3. Cohn 4. Münsterberg 5. Dilthey

325 327 330 346 353 363

10 Psychological Aesthetics: Play and Empathy 1. Spencer’s Revival of the Concept of Play 2. The Aesthetics of Empathy: Robert Vischer, Lipps, and Volkelt 3. Groos: The Play of Animal and Man 4. Psychological Aesthetics in the United States: Puffer 5. Psychological Aesthetics in Britain: Lee

378 380 389 409 418 426

Bibliography Index

439 457

Acknowledgments

Quotations from Friedrich Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, edited by Stuart Barnett, reprinted by permission from the State University of New York Press © 2001, State University of New York. All rights reserved. Quotations from Wihelm Dilthey, Selected Works Volume V: Poetry and Experience, edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, reprinted by permission from Princeton University Press © 1985. All rights reserved.

vii

Introduction

Periodization is always one of the great challenges for historiography. Deciding how to define the nineteenth century in the history of aesthetics is no exception. For some purposes, such as political and diplomatic history, a “long nineteenth century,” running from 1789 to 1914, that is, from the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I, might make sense, although if the Revolution is considered well within the eighteenth century and the Napoleonic era considered a continuation of that era, then the nineteenth century might only run from 1815 to 1914, which is in any case exactly one hundred years. In aesthetics, there are many if not more possibilities, due to different developments in different national traditions or even within single national traditions. Thus, in the case of Britain, the eighteenth-century flourishing of the field was largely completed with Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man of 1785 and Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste of 1790, but it made sense to include Dugald Stewart in the eighteenth century, even though some of his relevant work was published only as late as 1810, because of his proximity to the intellectual world of those authors. In Germany, the situation is even more complicated. It would be perfectly natural to think of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment of 1790 as the culmination of the developments that began in Germany with Wolff and of the developments that began in Britain with Hutcheson and Hume, as well as conceiving of it as a conclusive rejection of a tradition that began in France with Du Bos, and then to think of everything coming after Kant as part of a new epoch. Thus, in German aesthetics, the nineteenth century might begin after 1790. But we have already treated several prominent authors whose main works in aesthetics were published later in the 1790s, or even the first decade of the 1800s, namely Schiller, Goethe, von Humboldt, and even Herbart, in the 1

2

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 2

last chapter of the previous book, because of their intellectual proximity to Kant; and Herder’s Kalligone, published in 1800, which some might regard as the last year of the eighteenth century and others as the first year of the nineteenth century, certainly had to be treated there because it is so explicitly a critique of Kant. However, a new school of philosophy, still conceiving of itself in relation to Kant but breaking more radically with his thought, namely the era of German Idealism, while it would become the dominant school of thought in Germany in the first half of the calendar’s nineteenth century, and reverberate in Anglo-American thought for much of the second half of the century, began as early as 1794, with Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s first Wissenschaftslehre (“Theory of Science”), before Schiller had even published his main essays in aesthetics; and Fichte’s precocious colleague Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was also well-embarked on his publishing career before the end of the 1790s. In addition, the broader German artistic and intellectual movement known as Romanticism, although that is generally considered a nineteenth-century movement, was also well under way before the end of the decade, and that movement had reverberations within academic philosophy. So, in the end, perhaps we can only say that in German aesthetics the eighteenth century continued into the 1790s and the nineteenth century began in the same decade, depending upon what figures and movements we are considering. And that is how I have proceeded and will continue to proceed, with some of the figures I have already discussed as part of the eighteenth century, such as Schiller, Goethe, and Herbart, nevertheless having remained active in the 1790s or well beyond, while others who are now to be discussed, such as the two Friedrichs, Hölderlin and Schlegel, representing the Romantics, and Schelling, the first representative of German Idealism, having at least begun their careers in the 1790s as well. As we will see, the question where to begin the nineteenth century in the history of aesthetics is largely a question about where to begin it in Germany, since while in the eighteenth century there was great activity in the field in Britain and France as well as in Germany, although German aesthetics in that period was more affected by British and French developments than the other way around, in the first part of the nineteenth century Germany was definitely the center of new developments in aesthetics while the subject largely disappeared from the British or indeed the Anglo-American academy. Moreover, such extra-academic authors in Britain and America who did make significant contributions to the field, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even

Introduction

3

John Stuart Mill, to some considerable extent worked in the penumbra of the German philosophers, particularly Schelling. We will return to a truly independent British tradition in aesthetics only when we turn to the work of John Ruskin beginning in the 1840s, a figure who might seem to be more of an art (and social) critic than a philosophical aesthetician, but who was both so strongly influenced by the previous British tradition in aesthetics and had such an impact on the subsequent development of more philosophical aesthetics in Britain that he cannot be left out of our story. German aesthetics rather than its own eighteenthcentury tradition was largely dominant in France in the first part of the nineteenth century too, as we will see when we comment on the work of Victor Cousin (although France will play a smaller role in the remainder of this work than it did in the eighteenth century). When we try to find an end for the nineteenth century, developments in Britain and America will become as important as developments in Germany, and we will find that in all three national traditions we will again have to allow the end of the nineteenth century to overlap with the beginning of the twentieth century. In Germany, we can use 1914 as the dividing line between the centuries, because the two movements that still were dominant up until that date, namely Neo-Kantianism and the “empathy” schools, had their origins as early as the 1870s, and radically different movements, such as the aesthetics of Heidegger and his followers, did not begin until after the Great War – although Heidegger’s unique form of realism began as a critique of Neo-Kantianism, thus the dividing line of 1914 may be sharp but is hardly an impermeable barrier. So our discussions of the aesthetics of Neo-Kantianism and empathy will continue past 1900, and indeed our discussion of the empathy school will include consideration of several American and British texts, deeply influenced by the German leaders of the school, published between 1905 and as late as 1913. In Britain and America, however, things are more complicated. The leading aesthetician in Britain at the turn of the century was Bernard Bosanquet and the leading aesthetician in America at that time was George Santayana; their first books in aesthetics respectively, Bosanquet’s History of Æsthetic and Santayana’s Sense of Beauty, were published just four years apart, in 1892 and 1896, and both authors could easily be treated as nineteenth-century figures. But even though Bosanquet published another important work in aesthetics as late as 1915, Santayana remained productive throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and thus, while I will treat Bosanquet’s work as the culmination of nineteenth-century aesthetics in Britain, I will treat

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Santayana as founding twentieth-century aesthetics in America. This means that Clive Bell’s widely discussed Art of 1914, although it could easily be treated as a late document of the nineteenth-century “art for art’s sake” movement, will be treated as part of twentieth-century British aesthetics, and that makes sense too, because Bell’s work was so closely associated with the literary and artistic circle known as “Bloomsbury,” focused around the two Stephens sisters, Virginia Wolff and Vanessa Bell (Clive’s wife), and that is very much a movement of the twentieth century. Another decision that has to be made here is where, both chronologically and nationally, to discuss the Italian Benedetto Croce. Italian aesthetics as such has not been and will not be part of the story told here, although a case could certainly be made that our discussion of eighteenth-century aesthetics should have made room for Giambattista Vico; but Croce was such an influential figure in British aesthetics into the 1930s and even beyond that British aesthetics in that period cannot be understood without him, and therefore his work will be discussed as part of the history of British aesthetics. And likewise, while the publication date of his first main work in aesthetics in 1902 and even his second main contribution in 1913 might allow for his inclusion in the nineteenth century, his impact on twentieth-century British aesthetics clearly calls for his inclusion there. So, in this work the history of nineteenthcentury British aesthetics will conclude with Bernard Bosanquet, and, strange as it might seem, the history of twentieth-century British aesthetics will begin with Benedetto Croce. So much for the chronology of this and the next volume. Now for a few words on the substance of the history of nineteenth-century aesthetics to be presented in this volume. As we saw in Volume 1, Kant’s philosophy of fine art synthesized his version of the theory that the intrinsically pleasurable free play of our mental powers is the essence of aesthetic experience that was developed in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland and Germany with a version of the theory that aesthetic experience is a distinctive form of the apprehension of truth that had been the core of aesthetic theory since the time of Aristotle. Kant brought these two strands of aesthetic theory together in his conception of “aesthetic ideas” as the source of “spirit” in fine art and of genius as the uniquely artistic capacity for the creation and communication of aesthetic ideas, for, by means of this concept, he postulated that in both the production and the reception of fine art the imagination freely plays with and around the intellectual content furnished by ideas of reason. A natural response to Kant’s

Introduction

5

twofold synthesis would have been to add to it the third main line of thought in eighteenth-century aesthetics, the emphasis on the emotional impact of art by such figures as Du Bos and Kames that Kant had held at arm’s length, indeed explicitly rejected, and that a few in the 1790s, such as Heydenreich and Herder, had attempted to preserve. But that is not what happened. Instead, even Kant’s twofold synthesis was quickly sundered by the next generation, and Kant’s combination of the aesthetics of play with the aesthetics of truth as well as the aesthetics of emotional impact were rejected in favor of a purely cognitivist aesthetics. This is particularly evident in the three great aesthetic theories to take the stage after Kant, those of Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. While each preserved some of the outward trappings of Kant’s aesthetics, they each transformed Kant’s conception of aesthetic ideas as a form of free play with truth back into a more traditional conception of an apprehension of truth that is certainly different from other forms of cognition but does not really involve an element of free play. Schelling and Schopenhauer in particular both rejected Kant’s idea that aesthetic experience is intrinsically pleasurable because it is a free play of our mental powers, replacing that theory with the view that for the most part aesthetic experience is pleasurable only because it releases us from the pain of some otherwise inescapable contradiction in the human condition. To borrow terms used by Edmund Burke a half-century earlier, they replace Kant’s conception of aesthetic response as a “positive pleasure” with a conception of it as “the removal of pain” or “delight” as a merely “negative” or “relative” form of pleasure.1 In particular, even though Schopenhauer recognizes that there is some pleasure in aesthetic response that goes beyond mere relief at the removal of pain, he explicitly identifies the pleasure of aesthetic experience with relief from all other emotions, thus clearly rejecting that the arousal of emotions in any form is an essential or characteristic aim of art. Thus both he and Schelling nevertheless maintain that all of the pleasure in aesthetic experience comes through cognition alone rather than from a free play of our cognitive powers. In the case of Hegel, while his thesis that artistic beauty is the sensible appearance of what he calls “the Idea” can be taken as his version of Kant’s own theory of aesthetic ideas as the spirit of fine art, both the theories that aesthetic experience is a form of play and the theory that art aims at the arousal of emotions – which Hegel associates with Mendelssohn – are explicitly 1

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Part One, sections III–V.

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rejected. All three thus transmute Kant’s aesthetics back into a version of cognitivism. Before we turn to Schelling, we will begin this part with a brief discussion of the aesthetics of German Romanticism, to be represented here primarily by the work of Friedrich Schlegel although with a briefer comment on the work of Friedrich Hölderlin as well. From a philosophical point of view, the aesthetics of Romanticism might be regarded as a new version of the Neo-Platonism of Shaftesbury of a century earlier, thus presenting a potential for seeing art as offering the possibility of a three-way synthesis of our responses to the true, the good, and the beautiful; but Romanticism was a short-lived movement, at least in philosophy, shoved off the stage by Idealism precisely because its theory of art was not exclusively cognitivist; this is explicit in Hegel. And, pausing to look at a broader range of cultural figures in Germany, Britain, and America before we turn from Schelling to Schopenhauer, we will see that it was the philosophy of Schelling and not of Schlegel that was the dominant influence; thus, Jean Paul, Coleridge, and Emerson were all strongly influenced by Schelling. Meanwhile, within more professional philosophy, it was Hegel who dominated the scene in the decade before his death in 1831 and for several decades afterward, in spite of some resistance even in Berlin, such as from the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who defended something closer to Kant’s earlier theory of play. But Schleiermacher’s lectures on aesthetics, which began shortly after Hegel joined him at the university in Berlin, did not have the same influence as Hegel’s. Hegel’s influence would remain strong in Germany at least until about 1860, when Neo-Kantianism began, as much as a form of resistance to Hegelianism as a genuine revival of Kantianism. Thus leading aestheticians of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, such as Christian Hermann Weisse, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Karl Rosenkranz, and Rudolf Lotze, all worked within recognizably Hegelian frameworks, although we will see that some of these thinkers, especially Vischer, began to make room for the Kantian idea of free play and for the recognition of the emotional impact of art as well within the confines of their Hegelian framework. Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s son Robert Vischer would emphasize the idea of “empathy,” the reading of our own emotions back into inanimate objects, as one way of making room for an emotional response to art, and that would generate a whole school of German empathy theorists that had influence in Britain and the United States as well, lasting beyond 1900. At the same time, the Neo-Kantians, in both their Marburg

Introduction

7

and Southwestern schools, would make room for the emotional impact of art within a framework that is not particularly Kantian at all, by seeing art as a vehicle for the cognition of our own emotions. This approach will still be visible in Britain half a century later, in the aesthetics of R.G. Collingwood, although he was more overtly influenced by Benedetto Croce’s idiosyncratic mixture of Kantianism and Hegelianism. That, however, will be addressed in Volume 3. Meanwhile, Schopenhauer, although he had published his main work on aesthetics – the third book of The World as Will and Representation – the same year that Hegel merely began lecturing on the subject at Berlin (and when Schleiermacher gave his less influential lectures as well) was eclipsed by the fame of Hegel, and his star began to rise only later, especially during the years of pessimism that followed the failed liberal revolutions of 1848 across Europe. But once Schopenhauer’s star did rise, he had enormous influence, on the practice of the arts, especially literature and music, but also within philosophy, if not exactly academic philosophy, through Nietzsche and the now less known Eduard von Hartmann (Nietzsche was an academic for a decade, but a classical philologist, not a philosopher). In the case of Nietzsche in particular, we will see that while his first book and his only book devoted exclusively to aesthetics, The Birth of Tragedy, was very much influenced by Schopenhauer, in some passages in later work he began to revive the Kantian idea of free play. We shall also see that the famous “art for art’s sake” movement, identified more with literary figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde than with professional philosophers, and certainly not overtly influenced by Schopenhauer, can nevertheless be associated with the Schopenhauerian idea of art as an instrument for detachment from concerns of ordinary life. That attitude in turn can be seen as carrying over into some twentieth-century movements, such as the Bloomsbury aesthetics of Clive Bell and Roger Fry, although again that will be a matter for Volume 3. At the same time, these British movements, both the later stages of the art for art’s sake movement or aestheticism, as it is also called, as well as the Bloomsbury aesthetics of the early twentieth century – can also be seen as rejecting the underlying cognitivism of the main home-grown form of aesthetics in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, namely the aesthetics of John Ruskin, so Ruskin will also be considered in the present volume. I shall conclude this part by looking at two other fin-de-siècle theorists, namely Bernard Bosanquet and Leo Tolstoy, who, though very different in almost every way, nevertheless shared a reductive rather than expansive approach to aesthetic theory.

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Bosanquet, part of the British Hegelianism that flourished in the late nineteenth century while Neo-Kantianism was replacing Hegelianism in German itself, maintained a basically cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience. Tolstoy, on the contrary, promulgated an aesthetics of emotional arousal, but one of such narrow scope – for him, the sole function of art is the communication of religiously beneficial emotions – that he set back the cause of recognizing the emotional impact of art as much as the Idealism of Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel had done at the beginning of the century. Collingwood’s argument that only the clarification of emotions and not the arousal of emotions can be a legitimate aim of art, to be considered in Volume 3, can be understood as a rejection of Tolstoy’s view, even forty years later. Around the same time as Nietzsche was taking some steps toward reviving the theory of play, the Berlin philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, a much less orthodox Neo-Kantian than either his Marburg or Southwest contemporaries, developed a “poetics” that came as close as anything in the nineteenth century did to reestablishing a threefold synthesis of the aesthetics of truth, feeling, and play that had been hinted at by a few of Kant’s immediate predecessors or successors but that had been rejected by Kant himself. However, Dilthey’s version of a threefold synthesis would remain an isolated example of aesthetic nonreductivism in the nineteenth century. These are some of the figures and themes to be considered in the present volume. Let us now turn to them.

Part One

GERMAN AESTHETICS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

1 Early Romanticism and Idealism Schlegel and Schelling

1. Back to Kant Let us begin with a brief review of the central themes of Kant’s aesthetics that will be relevant to what follows. Kant began from the challenge posed by mid-eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, for example by Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” by Gerard’s Essay on Taste, and many other works ultimately going back to Du Bos, to explain how a judgment of taste, paradigmatically a judgment that a particular object is beautiful, can be made only on the basis of a feeling of pleasure in response to an object, independent of any determinate concept of or rule for that object, and yet be valid for all qualified observers of the object responding to it under appropriate conditions. Kant did not present this challenge merely as one raised by previous philosophers, but as one raised by common sense and practice. He began by accepting from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson that a judgment of taste must be disinterested, independent of any personal physiological, prudential, or moral interest in the existence of the object. But disinterestedness seems to be merely a necessary condition for universal validity: one’s pleasure in an object might be independent of any identifiable interest, yet still be utterly accidental or idiosyncratic. To find a sufficient condition for the universal validity of the judgment of taste, Kant sought its ground in a mental state that is disinterested and free from regulation by determinate concepts but nevertheless can be reasonably expected from all normal human beings who themselves approach the object without an antecedent interest in or preconception of what the object ought to be. This state Kant claimed to find in the free play of the imagination and understanding in response to an object, an “apprehension of forms” in which “the imagination . . . is unintentionally brought into accord with the understanding . . . and a 11

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feeling of pleasure is thereby aroused,”1 a “state of mind” in which the “powers of representation that are sent into play by [a] representation are hereby in a free play, since no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition,”2 which is also a state of the “animation of both faculties (the imagination and the understanding) to an activity that is indeterminate but yet, through the stimulus of the given representation, in unison.”3 Such a state of mind is pleasurable because it seems to us like the satisfaction of our general goal in cognition – finding unity in our manifolds of representation – in a way that is contingent and surprising precisely because it is not dictated by any concept of rule that applies to the object.4 But it is also a response to the object that we can impute to others as what they too would experience under ideal or optimal conditions, because it involves nothing but cognitive powers which themselves must be imputed to others and assumed to work in the same way in them as they do in ourselves. This inference is what Kant called the “deduction of judgments of taste.”5 Kant insisted that the universal validity claimed by judgments of taste does not merely rest on “psychological observations”6 but must be grounded on an “a priori principle,”7 although he made no explicit argument that we can know a priori that the free play of our cognitive powers will produce a feeling of pleasure or animation. In addition, his assumption that we can know a priori that the cognitive powers of others must work like our own even when not determined by particular concepts is, to put it politely, underargued. In the “Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” Kant restated the challenge of justifying the judgment of taste’s claim to universal validity in the form of an “antinomy” between the “thesis” that “The judgment of taste is not based on concepts, for otherwise it would be possible to dispute about it (decide by means of proofs)” and the “antithesis” that the “judgment of taste is based on concepts, for otherwise . . . it would not even be possible to argue about it (to lay claim to the necessary assent of others to this judgment).”8 However, instead of then reiterating his previous solution to this dilemma, that the

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, hereafter CPJ, Introduction, §7, 5:190. Kant, CPJ, §9, 5:217. Kant, CPJ, §9, 5:219. Kant, CPJ, Introduction, section VI, 5:187–8. Kant, CPJ, §§ 21, 38. Kant, CPJ, §21, 5:239. Kant, CPJ, §36, 5:288. Kant, CPJ, §56, 5:338–9.

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judgment of taste is based on a free and therefore indeterminate play of cognitive powers that can be assumed to work the same way in everybody under ideal conditions, Kant, whether in spite of or because of the inadequacy of his previous proof that these powers do work the same way in everyone, next argued that “all contradiction vanishes if I say that [determining ground of] the judgment of taste . . . may lie in the concept of that which can be regarded as the supersensible substratum of humanity,”9 the noumenal basis of our phenomenal, psychological powers that must be the same in all human beings. This assertion relocates the explanation of the non-derivability of particular intersubjectively valid judgments of taste from determinate concepts of their objects from the psychological theory of the free play of the faculties to a metaphysical theory of a common but noumenal and therefore inaccessible ground of the phenomenal psychologies of all human beings. It’s unclear how Kant might have thought he could assert that the noumenal ground of all human psychologies must be the same when he ordinarily maintains that our concept of our noumenal selves can be made determinate only through the moral law.10 Nevertheless, this introduction of the metaphysical conception of a noumenal basis for taste would be decisive for the aesthetic theories of Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, for they return not merely to a cognitivist theory of aesthetics but to a particular form of it that can be called a “metaphysical” or “speculative” version of cognitivist aesthetics.11 This leap into metaphysics to complete the deduction of judgments of taste played no role in Kant’s own account of fine art or of the significance of either natural or artistic beauty, however, which turns on moral rather than metaphysical ideas. Kant presented his theory of fine art in the form of a theory of genius as the source of fine art. Kant begins his account of genius by using his idea of the free play of the cognitive faculties, not that of the supersensible ground that he would introduce in the subsequent resolution of the antinomy of aesthetic judgment. Leading up to his account of genius, Kant defines art in general as the human

9 10

11

Kant, CPJ, §57, 5:340. See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:49, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 179. See Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art in the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), Part Two, “The Speculative Theory of Art,” and Joachim Ritter, Vorlesungen zur Philosophischen Ästhetik, ed. Ulrich von Bülow and Mark Schweda, Marbacher Schriften, Neue Folge 6 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010), pp. 153–76 (lectures originally given in 1962).

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power to produce a work through freedom rather than mere instinct and through skill rather than science, and then distinguishes “liberal” art from mere handicraft as an intrinsically agreeable rather than merely remunerative occupation.12 But “liberal” or “aesthetic art” in general can produce a feeling of pleasure in its audience as well, in either of two ways – namely, through mere sensation, in which case it is “agreeable” art, or as “a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication,” in which case it is “beautiful” art.13 Kant may initially seem to suggest that in order to appreciate beautiful art as such one may have to suppress one’s knowledge that it is the product of intentional human production: as he famously says, “the purposiveness of its form must still seem to be as free from all constraint by arbitrary rules as if it were a mere product of nature.”14 But as he continues, he makes it clear that beautiful art produces a free play of our cognitive powers precisely because its form engages and unifies our imagination in a way that goes beyond whatever determinate concepts – concepts of its goal, its medium and genre, and its content – that we do know apply to it. This is the lesson of Kant’s conception of genius as the source of art and of aesthetic ideas as what the artistic genius produces. Beautiful art must be produced by genius because “The concept of beautiful art . . . does not allow the judgment concerning the beauty of its product to be derived from any sort of rule that has a concept for its determining ground,” and genius is precisely the “talent (natural gift)” for “producing that for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition of skill for that which can be learned in accordance with some rule.”15 Beautiful art, Kant also says, must contain “spirit,” so genius must be responsible for the spirit in art. He then explicates spirit in terms of the concept of aesthetic ideas. Spirit, according to Kant, is the “animating principle in the mind” in the production and experience of beautiful art, and that “by which this principle animates the soul . . . is that which purposively sets the mental powers into motion, i.e., into a play that is self-sustaining and even strengthens the powers to that end.”16 What sets the mental powers into such a play, Kant continues, is an aesthetic idea, “that representation of the imagination that occasions much 12 13 14 15 16

Kant, CPJ, §43, 5:303–4. Kant, CPJ, §44, 5:305–6. Kant, CPJ, §45, 5:306. Kant, CPJ, §46, 5:307. Kant, CPJ, §49, 5:313.

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thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible.” What Kant means by this is that a work of art on the one hand has intellectual content – Kant assumes without argument that fine art is paradigmatically representational or mimetic – but specifically rational content, a content of ideas that cannot be reduced to determinate concepts of the understanding, and on the other hand conveys this content through a wealth of materials of the imagination – intuitions – that cannot be derived from that content by any concept or rule but nevertheless illustrate it and convey it to us in a satisfyingly harmonious and therefore pleasurable way. Thus he says, One can call such representations of the imagination ideas: on the one hand because they at least strive toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek to approximate a presentation of concepts of reason (of intellectual ideas) . . . ; on the other hand, and indeed principally, because no concept can be fully adequate to them, as inner intuitions. The poet ventures to make sensible rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creations, etc.17

A successful work of fine or beautiful art sets the form and the content of a work of art and the mental powers for the intuition of that form and the intellection of that content into a free and harmonious play: Now if we add to a concept a representation of the imagination that belongs to its presentation, but which by itself stimulates so much thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept, hence which aesthetically enlarges the concept itself in an unbounded way, then in this case the imagination is creative, and sets the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into motion, that is, at the instigation of a representation it gives more to think about than can be grasped and made distinct in it. (CPJ, §49, 315)

Genius is thus the ability to present rational ideas through particular artistic media and genres in imaginative ways that cannot be fully determined by any rules for the latter, and fine art is the presentation of such ideas. But such ideas are moral ideas, not overtly metaphysical ideas, and Kant’s theory of genius is not overtly a theory of art as a form of metaphysical cognition, as it will become for the successors we are about to consider. “Not overtly,” I say: to be sure, in the full development of Kant’s moral philosophy, he does argue that our ideas of moral rationality and obligation presuppose metaphysical conceptions of our own freedom and

17

Kant, CPJ, §49, 5:314.

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immortality and of the existence of God, and thus those who react to Kant by developing a metaphysical theory of art might be regarded as synthesizing Kant’s aesthetics with his own moral philosophy. But as we saw in our discussion of Kant in the previous volume, this was not the way he connected aesthetics and morality, and he allowed at most that the experience of beauty, not especially that of art, can suggest our own moral freedom to us, by way of analogy, not that it gives us any knowledge of that freedom. Kant stresses that genius consists not just in the capacity to create such ideas for oneself but also in the ability to find ways to communicate them to others: “genius really consists in the happy relation, which no science can teach and no diligence learn, of finding ideas for a given concept on the one hand and on the other hitting upon the expression for these, through which the subjective disposition of the mind that is thereby produced” in the artist “can be communicated to others,” namely the audience for art.18 This in turn means that the genius must have the special gift not only of enjoying the free play of his own mental powers but also of stimulating the free play of these powers in others, so that they may not simply apprehend the object he has produced but, paradoxical as it may sound, enjoy a free play similar to his own and thus be stimulated but not dominated by his artistic success. The work of a genius must be “exemplary” originality19 that stimulates the free play of the mental powers of its audience in general and of successive artists in particular. This point was not stressed by the immediate successors of Kant, but as we will see later, it would be stressed by that nineteenth-century thinker who most fully captured the spirit of Kant’s aesthetics and then extended it to complete a threefold synthesis of approaches to aesthetic experience, namely Wilhelm Dilthey. In his theory of aesthetic ideas and genius, then, Kant synthesized the old approach to aesthetic experience and one of the new approaches: beautiful art (and Kant subsequently extended this to beautiful nature)20 makes sensible or palpable the most profound ideas of (practical ) reason, which cannot be fully grasped through ordinary concepts of the understanding, but our pleasure in art does not come from our cognition of these ideas as such but from the free play between these ideas and the form and matter of the works by which they are conveyed, thus 18 19 20

Kant, CPJ, §49, 5:317. Kant, CPJ, §46, 5:308. Kant, CPJ, §51, 5:320.

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from the free play of our imagination with these ideas rather than from mere cognition of them. In aesthetic experience our cognitive powers are engaged with cognitions, but not for the sake of or to the end of cognition. As already suggested, Kant maintained this delicate position in the final piece of his aesthetic theory – that “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, and also that only in this respect (that of a relation that is natural to everyone, and that is also expected of everyone else as a duty) does it please with a claim to the assent of everyone else.” Here Kant argued that the beautiful may and indeed ought to be taken as a symbol of the morally good because of a number of analogies between our experience of the beautiful and our moral experience, above all the analogy between “the freedom of the imagination . . . in the judging of the beautiful” and “the freedom of the will . . . as the agreement of the latter with itself in accordance with universal laws of reason” in “moral judgment.”21 But Kant did not say that our experience of the freedom of the imagination in the experience of beauty gives us actual knowledge of the freedom of our will. That, he had argued in the Critique of Practical Reason, can come only from our immediate awareness of our obligation under the moral law, the “fact of reason.”22 Aesthetic experience can at most give us a feeling of our freedom rather than cognition of it, although apparently it is sufficiently important that we have even a mere feeling of our freedom that we can demand the attention of others to the beautiful objects that give this feeling to us and their assent to our judgments of taste about them. Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel draw on many of these ideas. But they also turn Kant’s idea of the free play of our cognitive powers back into the more traditional idea that aesthetic experience is actual cognition, and treat such cognition primarily as a source of the negative pleasure of relief from pain rather than as a source of positive pleasure presupposing no antecedent pain. Doing the latter, they go even further in excluding the emotions from our proper responses to beauty, in the case of Schopenhauer the beauty of nature as well as art, and in the case of Schelling and Hegel primarily the beauty of art. We are now about to see how they do that. But first we will pause to look at the aesthetic theory of German Romanticism, which prepares the way for the cognitivist turn of German philosophical aesthetics after Kant. 21 22

Kant, CPJ, §59, 5:353–4. Critique of Practical Reason, 5:30, 47–9.

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2. Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Romanticism It is customary to point to the epoch, or better the brief moment of “early German Romanticism” as the first stage of the movement of aesthetic theory beyond Kant and the “classicism” of such at least partial Kantians as Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt.23 Friedrich Hölderlin was present briefly in the still “classical” Jena of 1795, just before it was transformed into the seat of early German Romanticism the next year. The phrase “early German Romanticism” has come to refer to the philosophical, critical, and literary activity of a number of people working in close contact with one another, first in Jena and then in Berlin between 1796 and 1801. Goethe and Schiller had brought Johann Gottlieb Fichte to the university at Jena in 1794, and he attracted first students like Hölderlin and Schelling, and then the literary figures included in early German Romanticism, who took philosophy and literature in a very different direction from that of their original patrons. Leading figures in the group included the literary historian and philologist August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), the essayist and poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, who would call himself “Novalis” (1772–1801), the novelists and storywriters Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1772–1798), the theologian Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher

23

For a general survey of “early Romanticism,” see Ernst Behler, Frühromantik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992). For philosophical treatments, see Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (Bern: Francke, 1920; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), and Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989), with special emphasis on Schelling, as well as Unendliche Annäherung: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997); the final twelve lectures of this book, focusing on Schlegel, have been translated as Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). See also Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). Two classical surveys of German Romanticism are Rudolf Haym, Die Romantische Schule: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Geisters (Berlin: R. Gaertner, 1870), and Ricarda Huch, Die Romantik: Ausbreitung, Blüte, und Verfall (Leipzig: H. Haessel, 1908). A recent survey, including discussion of its influence in later nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, is Rüdiger Safranski, Romantik: Eine deutsche Affäre (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2007). Briefer treatments of Schlegel’s aesthetics include Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), ch. 2, and Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, ch. 2. A collection of papers is Walter Jaeschke and Helmut Holzhey, editors, Früher Idealismus und Frühromantik: Der Streit um die Grundlagen der Ästhetik (1795–1805) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), with a companion volume of texts, or Quellenband, under the same title, edited by Walter Jaeschke, also (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995).

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(1768–1834), and the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Josef Schelling (1775–1854). We will return to the last two, whose most important contributions to aesthetics came after the moment of early German Romanticism. As our representative of the aesthetic theorizing of early German Romanticism, we will focus on several works of the leading theorist of this group, Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), the younger brother of August Wilhelm, but will first say a few words about Hölderlin.

Hölderlin Hölderlin (1770–1843), who in the twentieth century came to be regarded as perhaps the greatest and most philosophical of all German poets, published some of his poems as well as the epistolary novel Hyperion and a translation of the Oedipus cycle of Sophocles during the decade and a half of activity preceding his mental breakdown in 1806, from which he never recovered; in spite of a brief attempt to become a teacher of philosophy at Jena, however, he published no work in philosophy at all while he was alive. Recent scholarship has shown, however, that he played a central role in the transition from Fichte’s version of Kantianism to the absolute idealism of his university roommates Schelling and Hegel,24 and he also left behind several essays on aesthetics that presaged and may also have influenced the full-blown systems of aesthetics developed by his friends. This work thus merits a brief look before we turn to the more representative Romanticism of Schlegel. Hölderlin was born in a small town in Württemburg. His father died when he was two, and a week before Friedrich turned nine his beloved stepfather also died. He was destined by his mother for the ministry, and received a thorough education, culminating in the two-year course in philosophy at the university at Tübingen followed by the three-year course in theology in the university seminary, the so-called Tübinger Stift. There he roomed with his fellow Württemburger Hegel, exactly the same age, and they were subsequently joined by the precocious Schelling, five years their junior but the first to achieve worldly success when he became a professor at Jena in 1798, at only twenty-three. Hölderlin, who was already publishing poetry, himself went to Jena to study philosophy with Fichte in 1794, but gave up his hope of himself becoming a professor after only six months, and instead embarked on a career as a tutor, first to a son of Schiller’s friend Charlotte von Kalb and then to a son of the 24

See especially Dieter Henrich, The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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banker Jacob Gontard and his wife Susette, with whom Hölderlin unhappily fell in love. He held a number of other such posts, each briefly, until his collapse in 1806, after which he was cared for during the remainder of his life by a Tübingen craftsman and his family (presumably at the expense of his own family). Hölderlin’s place in the general history of philosophy depends upon a brief paper called “Judgment and Being,” discovered only in 1961 but apparently written in the spring of 1795 while Hölderlin was still in Jena, thus after his time with Schelling and Hegel at Tübingen but before his various subsequent conversations with them, as well as on a subsequent, only slightly longer piece called the “Earliest Systematic Program for German Idealism,” which is in Hegel’s hand but was at least once thought to represent joint work by Hegel with Schelling and Hölderlin.25 Since this piece is now thought to be Hegel’s work alone, I will comment only on “Judgment and Being” before turning to Hölderlin’s posthumous papers directly on aesthetics. The key idea of “Judgment and Being” is that judgment (urtheilen) is a “primordial division” (ur-teilen) of an antecedent unity, thus that the process of knowledge is not the constitution of unity out of sheer diversity by a self (which must indeed constitute its own unity in the process) but rather the reconstitution of an original unity that precedes its various parts, including the conscious self, and that even if the conscious human self or the collectivity thereof can never fully complete the process of reconstituting this original unity for itself, nevertheless it is there all along, preceding the effort to reconstitute it, and this is in some way known to the self through an “intellectual intuition,” a state of mind that in some way already unifies the two things – namely concept and intuition – that it is always the task of the conscious mind to combine. In Hölderlin’s words, Judgment is in the highest and strictest sense the original separation of the object and subject already most intimately united in the intellectual intuition, that separation by means of which object and subject first become possible, the primordial division [Ur-Teilung]. In the concept of the division 25

See H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 249. The inclusion of this piece in Friedrich Hölderlin, Werke – Briefe – Dokumente, edited by Pierre Bertaux (Munich: Winkler, 1963), the first popular edition of Hölderlin’s work to publish the newly discovered fragment Urteil und Sein, represents the older view that Hölderlin had a hand in the Älteste Systementwurf as well. My translations of Hölderlin in the present section have been made from this edition. English translations of the texts to be discussed can also be found in Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, translated and edited by Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

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there already lies the mutual relation of the object and subject to one another, and the necessary presupposition of a whole, of which object and subject are the parts.26

Hölderlin’s affirmative use of the phrase “intellectual intuition” makes the anti-Kantian animus of this position clear: for Kant, theoretical philosophy can concern itself only with the manifold of intuition that is given to the mind in order to be connected into the parallel wholes of the unity of apperception and the unity of the world of objects in accordance with the mind’s own forms of intuition and thought (the categories), and any unity that the world or for that matter the mind itself may already have in itself is a matter beyond theoretical purview; but for Hölderlin, it is important that the mind already have some form of access to the primordial unity of being before it undertakes its task of reconstituting that unity in its own system or systems of representations; the mind recognizes that it is not creating unity out of nothing but is in some sense rediscovering a unity that already exists and that indeed in some way it already knows to exist. This is the crucial move from Kant’s “transcendental idealism” to the “objective” or “absolute idealism” of the next generation, then to be worked out in great detail, in their own ways, by Schelling and Hegel.27 A century later, Hölderlin’s idea that being must underlie judgment (although not the specific text “Judgment and Being”) would have a great impact on Martin Heidegger as well.28 The key idea of the aesthetics of absolute idealism is then that aesthetic experience is one if not the paradigmatic form of this “intellectual intuition” of the primordial unity of being, and art is one if not the paradigmatic form for the expression of the mind’s recognition or reconstitution of this unity. As we will see, in the early work of Schelling, aesthetic experience and the creation of art are the paradigmatic form for the recognition and reconstitution of the unity of being, in later Schelling one of the necessary forms for this, while in Hegel they are

26 27

28

Hölderlin, Werke – Briefe – Dokumente, p. 490. On “Judgment and Being,” see Henrich, “Hölderlin on Judgment and Being: A Study in the History of the Origins of Idealism,” in The Course of Remembrance, pp. 71–89, and Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, edited by David S. Pacini (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 279–95. See also Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, trans. Brady Bowman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 278–9. Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin will be discussed in the treatment of Heidegger in Volume 3, Part One.

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only a preliminary form for this. The gist of the idea of intellectual intuition is that somehow the sensory presentation of reality and the conceptual comprehension of it are already unified and do not need to be as it were forcibly brought together, and the gist of idealist aesthetics is that aesthetic experience is like this, that art expresses this fact about aesthetic experience, and that the full weight of the metaphysical importance of intellectual intuition can be borne by the aesthetic and artistic case. In an essay on “The Procedure of the Poetic Spirit,” which is the longest of the surviving pieces on aesthetics (from around 1799, or the year before Schelling would offer his first philosophy of art), Hölderlin states the first point by saying that the possibility of poetry depends on “the receptivity of the material to ideal content and to ideal form,”29 suggesting a kind of preestablished harmony between the reality that a poem is about with its poetic expression as well as a harmony within the poem as expression of this reality between its form and its content, or its perceptual and conceptual aspects. The aesthetic experience that goes into the creation of a poem as well as that triggered by it, that is, the experience of both artist and audience, thus intimate the unity of being as well as the preestablished harmony between being and the human experience of it (“judgment,” in the terms of Hölderlin’s earlier note). Hölderlin stresses the unity of intuition and intellect in the work of art and the experience of it in the further remark that the “ground of the poem, its significance [Bedeutung], should form [bilden] the transition between the expression, what is presented, the sensory material, what is actually expressed in the poem, and the spirit, the ideal treatment.”30 Several pages later, he adds that the harmonies inherent in the poem – between the outer world and the aesthetic experience, between the sensory and the intellectual within the aesthetic experience – are both primordial yet also progressively reconstituted, in this regard thus like all knowledge on his account: I say: it is necessary that the poetic spirit in its unity and harmonious progress also give itself an infinite standpoint in its work, a unity where in harmonious progress and alternation everything goes both forwards and backwards, and through its thoroughly characteristic relation to this unity it wins not only objective coherence, for the audience, but also felt and palpable [gefühlten und fühlbaren] coherence and identity in the alternation of opposites, and it is its final task in this harmonious alternation to keep a thread, a recollection, so that the spirit is never left in individual moments and again 29 30

Hölderlin, Werke – Briefe – Dokumente, p. 508. Hölderlin, Werke – Briefe – Dokumente, p. 509.

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in individual moments, but moves continuously from one moment to the next, and remains present in the different moods,

so that it, the aesthetic spirit and its experience, is then “the unifying point . . . of the opposites . . . so that in it the harmoniously opposed are neither opposed as separates nor united as opposed but are felt as in one.”31 It is not easy to put a precise sense on Hölderlin’s torrents of words, but the general idea seems clear that the poem, thus the aesthetic experience that leads to and/or to which it leads, does not merely put together what is originally separate, but rather progressively, infinitely, and thus in some sense never completely but in some sense always, discovers the unity in what only appears to be separate but is already primordially unified. Finally, Hölderlin suggests that aesthetic experience not only has this quality but represents it to us, thus functions as a form of metaphysical insight: the vocation or destiny (Bestimmung) of poetry is to be “cognition [Erkenntnis] of the harmoniously opposed . . . in its unity and individuality.”32 In the end, then, Hölderlin regards the spirit of poetry, and presumably the spirit of art more generally, as a form of metaphysical insight, and thus stands squarely in the cognitivist tradition in aesthetics. There has been no mention of play nor of emotion in his account of poetry; even when he spoke of what is gefühlt und fühlbar, felt and palpable, he was talking about the sensory aspect of intellectual intuition, thus of metaphysical insight, not about the experience of any ordinary human emotion. This is not to say that Hölderlin’s own poetry is not deeply expressive of emotion; it is a claim about Hölderlin’s theory, not his poetry. (Though I think few would allege to find any element of play or playfulness in Hölderlin’s earnest poetry.) The metaphysical cognitivism of Hölderlin’s rudimentary aesthetics was to be worked out in great detail by his friends Schelling and Hegel, although whether with knowledge of his texts or on the basis of conversations with him or only on the basis of a common way of thinking we cannot say. So for details of such a view we should turn to them. But first we will consider the Romantic aesthetics of Friedrich Schlegel, far better known in their own time than the unpublished thoughts of Hölderlin, communicated at best to his two friends who enjoyed worldly success while he languished alone in his tower room in Tübingen. 31 32

Hölderlin, Werke – Briefe – Dokumente, p. 515. Hölderlin, Werke – Briefe – Dokumente, p. 520.

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Schlegel Here we will focus on Friedrich Schlegel, who arrived in Jena the year after Hölderlin left and presumably knew nothing of his predecessor’s philosophical thought. Friedrich and August Wilhelm were sons, Friedrich the seventh and youngest child, of the minister Johann Adolf Schlegel and nephews of Johann Elias Schlegel, both literary figures of a previous generation (Johann Adolf Schlegel had been the translator of Batteux into German and Johann Elias a well-known playwright). August Wilhelm was allowed to pursue his philological interests directly, and matriculated as a student of the classics at the university at Göttingen in 1786. Their parents were concerned about the financial future of their youngest son, however, and apprenticed him to a banker in Leipzig at the age of fifteen, then allowed him to follow his brother to Göttingen in 1790, but only to study law. The next year, August Wilhelm left Göttingen to become a tutor to a family in Amsterdam, and Friedrich returned to Leipzig to continue his study of law, where he met von Hardenberg, who was studying to be a mining engineer. Friedrich quickly gave up law for the study of Greek and Roman literature. In 1794, he moved to Dresden, where he was able to live with an older, married sister, and continue his study of ancient literature as well as study the extensive collection of plaster casts of ancient sculpture that had been assembled for the Saxon royal family by the painter Anton Raphael Mengs. In 1795, August Wilhelm was invited to Jena by Schiller to work on his journal Die Horen. Von Hardenberg also went there to listen to Fichte, and the next year Friedrich Schlegel arrived to join his older brother. This was the beginning of the brief moment of early German Romanticism, which flourished in Jena for the next several years. By 1798, however, August Wilhelm had fallen out with Schiller, and Friedrich moved to Berlin in order to continue his literary career there: for the next two years in Berlin, he would edit the three volumes of the journal Athenäum, which presented the views of the early Romantics to the German literary public. In 1799, the leading philosopher of Jena, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, was forced out of his position in the aftermath of the “Atheism controversy,” and in 1803 Schelling, who had also been teaching there since 1798, departed as well, at least in part because of the scandal over his affair and marriage with Caroline, previously the wife of August Wilhelm Schlegel. Following Fichte’s departure, Friedrich Schlegel returned to Jena to matriculate in philosophy and offered courses, but attendance

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at his first lectures on transcendental philosophy (posthumously published in 1935) dwindled before the course was complete, and he and his wife, the former Dorothea Veit, originally Brendel Mendelssohn, a daughter of Moses, moved back to Berlin, then in 1801 on to Dresden and then Paris. Also in 1801, Ludwig Tieck arrived in Jena but Novalis died. Those events marked the end of the Romantic circle in Jena and the end of the moment of early German Romanticism. Schlegel would make his living as a private lecturer in Cologne for several more years (1804–8), but in 1808 he ultimately converted to Catholicism, became a political conservative, and went to work for the Austrian administration of Prince von Metternich in Vienna from 1809 to 1818, for which service he was awarded a “von” in 1815. In his last years, Schlegel lectured in Vienna. Friedrich Schlegel wrote and edited journals prolifically throughout his life. In addition to the works in aesthetics from 1794 to 1804, some of which will be discussed in what follows, he published a work on The Language and Philosophy of the Indians in 1808 – his brother edited the first Western editions of the Upanishads – which may well have been a source for Schopenhauer’s fascination with Indian philosophy. In his final lectures in Vienna, he was outlining a “system of Christian philosophy,” three volumes of which – Philosophy of Life, Philosophy of History, and Philosophy of Language or of the Word – were published before or shortly after his death. As we will see, Schlegel’s turn from a secular to a Christian philosophy appeared in his works in aesthetics no later than 1804. Before he arrived in Jena, the strongest philosophical influence on Friedrich Schlegel was Kant. The influence of Kant’s aesthetics is evident in an early piece on “The Limits of the Beautiful” (1794). This work looks both backward and forward. In Schlegel’s opening statement of his aims, he uses a Neo-Platonic formulation, reminiscent of Shaftesbury almost a century earlier: he will attempt, he says, “to exhibit the elements of beauty as they exist, not in the [sic] art only but also in nature and in love, and to prove that the proper combination of these three elements – the richness of nature, the purity of love, and the symmetry of art – will infallibly produce true, genuine, and majestic beauty. The idea of beauty, thus understood, cannot be regarded as distinct, either from truth, or from the abundance of living realities; it must not be severed from love . . . nor from the sentiment of goodness.” At least at the outset of his career, Schlegel thus recognized the possibility of a threefold synthesis of approaches to beauty. But what was of more immediate concern to him is not theory but present practice: he says that the beautiful is

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“everywhere defective, incomplete, and partial, presented to us in disjointed fragments, both in artistic representation and in reality.”33 In this context, the latter remark seems to imply that contemporary art itself is not living up to its potential, and needs to be reformed. It is often thought that the core idea of early German Romanticism is that since reality itself can never admit of a unified and complete comprehension, our representation of it is necessarily fragmentary, and the inexorably fragmentary representation of reality in art is precisely what makes art the paradigmatic vehicle for the representation of reality. If this were indeed the central thought of early German Romanticism, then it would seem that the Neo-Platonic ideal of the unity of beauty, truth, and goodness should disappear from Schlegel’s subsequent work, supposed to be the paradigm of this movement. In fact, as we will see, although there are hints of an acceptance of the ineluctably fragmentary nature of art and beauty in Schlegel’s central contributions of the later 1790s, the NeoPlatonic ideal that philosophy, moral sensibility, and the sense of beauty each offer distinct but co-extensive representations of reality as a unified and systematic whole, which in turn might ultimately be unified in art – an idea which, as we have seen, had not died with Shaftesbury, but had continued to live in Germany in the work of Karl Philipp Moritz and would animate Herder’s critique of Kant’s aesthetics as late as 1800 – would remain central to Schlegel’s work. The fact that Neo-Platonism would be the source for the critique of Kant six years after Schlegel wrote the essay we are now discussing would seem to raise a doubt about my opening suggestion that this early essay was written under Kant’s influence. But this suggestion should not be rejected, for two reasons. First, as we have seen, in spite of his initial rigorous separation of aesthetic response from all conceptual content, Kant had ultimately insisted that all fine art does have intellectual, indeed moral content, and even added that because of the structure of aesthetic experience itself all beauty, natural as well as artistic, is a symbol of the morally good; in other words, Kant by no means completely rejected the Neo-Platonic identification of the beautiful, the true, and the good, although he did transpose it from a metaphysical into a symbolic key and certainly underplayed any emotional aspect of the aesthetic response to the representation of the good. And second, in the present work Schlegel grounded his Neo-Platonism in a Kantian conception of the free activity 33

Friedrich Schlegel, “On the Limits of the Beautiful,” in The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Frederick von Schlegel, trans. E.J. Millington (London: Bohn, 1849), p. 413.

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of the mind as the core of aesthetic experience and the basis for its further cognitive and moral significance. He begins the central passage of the essay with a thought that sounds like it comes from Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education, although that work would be published only a year later: The soul needs a certain amount of intellectual enjoyment to give it strength adequate for the daily struggle in which it is involved. The energies of the mind are as completely shattered and destroyed by constant restraint, as they are relaxed and enfeebled by perpetual enjoyments. To make pleasure the sole object of life is to defeat our own intention; for man exists but in accordance with the decrees of nature, and her laws stand in constant opposition to his own desires. Life is a stern struggle between conflicting powers.

Then, in a move parallel to Schiller’s, Schlegel turns to a Kantian account of aesthetic experience as offering us a kind of pleasure that can resolve or at least ameliorate our constant struggle with the constraints of human existence without sapping our moral resolve, that can indeed strengthen our moral capacity without sacrificing what is unique to itself: Pleasure, indeed, has a higher zest when spontaneous and self-created; and it rises in value in proportion to its affinity with that perfection of beauty in which moral excellence is allied to external charms. It must be a free spontaneous burst of feeling: not the result of certain means applied for the attainment of any particular object; for pleasure thus pursued becomes occupation rather than enjoyment.

Here Schlegel adopts Kant’s conception that the purposiveness of the beautiful must be disinterested and subjective, that beauty cannot be equated with ordinary usefulness; indeed, he exclaims that “We call it desecration and pollution to employ holy things in ordinary uses.” Then he continues: But is not the beautiful also holy? Man can by representation inform the understanding; by beauty he can improve the manners; works of art may supply material for contemplation; but the mind will gain little or nothing thereby. As all energy demands for its development a free unrestrained power of action, so the sense of beauty and its creative faculty are kindled in the soul only by the free enjoyment and habitual contemplation of its creations. This inward perception of the soul for the beautiful is far different from the superficial artistic taste which refuses to acknowledge a susceptibility to comprehend represented and ideal forms as a creative and

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generative faculty for art. For beauty reigns supreme, not only in imitative works, but also in nature, in mankind, and in love.34

Here Schlegel’s idea is that the essence of beauty is not imitation, but free exercise – or free play – of our mental powers, and that the benefits of the experience of beauty for the rest of our lives – nature, mankind, and love – follow from the fact that aesthetic experience is a form of freedom. This was of course the central idea of Kant’s aesthetics and, as noted, the idea that Schiller was developing at the same time as Schlegel.35 In Schlegel’s next significant work on aesthetics, however, the essay “On the Study of Greek Poetry” written in 1795 as the introduction to a never completed history of ancient poetry, and published on its own in 1797, Schlegel’s thought adds a new twist. The central idea of the 1794 essay might be stated by saying that aiming for beauty in art at least under ideal circumstances also yields both truth and goodness, but what Schlegel argues the next year is that art aims for truth, although under ideal conditions that will also yield beauty. In particular, he argues, no doubt under the continuing influence of Winckelmann, that the artists of ancient Greece had naturally aimed for truthfulness to nature in their work, but because of the harmonious circumstances of their life and their holistic conception of nature had produced works that also had great beauty – “The bold nudity in the life and art of the Greeks and Romans is not animalistic crudity but, rather, uninhibited naturalness, liberal humanity, and republican candor”36 – while modern artists, because of the less harmonious conditions of modern life and their more fragmentary conceptions of reality, aim to capture the truth of particular objects rather than any sort of universal truth, and thereby do not produce harmonious beauty but only the “interesting” or even the ugly. In this essay, which is still only a way station to the early Romanticism of 34 35

36

Schlegel, “On the Limits of the Beautiful,” pp. 416–17. Ruth Sonderegger presents an interpretation of Schlegel centered on the concept of play in Für eine Ästhetik des Spiels: Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktion und der Eigensinn der Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000), especially Part II. She bases her interpretation primarily on Schlegel’s 1798 review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (see pp. 131–41), though her conception of play seems to equate it with the construction of unity out of the fragmentary and contradictory, so play is simply the “formal connection of diverse elements” in contrast to “hermeneutical” interpretation, which is understood as the discovery of previously existing meaning (see pp. 137, 140). Schlegel’s review can be found in Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenäums”-Fragmente und andere Schriften, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun.: 1978), pp. 143–64. Friedrich Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, trans. Stuart Bennett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 73.

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the immediately following years, this is not considered to be a virtue of modern art, but a defect that Schlegel hopes may be overcome by a revolution in art. Schlegel’s claim about the Greeks is that at the height of their art they strove for objectivity, not beauty, but that since beauty and objectivity are virtually identical, they could not but produce genuine beauty. He arrives at his conception of beauty as objectivity by transforming Kant’s conception of the universal subjective validity of aesthetic judgment into a conception of the objectivity of the beautiful object; in this way his essay is thus a first step toward the recreation of a theory of aesthetic experience as a form of cognition within the framework of Kant’s own language that we will also find in Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. In principle, Schlegel maintains, it has always been known that objectivity is the essence of beauty, and moderns as well as ancients have striven for objectivity in art: Throughout the most varied forms and orientations, in all degrees of vitality, the same need for a complete satisfaction, a consistent striving for an absolute maximum of art expresses itself in all modern poetry. What theory promised, what one hoped to find in each idol – what was this but a ne plus ultra of the aesthetic? The more often the longing for a complete satisfaction that would be grounded in human nature was disappointed by the individual and the mutable, the more ardent and restless it became. Only the universally valid, enduring, and necessary – the objective – can fill this great gap; only the beautiful can still this ardent yearning. Beauty . . . is the universally valid object of an uninterested pleasure, which, independent of the constraint of needs and laws, is at the same time independent, free, and necessary, entirely purposeless and yet unconditionally purposeful.37

The Kantian heritage of Schlegel’s conception of beauty is unmistakable – it is purposiveness without a determinate purpose, independent and free yet at the same time necessary – but it is transformed from a universally valid experience into a “universally valid object,” and with this transformation the goal of the artist is transformed from that of free exercise of the imagination to truthfulness to an object beyond his own work, and the goal of the audience transformed from the free exercise of its own imagination to appreciation of the artist’s truthfulness. The Greeks, Schlegel then argues, were able to produce unparalleled beauty because they could be truthful to an objective, harmonious nature. There is no question in his mind that Greek art at its greatest moment achieved a perfection of beauty unparalleled before or since: 37

Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, p. 35.

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Greek poetry truly attained this ultimate limit of the natural culturation [Bildung] of art and taste, this utmost pinnacle of free beauty. Culturation has attained a state of perfection if the inner striving force has fully unfolded itself, if the intention has been completely achieved, and no expectation remains unfulfilled in the uniform completeness of the whole. This state is termed a golden age when an entire complex of concurrently existing elements obtains. The pleasure that the works of the golden age of Greek art affords . . . is complete and self-sufficient. For this level of accomplishment, I know of no more appropriate name than ultimate beauty. Not simply a beauty about which nothing more beautiful could be thought but, rather, the complete example of the unattainable idea that essentially becomes here utterly apparent: the prototype of art and taste.38

And, Only where all elements of art and taste evolve, form, and complete themselves in equal proportion is the greatest beauty possible – that is, in natural culturation. In artificial culturation this symmetry is irrecoverably lost by the arbitrary division and mixture undertaken by the regulative understanding. . . . the greatest beauty is that which has become an organically formed whole, and which would be torn asunder by the smallest division, destroyed by the slightest excess.39

With his characterization of beauty as an “organically formed whole,” Schlegel takes a step that Kant did not take – the characterization of the object of aesthetic judgment in terms of the object of teleological judgment – and that would be influential in aesthetics into the twentieth century. (We will see it, for example, in the early twentieth-century British philosopher G.E. Moore, not usually thought of as a Romantic!) But his argument about the Greeks is that they could produce such beauty because they lived a harmonious and natural life and merely aimed in their art to be truthful in their representation of this life. This argument emerges in his characterization of the greatest of all Greek artists, Sophocles, who “developed what Aeschylus invented,” who “in perfection and serenity . . . is the equal of Homer and Pindar, and [who] surpasses all his predecessors and successors in grace.” In Sophocles, “Everything evolves necessarily out of a unity and even the smallest part belongs unconditionally to the great law of the whole,” thus achieving “uniform completeness” and organicity. Sophocles achieves this precisely by not consciously seeking beautiful effects, but by naturally responding to the harmonies of life itself: 38 39

Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, p. 55. Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, p. 58.

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The moderation with which he renounces even the most beautiful outgrowth and with which he would have resisted even the most alluring temptation to do damage to the equilibrium of the whole is . . . a proof of his richness. For his law-governedness is free, his accuracy is graceful, and the richest abundance organizes itself of its own accord to a perfect yet pleasing harmony. The unity of his dramas was not mechanically forced; rather, it emerged organically. Even the smallest side-branch enjoys its own life and appears simply to relegate itself freely to its place in the ordered context of the entire formation [Bildung]. . . . The whole as well as the various parts are precisely differentiated and pleasingly grouped in the richest and simplest conglomerations. And struggle and calm, act and contemplation, humanity and fate obligingly alternate and freely unite throughout the action . . . Here there is not the slightest reminder of labor, art, and necessity. We are no longer aware of the medium; the shell vanishes, and we immediately enjoy pure beauty. . . . These formations appear not to have been made or to have become, but, rather, to have been eternally present, or to have originated out of themselves, as the goddess of love arose effortlessly and at once perfect out of the ocean.40

Sophocles could create ultimate beauty precisely because he did not strive for particular beautiful effects, but naturally responded to a harmonious nature. Aiming only for truthfulness, in such conditions he inevitably produced beauty. The modern artist, however, no doubt because of the different circumstances of modern life, aims in his work for the truthful representation of idiosyncratic particulars, and thereby produces something interesting or even ugly, but not something beautiful. Schlegel makes this point often. “Nothing can better explain and confirm the artificiality of modern aesthetic development [Bildung] than the great predominance of the individual, the characteristic, and the philosophical, throughout the entire mass of modern poetry.”41 “The general orientation of poetry – indeed, the whole aesthetic development of modernity – toward the interesting can be explained by this lack of universality, this rule of the mannered, characteristic, and individual.”42 The focus on particulars inevitably disrupts uniform completeness or organic unity: In the particulars the representation can be truly splendid; yet, on the whole, it will still negate itself through inner contradictions . . . The ideality of art is contravened when the artist defies his instrument, and when he foists representation – which should only be a means – into the place of

40 41 42

Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, pp. 60–1. Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, pp. 30–1. Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, p. 35.

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the absolute goal, and strives only for virtuousity . . . The objectivity of art is contravened when, in the course of a universally valid representation, peculiarity gets involved, or quietly sneaks in, or flagrantly outrages. It is contravened by subjectivity.43

The modern artist consciously aims at truth, but truth of the wrong kind, truth about particulars rather than truths about the organic whole of the universe, and is therefore incapable of producing beauty; he produces subjectivity, not objectivity, but beauty lies in objectivity, truthfulness to the organic whole of nature. One might think, then, that the answer to the problem for modern art is to return to the style of the Greeks; this is, after all, what Winckelmann had advocated, and what much eighteenth- and even early nineteenthcentury art, so-called Neo-Classicism, attempted to do in many artistic media, including all forms of poetry and drama, painting, sculpture, and architecture, even music in its subjects if not its forms (think of the operas of Handel and Gluck).44 But simply copying the accidental idiosyncrasies of Greek art, which in their original context did not detract from its underlying organic unity, will not solve the problem of once again achieving objective beauty, although this is all that many modern artists seem able to do: If it had only discovered the secret of the Greeks, the individuality of modern poetry would be at liberty to be objective within the individual. Instead, it wants to elevate its conventional idiosyncrasies to the status of a general law of humanity. Not satisfied being the slave of so many aesthetic, moral, political, and religious prejudices, it also wants to clap its Greek sister in similar chains.45

Only if modern art can recapture the inward spirit rather than the outward forms of Greek art can it achieve objective beauty: One should not imitate just any one, or a particular, favorite poet, or the local form or the individual organ: for an individual “as such” can never be a universal norm. The modern poet who wants to strive for genuine, beautiful art should appropriate for himself the ethical abundance, the unfettered lawgovernedness, the liberal humanity, the beautiful proportions, the delicate equilibrium, the splendid appositeness that is more or less scattered over the entire mass. He should also approximate the perfect style of the golden

43 44

45

Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, p. 70. For a work with an emphasis on the visual arts, see Hugh Honour, Neo-Classicism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968). Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, p. 73.

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age, the genuineness and purity of the Greek poetic forms, the objectivity of the representation – in short, the spirit of the whole: pure Greekness.46

Easy to say, hard to do: Schlegel does not spell out how the artist working within the circumstances of modern life can recapture the attitude toward art that came naturally to the Greeks in their very different relation to culture and nature. And, as we saw earlier, at the very same time that Schlegel was advocating a return to “pure Greekness,” Schiller was arguing that there was no returning from our “sentimental” poetry to the “naïve” poetry of the Greeks. Whether there ever existed the idyllic relation between culture and nature that Schlegel and for that matter Schiller attribute to the Greeks is another matter; his account of the Greeks seems more like fantasy than fact – at the very least, it seems like a one-sided account of Greek life and art, as Nietzsche would later argue by means of his famous contrast between the “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” and his thesis that the epitome of Greek art in the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles combines these two elements, an argument that could have been directed against this work of Schlegel’s although Nietzsche does not mention it. One might be tempted to think that a recognition of the irretrievability of the organic wholeness of Greek art, if not the possibility that such organic wholeness never existed in the first place, would have driven Schlegel to what is often presented as the paradigmatic thought of early German Romanticism, the idea that art is always essentially fragmentary rather than whole because reality itself is always essentially fragmentary rather than whole.47 This idea would still be undergirded by the supposition that the aim of art is to strive for truthfulness toward reality rather than to create beautiful forms independently of what reality may have to offer, but now a different conception of reality itself would dictate a different conception of beauty. In fact, however, although Schlegel suggests this new idea at a few points in the famous fragments published in the Athäneum between 1798 and 1800 – in which he and his collaborators, 46 47

Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, pp. 83–4. See especially Frank, Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, ch. 12, pp. 201–19. The translator, Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, distances herself from Frank’s emphasis on the fragmentary and takes an approach to Schlegel’s central work that is closer to the one to be suggested here when she says in her own work that “The interest Schlegel has in art is epistemological; ultimately he endorses the value of aesthetic reflection as a way of reconciling the finite with the infinite”; see her Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), p. 165.

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chiefly his brother August Wilhelm but also Friedrich Schleiermacher, certainly adopted the fragment as a literary form – the majority of his characterizations of “romantic poetry” in this work continue to suggest that ultimate beauty lies in the artistic intimation of the organic unity of reality itself. If there is any substantive difference between Schegel’s stance in the essay on Greek poetry of 1795 and the fragments of 1798– 1800, it is chiefly in his greater confidence that modern poetry can actually achieve such beauty. A fragment in which Schlegel suggests the fragmentary character of reality and therefore the not only inevitably but also appropriately fragmentary character of its representation in art is perhaps this one: “A. You say that fragments are the real form of universal philosophy. But what can such fragments do and be for the greatest and most serious concerns of humanity, for the perfection of knowledge? B. Nothing but a Lessingean salt against spiritual sloth . . . or even the fermenta cognitionis for a critical philosophy . . .”48 What could be better than salt against spiritual sloth and the leaven for knowledge, or a higher vocation for art than to provide it? But in fact, the majority of the fragments in the Athäneum identify the “romantic poetry” that they praise with “universal poetry,” a form of poetry that precisely by overriding the traditional divisions among genres – as Schlegel himself attempted to do in his 1799 novella of fragments Lucinde 49 – manages to express the entirety of reality in all its diversity yet interconnectedness. In his definition of romantic poetry in the famous §116, Schlegel writes: Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical; poeticize wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate them with pulsations of humor. It embraces everything that is purely poetic, from the greatest systems of art, containing within themselves still further systems, to the sigh, the kiss that the poetizing child breathes forth in artless song. It can so lose itself in what it describes that one might believe it exists only to characterize poetical individuals of all sorts; and yet there is still no form so fit for expressing the entire spirit 48

49

Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), §259, pp. 54–5. Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde: Ein Roman, ed. Karl Konrad Polheim, rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1999); Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. with an introduction by Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971).

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of an author . . . It alone can become, like the epic, a mirror of the whole circumambient world, an image of the age. And it can also – more than any other form – hover at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real and ideal self-interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors.50

Schlegel’s suggestion that romantic poetry can raise its reflection of reality to ever higher powers may be influenced by the concept of “potencies” that Friedrich Schelling was developing in his philosophy of nature in 1797–98, immediately preceding or at the time that Schlegel was writing this. But another fragment that follows shortly suggests that what really underlies his conception of the cognitive significance of romantic poetry is nothing less than Leibniz’s monadology, a philosophical image that retained a tight grip on the German imagination long after Kant’s critique of it, even in the period of the 1790s when the influence of Spinoza was at its zenith. Thus in §121 Schlegel writes: An idea is a concept perfected to the point of irony, an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts. . . . But one shouldn’t call this mysticism, since this beautiful old word is so very useful and indispensable for absolute philosophy, from whose perspective the spirit regards everything as a mystery and a wonder, while from other points of view it would appear theoretically and practically normal. . . . But to transport oneself arbitrarily now into this, now into that sphere, as if into another world, not merely with one’s reason and imagination, but with one’s whole soul; to freely relinquish first one and then another part of one’s being, and confine oneself entirely to a third; to seek and find now in this, now in that individual the be-all and the end-all of existence, and intentionally forget everyone else: of this only a mind is capable that contains within itself simultaneously a plurality of minds and a whole system of persons, and in whose inner being the universe which, as they say, should germinate in every monad, has grown to fullness and maturity.51

The “they” who say this are, of course, Leibniz and his followers. This fragment may initially suggest that the universe is inexorably contradictory, that individuals are insuperably different from one another, and may therefore seem to imply that art must be fragmentary because if its role is to represent reality then it can only represent something fragmentary and so represent it fragmentarily. But the passage concludes by suggesting that every individual in fact represents the entire universe,

50 51

Schlegel, Fragments, §116, pp. 31–2. Schlegel, Fragments, §121, p. 33.

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although from a particular point of view, the key idea of Leibniz’s monadology,52 and Schlegel’s implication seems in the end to be that “universal poetry” is universal precisely because through the representation of something highly individual it can nevertheless represent the entire universe. Sometimes in the Athäneum fragments Schlegel suggests this point by assimilating poetry to philosophy. Here, for example, he borrows Kantian rather than Leibnizian terminology to make what is at least a closely related point: There is a kind of poetry whose essence lies in the relation between ideal and real, and which therefore, by analogy to philosophical jargon, should be called transcendental poetry. It begins as satire in the absolute difference of ideal and real, hovers in between as elegy, and ends as idyll with the absolute unity of the two. But just as we shouldn’t think much of an uncritical transcendental philosophy that doesn’t represent the producer along with the product and contain at the same time within the system of transcendental thoughts a description of transcendental thinking: so too this sort of poetry should unite the transcendental raw materials and preliminaries of a theory of poetic creativity – often met with in modern poets – with the artistic reflection and beautiful self-mirroring that is present in Pindar, in the lyric fragments of the Greeks, in the classical elegy, and, among the moderns, in Goethe.53

By transcendental philosophy Schlegel seems to understand a philosophy that unifies the subjective and the objective by recognizing the forms of the objective world to be the forms of thought itself, which gives thought the power (some might think Pyrrhic power) to discover the nature of the outward from within; by transcendental poetry he seems to mean the same as what he meant earlier by universal poetry, poetry that in mixing all the genres that were previously kept apart manages to transcend its own subjectivity or the particularity of any individual and to grasp the entirety of the universe through a reflection in or by one individual of the standpoints of all others. In one of a second set of fragments, the “Ideas,” Schlegel suggests that poetry 52

53

See Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), §14; Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason, §3; and Monadology (1714), §§56–9. The first work was not published until the beginning of the twentieth century, and could not have been known to Schlegel; but the other two were (posthumously) published as early as 1720, and were widely known throughout the eighteenth century, indeed, being far shorter than Leibniz’s only book, the Theodicy of 1710, formed the basis for the popular conception of Leibniz’s philosophy. Schlegel, Fragments, §238, pp. 50–1.

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supersedes philosophy, but only because it seems better suited than philosophy to play the role of a Leibnizian monad, finding universality in particularity: Where philosophy stops, poetry has to begin. An ordinary point of view, a way of thinking, natural only in opposition to art and culture, a mere existing: all these are wrong; that is, there should be no kingdom of barbarity beyond the boundaries of culture. Every thinking art of an organization should not feel its limits without at the same time feeling its unity in relation to the whole. For example, one ought to contrast philosophy not simply with unphilosophy, but with poetry.54

Whether both philosophy and poetry or only romantic poetry can reflect or represent the whole universe through the standpoint of an individual is less important to Schlegel’s aesthetic thought than his supposition that at least poetry can do this. The key claim of Schlegel’s central period as an aesthetic thinker is thus not that poetry can only be fragmentary because it represents a fragmentary world, but rather that through its combination of what would on their own be only fragmentary methods or genres truly universal poetry can represent the world in its entirety – and presumably derives its beauty from that. The beauty of poetry lies precisely in that it offers more profound knowledge than philosophy itself. This is an idea, as we will see, to which the young Schelling would be sympathetic, although the continued assumption that art aims at cognition but the rejection of the claim that art offers deeper knowledge than philosophy will subsequently be the basis of Hegel’s critique of Romanticism in the form of his thesis of the “end of art.” After his short-lived fiasco as a philosophy professor at Jena, Schlegel traveled to Paris and Brussels and then settled in Cologne. In these cities his attention turned from poetry to painting, and he wrote a series of reports on what he saw that were published as “Letters on Christian Art.” There is a change in tone in these letters from his fragments of 1798 to 1800: not a change from a fragmentary to a holistic conception of the truth that can be grasped by art, for as we have seen he by no means committed himself to the fragmentary conception of aesthetic cognition, but rather a change from a secular to a religious interpretation of the truth about the world as a whole that is grasped and conveyed by the best art. This passage from the end of the letters conveys the new religious tone of Schlegel’s aesthetics and prepares the way for his conversion to Catholicism in 1808: 54

Schlegel, Fragments, “Ideas” §48, p. 98.

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In what, then, does this exalted beauty consist? . . . The true object of the art should be, instead of resting in externals, to lead the mind upwards into a more exalted region and a spiritual world. While false-mannered artists, content with the empty glitter of a pleasing imitation, soar no higher, nor ever seek to reach that lofty sphere, in which genuine beauty is portrayed according to certain defined ideas of natural characteristics . . . The light of hope dawned not on heathen intelligence; impassioned grief and tragic beauty bounded their purest aspirations. Yet this blessed light of hope, borne on the wings of trusting faith and sinless love, though on earth it breaks forth only in dim anticipations of a glorious hereafter, – this glorious hope, radiant with immortality, invests every picture of the Christian era with a bright harmony of expression, and fixes our attention by its clear comprehension of heavenly things, and an elevated spiritual beauty which we justly term Christian.55

Here the Neo-Platonist identification of beauty with both truth and love of Schlegel’s 1794 essay has been replaced with the Christian association of “an elevated spiritual beauty” with faith, and beauty reveals not the coherent universe of the Leibnizian monadology but the “heavenly things” of religion. The change from his “early Romanticism” to his later attitude is a change from secular “transcendental” philosophy to Christian religiosity, and prepares the way for the marked presence of Christianity in the art of the later period of Romanticism, at least in Germany. We will return later to the aesthetic conceptions of several other Romantic thinkers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge of England and Ralph Waldo Emerson of Massachusetts. It might be natural to discuss them in connection with Schlegel, who no doubt influenced them in various regards, but they did not follow him in his turn to an explicitly Christian religiosity. It will therefore be more natural to discuss them in the shadow of the aestheticians of absolute idealism, above all Schelling, to whom we therefore now turn.

3. Schelling We begin our consideration of the aesthetics of German Idealism proper with the aesthetics of Friedrich Wilhelm Josef Schelling (1775– 1854). Born near Stuttgart and educated along with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin at the Tübingen Stift (seminary), where they were all close friends, Schelling was brought

55

Schlegel, Miscellaneous and Aesthetic Works, pp. 145–6.

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to Jena as a professor by Goethe in 1798, all of twenty-three years old, where he succeeded Fichte, and remained there until 1803, when he left for a position in Würzburg, accompanied by his wife Caroline, formerly the wife of August Wilhelm Schlegel. He had previously brought Hegel to Jena and they worked closely until Schelling’s departure, although Hegel was not to succeed Schelling the way Schelling had succeeded Fichte. Schelling moved to Munich in 1806, where he held a position at the Royal Academy of Art, and lived there until 1820 and again from 1827 until 1841 (in the interval he was in Erlangen). Finally, in 1841, now elderly instead of precocious, he was invited to Berlin to occupy the chair first held by his predecessor Fichte (1801–14) and then by his protégé Hegel (1818–31). In this late period of his career, Schelling worked on a vast philosophy of mythology that has its roots in his early work in aesthetics, but which will not be considered here. Schelling’s views in aesthetics first emerged in his System of Transcendental Idealism, published in 1800 when others of the Romantic group such as Friedrich Schlegel were already leaving Jena. In 1802–3 and 1803–4, Schelling gave a series of lectures on the philosophy of art, first in Jena and then in Würzburg, which was not published until his son’s edition of the father’s complete works in the middle of the nineteenth century,56 but was well known before they were published. The young Schelling had enormous influence, not only on Hegel, who was present in Jena when the lectures were first delivered, but also on Schopenhauer, whose notebooks show his close study of Schelling’s published works in spite of his invective against the trio of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. As we will see in the next chapter, Schelling also had great influence on many thinkers outside of German academic philosophy. It is difficult to write about the philosophy of Schelling briefly: he was a prolific and protean philosopher, whose views often underwent such rapid metamorphosis that only a geneticist could discern the constancies in their underlying DNA.57 Nor can his aesthetic theory (or theories) be 56

57

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, ed. K.F.A. Schelling, 14 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61); the text of Philosophie der Kunst from that edition is reproduced in F.W.J. Schelling, Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Manfred Frank, vol. 2: 1801–1803 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985). There is no detailed survey of Schelling’s whole philosophical career in English. Surveys in other languages include Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, vol. VII, third edition (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1902) and Xavier Tilliette, Schelling: Une Philosophie en Devenir, 2 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1970). Introductions to Schelling include Alan White, Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Werner Marx, The Philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling: History, System, and Freedom, trans. Thomas

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easily isolated from his larger projects: as he asserted in his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism, the work that made his fame at age twenty-five and may still be his mostly widely read work although it by no means represents his final position on aesthetics or anything else, Art is at once the only true and eternal organon and document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in acting and producing, and its original idea with the conscious. Art is paramount to the philosopher precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart.58

Schelling rapidly revised this claim, arguing in his lectures on The Philosophy of Art just a couple of years later (1802–3) that philosophy is more parallel to art than subordinated to it, expressing in abstract or “ideal” form the same ultimate content that art expresses in more concrete or “real” form.59 But it is obvious that the aesthetic theory of a philosopher who could make either of these claims cannot be well understood except as part of a much larger system. Equally obviously, we

58

59

Nenon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Manfred Frank, Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie (Framkfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985); Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophie (London: Routledge, 1993), which includes a chapter on Schelling’s aesthetics; and Dale E. Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1996), which does not. A monograph on Schelling’s aesthetics is Dieter Jähnig, Schelling: Die Kunst in der Philosophie, 2 vols. (Pfüllingen: Neske, 1966–69). Hans Feger provides background on Schelling’s philosophy in general in Poetische Vernunft: Ästhetik und Moral im Deutschen Idealismus (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2007), ch. 8–10, and then focuses on Schelling’s aesthetics in ch. 13–15. Briefer treatments include Engell, Creative Imagination, pp. 301–27; Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, lectures 9–13; and Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, second edition (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2003), ch. 4; Dale Jacquette, “Idealism: Schopenhauer, Schiller and Schelling,” in Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, editors, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, second edition (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 83–96; and Marie-Luise Raters, Kunst, Wahrheit und Gefühl: Schelling, Hegel und die Ästhetik des angelsächsischen Idealismus (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Albers, 2005), ch. 2. Quotations from F.W.J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) (STI), trans. Peter Heath, introduction by Michael Vater (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), p. 231. I have occasionally modified Heath’s translation; here I have translated Schelling’s Organon as “organon” rather than “organ.” See F.W.J. Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, ed. Walter Schulz (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1957), p. 297. F.W.J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art (PA), ed. and trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 6. The German text of this work is in Schelling, Ausgewählte Werke, vol. II, pp. 181–565.

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will not have space here to explicate adequately Schelling’s philosophical system at any one moment of his career or the evolution of his philosophical system through his career. We will have to say just enough about Schelling’s whole system at the time of his two most influential works on art, the two just referred to, to allow us to see how he transformed Kant’s theory of the free play of our cognitive powers in aesthetic experience back into a theory of aesthetic experience as itself a form of cognition, and how he replaced Kant’s positive view of the pleasure of aesthetic experience with an essentially negative view of it. Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800 completed his first philosophical system, in which he presented the parallel disciplines of “philosophy of nature” and “transcendental philosophy” as coinciding and culminating in the philosophy of art. In this system, written in response to Fichte’s radicalization of Kant’s original transcendental idealism by the replacement of the thing in itself with the self’s own “positing” of its other, Schelling argued that the laws of nature on the one hand are the product of unconscious thought and the laws of human knowledge and action (including institutions) on the other are the product of conscious thought, while only art, as the product of both unconscious and conscious thought, reveals the unitary and active character of the thought that underlies all reality. That art reveals this is precisely why it is essentially cognitive, and that only art fully reveals this is why it is more cognitively valuable than even philosophy, which manifests more the conscious than the unconscious aspect of thought. Schelling expounded his philosophy of nature in two early works, the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature of 1797 and the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature of 1799, and continued to expound it in works subsequent to the System of Transcendental Idealism as well.60 But this brief review of the philosophy of nature from the Introduction to the System captures Schelling’s central idea: If all knowing has as it were two poles that mutually presuppose and demand one another . . . there must necessarily be two basic sciences . . . The necessary tendency of all natural science is . . . the move from nature to the intelligent. . . . The highest consummation of natural science would be the complete spiritualizing of all natural laws into laws of intuition and thought. 60

F.W.J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Peterson (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2004); System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere (1804), in Schelling, Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 3, 141–588.

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The phenomena (the matter) must wholly disappear, and only the laws (the form) remain. Hence it is, that the more lawfulness emerges in nature itself, the more the husk disappears, the phenomena themselves become more mental, and at length vanish entirely.

Schelling illustrates this claim with the examples of optics, which he claims is “nothing but a geometry whose lines are drawn by light,” which is of itself “of doubtful materiality,” of magnetism, in which “all material traces are already disappearing,” and of gravitation, “which even scientists have thought it possible to conceive of merely as an immediate spiritual influence,” of which “nothing remains but its law.”61 No doubt the contemporary reader will object that the fact that the most general and fundamental laws of natural science can only be grasped by abstract acts of the human intellect hardly makes them into abstract acts of intellect in any sense, but this objection does not move an idealist who is committed to the claim that knowledge is possible only because of the underlying identity of the knower and the known: How both the objective world accommodates to representations in us, and representations in us to the objective world, is unintelligible unless between the two worlds, the ideal and the real, there exists a predetermined harmony. But this latter is unthinkable unless the activity, whereby the objective is produced, is at bottom identical with that which expresses itself in volition, and vice versa.62

Like Kant, Schelling thought that Leibniz’s central idea of a preestablished harmony between representations and objects had to be revised, but instead of transforming it into a regulative principle as Kant ultimately did, Schelling sought a metaphysical foundation for it in the essentially mental nature of reality itself. After 1800, in his so-called identity philosophy, he would turn to Spinoza for inspiration, explaining the possibility of the cognitive correspondence between thought and nature by the metaphysical theory that they are both manifestations of an underlying absolute that is expressed in each, although as we will see that actually has only minor impact on the development of his philosophy of art. So much for the philosophy of nature; on the other side, transcendental philosophy proceeds “from the subjective, as primary and absolute,” to the objective that arises from this,63 that is, it studies how the indisputably 61 62 63

Schelling, STI, p. 6. Schelling, STI, pp. 11–12. Schelling, STI, p. 7.

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subjective structures of human thought manifest or objectify themselves in human discourses and sciences, human actions and institutions. Here Schelling introduces an historical dimension, holding that human thought is actually “a graduated sequence of intuitions, whereby the self raises itself to the highest power of consciousness,” and thus that transcendental philosophy must take the form of “a progressive history of self-consciousness, for which what is laid down in experience serves merely, so to speak, as a memorial and a document.”64 In these two brief comments, two important features of Schelling’s thought are revealed. First, again revealing a preference for Leibniz over Kant, Schelling suggests that human thought takes the form of a gradual transition from intuitions to concepts, from more concrete to more abstract forms of thought, rather than that of a synthesis of intuitions and concepts; second, his claim that experience serves merely as a memorial and document of self-consciousness suggests that even with such things as human sciences and institutions, which are more obviously the products of thought than magnetism or gravitation, we are not always self-conscious, that is, conscious that these are in fact the products of our own thought, and that we need philosophy to make us conscious of that fact. But it is central to Schelling’s philosophy that even the products of human thought are never solely the products of conscious or self-conscious thought and intention, or voluntary actions, but always reflect unconscious thought and intentions as well. This fundamental fact is what, for the Schelling of 1800, art and only art reveals, and revealing that is the essentially cognitive function of art. To prepare the way for his apotheosis of the role of art in the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling combines his philosophy of nature and his transcendental philosophy into the thesis that all nature, our own included, is the product of both unconscious and conscious thought, and that there is something contradictory about this. The contradiction is, or better, the contradictions are, although Schelling does not distinguish them, that the one and the same continuous process of thinking should be both unconscious and conscious, that it should be both ideal and real, that is, take the form of both mental representation and external object of representation, and that it should be both infinite and finite, that is, like a general concept that applies to indeterminately many objects and like a particular object to which a general concept applies. What we commonly call nature tends to line up with one side of these 64

Schelling, STI, p. 2.

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contrasts and what we commonly call thought with the other, but for Schelling we must be able to understand both sides of these contrasts as present in each of what we artificially distinguish as nature and thought. He argues that we can do this in two ways: first, inadequately, in a teleological view of nature that finds a way to incorporate not merely thought but also volition in our conception of nature, and then, more fully, in art, which we can experience as both a natural and an intentional product of both unconscious and conscious thought. Art thus offers a higher-level resolution of the underlying contradictions of existence than could natural beauty. The task for uniting the two forms of thought conceived by Schelling to underlie nature on the one hand and our own knowledge and action on the other is to find something that makes manifest the “original identity of the conscious with the unconscious activity.” He adds to Kant’s characterization of teleological judgment his own identifications of that which is conscious with that which is intentional or purposive, and of that which is unconscious with that which is unintentional, in order to argue that the first form in which this identity is manifest is nature judged teleologically: “But now if all conscious activity is purposive, this coincidence of conscious and unconscious activity can evidence itself only in a product that is purposive, without being purposively brought about.”65 He does not reproduce Kant’s argument that it is only the peculiar characteristics of organisms that force us to conceive of them as if they were internally purposive systems, a conception that in turn leads us to think of nature as a whole as if it were a purposive system for which we have to conceive of both an author and a final end, a purpose for the system as a whole. He just helps himself to the assumption that nature in general presents itself to us “as a product, that is, which although it is the work of unseeing mechanism, yet looks as though it were consciously brought about,” or that it seems to us as if “in its mechanism, and although itself nothing but a blind mechanism,” nature “is nonetheless purposive.”66 But Schelling’s inadequate motivation of a teleological view of nature matters little, for he is insistent that such a view of nature does not reveal any connection between the purposiveness of nature and our own thought: “Nature, in its blind and mechanical purposiveness, admittedly represents to me an original identity of the conscious and unconscious activities, but it does 65 66

Schelling, STI, pp. 213–14. Schelling, STI, p. 215.

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not present this identity to me as one whose ultimate ground resides in the self itself.”67 What he is looking for is something that will make manifest that the intellect that emerges unconsciously and nonpurposively in nature is in fact identical with our own conscious and purposive thought. Only art reveals that. Schelling is looking for an intuition that “is to bring together that which exists separately in the appearance of freedom and in the intuition of the natural product, namely identity of the conscious, and the unconscious in the self, and consciousness of this identity.”68 Drawing now on Kant’s conception of genius as the gift of nature that allows an artist to create an object that can suggest a harmony between imagination and understanding that goes beyond anything implied by the determinate concepts that guide the intentional and voluntary aspects of the artist’s creative process, Schelling finds this identity in the work of art, putting Kant’s conception of genius as the source of art to his own use: “With the product of freedom, our product will have this in common, that it is consciously brought about; and with the product of nature, that it is unconsciously brought about.”69 A work of artistic genius is indisputably a product of human thought and human intentional action, yet at the same time it exceeds the conscious intentions of the artist in a way that must be attributed to nature, but to nature working with and through the conscious thoughts of the artist to determine the complete form, matter, and content of the object, and thus to unconscious as well as conscious thought. Further, in the work of art both the conscious and unconscious thought that begin within the artist result in an object that typically seems to exist independently of the artist but of course could not have come to exist without the artist, so what ordinarily may seem to be the insuperable gap between thought and object is breached, and the underlying identity of thought in both thinker and object is made manifest. Schelling sums all this up in the statements that “This unchanging identity, which can never attain to consciousness, and merely radiates back from the product, is for the producer precisely what destiny is for the agent, namely a dark unknown force which supplies the element of completeness or objectivity to the piecework of freedom, and . . . is denominated by means of the obscure concept of genius,” while “The product we postulate is none

67 68 69

Schelling, STI, p. 217. Schelling, STI, p. 219. Schelling, STI, p. 219.

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other than the product of genius, or, since genius is possible only in the arts,70 the product of art.”71 Schelling does not pause in the crowning but brief final section of the System of Transcendental Idealism to persuade his reader of this analysis of the nature of artistic genius and its product by applying it to any example; that deficiency he will amply make up for in the lectures on The Philosophy of Art. But he does argue that in being experienced to resolve the alleged contradiction between the description of one and the same thing as both conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, the work of art will be experienced with an “infinite satisfaction” or “tranquility”: The intelligence will therefore end with a complete recognition of the identity expressed in the product as an identity whose principle lies in the intelligence itself; it will end, that is, in a complete intuiting of itself. Now since it was the free tendency to self-intuition in that identity which originally divided the intelligence from itself, the feeling accompanying this intuition will be that of an infinite satisfaction [Befriedigung]. With the completion of the product, all urge to produce is halted, all contradictions are eliminated, all riddles are resolved. . . . The intelligence will feel itself astonished and blessed [beglückt] by this union, will regard it, that is, in the light of a bounty freely granted by a higher nature.72

For Schelling, the experience of art pleases because it resolves what is supposed to be a troubling paradox: this is the pleasure of relief from pain, or negative pleasure. Far from being an active, positive pleasure, this pleasure is experienced as a gift from without, something that we passively receive rather than ourselves produce, and it does not stimulate any one – audience or successive artists – to activity but rather stills all “urge to produce.” It is passive as well as negative. And since tranquility is the only subjective response to the experience of art that Schelling mentions, there is no room in his account for the artistic arousal of the wide range of other human emotional states. 70

71

72

On this point Schelling apparently just accepts Kant’s position (CPJ, §47, 5:308–9), which, as we saw, was itself opposed to the position of Alexander Gerard that genius manifests itself in both natural science and the fine arts, although of course in specifically different ways; see Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London and Edinburgh: Strahan, Cadell, and Creech, 1774), Part III. Schelling, STI, p. 222. Schelling’s conception of genius is discussed in Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literature, Philosophie und Politik 1750–1945, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), vol. 1, pp. 390–403. Schelling, STI, p. 221.

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Schelling has thus transformed Kant’s account of our positive pleasure in our free play with our own cognitive powers, which already excluded other emotions, into an account of relief from pain in the insight into the resolution of the fundamental paradox of metaphysics. Kant’s idea that the imagination and the understanding are in harmony in aesthetic creation and experience has been transformed into the idea that unconscious and involuntary thought and conscious and voluntary thought reveal their identity in the work of art, but in that transformation the element of free play has been lost, the creativity of the imagination has been turned into metaphysical insight, and the positive feeling of life and activity that is the heart of Kant’s account has been transformed into relief at the revelation of the solution to a theoretical problem. Several additional features of Schelling’s aesthetic theory in the System of Transcendental Idealism should be mentioned before we turn to the further developments of the lectures on The Philosophy of Fine Art. The account considered so far concerns primarily the cognitive content of aesthetic experience in the artist and the audience for a work of art and the affective dimension of that cognition. Schelling also offers brief accounts of the paradigmatic general categories of the objects of such experience, namely beauty in the work of art, sublimity in the work of art, and natural beauty. His account begins with a restatement of his thesis about the cognitive content of art: “The work of art reflects to us the identity of the conscious and unconscious activities” of thought. In spite of the fact that the work of art thus seems to overcome the alleged contradiction between the conscious and the unconscious, there is apparently some sense in which they remain ineluctably different, a point that Schelling makes by calling the “opposition” between them “an infinite one.” On the basis of this lemma he then infers that “the basic character of the work of art is that of an unconscious infinity [synthesis of nature and freedom]. Besides what he has put into his work with manifest intention, the artist seems instinctively, as it were, to have depicted therein an infinity, which no finite understanding is capable of unfolding to the full.”73 This seems to be Schelling’s way of deducing Kant’s claim in his theory of aesthetic ideas that an inspired work of art conveys a rational idea through a wealth of harmonious material for the imagination in a way that cannot be “grasped and made distinct” by any determinate concept of the work or its content.74 From the position that “Every aesthetic production 73 74

Schelling, STI, p. 225. Kant, CPJ, §49, 5:315.

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proceeds from the feeling of an infinite contradiction, and hence also the feeling which accompanies completion of the art-product” (or presumably the experience thereof) “must be one of an infinite tranquility,” Schelling infers that “this latter, in turn, must also pass over into the work of art itself,” and he therefore characterizes beauty as “the infinite finitely displayed” or “exhibited” (dargestellt): beauty is the manifestation in the work of the cognitive content of aesthetic experience accompanied with the affective [content] thereof, namely, satisfaction at the resolution of the contradiction between the infinite and the finite. In this context, an unmistakable allusion to Winckelmann’s conception of the ideal of beauty emphasizes Schelling’s conception of the passive rather than active nature of aesthetic pleasure: “Hence the outward expression of the work of art is one of calm, and of silent grandeur [der stillen Größe], even where the aim is to give expression to the utmost intensity of pain or joy.”75 Schelling claims that beauty is the “basic feature of every work of art,” because the resolution of the tension between the infinite, involuntary unconscious and the finite, intentional conscious is the gist of every aesthetic experience. But he then re-introduces the traditional distinction between the beautiful and the sublime as a distinction between kinds of beauty in his own sense, a distinction that does not concern the ultimate cognitive and affective character of the experience but the relation of the experience to its object. His claim is that “the difference . . . consists simply in this, that where beauty is present, the infinite contradiction is eliminated in the object itself, whereas when sublimity is present, the conflict is not reconciled in the object itself, but merely uplifted to a point at which it is involuntarily eliminated in the intuition, and this, then, is much as if it were to be eliminated in the object.”76 The difference is presumably phenomenological: in the case of beauty in its narrower sense, not only does our experience seem to resolve the fundamental contradiction, but the object somehow also immediately presents itself to us intrinsically harmonious, whereas in the case of the sublime the object presents itself to us as riven by contradiction but nevertheless leads to the harmonious experience of beauty in its broader sense. Here Schelling seems to be drawing on Kant’s claim that we can speak of beauty as if it were a property of the object77 but that the sublime “should 75 76 77

Schelling, STI, p. 225. Schelling, STI, p. 226. Kant, CPJ, §6, 5:211.

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properly be ascribed only to the manner of thinking, or rather to its foundation in human nature,”78 a claim that Kant makes because for him the essence of the experience of sublimity is a reflection on our own superiority over mere nature rather than a response to harmony within an object. For this reason Kant had thought of the experience of the sublime as primarily a response to nature rather than to art, although he has no trouble finding beauty in art as well as nature. But when Kant did, at least in his Anthropology, allow for the possibility of the sublime from art, he at least left the door open to the possibility that art might properly arouse a wider range of emotions than pleasure itself. There is no such opening in Schelling’s account, where both the beautiful and the sublime produce just the state of tranquility. We will subsequently see how what is for Schelling perhaps the silent omission of other emotions from aesthetic response becomes the overriding goal of aesthetic experience for Schopenhauer. While Kant had initially analyzed primarily natural beauty and then treated artistic beauty as a special and complicated case of beauty in general, Schelling emphasizes artistic beauty and treats natural beauty as the derivative case. Having treated teleological purposiveness in nature as something that bridges the gap between intention and the unintentional but does not bring out the specifically human character of intention, he does not ground an account of natural beauty in the experience of organisms, nor does he think of artistic beauty as the imitation of natural beauty. Instead, he says, “so far from the merely contingent beauty of nature providing the rule to art, the fact is, rather, that what art creates in its perfection is the principle and norm for the judgment of natural beauty”79: we find nature beautiful insofar as it seems to rise to the level of art rather than art beautiful insofar as it seems like nature. Here Schelling echoes Moses Mendelssohn’s critique of Charles Batteux that beauty is not immediately given in nature but requires a human act of idealization and prepares the way for Hegel’s even more aggressive rejection of the significance of natural beauty. Finally, Schelling draws an inference that emphasizes the strictly cognitivist character of his interpretation of aesthetic experience. On his account, the essence of the experience of art is its cognitive content, its revelation of the resolution of the contradiction between the conscious and the unconscious, the finite and the infinite, and so on, and since 78 79

Kant, CPJ, §30, 5:280. Schelling, STI, p. 227.

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that content is essentially the same for all works of art, there really is no important difference among works of art: For if aesthetic production proceeds from freedom, and if it is precisely for freedom that this opposition of conscious and unconscious activities is an absolute one, there is properly speaking but one absolute work of art, which may indeed exist in altogether different versions, yet is still only one, even though it should not yet exist in its most ultimate form. It can be no objection to this view that it is not consistent with the very liberal use now made of the predicate “work of art.” Nothing is a work of art which does not exhibit an infinite, either directly, or at least by reflection.80

This is not something that Kant ever would have said, for not only do different works of art take different ideas of reason as their themes, but since the essence of artistic beauty is the way in which the work of art freely plays with its theme – expressing the free play of the cognitive powers of its creator and stimulating a free play of those powers in its audience – there must be possible, at least in principle, an infinite number of genuine works of art rather than just one.81 The modification of this point is, however, one of the central accomplishments of Schelling’s 1802–3 lectures on The Philosophy of Fine Art. These lectures are an early document of Schelling’s transition to his “identity” philosophy, his replacement of his earlier, still Fichtean view that nature on the one hand and human theoretical and practical thought on the other are both manifestations of some more fundamental kind of thought, the unity of which is revealed only through art, with the more Spinozistic view that nature on the one hand and human thought on the other are both manifestations of some underlying subject that cannot be identified with either but can only be characterized as the “absolute” or “God.”82 This new standpoint leads to several important changes in Schelling’s conception of art. For one, since the absolute can never be fully grasped by any human means, there is no need for him to suppose that one form of human thought and activity is the best way to grasp it, and he now treats philosophy and art as two different ways of grasping 80 81

82

Schelling, STI, p. 231. To be sure, this implication of Kant’s central conception of free play even in the case of art does not sit very well with his insistence that only classical works of art in dead languages can be the “models of beautiful art” (CPJ, §47, 5:310); this is a point at which Kant’s preference for unanimity in taste overcomes his emphasis on free play, or his willingness to let taste “clip the wings” of genius prevails (CPJ, §50, 5:319). Schelling first pointed toward the new “identity” philosophy in the Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie (1801) and Fernere Darstellung aus dem System der Philosophie (1802); see Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 2, pp. 37–167.

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the nature of reality, the former more abstract, intellectual, or “ideal,” and the latter more concrete, intuitive, or “real.” Further, again since there is no uniquely adequate way to grasp the absolute, although every form of human thought or activity is in some way an apprehension of the absolute, Schelling drops the insistence that in some sense there is only one work of art, and recognizes genuine variety among the media and genres of art as well as among particular works of art. Indeed, the bulk of the lectures consist in detailed description of the variety of the arts and of works of art. Finally, both since the absolute has now been identified with God and also because art is now understood as the more concrete rather than abstract way of apprehending the absolute, Schelling now introduces the idea that the characteristic content of art is the representation of gods, or the creation of mythology. This would prepare the way for the labors on a philosophy of mythology that occupied much of Schelling’s later life.83 In spite of these changes, Schelling’s underlying view that the significance of art lies in its cognitive content rather than in the free play of our cognitive powers with cognitive content remains fixed, and if anything his emphasis on the pleasure of aesthetic experience is even more diminished than previously – he goes from giving an account of aesthetic pleasure as negative satisfaction at the resolution of a paradox to barely mentioning it at all. He does preserve the idea that beauty manifests the underlying identity or as he now calls it “indifference” between opposites, now both the ideal and the real as well as freedom and necessity, and even goes so far as to say that in beauty nature appears to have played, but he does not say that we or our mental powers freely play with beauty, nor does he mention any special pleasure in play: Since our explanation of beauty asserts that it is the mutual informing of the real and the ideal to the extent that this informing is represented in reflected imagery, this explanation also includes the following assertion: beauty is the indifference, intuited within the real, of freedom and necessity. For example, we say a figure is beautiful in whose design nature appears to have played with the greatest freedom and the most sublime presence of mind, yet always within the forms and boundaries of the strictest necessity and adherence to law. A poem is beautiful in which the highest freedom

83

See the Philosophie der Mythologie (1842), Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 6, pp. 11–686, or Schelling, Historical-critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger with a foreword by Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2007).

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conceives and comprehends itself within necessity. Accordingly, art is an absolute synthesis or mutual interpenetration of freedom and necessity.84

Schelling certainly must be supposing that a human being and not something else in nature creates a poem, but precisely in this human case, though a reference to freedom remains, any reference to play disappears. And again there is no mention of pleasure at all, let alone any other emotions. Thus the underlying cognitivism of Schelling’s aesthetics does not radically change in The Philosophy of Art. However, one point about the treatment of the arts in these lectures is novel, and will also be crucial for understanding both Schopenhauer and Hegel. This is Schelling’s view that although philosophy is primarily the intellectual or “ideal” form for representing reality and art the intuitive or “real” form – “Art is real and objective, philosophy ideal and subjective”85 – the distinction between real and ideal appears within the arts as well. Thus although all art has a sensible, intuitive, and objective aspect, some arts are more sensible and objective than others and some more intellectual and subjective than others. In particular, Schelling maintains that “The formative [bildende] arts constitute the real side of the world of art,”86 while “Verbal art is the ideal side of the world of art.”87 That is, poetry – Schelling conceives of the verbal arts as divided primarily into the poetic genres of lyric, epic, and drama – uses the sensible media of sound and imagery in order to present abstract ideas to us relatively directly, while in the formative arts such as architecture and painting the sensible qualities of the media are much more prominent in our experience and their intellectual content is less direct. Schelling’s claim is actually that in each form of art “all the forms of unity recur: the real, the ideal, and the indifference of the two,”88 but in each medium and genre of art the relation among these moments is different and one is more prominent than the other. Schelling’s classification of the arts is even more complicated than this initial characterization suggests. He divides the arts into three main groups rather than two: on one extreme, the most concrete or real of the arts, which include music and painting; on the other hand, the most ideal of the arts, the various forms of the verbal arts; but in the middle, the

84 85 86 87 88

Schelling, PA, p. 30. Schelling, PA, p. 13. Schelling, PA, §72, p. 99. Schelling, PA, §73, p. 102. Schelling, PA, §87, 128.

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“plastic” arts of architecture and sculpture, which involve more of a mix of the real and the ideal than either of the other two groups. Schelling groups music and painting together as the most real of the arts, because both depend upon the most immediate features of sense perception, such as the rhythm of sound, color, and line, and he classifies the verbal arts as the most ideal because they have the least direct relation to sense perception, conveying abstract ideas through words that suggest sensual imagery rather than directly presenting us with sensory experiences. Architecture and sculpture are put in the middle because they present us with objects that are both more real – not just sensible but also three-dimensional – than the imagery of poetry but at the same time, allegedly, better at suggesting abstract ideas to us than music or painting, thus more ideal than those. Sculpture, for example, “as the immediate expression of reason, expresses its ideas particularly or even primarily by means of the human figure.”89 But the most important point is that throughout all the details of his classification of the arts and his loving discussion of the details of particular media and works of art, Schelling always keeps his eye on the cognitive significance of art. So, for example, he says that “the primary demand that must be made of drawing” is “truth,” although not “only that particular kind of truth attainable through faithful imitation of nature,” but a truth that lies “at a deeper level than even nature has suggested and than the mere surface features of figures show.”90 Or about painting as a whole, which involves color and chiaroscuro as well as drawing,91 he says that “painting is the art in which appearance and truth must be one, in which appearance must be truth and truth appearance.”92 Among the intermediate arts, for example, “Sculpture as such is an image of the universe.”93 And “the essential nature of poesy is the same as that of all art: it is the representation of the absolute or of the universe in the particular.”94 All art employs some more or less sensible medium to convey some truth more or less abstractly, and its essence always lies in some actual cognition rather than in a free play of our cognitive powers. 89 90 91 92 93 94

Schelling, PA, §122, p. 183. Schelling, PA, §87, 131. Schelling, PA, p. 128. Schelling, PA, p. 139. Schelling, PA, §122, p. 182. Schelling, PA, p. 204. The division of the lectures into numbered paragraphs ceases before this point.

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Through his recognition of the variety of arts and through his thesis that all the arts “intuit” ideas “objectively,” in the form of “real or objective living and existing ideas” of the “gods” of mythology,95 in which morally important ideas are personified, Schelling returns to a version of Kant’s theory that the arts present a potentially infinite variety of aesthetic ideas, but a version from which the element of the free play of our cognitive powers with those ideas and the positive pleasure of such play has to a considerable extent disappeared. We will subsequently see that this cognitive interpretation of art together with the largely negative interpretation of aesthetic pleasure presented in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism are paralleled in the central themes of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art. But before we finally turn to Schopenhauer, we should not only take a look at the extraordinary influence of Schelling outside of academic aesthetics, but also note one last moment in Schelling’s philosophical development that suggests that there are not merely parallels between the aesthetic theories of these two Idealists, but that for all of Schopenhauer’s often expressed distaste for the trio of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, the philosophy of Schelling in fact must have had great influence on Schopenhauer. I refer here to the prominence of the concept of will in the further development of Schelling’s philosophy, notably in the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom of 1809. In this work, his only foray into moral philosophy, Schelling tackles the ancient problems of theodicy and free will on the basis of his identity philosophy. He is concerned with the questions of how the freedom of human beings is compatible with their being created by God and with how, supposing human freedom is possible, human beings who are essentially rational can freely choose evil, which is irrational – the problem that had plagued Kant throughout his many attempts to understand freedom of the will.96 There are two stages to Schelling’s solution to these problems. First, now clearly identifying God with that whose identity underlies all reality, he holds that in God the most basic ground of being must necessarily divide itself into two (for the sake of variety in existence) and must equally necessarily be united (in order to maintain identity), but that in man it must be possible for the ground of his being to divide itself without any guarantee that it must be reunited, precisely because that possibility is what marks the difference

95 96

Schelling, PA, Introduction, p. 17. For clear evidence that Schelling is attempting to respond to Kant, see Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (EHF), trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 39.

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between God and man: “Were now the identity of both principles in the spirit of man exactly as indissoluble as in God, then there would be no distinction, that is, God as spirit would not be revealed. The same unity that is inseverable in God must therefore be separable in man – and this is the possibility of good and evil.”97 Second, in a version of the doctrine of voluntarism, which treats God’s will rather than intellect as the source of law, whether moral or otherwise, for the creation, Schelling treats God’s will as the primary aspect of his being and the source of his reason, so while will and reason in God although different can never come apart, in man, will is more primary than reason but can also come apart from it: hence the possibility of irrational willing and evil. The crucial point in all of this for the history of aesthetics is that Schelling characterizes the ground of both divine and human being as will: “In this rising up (of freedom) the final empowering act was found through all of nature transfigured itself in feeling, intelligence, and, finally, in will. In the final and highest judgment, there is no other being than will. Will is primal being, to which alone all predicates of being.”98 And in all reality other than God, the possibility always remains that nonrational will that lies beneath all appearances, no matter how rational they seem, can break through: After the eternal act of self-revelation, everything in the world is, as we see it now, rule, order, and form; but anarchy still lies in the ground, as if it could break through once again, and nowhere does it appear as if order and form were what is original but rather as if initial anarchy had been brought to order. This is the incomprehensible base of reality in things, the indivisible remainder, that which with the greatest exertion cannot be resolved in understanding but rather remains eternally in the ground.99

In human beings, this ineliminable substratum of nonrational will expresses itself in irremediable “yearning”100 and in an incessant struggle against our own capacity for a strictly rational use of our freedom: “For that reason the will reacts necessarily against freedom as that which is above the creaturely and awakens in freedom the appetite for what is creaturely just as he who is seized by dizziness on a high and steep summit seems to be beckoned to plunge downward by a hidden voice,” or just as sailors were lured to their destruction against all reason by the songs of the sirens.101 97 98 99 100 101

Schelling, EHF, p. 33. Schelling, EHF, p. 21. Schelling, EHF, p. 29. Schelling, EHF, p. 32. Schelling, EHF, p. 47.

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Schelling thus introduces the idea of will as the ultimate reality that can sometimes break through to the surface of our experience. This idea will have a profound influence on the philosophy of Schopenhauer and through him on Nietzsche, and specifically on their aesthetics. But before we can turn to those figures, we will pause to examine the influence of Schelling on a variety of other, literary figures.

2 High Romanticism in the Shadow of Schelling

Schelling had an immediate and tremendous influence not only on fellow philosophers – as we shall soon see, both Schopenhauer and Hegel were deeply influenced by him, although in different ways – but also on more literary writers who indulged in theorizing in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Before we continue our survey of the major philosophical aestheticians of German idealism, a brief discussion of several of these writers who worked in the penumbra of Schelling in these decades is in order. We will consider first the German novelist “Jean Paul,” whose theoretical work appeared in the first decade of the century. Then we will turn to the English poet and journalist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose chief work in philosophy and aesthetics appeared in the second decade of the century, and also take a brief look at the aesthetic attitudes expressed by fellow British Romantics William Wordsworth and Percey Bysshe Shelley, as well as several early essays on the philosopher John Stuart Mill. Finally, we will turn to the American Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose relevant works appeared in the next generation. We will find that these representatives of later Romanticism, as opposed to the “early Romanticism” represented by Friedrich Schlegel, largely share the cognitivist approach to art, the conception of art as the “organon of philosophy” of Schelling, although in the writings of the poets Wordsworth and Shelley we also find expressions of the view that the point of their poetic art is not just to afford insight into the nature of human emotions but to stir them. Surprisingly, the most unequivocal assertion that the point of poetry, and by implication art in general, is to arouse deeply felt human emotions comes from the utilitarian philosopher Mill.

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1. Jean Paul “Jean Paul,” Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), was perhaps the most successful fiction writer in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Germany, who in a long series of novels and stories combined the intellectual ambitions of idealism and early Romanticism with the love of the fantastic characteristic of later German Romantics such as E.T.A. Hoffmann.1 Born in Bavaria, the son of a pastor, like so many other German intellectuals of the period, Richter was left poor owing to his father’s early death. He went to Leipzig to study theology, but there, like Goethe before him, quickly turned to the study of literature. Again like so many others, he struggled to make a living as a tutor, and published several unsuccessful novels before achieving success with the novel Die Unsichtbare Loge (The Invisible Lodge) in 1793;2 it was for this work that he adopted the pen name “Jean Paul,” in honor of “Jean-Jacques,” i.e., Rousseau. In 1798, Jean Paul moved to Weimar, where he was befriended by Herder, but his satirical and fantastical fiction did not earn the favor of Schiller or Goethe. In 1804, thus just a year after Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of art, Jean Paul published a theoretical work, the Vorschule der Ästhetik (Preparatory School for Aesthetics, revised in 1813).3 Jean Paul had attacked Fichte in the appendix “Clavis Fichtiana” in his novel Titan the previous year,4 but his own aesthetics has much affinity with Schelling’s.5 Much of the School for Aesthetics is a poetics or theory of specific literary genres, but it begins with more general claims in aesthetic theory. In an obvious attack upon Kant, Jean Paul starts with an equation of the theory of free play as a form of “poetic nihilism” and a defense of the imitation 1

2 3

4 5

Perhaps the best known of Jean Paul’s novels is Siebenkäs, more fully Blumen-, Frucht-, und Dornenstücke, oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten F. St. Siebenkäs (1796–97), in Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke, edited by Norbert Müller, fourth edition (Munich: Hanser, 1987), vol. II; Flower, fruit, and thorn pieces; or, The wedded life, death, and marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs, parish advocate in the burgh of Kuhschnappel (A genuine thorn piece), translated by Alexander Ewing (London: G. Bell, 1897). Jean Paul, Die Unsichtbare Loge, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. I, pp. 1–469. Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, Sämtliche Werke, vol. V, pp. 1–456; Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul’s School for Aesthetics, translated by Margaret R. Hale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973). Hereafter School for Aesthetics. Jean Paul, Titan, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. III. A biography of Jean Paul is Günter de Bruyn, Das Leben des Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1975). For the philosophical context of his aesthetics, see Schmidt, Genie-Gedankens, pp. 430–50, and Götz Müller, “Jean Pauls Ästhetik im Kontext der Frühromantik und des deutschen Idealismus,” in Jaeschke and Holzhey, Früher Idealismus und Frühromantik, pp. 159–73.

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of nature and thus a cognitive approach to aesthetic theory. But, as for Schelling immediately before him and Hegel and others to follow, nature for Jean Paul hardly means mere physical reality, but rather physical reality as an expression of infinite, divine spirit: It follows from the lawless, capricious spirit of the present age, which would egotistically annihilate the world and the universe in order to clear a space merely for free play in the void, and which tears off the bandage of its wounds as a bond, that this age must speak scornfully of the imitation and study of nature. . . . He who scorns the universe respects nothing more than himself and at night fears only his own creation. Is not nature now spoken of as if this creation of a Creator, in which the painter himself is only a dot of color, were hardly fit to be the picture nail or the frame for some small painted creation of a creator. As if what is greatest were not precisely the infinite! If the scorners of reality would only first bring before our souls the starry skies, the sunsets, the waterfalls, the lofty glaciers, the character of a Christ, an Epaminondas, the Catos, . . . then indeed they would have produced the poem of poems and would have repeated God.6

Jean Paul’s reference to the “starry skies,” of course a famous phrase from Kant,7 as well as to other stock images of the sublime, some of which were also used by Kant, might be meant to suggest that Kant should have organized his aesthetics around the experience of the sublime rather than around his theory of the experience of beauty as mere free play; but a fundamental difference would remain, namely that for Kant the experience of the sublime is ultimately an experience of the grandeur of our own theoretical and practical reason, while for Jean Paul the aim of poetry is the characterization both of ourselves and of nature in the ordinary sense as expressions of something beyond both, the universe as the manifestation of God. While urging a cognitive approach to art, Jean Paul certainly recognizes the individuality of striking artistic accomplishments. Thus his account of genius is that it is a uniquely individual presentation of the universal truth of reality: Genius is distinguished by the fact that it sees nature more richly and more completely, just as man is distinguished from the half-blind and half-dead animal; with every genius a new nature is created for us, in that he further unveils the old one. Every poetic representation admired by successive ages is distinguished by some freshly sensuous individuality and manner of representation.8 6 7 8

Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, pp. 15–16. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:161. Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, p. 12.

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But his idea is not that the expression of human individuality is something that we enjoy for its own sake, but rather that it is a concomitant of the way in which the “absolute and infinity” are made perceptible: Whereas the other faculties and experience only tear leaves from the book of nature, imagination writes all parts into wholes and transforms all parts of the world into worlds. It totalizes everything, even the infinite universe. Hence its poetic optimism, the beauty of the figures who inhabit its realm, and the freedom with which beings move like sun in its ether. Imagination brings as it were the absolute and infinity of reason closer and makes them more perceptible to mortal man. To do this it uses much of the future and much of the past, its two creative eternities, because no other time can become an infinite or a whole.9

“Poetic optimism” is the opposite of “poetic nihilism”: while the theory of free play supposedly denies the significance of anything beyond our individual selves and their pleasures, a theory of art as the presentation of the absolute and infinity in a sensible form celebrates the importance of something greater than us and our own importance only as part of that something greater. Jean Paul further stresses the revelatory, thus essentially cognitive character of genius in the conclusion to his detailed analysis of it: If, however, there are men in whom the instinct of the divine speaks more clearly and loudly than in others; if it teaches them to contemplate the earthly (instead of the earthly teaching them to contemplate it); if it provides and controls the perception of the whole; then will harmony and beauty stream back from both worlds and make them into one whole, for there is only unity before the divine and no contradiction in parts. That is genius; and the reconciliation of the two worlds is the so-called ideal. Only through maps of heaven can maps of earth be made; only viewed from above (for the view from below eternally divides heaven) does the whole sphere of heaven appear, and the sphere of earth itself will swim therein, small perhaps, but round and shining.10

Genius is a cognitive gift, the gift of perceiving the unity that lies beneath the diversity of the world as ordinarily perceived. Both this unity and the gift of perceiving it are of divine origin. Jean Paul’s final image of the earth swimming within the whole sphere of heaven graphically expresses the theory that all of nature, including human nature, is only an expression of a greater, spiritual reality.

9 10

Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, p. 28. Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, pp. 42–3.

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Like everyone who thought about art in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Jean Paul had to take up Winckelmann’s celebration of the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of Greek art. Following in the footsteps of Schiller’s 1795 essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” and Schlegel’s “On the Study of Greek Poetry” from the same year, he does this by accepting Winckelmann’s characterization of Greek or “Classical” art but arguing that modern, “Romantic” art necessarily has a different character. Jean Paul focuses on Greek poetry, but calls it “plastic,” thus extending to Greek poetry what Winckelmann had found in ancient sculpture and painting (and what Herder had argued was unique to sculpture). The four chief features of the “plastic” or objective quality of Greek poetry are “objectivity,” that “all figures appear on earth fully of body and motion,” while “modern forms float more like clouds in heaven, with immense but shifting contours that assume arbitrary shapes in each man’s imagination”;11 “the ideal or the beautiful,” which “always grasps the general . . . and excludes the accidents of individuality”;12 “serene repose”;13 and finally, “moral grace.”14 Modern or “Romantic” poetry and art is paradigmatically the art of Christianity, but is anticipated by Platonic and NeoPlatonic philosophy15 – Jean Paul thus quite rightly senses that Plato’s otherwordliness cannot be read as the philosophical theory of classical Greek art but as its philosophical criticism. In contrast to classical art, modern (Romantic) art is essentially characterized by awareness of a gap between the finite and the infinite, and of longing to overcome that gap: “In place of serene Greek joy there appeared either infinite longing or ineffable bliss – perhaps without limit in time or space – the fear of ghosts which dreads itself – enthusiastic, introspective love – unlimited monastic renunciation.”16 Many forms of modern art try to overcome this gap, to reconcile the finite and the infinite, of course, but they can never do so by proceeding as if the gap did not exist in the first place. “Romantic poetry is presentiment of a greater future than finds room here below.”17 This is Jean Paul’s version of Schiller’s thesis that Greek art is “naïve” and modern art “sentimental,” and that 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, p. 47. Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, pp. 49–50. Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, p. 51. Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, p. 53. Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, p. 64. Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, p.64. Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, p. 61.

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we moderns can never simply recapture the naïvety of Greek art, as Winckelmann seemed to think possible. One feature that is distinctive in Jean Paul’s poetics is his presentation of the humorous as a major category of modern, Romantic art, because he thinks of humor as the “inverted sublime” which “annihilates not the individual” (as does the ridiculous) “but the finite through its contrast with the idea.” “In general, reason dazzles the understanding with light (e.g., by the idea of an infinite divinity), as a god dazzles, prostrates, and forcibly subverts finitude. Humor does the same; unlike persiflage, humor abandons the understanding and permits it to fall down piously before the idea. Therefore humor often delights even in contradictions and impossibilities.”18 Humor as opposed to mere satire is a distinctively modern phenomenon because it plays on our recognition of the gap between the finite and the infinite. But the fact that Romantic art in general is only a presentiment of a greater future, not a promise of it, and that in one of its most characteristic forms, the humorous, the understanding is prostrated and dazzled by the idea or the infinite rather than fully comprehending it, means that for Jean Paul the gap between the finite and the infinite can never be completely closed by Romantic art. Thus, although his image of light in the last quotation certainly suggests that Jean Paul is thinking within the framework established by Schelling – in Schelling’s philosophy of nature, light is one of the paradigmatic expressions of the spiritual within the natural – Jean Paul does not think, as the Schelling of the System of Transcendental Idealism did, that art can succeed in accomplishing what philosophy itself could not, the final reconciliation of the finite and the individual. But neither is there any suggestion that he concludes, as in the next decade Hegel will, that art must be superseded by philosophy because philosophy can accomplish what art cannot. Rather, that for Jean Paul modern or Romantic art seems always destined to work within the gap between the finite and the infinite seems to express the modern condition in general. Thus, Jean Paul’s position anticipates versions of cognitivist aesthetics that we will encounter much later in this work, such as that of Theodor W. Adorno’s view of art’s never-to-be-fulfilled promise of happiness, the view that art has a cognitive task that nothing else can fulfill but that art itself also cannot complete.

18

Jean Paul, School for Aesthetics, pp. 88, 93.

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2. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), one of thirteen children of an English vicar, was educated at the charitable school of Christ’s Hospital in London and then at Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1795, he met William Wordsworth, and from 1795 to 1797, he lived near Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy in the English Lake District, writing what remain his most famous poems, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.”19 The former was published in a joint volume of Lyrical Ballads that first appeared in 1798 (with further editions in 1800 and 1802), after which the two men embarked on a trip to Germany; Coleridge would spend a year there, visiting German universities, learning German, and listening to lectures on German philosophy at Göttingen – thus he came close to the Jena Romantic circle but did not actually intersect it. At Göttingen, Coleridge learned about the philosophy of Kant, although Göttingen, with its British connections, had at least initially been a hotbed of criticism of Kant from an empiricist point of view; Coleridge reacted to Kant in ways similar to Schelling but before he became acquainted with Schelling’s work, which happened only later.20 Coleridge moved to Keswick in the Lake District in 1800, resuming his intimacy with Wordsworth and writing more poetry in these years (e.g., the “Ode to Deception”), but also forming the idea of writing a poetics, which would never quite come to fruition. He apparently read some Fichte as early as 1804,21 and would accept Fichte’s idea that spirit should be conceived of as essentially active rather than substantival, although he would also criticize Fichte’s philosophy as degenerating into “a crude egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to NATURE, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy.”22 At some point after his return from Malta, Coleridge became familiar with Friedrich Schlegel’s 1808 Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, and certainly by 1810 he was familiar with a number of Schelling’s, works, apparently including the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature of 1797, the System 19

20

21

22

On “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” see Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 50–75. For an overview of Coleridge’s acquaintance with both German and previous British philosophy, see Paul Hamilton, “The Philosopher,” in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 170–86. On his relation to Schelling, see Raters, Kunst, Wahrheit, und Gefühl, pp. 113–39. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, with his Aesthetical Essays, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907),Vol. I, p. xlvii. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, pp. 101–2.

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of Transcendental Idealism of 1800, and the Munich Academy lecture on the plastic arts of 1807, although in The Friend, a philosophical work published that year, he criticized Schelling for having departed too much from Kant.23 In 1807–8, Coleridge gave a series of lectures in London on “The Principles of Poetry,” in 1810 he wrote a fragmentary “Essay on Taste,” in 1811 he lectured on Shakespeare and Milton, and in 1812 and 1813 he again lectured on the principles of poetry, the second time in Bristol. In 1814, he published three essays on the “Principles of Genial Criticism,” and then embarked on what would become the best known of his theoretical works, the Biographia Literaria, originally conceived of as an introduction to a collection of his poetry but which, since its publication in 1817, enjoyed a life of its own (it had enjoyed four British and three American editions before 1907, as well as numerous reprints).24 In this work, a farrago of theory, criticism, anecdote, and autobiography that, had it been written in German could easily have been mistaken for one of Jean Paul’s fictions, Coleridge claims that he had arrived at his central conceptions before becoming familiar with Schelling but openly acknowledges the affinity of his views with Schelling’s. “In Schelling’s “NATURPHILOSOPHIE,” and the “SYSTEM DES TRANSCENDENTALEN IDEALISMUS, I first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do,” he writes. He openly acknowledges that there will be many similarities between his formulations and those of Schelling, as there are with those of Schlegel, but defends himself against “the charge of plagiarism” on the ground that “many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all of the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before I had ever seen a single page of the German philosopher.”25 Coleridge gave another course of lectures in 1818, from which an essay “On Poesy and Art” was published in his Literary Remains, completing his theoretical statements in aesthetics. A translation of Goethe’s Faust (Part I) that he began in 1814 may have been published anonymously in 1821.26 23 24

25 26

Biographia Literaria, vol. I, pp. xlix–xl. Biographia Literaria, vol. I, pp. xcvi–xcvii. For a brief account of the origins of Biographia Literaria, its contents, and its reception, see James Engell, “Biographia Literaria,” in Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, pp. 59–74. For a fuller account, see Kathleen M. Wheeler, Sources, Processes, and Methods in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 102. Faustus: from the German of Goethe, translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; edited by Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). The standard edition of Coleridge’s works is The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

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Coleridge wrote his chief works in aesthetics between 1810 and 1818, thus a decade later than Jean Paul, but stayed even closer to Schelling than Jean Paul had: he is not a modernist or post-modernist avant la lettre who thinks that art must always work within a gap between the finite and the infinite, but rather a confident idealist who believes that the imagination and its expression in art is precisely what bridges the gulf between the finite subject and the infinite spirit that is the ground of reality, more precisely that imagination is what makes known the identity between subject and object. Coleridge’s central idea in aesthetics is that of the “primary” or “esemplastic imagination,” “esemplastic” being a term he coined out of the Greek “ειςενπλαττειν, to shape into one,”27 and an adjective that actually renders his phrase redundant, since on his interpretation of the primary sense of “imagination” itself it also means the power to shape into one, an interpretation that he arrived at by thinking of the German term Einbildungskraft, “the power of imagining,” as if it were actually Einsbildungkraft, the power of forming into one.28 Coleridge also emphasizes the unifying character of aesthetic experience in his definition of its primary object, beauty: “The BEAUTIFUL, contemplated in its essentials, that is, in kind and not in degree, is that in which the many, still seen as many, becomes one. . . . The most general definition of beauty, therefore, is – that I may fulfill my threat of plaguing my readers with hard words – Multëity in Unity.”29 Considered in isolation, these characterizations of imagination and beauty could certainly be taken to suggest that the imagination is an essentially playful power of individual human beings to create forms or meanings or combinations of both that are not

27 28 29

Bollingen Series 75, general editor Kathleen Coburn, thus far 16 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2002). Works on Coleridge include John H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930); I.A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1934); Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (London: Macmillan, 1968); and G.N.G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism: A Study in the History of Philosophy with Unpublished Materials from Coleridge’s Manuscripts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969). Briefer treatments include René Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England 1793–1838 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931), pp. 63–135; M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 114–24, and Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), especially pp. 256–77; and Engell, Creative Imagination, pp. 328–66. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 107. See Shawcross’s introduction to Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. lxii. Coleridge, “On the Principles of Genial Criticism” (1814), in Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 232. See Engell, Creative Imagination, p. 357.

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given, by nature or otherwise, and that have no cognitive value, reveal no deep truths, and thus to associate Coleridge with the new, originally Scottish approach to aesthetic experience as a form of mental play. In fact, however, Coleridge dismisses such a conception of imagination as mere “fancy,” which “is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space” and “must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.”30 In distinguishing fancy from imagination, Coleridge dismisses the Scottish-Kantian theory of aesthetic experience as free play. Instead, within his Schellingian metaphysics, the primary, esemplastic imagination is the way in which the fundamental unitary activity of the spirit that expresses itself as both subject and object, human consciousness and the nature and its ultimate ground of which the human is conscious, manifests itself in human experience, and art is the concrete human expression of imagination in this sense. Thus, for Coleridge, imagination is the deepest form of insight into the nature of reality, and art is the most effective form for the communication of this insight among human beings; in other words, for Coleridge as for Schelling, art is the organ of philosophy, grounded in cognition, although not without emotional effect. Coleridge gives a concise statement of his Schellingian philosophy in Chapter XII of Biographia Literaria, “A Chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or omission of the chapter that follows,”31 that referring to the surprisingly brief Chapter XIII in which he presents his central idea of the imagination as an organ of truth and its contrast to mere fancy as mere play with memories and associations. The central idea of Coleridge’s philosophy is that subject and object, intelligence and nature, seem like opposites but must both manifest an underlying identity: Now the sum of all that is merely OBJECTIVE we will henceforth call NATURE, confining the term to its passive and material sense, as comprising all the phænomena by which its existence is made known to us. On the other hand the sum of all that is SUBJECTIVE, we may comprehend in the name of the SELF or INTELLIGENCE. Both conceptions are in necessary antithesis. Intelligence is conceived of as exclusively representative, nature as exclusively represented; the one as conscious, the other as without consciousness. Now in all acts of positive knowledge there is required a reciprocal concurrence of both, namely of the conscious being, and of that which is in itself unconscious. Our problem is to explain this concurrence, its possibility and its necessity.32 30 31 32

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 202. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 160. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 174.

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The characterization of nature as unconscious in contrast to conscious intelligence is characteristically Schellingian, but the passage as a whole can be taken as a concise statement of the fundamental principle of German idealism: knowledge is possible only if the knower and the known, while superficially contrasted, are fundamentally identical.33 After following Schelling in the view that this identity can be revealed in two different ways, either by explaining “how intelligence can supervene to” nature or how the latter “itself can grow into intelligence”34 – Schelling’s Naturphilosophie – or alternatively by explaining how “if the subjective is taken as the first” then “how there supervenes to it a coincident objective,”35 Schelling’s “transcendental idealism” – Coleridge then expounds the core of his philosophy in ten theses. First, he states, “Truth is correlative to being,” and “Knowledge without a correspondent reality is no knowledge; if we know, there must be somewhat known by us,” but yet “To know is in its very essence a verb active”:36 the identity between subject and object is something that in some sense must be created, is not simply static. Second, “All truth is either mediate, that is derived from some other truth or truths; or immediate and original,”37 from which Coleridge infers the “scholium” that “a cycle of equal truths without a common and central principle” is “inconceivable ” and the third thesis that “We are to seek therefore for some absolute truth capable of communicating to other positions a certainty, which it has not itself borrowed; a truth self-grounded, unconditional and known by its own light.”38 Thesis IV is that there can only be one such principle,39 and the fifth thesis states that “Such a principle cannot be any THING or OBJECT” but “neither can the principle be found in the subject as a subject, contra-distinguished from an object,”40 precisely because since either of these must be conceived of by contrast to the other it cannot be “self-grounded, unconditional and known by its own light.” Instead (this is Thesis VI), “This principle . . . manifests itself in the SUM or I AM; 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

James Engell describes Coleridge’s conception of imagination as that which identifies the perceiver and the perceived and thus creates the only possibility for a philosophy beyond the philosophies of pure objectivism and pure subjectivism; see Creative Imagination, pp. 333–5. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 175. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 176. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 180. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 180. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 181. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 181. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 182.

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which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words spirit, self, and self-consciousness,” understood however not by a simple contrast to the object of its consciousness or knowledge but rather as “a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself.”41 Self-consciousness is the model for knowledge in general because in a single act of self-consciousness there is consciousness of the self as both known and knower, the identity that must underlie all knowledge; thus, in the words of Thesis VII, “Only in the self-consciousness of a spirit is there the required identity of object and of representation . . . spirit in all the objects which it views, views only itself.”42 This also means that even in the knowledge of any object, there is always something beyond the object immediately known, thus that knowledge is never finite but always involves an element of the infinite (or so Coleridge argues in his Thesis VIII). And this step from the finite to the infinite means that the real object and subject of knowledge is more than the merely individual human being, but must be like God: thus, Thesis IX is that “We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD.”43 Yet in the end – this seems to be the content of Thesis X, which suddenly rambles and does not indicate its point with capital letters – all of this is capable of being understood by or in “the fulness of the human intelligence”44 and in particular is capable of being both understood and expressed by the human imagination, as long as that is understood to be more than mere fancy, or mere play with memories and associations. This is the central claim of the brief but crucial Chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria, which Coleridge seems to have boiled down from a much longer text into a few pages that culminate with these assertions: The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate . . .

Coleridge continues, in words already partially quoted: 41 42 43 44

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 183. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 184. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 186. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 188.

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FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.45

Against the background of the metaphysics expounded in the previous paragraph, what this means is that the primary human imagination is the way in which the human mind perceives its own essential nature, its identity with nature outside of it, and the foundation of both of these in one and the same spirit or God; the secondary imagination is the way that the human mind finds to express this cognition in art, inevitably partly dissolving and dissipating its profound sense of unity in order to incorporate it in something finite, a poem or a painting, but by that means also communicating or diffusing it to others; but the voluntary exercise of the fancy is a mere play with memories and associations that does not realize this cognitive vocation of art.46 Thus Coleridge does not deny the existence of something that sounds like the free play of the imagination and understanding as Kant, inspired by Kames and Gerard, had understood it, but he denies that such play can be central to beauty and art. Coleridge actually entertained something like a purely Kantian conception of beauty and taste – or, more strictly, the initial conception of beauty in the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” to which, as we have seen, Kant himself added an indispensable element of intellectual content in the guise of the “aesthetic idea” in his theory of fine art – in the 1810 “Fragment of an Essay on Taste”47 and the 1814 “Principles of Genial Criticism.”48 In the 1818 lecture “On Poesy or Art,” however, he gives an account of art in the spirit of the core conceptions of Biographia Literaria. He begins this piece with what might seem like a purely subjectivist view of art, as a vehicle for the projection of human subjectivity onto a nature that is actually independent of humankind, though humankind might be one among its products. Thus he opens with the remark that “Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture, and music,” but also including the “primary art,” “writing,” “is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into every thing which is the 45 46 47 48

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 202. On the “levels of imagination” in Coleridge, see Engell, Creative Imagination, pp. 343–6. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II, pp. 247–9. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II, pp. 219–46, at pp. 233–9.

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object of his contemplation; color, form, motion, and sound, are the elements which it combines, and it stamps them into unity in the mould of a moral idea.”49 The expression “stamps into unity” evokes Coleridge’s conception of the “esemplastic imagination,” but here it sounds as if this imagination, previously considered the vehicle of the profoundest metaphysical cognition, is now being reduced to a subjective faculty that paints or projects human perception and human emotion onto nature for the sake of human amusement. However, Coleridge quickly corrects any such impression. For he next maintains that nature itself must be understood as the primary product of mind, of course not the individual human mind but the mind of God, and that what art does is not to project merely subjective human thoughts and passions onto nature, but rather to recreate the unity of thought and nature: Nature is to a religious observer the art of God; and for the same cause art itself might be defined as of a middle quality between a thought and a thing, or, as I said before, the union and reconciliation of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human. It is the figured language of thought, and is distinguished from nature by the unity of all the parts in one thought or idea. Hence nature itself would give us the impression of a work of art, if we could see the thought which is present at once in the whole and in every part; and a work of art will be just in proportion as it adequately conveys the thought, and rich in proportion to the variety of parts which it holds in unity.50

Rather than projecting onto nature something that is in us but not outside us, art makes it possible for us to grasp in something concrete the wholeness and identity of subject and object that through philosophy we know only abstractly to be the truth of our relation to nature. In other words, as Schelling had done with his apotheosis of art in the System of Transcendental Idealism, here Coleridge suggests that art is the organ of philosophy. Art makes the central truth of philosophy intuitable: “We must imitate nature! yes, but what in nature, – all and every thing? No, the beautiful in nature. And what then is the beautiful? What is beauty? It is, in the abstract, the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse; in the concrete, it is the union of the shapely (formosum) with the vital.” As Schlegel claimed that modern art must not imitate the superficial style of Greek art but its essence, indeed the essence of being Greek, namely the harmony between mankind and nature, so Coleridge

49 50

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II, p. 253. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 255.

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holds that art must not imitate the surface of nature but must capture the underlying harmony that creates nature itself: “If the artist copies the mere nature, the natura naturata, what idle rivalry! . . . Believe me, you must master the essence, the natura naturans, which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man.” More fully, nature is itself the product of the act of intelligence, and art makes this fundamental fact about nature intuitable: In the objects of nature are presented, as in a mirror, all the possible elements, steps, and processes of intellect antecedent to consciousness, and therefore to the full development of the intelligential act; and man’s mind is the very focus of all the rays of intellect which are scattered throughout the images of nature. Now to so place these images, totalized, and fitted to the limits of the human mind, as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflexions to which they approximate, to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature, – this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts. Dare I add that the genius must act on the feeling, that body is but a striving to become mind, – that it is mind in its essence!51

Here, older and newer ways of thought are being joined. As we saw earlier, the central idea of the theorist of imitation whom all later writers loved to scorn, namely Batteux, was actually that art should imitate the spirit of nature, not its mere letter; Coleridge is adopting that idea, but adding to it Schelling’s idea, that nature itself is the product of spirit, although of course not of the secondary imagination of particular human artists. Coleridge’s account of genius in Biographia Literaria does introduce one strikingly novel image. There he says, quoting himself from his earlier work The Friend, which had circulated only by subscription, that To find no contradiction in the union of old and new; to contemplate the ANCIENT of days and all his works with feelings as fresh, as if all had then sprang forth at the first creative fiat; characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar; . . . this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talents.52

Coming upon this passage early in Biographia Literaria, one is struck above all by the image of the adult artist approaching the world with the open curiosity of the child. But coming back to it with the subsequent 51 52

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II, pp. 257–8. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, p. 59.

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argument of this work and with the 1818 essay in mind, one realizes that genius lies first and foremost in feeling the riddle of the world and unraveling it, in other words, in the capacity for metaphysical insight, although to be sure achieving that insight must require shedding the habits and preconceptions of everyday life with which the adult is so typically saddled, and in that sense approaching the world with the freshness of a child – but with the reflective capacity of the adult as well. Coleridge likes Plato’s image of metempsychosis, the idea of the Meno that education in the fundamental truths of any science, such as geometry, is recapturing knowledge that we had before we were even born, but lost consciousness of in the passage into bodily existence and must regain, but he does not take it literally any more than he thinks that Plato did.53 The cognitive insight that is to be captured by genius and expressed through art is not literally the knowledge of a child, although it requires something childlike to discover it. Coleridge is drawn to the Platonic image of coming to learn what in some sense we already know because it anticipates the structure of his own idea that in creating a work of art the artist is recreating mind’s own creation of nature: “the man of genius” must out of his own mind create forms according to the severe laws of his intellect, in order to generate in himself that co-ordination of freedom and law . . . which assimilates him to nature, and enables him to understand her. He merely absents himself for a season from her, that his own spirit, which has the same ground with nature, may learn her unspoken language in its main radicals . . . – for this does the artist for a time abandon the external real in order to return to it with a complete sympathy with its internal and actual.54

Like Schelling, Coleridge transforms Kant’s idea that a gift of nature allows the artistic genius to accomplish more than he intends into a conception of genius as the unconscious emerging into consciousness, which is in turn their conception of how intelligence itself arises in nature and thus of how the identity between the known and the knower is created. So Coleridge’s conception of artistic genius is part and parcel of his artistic metaphysics. For a work that was at least initially intended as the introduction to a volume of its author’s own poetry,55 the Biographia Literaria does not 53 54 55

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II, p. 121; “On Poesy or Art,” vol. II, p. 259. Coleridge, “On Poesy or Art,” vol. II, pp. 258–9. See Engell, “Biographia Literaria,” pp. 59–61. Engell reports that Coleridge felt that Wordsworth had hijacked the privilege of writing the introduction to the Lyrical Ballads

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often illustrate its lofty abstractions through the criticism of particular works of art. The central chapter on imagination is, however, followed by discussions of Shakespeare and especially Wordsworth that do somewhat bridge the gulf between Coleridge’s metaphysics and his own experience of art. He begins his critical as well as appreciative account of Wordsworth with a list of his defects: inconstancy of style, “not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems,” excessive drama in some poems, and then feelings, thought, and images that are sometimes too great for their subject.56 But, their original friendship by no means forgotten, Coleridge concedes that these defects pale beside Wordsworth’s excellences, which fulfill the conditions for genius in Coleridge’s estimation: first, “an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning”;57 second, “a correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments, won – not from books, but – from the poet’s own meditative observation”;58 third, “the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs”; fourth, “the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions, as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the works of nature”;59 fifth, “a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator . . . from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature”;60 and “Last, and pre-eminently . . . the gift of IMAGINATION in the highest and strictest sense of the word.” “In the play of Fancy,” Coleridge says, Wordsworth “is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite.”61 But fancy, remember, is mere play, the least significant form of imagination, and of little account; the imagination for which Coleridge praises Wordsworth,

56 57 58 59 60 61

from him – Wordsworth actually wrote the Preface for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, revising it for yet another edition in 1802 – and when Wordsworth reprinted that introduction in a new edition of his Poems in 1815, Coleridge decided to write a similar introduction to a new volume of his own poems, which grew out of all proportion into the two volumes of Biographia Literaria, much larger than the collection of poems to which it was supposed to be the introduction and in the end was published on its own. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II, pp. 97–109. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II, p. 115. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II, p. 118. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II, p. 121. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II, pp. 122–3. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II, p. 124.

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summing up his second, fourth, and fifth excellence (the first and third are stylistic virtues which almost any critic could praise in almost any poet), is nothing less than the esemplastic imagination, insight into the unity of human and nature as both products of underlying spirit. In a remarkable moment of one poet of imagination praising another poet of nature by citing a poetic naturalist, Coleridge sums up his appreciation of Wordsworth with a quotation from the Travels of the American botanist William Bartram (1739–1823):62 “The soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting their backs above the surface. The trees which chiefly grow here are the gigantic black oak; magnolia magna-flora; fraxinus excelsior; platane; and a few stately tulip trees.” What Mr. Wordsworth will produce, it is not for me to prophecy; but I could pronounce with the liveliest conviction what he is capable of producing. It is the FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM.63

The image of the rocks pushing through the soil and of the tallest and most impressive trees then known of the American flora growing from both (the even taller firs and redwoods of the Pacific coast not yet being known, at least to Bartram) is the metaphor for the conscious subject emerging from and in turn reflecting back upon unconscious nature, the soil, and both being grounded in the underlying spirit, the rock; Bartram the naturalist, as if he were himself part of nature, offers the metaphor, but the poet, here Coleridge speaking of his friend Worsdworth, uses the metaphor self-consciously, illustrating the reflexive character of artistic genius that he has elsewhere described in abstractions. Here the voices of three authors coincide to make these abstractions concrete. Whether Coleridge’s own work would better be described as work of the esemplastic imagination or of fancy is beyond our concern here. Our aim has only been to show that even if in spite of the sometimes playful character of Coleridge’s own poetry, his aesthetics is part and parcel of the aesthetics of truth rather than the aesthetics of play that dominated so much of post-Kantian aesthetics. We will see shortly that the same is true in the aesthetic thought of the first American writer who

62

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See William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, etc. (Philadelphia, 1791), reprinted in Travels and Other Writings, ed. Thomas Slaughter (New York: Library of America, 1996), and Judith Magee, The Art and Science of William Bartram (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II, pp. 128–9.

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could move in the company of such as Friedrich Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and even Friedrich Schelling himself, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson. But before we turn to Emerson, we should take a brief look at the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth, the reprinting of which provoked Coleridge to compose Biographia Literaria, and at the Defence of Poetry composed by another Romantic poet a few years later, namely Shelley.

Wordsworth Our account of Coleridge has said nothing about the emotional impact of poetry or art more generally; that does not receive any attention in his theory of the imagination. William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born in the Lake District, and after completing his education at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and several years of travel, including the trip to Germany with Coleridge, he would spend the major part of his life there, much of the time as an officer in the British revenue service. Unlike Coleridge, he devoted almost all of his effort to poetry, having published his first poem even before he entered Cambridge. Apart from a Guide to the Lakes published in 1810, his Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, revised in 1802, is a rare piece of prose and his sole theoretical statement about his own art.64 In this Preface, the emotional impact of poetry becomes the center of attention, although Wordsworth begins from a cognitivist premise. He starts by saying that the purpose of his poems is “to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement . . . to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature.”65 Thus far, poems are described as an instrument of knowledge, although knowledge of the course of human feelings, not of any metaphysical truth about them, about human nature more broadly, or about the relation of human being to nature. Wordsworth subsequently 64

65

Discussions of Wordsworth’s aesthetics include Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 103– 14; Engell, Creative Imagination, pp. 265–76; Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, pp. 69–75; Theresa M. Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Richard Eldridge, “Internal Transcendentalism: Wordsworth and ‘A New Condition of Philosophy,’” in Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 102–23; and Raters, Kunst, Wahrheit und Gefühl, pp. 74–89. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1802), in Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 595–617, at p. 598.

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argues that the poet can obtain the knowledge of human feelings that he expresses in his poems only by himself experiencing those feelings, although of course he cannot write poetry while in the immediate grip of powerful feelings, but must be able to write about what he has felt in a less passionate state than he was in when he originally experienced them. This leads to a famous passage: I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.66

It has been a common charge in the two centuries since this was written that Wordsworth’s inference is fallacious, because there is no logical necessity that a poet can find ways to successfully describe only what she herself actually felt; she might learn about some specific feelings from another source than her own experience, even another work of literature, but be so gifted that she can on that basis successfully evoke that feeling for others. But even though it is not necessarily so, it seems a matter of common sense that for the most part people, even poets who are gifted readers and imaginative writers, will best describe what they have actually felt; and Wordsworth is particularly concerned that emotions described on any other basis will have little impact on the audience for poetry. Wordsworth initially describes the effect on the audience of the poet’s expression of what has been recollected in tranquility as an improvement to the audience’s own sensitivity to feelings, thus as a form of knowledge, and also as a form of stimulation, an almost Dubosian counter to “torpor”: For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this; and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capacity is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of

66

Wordsworth, Preface, p. 611.

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the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.67

This makes it sound as if a whole society is being dulled into a state of ennui – “by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse,” Wordsworth fulminates – and that poetry coming from emotions genuinely felt has the best chance of raising the audience from its torpor. What will thereby be “produced” or “enlarged” in the audience is the capacity to feel emotions; but it is not clear at first that the point of this is anything other than what Wordsworth’s initial comment about the purpose of his poems has suggested, namely, to allow the audience to know the emotions the poet herself has felt and then recollected in tranquility. However, Wordsworth soon makes it clear that the point of poetry is to produce pleasure in its audience, indeed not just the negative pleasure of relief from boredom, but a positive pleasure, in particular a positive pleasure in sharing emotions both with the poet and with other human beings. Thus “The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an over-balance of pleasure,”68 and the poet who successfully recollects in tranquility what she has previously felt in excitement both feels pleasure in that recollection of excitement and successfully communicates that pleasure as well as the emotions themselves to her reader. Thus Coleridge continues the famous passage previously quoted thus: In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind and in whatever degree, from various causes is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will upon the whole be in a state of enjoyment. Now, if Nature be thus cautious in preserving in a state of enjoyment a being thus employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson thus held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that whatever passions he communicates to his Reader, those passions, if his Reader’s mind be sound and vigorous, should always be communicated with an overbalance of pleasure.69

There is actually something Humean about Wordsworth’s position, for his idea is that the formal features of poetry temper the most passionate emotions and transform them from something painful into something pleasurable: poetry uses “language closely resembling that of real

67 68 69

Wordsworth, Preface, p. 599. Wordsworth, Preface, p. 609. Wordsworth, Preface, p. 111.

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life, yet, in the circumstance of metre, differing from it so widely, [that] all these imperceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight, which is of the most important use in tempering the painful feeling which will always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions.”70 But Wordsworth does not go as far as Hume did in suggesting that painful feelings are completely transmuted into pleasure, thereby losing all of their original character; and he also emphasizes that part of what pleases us in our experience of the feelings communicated to us by poetry is our knowledge that these feelings are shared by other human beings, perhaps the poet herself but more importantly other human beings in general: “the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.”71 Hume had noticed that we enjoy sharing our response to works of art, thus that those watching a play with others in a full theater enjoy it more than they would alone, but that would be true even if what were being enjoyed were purely formal features of the composition being performed; Hume had not emphasized that shareable feelings are the content of art, and that our pleasure in art arises from experiencing those feelings and knowing that they are shared. Sometimes Wordsworth falls into the language of theories that do not place much emphasis on the arousal of emotion by poetry; thus in one remark that even Wolff could have made a century earlier, he simply says that “the Poet’s art . . . is an acknowledgement of the beauty of the universe.”72 But the stress on the emotional impact of real life on the poet and then of the poetry that the poet is thereby enabled to create is dominant in his account. He thus effects a synthesis between the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of emotional impact – by communicating the truth about emotions recollected in tranquility, the poet also communicates those emotions themselves, which both pleases her audience and also improves the audience’s knowledge of the nature of human emotions. But there is no more suggestion in Wordsworth than there is in Coleridge that enjoyment of the sheer play of human imagination is any part of our enjoyment of poetry or any other art: what we admire in a poet is above all sincerity of feeling, not inventiveness or originality. 70 71 72

Wordsworth, Preface, p. 611. Wordsworth, Preface, p. 606. Wordsworth, Preface, p. 605.

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Shelley The “Defence of Poetry” written in 1821 by Percey Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) but published only a decade after his drowning the next year, starts off with a Coleridgean emphasis on the imagination, quickly gives that a cognitivist emphasis, and then, like Wordsworth’s Preface, celebrates poetry as a communication of emotion from human to human, so should also be regarded as combining a cognitivist approach to art with a recognition of its emotional impact while not emphasizing the pleasure of imaginative play for its own sake. Shelley, from a much wealthier family than Coleridge or Wordsworth, had a meteoric career. After Eton, he went up to University College, Oxford, but was expelled in his first year because of his presumed association with a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism. He soon eloped to Scotland with one woman, but left her and their two children after three years to elope with Mary Godwin, the daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the political philosopher William Godwin, marrying her in 1816 after his first wife committed suicide. The pair moved to Italy in 1818, the same year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus was published, and Shelley wrote most of his best known poetry in the four years that they lived together there before he drowned while sailing a new boat off the Ligurian coast. His wife published complete editions of his poetry and prose after his death.73 The “Defence of Poetry” begins by describing imagination as “mind acting upon . . . thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity.” It is “το ποιειν or the principle of synthesis; and has for its objects those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself.”74 In this definition Shelley takes a traditional conception of imagination – it combines previously given elements into representations of new and possibly unexperienced objects – but puts both his own stamp on this idea – the imagination colors the elements with which it works with the imaginer’s “own light” or personality – as well as Coleridge’s – namely, that the traditional combination

73

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Biographical data from Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, edited by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). “A Defence of Poetry” will be cited from this edition, where it appears at pp. 674–701. For discussion of Shelley’s aesthetics, see Abrams, Mirror and Lamp, pp. 126–32, and Engell, Creative Imagination, pp. 256–64. Shelley, “Defence,” Major Works, p. 674.

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of given elements into new objects is a “synthesis” which gives to those objects their own “integrity.” Shelley then makes imagination central to his conception of poetry, stating that “Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the Imagination,’” and adds a thought that could have come from Giambattista Vico, that “Poetry is connate with the origin of man,”75 something that humans naturally produce “even in the infancy of society.”76 Having started with this emphasis on imagination, however, Shelley turns to a cognitivist approach, and next states that “to be a poet,” even in the infancy of society, “is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression.”77 In this statement, Shelley emphasizes not the capacity of imagination to invent something new, but rather the perception of something true, though truth about the moral relations of humans to one another and the world as well as truth about other facts, and he even subsumes successful expression, that is, an aesthetically satisfactory relation between the true content of a poem and the form in which that is communicated, under the rubric of truth as well as beauty. Or he suggests that beauty consists in truth in both relations – that between content and reality and the one between form and content. This dual conception of truth is also suggested in a further, fuller statement: Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which we represent, and a perception of the order of those relations, has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets has ever effected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves without reference to that peculiar order.78

The imagination might seem to be poised to return to the stage when Shelley goes on to make a contrast between “a story and a poem,” for it might be expected that he would distinguish them by distinguishing truth from invention. But in fact what he argues, entirely in the Aristotelian tradition, is that poetry expresses deeper and more universal truth than the superficial and accidental truth expressed by a mere story. Thus he 75 76 77 78

Shelley, “Defence,” Major Works, p. 675. Shelley, “Defence,” Major Works, p. 676. Shelley, “Defence,” Major Works, pp. 676–7. Shelley, “Defence,” Major Works, p. 678.

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argues “that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond of connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect,” while poetry “is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial . . . the other is universal.”79 Thus “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth,” and even if “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted,” it does this not by inventing something that has never existed but by capturing the essence of that which does exist: beauty lies precisely in getting beyond meaningless superficial variety to the true essence of reality. In these definitions, Shelley has if anything affirmed a more traditional aesthetics of truth than Coleridge. However, he soon effects a transition from the aesthetics of truth to the aesthetics of emotional impact much as Wordsworth had done. Here is the crucial passage: poetry awakens and enlarges the mind by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it co-exists.

Thus far, Shelley is talking about poetry as conveying truth colored by the beauty of its own form, which he has previously also subsumed under the rubric of truth. However, he now introduces the moral impact of poetry by talking about its moral benefit: The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, nor our own. A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.80

Poetry acquaints its audience with the full range of human feelings, which is a cognitive accomplishment, but it does that by arousing those feelings in each of us who reads or hears it. Thus truth and emotional impact are inseparable: poetry conveys to us the truth about the feelings 79 80

Shelley, “Defence,” Major Works, pp. 679–80. Shelley, “Defence,” Major Works, pp. 681–2.

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of our fellows, on which our moral treatment of them depends, by conveying to us their feelings themselves. And the imagination is central to this accomplishment, but not the imagination as a faculty of invention, rather the imagination as a faculty of communication, that by which we put ourselves into the place of others and feel what they feel. Here Shelley is drawing on another eighteenth-century conception of the imagination, namely Adam Smith’s conception, although the conception of imagination that is at the heart of his Theory of Moral Sentiments rather than that on which his theory of imitation was based. What is ultimately important about imagination for Shelley is that it is by means of the imagination of both the poet and his audience that emotion is communicated from one human being to another. Shelley’s emphasis on the moral benefit of such imagination might seem to moralize his conception of our response to poetry completely. He certainly emphasizes the moral benefits of the experience of poetry: “The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise,”81 and “it were superfluous to explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred emotions can render men more amiable, and generous, and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self.”82 However, Shelley also stresses the sheer pleasure of experiencing both the truths and the emotions that poetry conveys, independently of the beneficial effect of these on our conduct. “Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls, open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight,”83 so there is pleasure in the perception of truth, quite apart from the beneficial effects of knowing that truth; and there is pleasure in feeling the full range of human emotions, apart from the beneficial effect on our conduct of such feeling, as Shelley makes clear in his passing treatment of the paradox of tragedy: Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle: tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. . . . The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. . . . Not that this highest species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. The

81 82 83

Shelley, “Defence,” Major Works, p. 684. Shelley, “Defence,” Major Works, p. 690. Shelley, “Defence,” Major Works, p. 680.

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delight of love and friendship, the ecstasy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception, and still more of the creation of poetry is often wholly unalloyed.84

Some emotions are intrinsically pleasurable, of course, but even in the case of those that are not, the pleasure of experiencing the emotions of others, of not just knowing but actually feeling what they feel, colors and perhaps even outweighs the intrinsic painfulness of those emotions – perhaps that is what Shelley means by saying that “the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.” For these two reasons, then – that there is pleasure in knowledge as such and pleasure in feeling what others feel, both apart from a direct influence on our conduct – Shelley can conclude that “The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true utility.”85 Utility ultimately depends upon pleasure, of course, so pleasure cannot be reduced to utility without circularity. The mention of utility naturally brings us to utilitarianism, the characteristic British moral philosophy of the nineteenth century. Utilitarianism was pioneered by Hutcheson and Hume, each of whom, as we have seen, had a well-developed aesthetic theory as well; but of the three great later British utilitarians, namely Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, the first dismissed aesthetics with the remark that “Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry”86 – utilitarianism only cares that people’s preferences be satisfied, not what they are – while the last did not touch upon aesthetics at all. Only Mill, in whom the utilitarianism stamped upon him by Bentham and his own father, James Mill, was self-avowedly tempered by Coleridge, and who immortally reduced Bentham’s position to the slogan that “push-pin is as good as poetry”87 in his own attempt to distinguish between higher and lower pleasures, wrote directly on aesthetics. So we will turn to Mill before completing our survey of the penumbra of Schelling with an examination of the aesthetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

84 85 86 87

Shelley, “Defence,” Major Works, pp. 694–5. Shelley, “Defence,” Major Works, p. 695. Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward (London: Robert Heward, 1830), p. 206. John Stuart Mill, “Bentham” (1838), in Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson, F.E.L. Priestly, and D.P. Dryer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 75–115, at p. 113.

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3. Mill Son of the utilitarian philosopher and protégé of Jeremy Bentham, the Scotsman James Mill (1773–1836), John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was the subject, or victim, of the educational experiment aimed at producing a purebred utilitarian famously described in his Autobiography.88 Such an education, Mill wrote, produced an attitude in which “the cultivation of feelings (except the feelings of public and private duty) was not in much esteem,” in which “we did not expect the regeneration of mankind from any direct action on . . . sentiments, but from the effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish feelings.”89 Coleridge eventually taught Mill the importance of feelings as well as intellect and calculation in moral and political life, and in an 1840 appreciation of Coleridge, Mill wrote that Coleridge provided an indispensable complement to Benthamite utilitarianism, teaching the importance of “restrained discipline” but also “the feeling of allegiance” and “a feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government.”90 Several years before this essay, however, and before his great System of Logic (1843) and major works in moral and political philosophy, including Principles of Political Economy (1848), On Liberty (1859), and Utilitarianism and Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill had written a pair of essays on poetry, in which he stressed the importance of the direct expression of emotion in genuine poetry and the emotional impact of such poetry on its reader. In these essays, published in 1833, he did not mention the name of Coleridge, and indeed they may be taken as a corrective to the absence of such an emphasis in Coleridge’s own works of aesthetic theory. While Mill wrote these essays well before he was thirty, he reproduced them in his later essay collection Dissertations and Discussions (first published in 1859), and thus did not himself regard them as mere juvenalia. And even though these essays have not figured largely in the history of aesthetics, they are worth our attention because they point to an omission in Idealist aesthetics and to a factor the importance of which would eventually have to be restored in any complete account of aesthetic experience.91 88

89 90 91

The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, published posthumously in 1873; see The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 1, Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). Mill, Autobiography (Early Draft), in Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 113. John Stuart Mill, “Coleridge,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, pp. 133–5. On Mill’s life, see, in addition to the Autobiography, Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and for our purposes

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Mill starts these essays with the question “What is Poetry?” but he immediately makes plain that the answer to this question will not be formalistic, for example that poetry is merely “metrical composition”; indeed, what he means by poetry is not even limited to any specific form or genre of literature: That, however, the word poetry imports something quite peculiar in its nature, something which may exist in what is called prose as well as in verse, something which does not even require the instrument of words, but can speak through the other audible symbols called musical sounds, and even through the visible ones which are the language of sculpture, painting, and architecture; all this, we believe, is and must be felt, though perhaps indistinctly, by all whom poetry in any of its shapes produces any impression beyond tickling the ear.92

What Mill has in mind is something more like what would be called in German Poesie rather than what is called poetry, that is, verse, in English, and Mill thus makes it clear that his question “What is Poetry?” is equivalent to the question “What is art?” What he is about to argue distinguishes poetry from mere prose is therefore what distinguishes all art from other artifacts. The “distinction between poetry and what is not poetry,” thus between art and non-art, is one, he trusts, felt and acknowledged by all who have any understanding of poetry or art whatever; the method of his argument is thus to be empirical, appealing to the feelings of all qualified judges – here there is no tincture of the a priori methodology of German Idealism, whatever other influence its English representative Coleridge might have had on Mill. But Mill’s argument does not merely appeal to the feelings of qualified readers; the substance of his proposal is also that the primary aim of poetry and all art is to work upon the feelings of its audience. In the course of his argument, Mill will assume that genuine poetry is the expression of feelings that actually exist in the mind of the poet, as Wordsworth had (“emotion recollected

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especially ch. 4, “The Discovery of Romance and Romanticism,” pp. 86–132; for surveys of Mill’s philosophy, see Alan Ryan, J.S. Mill (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), and John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill (London: Routledge, 1989). Relevant monographs are F. Parvin Sharpless, The Literary Criticism of John Stuart Mill (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), and Colin Heydt, Rethinking Mill’s Ethics: Character and Aesthetic Education (London: Continuum, 2006). A relevant article is Wendy Donner, “Morality, Virtue, and Aesthetics in Mill’s Art of Life,” in Ben Eggleston, Dale E. Miller, and David Weinstein, editors, John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 146–65. Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” Part I (originally in the Monthly Repository, January 1833), in Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 343.

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in tranquillity”), but what is fundamental to his conception is that poetry aims to produce feeling in its audience; and insofar as poetry or art is also concerned to convey truth or create beauty, it is genuinely poetic or artistic only insofar as it conveys “impassioned” truth93 and beauty that “harmonizes” with some feeling which it has “a tendency to raise up in the spectator’s mind . . . a feeling of grandeur, or loveliness, or cheerfulness, or wildness, or melancholy, or terror.”94 Thus the premise of Mill’s account, the basic claim that is to be confirmed from his or her own experience by each reader of Mill’s essay, is that The object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions; and therein is poetry sufficiently distinguished from what Wordsworth affirms to be its logical opposite, namely, not prose, but matter of fact or science. The one addresses itself to the belief, the other to the feelings. The one does its work by convincing or persuading, the other by moving. The one acts by presenting a proposition to the understanding; the other by offering interesting objects of contemplation to the sensibilities.95

Again, Mill makes it clear that what matters is not the outward form of a work, for example whether it is metrical or not, rhymed or not, but its intended effect: prose or non-art aims to produce conviction, whether its content is actually true or not, and poetry or art aims to move the emotions, even if its content, should it have content (as for example architecture usually does not), is also true. Mill uses the word “contemplation” in connection with poetry, but it is clear from what immediately precedes that by this he does not mean a purely cognitive attitude toward some truth, but rather the close attention to an object that is necessary for it to produce its emotional impact. Mill also says that poetry “is the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion,” which might be taken to mean that it is a medium for knowledge about emotions and thus that its aim is essentially cognitive even if its subject matter is emotional; but he immediately follows this with the statement that poetry “is interesting only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they might have been able to feel had their outward circumstances been different.”96 Even when poetry does truly describe emotions, its aim is not, or not merely, to provide cognition about them, but to stimulate 93 94

95 96

Mill, “Poetry and Its Varieties,” Part I, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 348. Mill, “Poetry and Its Varieties,” Part I, Autobiography and Literary Essays, pp. 343–4n.; this passage is from the 1833 version of the essay. Mill, “Poetry and Its Varieties,” Part I, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 344. Mill, “Poetry and Its Varieties,” Part I, Autobiography and Literary Essays, pp. 345–6.

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experience of them. Mill also observes that the stimulation of emotion does not have to proceed by means of the “delineation” or description of emotion, even if it sometimes can; emotion may also be stimulated by description of an external object in a way that stirs the emotions of an audience. Thus, “If a poet describes a lion, he does not describe him as a naturalist would . . . who was intent upon stating the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Rather, “He describes him by imagery, that is, by suggesting the most striking likenesses and contrasts which might occur to a mind contemplating the lion, in the state of awe, wonder, or terror, which the spectacle naturally excites . . . Now this is describing the lion professedly, but the state of excitement of the spectator really.”97 More precisely, it is describing the lion in a way aimed at producing the state of excitement, or the excitement of a particular emotion or range of emotions, in the spectator. Unlike Wordsworth and Shelley, who had forged a connection between poetry’s conveying truth and its conveying emotion, Mill separates the two and argues that the aim of poetry is only its emotional impact. A decade after writing the essay we are discussing, Mill would write one of the nineteenth century’s great works on philosophy of science; perhaps a thinker with his intimacy with science felt a stronger need to distinguish poetry from any vehicle of truth than the Romantic poet-philosophers had. Be that as it may, having argued that poetry is aimed at stirring emotions rather than conveying truths, Mill is then faced with the problem of distinguishing between poetry and “eloquence” or oratory (or “propaganda,” as R.G. Collingwood would add a century later), which also works by stirring the emotions of its audience. An obvious way of distinguishing between poetry and oratory would be to say that the latter aims to stir up emotions in its audience as a means to some end of the orator, as a way of motivating or manipulating its audience toward some action, while poetry aims at stirring emotions for the sake of the audience only, that is, for their enjoyment.98 Mill takes a different tack, arguing that “Eloquence supposes an audience” while “the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener.” Poetry is feeling, confessing to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols, which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is 97 98

Mill, “Poetry and Its Varieties,” Part I, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 347. So had Kant famously distinguished between poetry and oratory in Critique of the Power of Judgment, §51.

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feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy or endeavouring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or action.99

Here Mill draws his distinction too strongly, making the poet’s expression of his feeling for his own sake essential to poetry but the communication of his feeling to his audience accidental or incidental to his aims, and lumping together moving an audience to passion and to action as both characteristic of eloquence, when a distinction between moving an audience to passion and moving it to action might have been more germane to his original definition. Nevertheless, his distinction leads him to the memorable remark that “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard,”100 suggesting that the distinction between poetry and eloquence, art and non-art, lies not so much in the author’s intentions as in the phenomenology of the audience’s response: in art we are absorbed by an object and our emotional response to it, while with other sorts of objects we are always cognizant of the author’s intentions regarding us. Mill again overdraws his distinction when he states that “Poetry, accordingly, is the natural fruit of solitude and meditation; eloquence, of intercourse with the world”;101 surely many kinds of emotion are intimately connected with human intercourse with the world, and only an author who has had such intercourse can express these emotions and arouse them in his audience, whether or not he has any further aim in so doing. But apart from his exaggerations, what is important in Mill’s account is his emphasis on the emotional aspect of the experience of art, so noticeably absent from the idealist philosophy of art since Kant. The emphasis on emotion is evident in Mill’s account of beauty in the first edition of the essay, already mentioned. Mill takes up the topic of beauty precisely in order to controvert the view that “The direct aim of art as such, is the production of the beautiful ”; this view would conflict with his own account of poetry because “as there are other things beautiful besides states of mind, there is much of art which may seem to have nothing to do with poetry or eloquence as we have defined them.” As a possible counterexample to his own view, Mill refers to landscape painting, for example something by Claude Lorrain. He alludes to a traditional account of beauty on which such a painting presents “a beauty more perfect and faultless than is perhaps to be found in any actual landscape,” but argues that such traditional criteria or components of 99 100 101

Mill, “Poetry and Its Varieties,” Part I, Autobiography and Literary Essays, pp. 348–9. Mill, “Poetry and Its Varieties,” Part I, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 348. Mill, “Poetry and Its Varieties,” Part I, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 349.

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beauty as “unity, and wholeness, and æsthetic congruity” actually depend on “singleness of expression.” Anticipating a common later objection to all expression theories of art, he concedes that “The objects in an imaginary landscape cannot be said, like the words of a poem or the notes of a melody, to be the actual utterance of a feeling,” but insists, as we saw earlier, that there must nevertheless “be some feeling with which they harmonize, and which they have a tendency to raise up in the spectator’s mind.” “Even architecture,” he adds, “to be impressive, must be the expression or symbol of some interesting idea”; if the emphasis in this clause were placed on the word “idea,” this would sound like an idealist theory of art as cognition of an idea, of the kind that we have found in Schelling and will find in Hegel, but we should rather read the clause with the emphasis on “interesting,” by which Mill in turn means emotionally interesting: what makes a thought expressed by architecture (or other non-verbal art) interesting and impressive is that it is “some thought, which has power over the emotions.”102 In this passage, Mill demonstrates that he does not entirely ignore either cognitive content or formal beauty as important features of art, but holds that they must be accompanied with emotional impact and constitute genuine art only insofar as they contribute to the emotional impact of the work. Mill also makes it clear here that it is the emotional impact on the audience that is the necessary feature of art, the occurrence of emotion in the artist being at best a causal condition for the creation of an object that can have such an impact on its audience. Were it to turn out that objects with emotional impact, whether verbal artifacts that have the linguistic form of expressing their author’s state of mind or other sorts of artifacts that do not, could be created without the actual experience of emotion in their artists, that would not affect the status of such objects as art as long as they had emotional impact on their audience. Only that is the sine qua non of poetry or art, even if it is actually unlikely that art with an emotional impact on its audience could be produced by an artist who had not experienced the relevant emotion. In his brief and early essays on poetry, Mill does not raise the question of why it should be important to us to experience emotions through the medium of poetry or other arts; perhaps the pleasure of so doing is supposed to be self-evident. He certainly does not argue, as Shelley had, that the experience of art has a direct benefit for our moral imagination. Since Mill did not devote any part of his later, more systematic work to 102

Mill, “Poetry and Its Varieties,” Part I, Autobiography and Literary Essays, pp. 353–4n.

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aesthetics, he never directly addresses the question of the importance of the emotional experience of art. But perhaps Mill’s most enduring work, the 1859 essay On Liberty, suggests a way he could have answered this question. In this work, deeply influenced by the posthumous publication of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s essay on the limits of state action just a few years before,103 Mill defends the most extensive possible liberty of thought and speech as the necessary condition for progress in the discovery of truth and for the appreciation of truth already discovered – a cognitivist argument for liberty, so to speak. But in the third chapter of the work, “Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being,” Mill argues that freedom in the development of individual character is a good in its own right, not just good as a means to the discovery of truth. The underlying assumption of this argument seems to be that (right-thinking) human beings approve of variety and individuality among human characters because they enjoy the spectacle of human variety. Mill puts the premise for his argument in aesthetic terms: “It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interest of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and as the works partake of the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating.”104 If we assume that part of what we each enjoy in contemplating the full variety of human lives is the full variety of human emotions, then of course each of us has to have a way of experiencing that variety, which may extend well beyond the range of emotions that any one of us might otherwise enjoy in his or her own life apart from the experience of art. The expression of emotions in art might be a way, perhaps the best way, for us to experience the full range of human emotions and thus to be able to enjoy contemplating the full range of human variety. Mill does not quite make such an argument, but it would be consistent both with his early essays and with the centerpiece of his mature thought. Half a century later, as we will see in Volume 3, the British aesthetician Edward Bullough would 103

104

Michael Forster shows how closely Mill follows von Humboldt’s argument in “The Liberal Temper in Classical German Philosophy: Freedom of Thought and Expression,” in After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 244–80. Mill, On Liberty, chapter III, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, volume 18, Essays on Politics and Society, ed. J.M. Robson and Alexander Brady (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 266.

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make such an argument, and perhaps we may think of Mill as having anticipated it. As we have seen thus far in this chapter, Coleridge developed an essentially cognitivist aesthetics from the philosophy of Schelling. Wordsworth, who was personally close to Coleridge, and Shelley, who had no personal contact with him but was clearly influenced by his poetics, began with Coleridge’s aesthetics of truth but intimately connected the emotional impact of poetry to its truth, in Shelley’s case truth in both content and form. It was left to the scientific philosopher Mill to emphasize the emotional impact of poetry, and under that as a general term, other kinds of art as well, almost exclusively. In turning now to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mill’s almost exact contemporary in America (although the American outlived his British counterpart by a decade), we also turn back to a more purely Coleridgean aesthetic.

4. Emerson In early nineteenth-century America, the need for texts in academic aesthetics, such as it was, as part of general courses in philosophy or rhetoric, was filled by American editions of the works of such Scottish writers as Lord Kames and Dugald Stewart. In the broader culture of the United States, the need for reflection on beauty and art, as on much else, was filled by the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82).105 A thinker with a highly absorbent mind, Emerson was exposed early to many philosophical and intellectual traditions, including the Scottish tradition that was the basis of American collegiate education in philosophy at Harvard, where Emerson was an undergraduate and then a divinity student, as well as elsewhere, but also Neo-Platonism, mysticism, and 105

The sole monograph devoted to Emerson’s aesthetics focuses on Emerson’s contact with artistic and literary culture in nineteenth-century America and his influence on it; see Vivian C. Hopkins, Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951). Stanley Cavell’s essays on Emerson are collected in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); see also Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 19–34; another philosophical treatment is Russell B. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For biographies, see Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1981), Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), and Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). For discussion of Emerson and Schelling, see Raters, Kunst, Wahrheit und Gefühl, pp. 139–59.

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above all German Idealism, especially in the form given to it by Schelling and transmitted to the English-speaking world by Coleridge. According to some accounts, later in his career Emerson was also influenced by Hegel and the school of his American followers known as the St. Louis Hegelians,106 but the “Transcendentalism” espoused in Emerson’s first essay collection Nature (1836) and the First (1841) and Second Series (1844) of his Essays surely shows the influence of Schelling more than of Hegel in its conception of the unification of nature and human being rather than a conception of the sheer externalization of the human “spirit” in nature. Emerson’s first book, Nature, includes a chapter on “Beauty,” and the Essays include chapters on “Art” (First Series) and “The Poet” (Second Series), but none of these have the appearance of an academic treatise in aesthetics. Only in a second chapter on “Beauty” in the 1860 collection The Conduct of Life does Emerson offer anything that looks like an analysis of the concept of beauty; even here, however, Emerson begins by remarking that he is “warned by the ill fate of many philosophers, not to attempt a definition of Beauty,” and says that he will rather only “enumerate a few of its qualities.”107 Yet this caution hardly precludes Emerson being seriously considered in a history of aesthetics; on the contrary, not only does it look back to Thomas Reid’s observation on the manifold senses of the word “beauty” and kinds of beauty,108 it also looks forward to the attack upon the possibility of definitions in aesthetics that would become characteristic of mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American aesthetics, although under the immediate influence of Wittgenstein rather than Emerson.109 An account of Emerson belongs in the history of aesthetics because of his illustration of the aesthetics of German Idealism as well as because of his anticipation of this characteristic tendency of more recent aesthetics. He should also be noted because of his well-documented influence on the young Nietzsche, certainly a major figure in the history of aesthetics later in the nineteenth century: Emerson’s remark in Nature that “The world thus exists to the soul to 106

107

108

109

See Michael Moran, “Emerson, Ralph Waldo,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, second edition, ed. Donald M. Borchert (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson-Gale, 2006), vol. 3, p. 196. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. VI, introduction by Barbara L. Packer, Notes by Joseph Slater, text edited by Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 154. See Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, edited by Derek R. Brookes (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), Essay VIII, p. 575, and Thomas Reid’s Lectures on the Fine Arts, edited by Peter Kivy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 40. See Volume 3, Part 4.

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satisfy the desire of beauty”110 could be a source for Nietzsche’s famous remark in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) that “the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.”111 Emerson, the son of a Unitarian minister in Boston, was, as already noted, educated at Harvard. By all accounts, he was undistinguished as an undergraduate student, but by the later 1820s he had already read widely among authors such as religious sages of all traditions from Confucius to Swedenborg and philosophers and social thinkers such as Leibniz, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Burke, Herder, and Madame de Staël’s report on contemporary German literature and philosophy in De l’Allemagne.112 After a few years as a schoolteacher, Emerson also became a Unitarian minister in Boston, but following the death of his first wife in 1831, after only two years of marriage, he gave up the ministry. His first resort after her death was a trip to Europe in 1833, during which he not only acquainted himself with Italian art but also met Wordsworth and Coleridge and became lifelong friends with Thomas Carlyle in England. Shortly after returning to his home in Concord, Massachusetts, he remarried, and also embarked on a career as a public lecturer throughout the United States. (with a further lecture tour to England in 1847–48) that would make him the most famous man of letters in nineteenth-century America; all of his books, which in addition to those already mentioned include Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), and Letters and Social Aims (1875), were based on his lectures. His career as a lecturer and writer made Emerson rich and famous as the “Sage of Concord.” Emerson’s “Transcendentalism,” enunciated in the works that first made him famous, Nature, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa lecture “The American Scholar” (1837), and the Harvard Divinity School Address (1838), is the view that each human individual is part of a larger spiritual entity, which Emerson sometimes calls the “Over-Soul,” and that this in turn comprises a unity with what we are so often inclined to conceive of as the opposite of the human soul, namely nature. Emerson succinctly expresses the first point in Nature when he states that “Man is conscious 110

111

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Emerson, Nature, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. I, edited by Alfred R. Ferguson, introductions and notes by Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 8. Actually, this remark comes the “Attempt at Self-Criticism” that Nietzsche added to the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy in 1886, suggesting that the influence of Emerson continued throughout Nietzsche’s career. Moran, “Emerson, Ralph Waldo,” p. 195.

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of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine or thine or his, but we are its.”113 Because of the “identity of the mind through all individuals,” he who goes “down into the secrets of his own mind . . . has descended into the secrets of all minds.”114 He expresses the second point in a remark such as that the “relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men.”115 Because of the unity of mind or man and nature, nature reflects the human mind, but the human mind cannot exist except embedded in nature. In his early work, Emerson may emphasize the first of these facts more than the second, as when he writes that Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation . . . ; every animal function . . . shall hint to man the laws of right and wrong . . . This ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made.116

But he equally stresses the second fact, that humankind is essentially embedded in nature as well as nature reflecting the human mind, in only slightly later work such as the central essay on “The Over-Soul” in Essays: First Series. Here Emerson stresses that the unity that underlies all individuality is the unity of man and nature as well as the unity of diverse humans: The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that OverSoul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other. . . . We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. . . . We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree: but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.117 113 114 115 116 117

Emerson, Nature, p. 18. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Collected Works, Vol. I, pp. 66, 63. Emerson, Nature, p. 22. Emerson, Nature, pp. 25–6. Emerson, Essays: First Series, Essay IX, “The Over-Soul,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. II, introduction and notes by Joseph Slater, text edited by Alfred R.

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It is the bidirectionality of Emerson’s Transcendentalism, the thought that nature gives rise to the most characteristic features of human thought but that human beings must also always recognize that they are at home only in nature, that marks the association of his thought with that of Schelling. Emerson’s language in these passages demonstrates that he conceives of our affinity with nature as expressed in aesthetic as well as ethical form: our responsiveness to natural beauty as well as our tendency to conceive of nature in ethical terms both mark our essential identity with nature and its with us. In the very first chapter of Nature, Emerson remarks that “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood”118 (a remark that surely reveals the influence of Coleridge’s account of genius in Biographia Literaria), that is, one whose response to nature is aesthetic as well as ethical. Emerson then develops the themes that natural beauty is an expression of our identity with nature and that art is a vehicle through which this fundamental relationship is further expressed. Emerson continues the first chapter of Nature with the suggestion that natural beauty is found in the wilder, uncultivated, and untamed aspects of nature in the ordinary sense, our physical environment: “I am the lover of uncontained beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.”119 But he quickly moves to an identification of all of nature with beauty. Following the remark that “A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty,” Emerson opens the third chapter of Nature, on “Beauty,” with the remark that “The ancient Greeks called the world κοσμος, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping.”120 But while this passage generalizes the objects that we may find beautiful in nature, to anything natural, it also suggests a restriction of natural beauty to what is in fact only the first of its three “aspects” or levels of importance. Emerson

118 119 120

Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 160. Emerson, Nature, p. 9. Emerson, Nature, p. 10. Emerson, Nature, p. 12.

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continues that “we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in a threefold manner.” That “the simple perception of natural forms is a delight”121 is only the first of these levels. The second level of beauty is the “presence of a higher, namely, . . . spiritual element . . . that which is found in combination with the human will,” in other words, “Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue”:122 beauty is the outward expression, in human action, but of course human action as itself part of nature, of virtue. Emerson also calls this kind of beauty “graceful,” which seems a clear reference to Schiller’s conception in “On Grace and Dignity” and perhaps a reference to Kames’s account of gracefulness standing in turn beyond Schiller. Finally, Emerson holds that “There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world must be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect. Beside the relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought.” Here Emerson refers to the beauty of order in nature as a whole, which can be taken in only by intellect, rather than the beauty of the forms of individual objects, which can be recognized by mere sense: “The intellect searches out the absolute order of things,” and thereby “The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind.”123 Here, with Platonic and Neo-Platonic as well as German Idealist antecedents in mind, Emerson holds that natural beauty is most deeply appreciated when it is interpreted as the reflection of the underlying order of nature. That an “intellectual” thought of such a metaphysical account of beauty is necessary for the deepest level of its reception is indicative of the fundamentally cognitivist character of Emerson’s theory of beauty. Thus far we have sampled Emerson’s account only of natural beauty. But Emerson immediately turns to the beauty of art, arguing basically that art is a medium for capturing and transmitting the experience of natural beauty. He continues the chapter on “Beauty” in Nature with the remark that “The creation of beauty is Art,” which might suggest that artistic beauty is a creation of the imagination rather than an imitation of something already present in nature and our experience of it, and indeed we will find some remarks in later writings that suggest such a view, which might count as an alternative to a purely cognitivist approach to artistic beauty. But here Emerson continues that “A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature.”124 Artistic beauty is an expression of the beauty 121 122 123 124

Emerson, Nature, p. 13. Emerson, Nature, p. 15. Emerson, Nature, p. 16. Emerson, Nature, pp. 16–17.

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of nature, most fully understood, and as in general “Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole,” so too in art “A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.” An artist is then one who produces artifacts that capture and communicate the beautiful order of nature: The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.125

Here is where Emerson then continues with his remark that “The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty.” We can now see that it does this in two ways, most directly through the existence of objects in nature in the ordinary sense, that is, objects that are not human artifacts, as well as less directly, through its creation of human artists who are in turn capable of creating concentrated images of natural beauty in the first sense, as well as at several levels, the levels of mere form, of the graceful expression of virtue, and of order that must be understood intellectually. Emerson develops these themes in the next chapter of Nature, on symbols and language, and in the chapters on “Art” in Essays: First Series and “The Poet” in Essays: Second Series. We can take a look at these chapters before returning to Emerson’s later analysis of beauty in The Conduct of Life. In the essay on “Art,” Emerson begins by stating the “in our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim. In landscapes,” for example, “the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation that we know.” This might suggest that the aim of art is not to reproduce nature or in any other way render nature graphic or intelligible for us, but Emerson quickly corrects any such impression by continuing that “The details, the prose of nature he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendor. He should know that the landscape has beauty for his eye, because it expresses a thought which is to him good.”126 This makes it clear that the creativity of the artist does not lie in offering any alternative to nature, but rather in having and communicating an insight into – a thought about – what is essential rather than accidental to nature. Emerson emphasizes this point some pages later when he says that “genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and 125 126

Emerson, Nature, p. 17. Emerson, “Art,” in Essays: First Series, p. 209.

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itself pierced directly to the simple and true . . . the old, eternal fact I had met already in so many forms.”127 Art cannot simply be equated with an intellectual understanding of the underlying order of nature, the unity of man and nature, the unity among human beings, that is, the essential truths on the Emersonian worldview, but it plays a special role in getting us to recognize such truth: it has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist and lead the dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we behold what is carved and painted, as students of the mystery of Form. The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought.128

Here Emerson adapts the traditional, for example Kantian, terms of detachment and disinterested contemplation, but treats them as necessary conditions for appreciating the real truth about nature rather than as separating the creation and enjoyment of art – he clearly alludes to both – from the intellectual activity of understanding nature. Art has a special role for us, but within a primarily cognitive relation to the world. Emerson also makes the Schellingian point that “man,” by which he means both human beauty itself and human creativity, the human ability to present the beauty of both human and non-human nature in art, is itself an expression of a power within nature. He asks rhetorically “What is a man but nature’s finer success in self-explication? What is a man but a finer and compacter landscape, than the horizon figures?”129 Borrowing a favorite figure from Kant, we might say that for Emerson, art is the ratio cognoscendi of the essence of nature, but nature is the ratio essendi of art: art provides insight into the essence of nature, but it is the unity and coherence of nature that makes art possible. This bidirectional link between nature and art provides the foundation for Emerson’s solution to what the eighteenth century had formulated as the problem of taste, and which, once again revealing his essentially cognitivist approach, Emerson formulates as the problem of the “universal intelligibility” of art: for Emerson, art, or at least successful art, “the work of genius,” is universally intelligible because it gives expression to profound truths 127 128 129

Emerson, “Art,” Essays: First Series, p. 214. Emerson, “Art,” Essays: First Series, pp. 210–11. Emerson, “Art,” Essays: First Series, p. 209.

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about nature that must be intelligible to all and does so in ways that are themselves natural, and thus also intelligible to all. Here Emerson relies on his conception of the “Over-Soul,” explicated in a previous chapter of Essays: First Series,130 or of the unity of all humans, as well as on his conception of the unity of humanity and nature. He writes: The reference of all production at last to an Aboriginal Power, explains the traits common to all works of the highest art, – that they are universally intelligible . . . Since what skill is therein shown is the reappearance of the original soul, a jet of pure light, it should produce a similar impression to that made by natural objects. In happy hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected, – the work of genius. And the individual in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to all the great human influences overpowers the accidents of a local and special culture, is the best critic of art. . . . The best of beauty is . . . a wonderful expression through stone or canvas or musical sound of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.131

On the basis of his Transcendentalist metaphysics and cognitivist approach to beauty in nature and in art, Emerson is as fully committed to the universal validity of judgments of taste as any eighteenth-century theorist, or even more so than some. Emerson has perhaps learned from Herder to reject the idea of Winckelmann that people at one time can simply recreate the beautiful art of another time – “Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America, its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”132 Thus moderns may better create images of shops and mills than of Olympian athletes. But Emerson also shares Herder’s assumption, though on his own Schellingian, Transcendentalist grounds rather than on Herder’s more naturalistic ground, that artistic beauty created at any time will be able to communicate its insight into the underlying truth about humanity’s place in nature to audiences at any time. Emerson returns to the theme of universal intelligibility in “The Poet,” the first of the Essays: Second Series. Here Emerson emphasizes that poets, standing in for all artists, have gifts of both insight and expression that exceed those of other humans, but that what they understand and communicate is precisely through their work accessible to all:

130 131 132

Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” Essays: First Series, ch. IX, pp. 159–75. Emerson, “Art,” Essays: First Series, p. 213. Emerson, “Art,” Essays: First Series, p. 218.

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the poet is the representative man. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth. . . . He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. . . . The poet is the person in whom these powers –

of sense and speech, insight and expression – are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.133

Here Emerson reproduces the twofold structure of the Kantian analysis of genius, with its emphasis on both the inventiveness and the expressiveness of genius, although Emerson’s characterization of the first of these poles as “receptive” rather than creative again confirms the cognitivist character of his own approach. Later in this essay, Emerson expands on the bold statement that “The poets are . . . liberating gods,”134 and in saying this he might seem finally to accept Kant’s account that the essence of aesthetic experience and thus at least a necessary condition for art is the free play of the imagination within the constraints of the understanding’s demand for unity rather than any form of intellectual insight. However, Emerson’s thought in “The Poet” seems to be the same as his thought in the earlier essay on “Art,” namely that the special gift of the artist is to liberate himself and thereby the rest of us from an excessive focus on the particulars in nature so that we can appreciate the essential truths about nature that lie behind or beneath its particulars; in other words, liberation from the particularity of the senses is a means to the appreciation of more important truth through beauty and art, not an end in itself. Thus Emerson continues that while the “emancipation” offered by poetry is “dear to all men,” “the power to impart, as it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth, that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence, possessing this virtue, will take care of its own immortality.”135 The liberation that Emerson finds essential to art is the liberation of the intellect 133 134 135

Emerson, “The Poet,” Essays: Second Series, pp. 4–5. Emerson, “The Poet,” Essays: Second Series, p. 19. Emerson, “The Poet,” Essays: Second Series, pp. 19–20.

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from its distractions and to the essential character of nature and mankind’s relation to it and to each other. In his most formal analysis of beauty, in the chapter on that topic in the 1860 collection The Conduct of Life, Emerson again emphasizes his cognitivist approach with the remarks that “Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world”136 and that “The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundations of things.”137 Here, however, Emerson recognizes multiple aspects of beauty, as earlier noted. First, he does not actually deny that the “forms and colors of nature” do contribute to our “sensuous delight” in natural beauty. Rather, he proposes that forms have “a new charm for us” or constitute a second aspect or level of beauty in our recognition of them “as a sign of some better health, or more excellent action” or “excellence of structure” either in what acts or in what is produced by action.138 Emerson characterizes this second level of beauty with a variety of terms, all of which have a large role sooner or later in the history of aesthetics: “beauty must be organic” or “necessary,” lying in structures essential to the well-being or proper functioning of its object, in “the soundness of bones that ultimate themselves in a peach-bloom complexion” or in “the real supporters of a house” that “honestly . . . show themselves,”139 and “The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy” and “Veracity.”140 All of these qualities – organic functioning, soundness, honest, economy, veracity – can show themselves to particular advantage in the human form, and thus human form is the paradigmatic content of art, although its beauty also exceeds the beauty of art: “The felicities of design, or in works of nature, are Shadows or forerunners of that beauty which reaches its perfection in the human form. All men are its lovers.”141 But the beauty of sound human form is, so to speak, only the pinnacle of the second level of beauty. The highest level of beauty is beauty as the expression of moral character, or the expression of moral character that accompanies beauty in the first two senses. “And yet – it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires.”142 Or, as Emerson concludes 136 137 138 139 140 141 142

Emerson, “Beauty,” in The Conduct of Life, p. 153. Emerson, “Beauty,” The Conduct of Life, p. 154. Emerson, “Beauty,” The Conduct of Life, p. 154. Emerson, “Beauty,” The Conduct of Life, p. 155. Emerson, The Conduct of Life, pp. 156–7. Emerson, The Conduct of Life, p. 158. Emerson, The Conduct of Life, p. 159.

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the essay, “beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus; and the beauty ever in proportion to the depth of thought.”143 First Emerson contrasts grace as the expression, presumably, of moral character, to beauty, but then he makes grace an element of beauty, thereby suggesting that the highest form of beauty is that which incorporates all three aspects of surface, form, and grace. In the end, then, Emerson’s conception of the highest form of beauty is not far from Kant’s conception of the “ideal” of beauty. But although it is only in connection with this third aspect of beauty that Emerson mentions passion as part of our response to beauty at all, thus potentially opening his analysis up to that aspect of aesthetic experience that Kant had struggled hard to exclude from his own account but that others such as Kames and among the Romantics both Wordsworth and Shelley had clearly recognized, at the same time Emerson also emphasizes yet again the essentially intellectualist cast of his conception of beauty: even the “moral element” is “depth of thought” rather than, for example, resolve or commitment. Even when he recognizes multiple aspects or layers of beauty, then, Emerson does not so clearly adopt multiple approaches to beauty: for him, beauty is above all the appearance of truth, of course in his particular Transcendentalist sense, and neither emotional impact nor the free play of the imagination are central to his account. The long opening chapter of Emerson’s final book, Letters and Social Aims of 1875, is titled “Poetry and Imagination,” and through its emphasis on the latter might suggest a departure from the emphasis on both natural and artistic beauty as a vehicle of truth that is so prominent in his earlier work. But it is not clear when this material was actually written: after a fire at his home in 1872 precipitated his intellectual decline, this book was compiled out of older material by a friend, James Elliott Cabot, with general supervision but only minor intervention by Emerson, and Cabot stated that most of the essays in the volume, not excepting “Poetry and Imagination,” were “written in great part long before,”144 so the essay may have been contemporaneous with Emerson’s earlier, not later, work. And be that as it may, while the essay does celebrate the centrality of imagination in successful poetry, presumably in the arts more generally, it also introduces a distinction, much like Coleridge’s distinction, between imagination and mere “fancy” that treats the latter as 143 144

Emerson, “Beauty,” The Conduct of Life, p. 163. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims, in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. III, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), Preface to First Edition, p. xi.

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superficial play, or play with surfaces, and the former as “perception . . . of a real relation between a thought and some material fact.” The foremost requirement for poets and their poetry is therefore “veracity,”145 and thus Emerson’s approach to art even in this essay remains fundamentally cognitivist. There may be a departure from Emerson’s Schellingian Transcendentalism of forty years earlier in the fact that Emerson does not begin this essay by reasserting the essential identity of nature and human consciousness or thought, but instead begins from the premise that the human mind “projects” its thoughts on to nature, and uses natural objects as “symbols” of its own states. Emerson begins the section subtitled “Poetry” thus: The primary use of a fact is low; the secondary use, as it is a figure or illustration of my thought, is the real worth. First the fact, second its impression, or what I think of it. Hence Nature is called “a kind of adulterated reason.” Seas, forests, metals, diamonds and fossils interest the eye, but ’t is only with some preparatory or predicting charm. Their value to the intellect appears only when I hear their meaning made plain in the spiritual truth they cover. The mind, penetrated with its sentiments or its thoughts, projects it outward on whatever it beholds.146

In the last sentence of this passage, Emerson refers to both “sentiments” and “thoughts,” which might suggest that poetry, or art more generally, expresses the emotions as well as the cognitions of artists and projects them on to natural objects that are then used as symbols or “imaginative expressions”147 of those mental states, and that art can in turn arouse emotional impact as well as knowledge of truth in its audience. Such an emphasis on emotional impact would be a departure from Emerson’s earlier work. But the singular “it” in the final clause would seem to refer back to the singular “meaning” in the previous sentence, and the term “meaning” could suggest that Emerson is still primarily thinking of the cognitive content of art as what is expressed or symbolized through the images of objects in nature, thus still thinking primarily of art as a vehicle of truth, although he is now emphasizing that nature is more the means for artistic expression than its object. In any case, as he continues he refers primarily to the meaning or truth expressed by art, for example when he says that “When some familiar truth or fact appears 145 146 147

Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” Letters and Social Aims, p. 29. Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” Letters and Social Aims, p. 11. Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” Letters and Social Aims, p. 12.

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in a new dress, mounted as on a fine horse, equipped with a grand pair of ballooning wings, we can [not] enough testify our surprise and pleasure.”148 Thus when he adds that “Vivacity of expression” is the “high gift” of the poet and that “There is no more welcome gift to men than a new symbol,” it is the vivacity or symbolization of “truth or fact,” though truth about human thought rather than about nature outside of human beings, that he is talking about. Having reaffirmed his commitment to truth as the content of art, Emerson does emphasize the creative character of imagination in the expression of such truth. He says that “All thinking is analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy. The endless passing of one element into new forms, the incessant metamorphosis, explains the rank which the imagination holds in our catalogue of mental powers.”149 Further, the “essential mark” of poetry “is that it betrays in every word instant activity of the mind, shown in new uses of every fact and image, in preternatural quickness or perception of relations.”150 But just as he stops short of elevating the emotional impact of art to an aspect of its creation or experience of equal importance to the discovery and communication of truth, likewise he stops short of recognizing sheer pleasure in the activity of the imagination as an aspect of art and our experience of it equal in importance to insight. He comes close, saying that “The act of imagination is ever attended by pure delight,”151 but then draws back, next saying that “Whilst common sense looks at things or visible Nature as real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words for thoughts which they signify.”152 The cognitive content of art remains of paramount importance, not one of two or three equally important aspects. And thus Emerson’s discussion of imagination culminates with his contrast between imagination and mere fancy, already mentioned: Imagination is central; fancy, superficial. Fancy relates to surface, in which a great part of life lies. . . . Fancy is a wilful, imagination a spontaneous act; fancy, a play as with dolls and puppets which we choose to call men and women; imagination, a perception and affirming of a real relation between a thought and some material fact. Fancy amuses; imagination expands and

148 149 150 151 152

Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” Letters and Social Aims, pp. 12–13. Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” Letters and Social Aims, p. 15. Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” Letters and Social Aims, p. 17. Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” Letters and Social Aims, p. 18. Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” Letters and Social Aims, p. 19.

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exalts us. Fancy joins by accidental resemblance, surprises and amuses the idle, but is silent in the presence of great passion and action.153

Perhaps it would be fair to say that in this passage Emerson does recognize the importance of passion as well as true thought in art, although his view certainly seems to be that passion is aroused by true thought: imagination expands and exalts us by expressing a real relation between thought and some material fact. But, although there is no suggestion that Emerson has Kant in mind in this passage, he tacitly rejects Kant’s idea that free play is central to the role of imagination in the creation and appreciation of art, and instead treats play like child’s play, mere play with dolls and puppets. As we shall subsequently see, this interpretation of play was to become characteristic of many professional philosophers and aestheticians in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, and to constitute a continuing obstacle to the recognition that the free play of the imagination within but also with the limits of understanding and reason should count as at least one of the central elements of aesthetic experience. Jean Paul, Coleridge, and Emerson remained largely in the shadow of Coleridge’s conception of art as the organon of philosophy, a source of metaphysical insight, while Wordsworth and Shelley began from this premise, transmitted to them by Coleridge, but intertwined the emotional impact of art, or their particular art of poetry, with its truth; only Mill drew a strong contrast between truth and emotional impact and assigned art the task of producing only the latter. We can now turn from these figures to another philosopher who, also influenced by Schelling although he hated to admit it, likewise developed a highly intellectualistic account of aesthetic experience, and who did not merely ignore the passions in his account of such experience but rather argued that aesthetic experience can liberate us from the dolorous effects of passion. This philosopher is, of course, Arthur Schopenhauer.

153

Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” Letters and Social Aims, pp. 28–9.

3 The High Tide of Idealism Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Schleiermacher

We have just seen that while Schelling’s cognitivist approach to aesthetics excluded any place for the free play of the imagination and had little room for the emotional impact of art, and at least some of those within his penumbra, such as Emerson, retained his cognitivist approach, at least some others among the wide range of thinkers and poets to whom Schelling’s influence was communicated by Coleridge, including Wordsworth, Shelley, and Mill, gradually found ways to combine emotion with truth in their conceptions of aesthetic experience. Now we return to the next two leading philosophers of German Idealism − Arthur Schopenhauer, almost as precocious as Schelling, and Hegel, older but slower to publish − and see that for all their differences they both accepted a strictly cognitivist approach to aesthetics and were as hostile as Kant himself had been to the emotional impact of art. In the final section of this chapter, we will see that one of their contemporaries in Berlin, the theologian Schleiermacher, took a less reductive approach to aesthetics, but his course on the subject did not have an immediate effect on the field. Instead, Hegel’s aesthetics would dominate the subject in Germany for at least three decades following his death in 1830, while after that Schopenhauer’s approach would influence not only the further development of aesthetics itself but a wide range of creative artists across Europe.

1. Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) generally expressed nothing but contempt for the trio of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, but at one point he conceded that “Schelling had once said ‘willing is original and primary

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being.’”1 It is difficult to imagine that Schopenhauer’s own transformation of Kant’s epistemology, metaphysics, and aesthetics into his theory that beauty in general and art in particular gives us cognition of the different “Platonic ideas” or types of “objectification” of the nonrational will as the ground of all reality, and by that very cognition of the general forms of the expression of the will distracts us from the incessant demands of our own particular wills, thereby at least temporarily bringing peace into our conflicted existence, was not profoundly influenced by Schelling’s identification of the will as the ground of all being in the Essence of Human Freedom. But defending that historical conjecture will not be my task in this chapter. Rather, what will be argued here is that Schopenhauer exploits many of the central themes of Kant’s aesthetics, notably Kant’s concepts of disinterestedness, of genius, and of aesthetic ideas, but, like Schelling, transforms Kant’s theory of the free play of our cognitive powers, even with aesthetic ideas, into a strictly cognitivist theory of the content of aesthetic experience – a transformation signaled by his use of the expression “Platonic ideas” instead of “aesthetic ideas” – and transforms Kant’s theory of the positive pleasure of such free play into a theory of negative pleasure at our release from the incessant demands of our particular wills through the cognition of the general forms of the expression of the will in aesthetic experience. Unlike Schelling, however, Schopenhauer does at least sometimes recognize a positive rather than merely negative pleasure in aesthetic cognition, but this is a pleasure in cognition itself, and there is no hint in Schopenhauer that we take pleasure in the experience of any other emotions – the point of the experience of beauty is simply to free us from all other emotions. Thus Schopenhauer only barely hints at Kant’s synthesis of the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of play, and excludes the emotional impact of art from his conception of aesthetic experience even more rigorously than Kant had done: for Schopenhauer, allowing emotion into aesthetic experience would not merely violate good taste, but would undermine the very point of this experience. Schopenhauer was the son of a wealthy merchant from the German Hanseatic trading city of Danzig (present-day Polish Gdansk), who sent him to England to study business, but conveniently died and left the young man enough money to devote himself to philosophy without regular employment for the rest of his life. Free to pursue his own interests, 1

Schopenhauer, “Fragments for the History of Philosophy,” in Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. I, p. 132.

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Schopenhauer first studied medicine and physiology at Göttingen – for an idealist, there would always be an unusual emphasis upon the physicality of the human condition in his philosophy – and then turned back to philosophy under the tutelage of the skeptical philosopher Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833) (known as “Anesidemus” after the title of his anonymous criticism of Kant through the vehicle of Kant’s disciple Karl Leonhard Reinhold, a work published in 1792). Schopenhauer then went to Berlin to hear Fichte, who disappointed him, although his study of Plato under Scheiermacher (discussed later in this chapter) also put a permanent mark upon his work. Schopenhauer received his doctorate for his work On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason from Jena in 1813, too late to have heard Schelling in person, who had left for Würzburg and then Munich a decade earlier. Upon the publication of his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (late 1818, dated 1819, substantially expanded in 1844), Schopenhauer offered lectures as a Privatdozent at the university in Berlin. He offered them at the same time as Hegel’s lectures, so attendance was very poor, but Schopenhauer persisted in announcing his lectures as long as he remained in Berlin, adding Hegel as well as Fichte to his list of enemies. He left Berlin for Frankfurt am Main during the cholera epidemic of 1831 (which would claim Hegel as one of its victims). He lived the life of a private scholar in Frankfurt, at first largely ignored, but eventually he enjoyed renown as The World as Will and Representation was taken up in the wave of pessimism that swept European intellectuals after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. Schopenhauer became a seminal figure for many European intellectuals and writers, artists, and musicians, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann, and Samuel Beckett, throughout the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth.2 2

The literature on Schopenhauer is extensive. Two biographies are Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), and David E. Cartwright, Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010). Most general treatments of Schopenhauer’s philosophy include a treatment of his aesthetics: some of these are Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (1907), trans. Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), ch. 5; Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), ch. 5; D.W. Hamlyn, Schopenhauer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), ch. 6; Ulrich Pothast, Die eigentliche metaphysische Tätigkeit: Über Schopenhauers Ästhetik und ihre Anwendung durch Samuel Beckett (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982); Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), ch. 8; Christopher Janaway, Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), ch. 6; Dale Jacquette, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2005), ch. 5; and Julian Young, Schopenhauer (London: Routledge,

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The general outlines of Schopenhauer’s philosophy are much more widely known than those of Schelling’s, and can be presented more briefly here. According to Schopenhauer, the general structures of conscious human thought – above all, the organization of our experience into space, time, causal relations among events, and intentional relations between desires and actions – are structures imposed by our own minds on the effects of an otherwise unknown substratum of reality on our own underlying reality. In this position, which the twenty-five-year-old already defended in On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Schopenhauer took himself to be the legitimate heir of Kant. Unlike Kant, however, in his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (Book I recapitulates this doctrine), Schopenhauer insisted that we could characterize the underlying reality that acts upon us and that acts within us as nonrational will; for Kant, we could infer that our own underlying reality is will, but a rational will or at least a will capable of rationality, yet we could make no inference at all about what underlies the rest of nature. Schopenhauer based this assertion upon the claims that we have a double knowledge of ourselves, through the cognitive representation in which our own bodies are like everything else in the world and through voluntary action in which we have a unique relation to our own bodies; that we recognize the latter to be more fundamental than the former, even though the former contains all the structures we think of as rational; and that we can extend this view to all of reality beyond ourselves. Thus in Book II of the World as Will and Representation, he writes: Whereas in the first book we were reluctantly forced to declare our own body to be mere representation of the knowing subject, like all other objects 2005), ch. 5 and 6. Papers on Schopenhauer’s aesthetics can be found in Dale Jacquette, editor, Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Günter Baum and Dieter Birnbacher, editors, Schopenhauer und die Künste (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005); and Alex Neill and Christopher Janaway, editors, Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Value (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Christopher Janaway, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), includes Cheryl Foster, “Ideas and Imagination: Schopenhauer on the Proper Foundation of Art,” pp. 213–51, and Martha C. Nussbaum, “Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionyus,” pp. 344–74. See also Michael Podro, The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford: Clarendora Press, 1972). ch. VII; Schmidt, Genie-Gedankens, pp. 467–76; Lucien Krukowski, Aesthetic Legacies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), ch. 2 and 5; Brigitte Scheer, Einführung in die philosophische Ästhetik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), pp. 142–52; Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, pp. 182–208; Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, pp. 271–80; Feger, Poetische Vernunft, pp. 461– 85; and Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 5–13.

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of this world of perception, it has now become clear to us that something in the consciousness of everyone distinguishes the representation of his own body from all others that are in other respects quite like it. This is that the body occurs in consciousness in quite another way, toto genere different, that is denoted by the word will. It is just this double knowledge of our own body which gives us information . . . about what it is, not as representation, but as something over and above this, and hence what it is in itself.3

Then he goes on to state that we can use this “double knowledge” as the “key to the inner being of every phenomenon in nature”: We shall judge all objects which are not in our own body . . . according to the analogy of this body. We shall therefore assume that as, on the one hand, they are representation, just like our body . . . so on the other hand, if we set aside their existence as the subject’s representation, what still remains over must, according to its inner nature, be the same as what in ourselves we call will. If, therefore, the material world is to be something more than our mere representation, we must say that, besides being the representation, and hence in itself and of its inmost nature, it is what we find immediately in ourselves as will.4

Now it may seem natural to insist that once Schopenhauer has accepted Kant’s distinction between representation or things as they appear and those things as they are in themselves, it is completely illegitimate of him to make any further claims about the real nature of the in-itself. But in fact Kant was willing to make a claim about the determinate nature of the in itself, at least about the human self as it is in itself, namely that the otherwise indeterminate concept of our real self can be made determinate through the concept of a rational will governed by the moral law.5 Schopenhauer’s departure from Kant lies not in his willingness to make any claim at all about the noumenal, but in the fact that he follows Schelling in insisting that our own underlying reality and by extension that of the rest of nature is thoroughly nonrational will, and that rationality is only one more superficial feature of appearance like spatiality, temporality, and causality which does not characterize will at its deepest 3

4 5

Translations from Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (WWR), trans. E.F.J. Payne, 2 vols. (Indian Hills, Colo.: Falcon’s Wing Press, 1958), vol. I, §19, p. 103. All further citations from WWR will be from Volume I, the original portion of the work published in 1818 (dated 1819), so the reference to the volume will be omitted from subsequent notes. Schopenhauer, WWR, §19, p. 105. See Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, section III, 4:452, and Critique of Practical Reason, 5:49, in Practical Philosophy, pp. 99, 179.

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level. “Every person invariably has purposes and motives by which he guides his conduct; and he is always able to give an account of his particular actions. But if he were asked why he wills generally, or why in general he wills to exist, he would have no answer; indeed, the question would seem to him absurd. This would really be the expression of his consciousness that he himself is nothing but will.”6 For Schopenhauer, further, the nonrational nature of the will means that it never leads to a feeling of pleasure in the realization of our potential for rationality, what Kant called “contentment” or “moral feeling,”7 but only to an endless striving that has no stable, unconditionally valuable goal and that therefore can never be completely satisfied. “Absence of all aim, of all limits, belongs to the essential nature of the will in itself, which is an endless striving . . . human endeavours and desires . . . buoy us up with the vain hope that their fulfillment is always the final goal of willing. But as soon as they are attained, they no longer look the same, and so are soon forgotten . . . and are really, although not admittedly, always laid aside as vanished illusions.”8 The nature of the will that is the underlying reality of both ourselves and everything else in nature means that we are condemned to a painful cycle of frustration in which even the realization of our desires turns out to be nothing but the source of another unfulfilled desire, a cycle that would be ended by nothing but death. The will and rationality that for Schelling must be able to come apart in order to mark our difference from God must come apart for Schopenhauer, perhaps because for him there is no God to guarantee even the possibility of the reunion of these two contrary principles. The first step of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, however, is to transform Kant’s account of disinterestedness as a characteristic of aesthetic experience that allows us to make intersubjectively valid judgments of taste into the negative pleasure of at least a temporary respite from this cycle of frustration that is afforded by the experience of beauty. Schopenhauer’s thought, presented in Book III of The World as Will and Representation, is that ordinarily we set ourselves on the possession of particular objects that we expect to fulfill desires, but that it is possible to so immerse ourselves in the perception of an object that we can actually forget our

6 7

8

Schopenhauer, WWR, §29, p. 163. See Critique of Practical Reason, 5:118, and Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, Introduction, section XII.a, 6:399, in Practical Philosophy, pp.528. Schopenhauer, WWR, §29, p. 164.

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inevitably unsatisfying desire to possess or consume it, at least for a while. In such a state we devote the whole power of our mind to perception . . . and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building, or anything else. We lose ourselves entirely in this object . . . ; we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object. . . . Thus at the same time, the person who is involved in this perception is no longer an individual, for in such perception the individual has lost himself; he is pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge.9

This state of relief from the pain of particularized desire, clearly a negative form of pleasure, is achieved by perception, a form of cognition itself rather than a play with cognitive powers, although Schopenhauer’s initial suggestion that it is achieved through the perception of particulars qua particulars is misleading; it is achieved through the cognition of the general form of the kind of expression of the underlying reality of will that the particular object is: “If, therefore, the object has to such an extent passed out of all relation to something outside it, and the subject has passed out of all relation to the will, what is thus known is no longer the individual thing as such, but the Idea, the eternal form, the immediate objectivity of the will at this grade.”10 The disinterested pleasure of Kant’s free play of our cognitive powers with aesthetic ideas is transformed into relief at the liberation of the will from its unsatisfiable obsession with particulars through the cognition of the general forms or Platonic ideas of the expression of the will itself in aesthetic experience. In this theory, Schopenhauer combines the idea that beauty in general, not just art, has cognitive content, not with Kant’s idea of free play, as Kant had in his own theory of aesthetic ideas, but rather with Kant’s hostility to emotion in aesthetic experience, and ends up with the view that aesthetic experience as a form of cognition frees us from all emotion other than our sense of relief at being so freed (which may be accompanied, as he later concedes, with a positive pleasure in knowing). The cognitive character of Schopenhauer’s theory of ideas is further apparent in his specific theory of art, including his theory of genius as the source of art, his comments about the reception of art, and his classification of the arts as types of representations of the ideas – until he reaches music, 9 10

Schopenhauer, WWR, §34, pp. 178–9. Schopenhauer, WWR, §34, p. 179.

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which represents the will itself rather than any of its objectifications. Following his initial introduction of the theory of ideas as the objects of timeless, painless, will-less contemplation, Schopenhauer illustrates the contrast between the “different grades at which” the “objectivity” of the “will as thing-in-itself” appears, “i.e., the Ideas themselves, from the mere phenomenon of the Ideas in the form of the principle of sufficient reason, the restricted method of knowledge of individuals,”11 with examples drawn from nature: the shape of particular clouds at particular moments is mere phenomenon, but the very fact that “as elastic vapour they are pressed together, driven off, spread out, and torn apart by the force of the wind” shows that “this is their nature, this is the essence of the forces that are objectified in them, this is the Idea.”12 (We have to take the identification of physical forces of the sort that are mentioned as the phenomenal expression or objectification of a thing-in-itself that is will as a leap of metaphysical faith: there can be no further evidence for it than the experience of will in our own cases that Schopenhauer earlier mentioned.) But in the ensuing sections, Schopenhauer makes it clear that the primary way in which we encounter Ideas and enjoy the benefits of contemplating them is through art, and here he makes clear the cognitive character of art and of our response to it: What kind of knowledge is it that considers what continues to exist outside and independently of all relations . . . the true content of phenomena . . . known with equal truth for all time, in a word, the Ideas that are the immediate and adequate objectivity of the thing-in-itself, of the will? It is art, the work of genius. It repeats the eternal ideas apprehended through pure contemplation, the essential and abiding element in all the phenomena of the world. According to the material in which it repeats, it is sculpture, painting, poetry, or music. Its only source is knowledge of the Ideas; its sole aim is communication of this knowledge.13

While natural things might occasionally suggest their own Ideas and dispose us toward contemplation, art actively and therefore presumably more reliably and frequently “plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world’s course, and holds it isolated before it.” Schopenhauer accordingly describes genius, the ability to create art, in strictly cognitive terms. Genius consists in the exceptional capacity for the recognition of timeless Ideas through the particularities of phenomena and in the exceptional capacity for the communication of such 11 12 13

Schopenhauer, WWR, §35, p. 181. Schopenhauer, WWR, §35, p. 182. Schopenhauer, WWR, §36, pp. 184–5.

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cognition. First, the heightened capacity for cognition: “Only through the pure contemplation . . . which becomes absorbed entirely in the object, are the Ideas comprehended; and the nature of genius consists precisely in the preeminent ability for such contemplation . . . the gift of genius is nothing but the most complete objectivity, i.e., the objective tendency of the mind . . . Accordingly, genius is the capacity to remain in a state of pure perception, to lose oneself in perception.” And “For genius to appear in an individual, it is as if a measure of the power of knowledge must have fallen to his lot far exceeding that required for the service of an individual will.”14 Second, the exceptional capacity for the communication of such cognition: while all people must have the capacity to contemplate the Ideas and through that contemplation to obtain relief from the demands of their will to some degree, otherwise the effect of art would be entirely lost on them, most people have the capacity to recognize or discover ideas to a “lesser and different degree” than the genius; and the genius in turn excels the rest of mankind not merely in the capacity to have such ideas but also in the capacity to retain them and convey them through a “voluntary and intentional work, such repetition being the work of art. “Through this he communicates to others the Idea he has grasped.” The gift of the genius is the twofold gift of cognition and communication, although the latter can to some extent be acquired: “that he knows the essential in things which lies outside all relations, is the gift of genius and is inborn; but that he is able to lend us this gift, to let us see with his eyes, is acquired, and is the technical side of art.”15 The key point is not so much whether one aspect of genius is more innate than the other, however, but that it has these two aspects. In this regard, the structure of Schopenhauer’s analysis of genius replicates that of Kant’s, with the key difference that the element of play is missing from the experience of both the genius and the audience. For Kant, genius consisted in the ability to create a free play of the imagination with an idea and then to communicate that to the audience in a way that would allow the audience not just to apprehend the content of the artist’s idea but also to enjoy a free play of their mental powers in some way analogous to but not fully determined by the free play of the artist – without that, the experience would not be an aesthetic experience for Kant. For Schopenhauer, however, although the genius must be active in plucking an idea out of the phenomena, he does not play with the idea, but simply 14 15

Schopenhauer, WWR, §35, p. 185. Schopenhauer, WWR, §37, pp. 194–5.

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contemplates it, and facilitates the contemplation of it in his audience, by means of which they are both, to some degree or other, transformed into will-less and therefore painless pure subjects of knowledge. Throughout this cognitivist account, Schopenhauer’s theme remains that aesthetic experience offers the negative pleasure of relief, although only momentary, from the incessant frustration of the will. In this regard, his theory remains parallel to Schelling’s account of our pleasure in beauty as pleasure in the resolution of the paradox of being, although at least in Schelling’s writings prior to the Essence of Human Freedom, for example in the apotheosis of art as the instrument and organon of philosophy in the System of Transcendental Idealism, there is no suggestion that the pleasure afforded by beauty is only temporary and might need to be supplanted by a moral resolution or attitude of some kind, as Schopenhauer will ultimately argue. (This is the subject of Book IV of the World as Will and Representation.) But there is a hint in Schopenhauer that aesthetic pleasure may have a positive side, a sheer pleasure in knowing that does not presuppose any antecedent frustration from which knowledge offers an escape. In §38 of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer says that there are “two inseparable constituent parts” in the “aesthetic method of consideration,” namely “knowledge of the object not as individual thing, but as Platonic Idea . . . ; and the self-consciousness of the knower, not as individual, but as pure, will-less subject of knowledge,” and he then adds that the pleasure produced by contemplation of an aesthetic object arises sometimes more from one of these sources than the other.16 Here he is alluding to his theory, again similar to Schelling’s, that in the case of beauty the Idea presents itself to us (or at least to the genius) as if it were immediately in the object, whereas in the case of the sublime we are more conscious of a struggle to isolate the Idea out of the experience of the object. In the case of beauty, “that purely objective frame of mind is facilitated and favoured from without by accommodating objects,”17 whereas in the case of the sublime “that state of pure knowing is obtained first of all by a conscious and violent tearing away from the relations of the same object to the will . . . by a free exaltation, accompanied by consciousness, beyond the will and the knowledge related to it.”18 But in the opening paragraph of his discussion of the sublime, Schopenhauer does describe the “subjective part of aesthetic pleasure” as “that pleasure 16 17 18

Schopenhauer, WWR, §38, pp. 195–6. Schopenhauer, WWR, §38, p. 197. Schopenhauer, WWR, §39, p. 202.

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in so far as it is delight in the mere knowledge of perception as such.”19 Whether he intended it thus or not, this remark suggests that we might take pleasure in the contemplation of Ideas even if we did not need to be relieved from frustration by that contemplation. So here Schopenhauer hints at a return to the purely positive account of aesthetic pleasure characteristic of Kant and most other writers, including such contemporaries as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Mill, and to prepare the way for a return to this emphasis in subsequent aesthetics. But even Schopenhauer’s suggestion of a positive pleasure in aesthetic experience remains firmly linked to his interpretation of this experience as an exceptional form of cognition rather than a free play with our cognitive powers that is not aimed at actual cognition. And of course there is no hint, as there was in those writers or will be in later writers such as Edward Bullough, that we could take positive pleasure in the experience of emotion as such. Schopenhauer’s theory of art as the genius’s vehicle for the repetition and presentation of the Platonic Ideas leads him to a classification of the arts that is in some ways reminiscent of Schelling’s detailed classification in the Philosophy of Art but that also departs from it in various ways. Schopenhauer’s classification begins with architecture as the medium that, insofar as it is considered “merely as a fine art and apart from its provision for useful purposes,” brings to “clearer perceptiveness some of those Ideas that are the lowest grades of the will’s objectivity,” such Ideas as “gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness,” and so on, “those first, simplest, and dullest visibilities of the will.”20 Schelling, by contrast, began his classification with music, because it works with the most real of the ideal forms of representation, such as rhythm. Schopenhauer then mentions both horticulture and landscape and still-life painting as arts that present the Ideas of the objectification of the will in vegetable life, a form of its objectification that is more advanced than the mechanical forces presented by architecture but is still far from its objectification in human character and action.21 From these arts, Schopenhauer advances to historical painting and sculpture, which present the outward forms of isolated manifestations of the will in human actions (§§45–49), and then to poetry, which reveals “that Idea which is the highest grade of the will’s objectivity, namely the presentation of man in the connected series of his efforts and actions.”22 His discussion of poetry culminates with his own 19 20 21 22

Schopenhauer, WWR, §39, p. 200. Schopenhauer, WWR, §43, p. 214. Schopenhauer, WWR, §44, pp. 218–19. Schopenhauer, WWR, §51, p. 244.

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version of the conventional wisdom that tragedy is the “summit of poetic art”: for Schopenhauer this is so because tragedy presents more effectively than any other art form “The unspeakable pain, the wretchedness and misery of mankind, the triumph of wickedness, the scornful mastery of chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and the innocent.”23 Finally, Schopenhauer turns to music, which is for him the highest rather than the lowest of the arts, because it “is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but [is] a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. For this reason the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.”24 Music is thus on a par with the other manifestations of the will rather than with the other arts as copies of the manifestations of the will; music is the art that crosses the Platonic barrier between art and other ordinary things by being a copy of reality itself rather than a copy of a copy of reality itself. From this point of view, Schopenhauer then interprets the different aspects of music as “copies” of different aspects of the will itself rather than of its objectifications: the deepest tones of harmony are a manifestation of inorganic forces; in “the whole of the ripienos . . . between the bass and the leading voice singing the melody,” he recognizes “the whole gradation of the Ideas in which the will objectifies itself,” and finally in melody he recognizes “the highest grade of the will’s objectification, the intellectual life and endeavour of man.”25 Schopenhauer’s accounts of both tragedy and music seem to present a paradox, indeed a version of the traditional paradox of tragedy: the contemplation of beauty, especially artistic beauty, is supposed to present us with timeless ideas the contemplation of which will release us from the frustration of our time-bound wills; but tragedy presents us with such affecting representations of human suffering, and music supposedly presents the will and all of its indifference to our own concerns to us with even greater directness, that it is difficult to see how we can take pleasure in these arts, except perhaps to the limited extent that Schopenhauer recognizes a positive pleasure in cognition as such – a form of pleasure, however, which he hardly emphasizes and does not seem adequate to account for the profundity of our pleasure in these arts. Schopenhauer recognizes the threat of this paradox and confronts it directly in his 23 24 25

Schopenhauer, WWR, §51, p. 253. Schopenhauer, WWR, §52, p. 257. Schopenhauer, WWR, §52, pp. 258–9.

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discussion of music. He writes that music “never expresses the phenomenon, but only the inner nature, the in-itself, of every phenomenon, the will itself.” Therefore music does not express this or that particular gaiety and definite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without any accessories, and so also without the motives for them.26

Schopenhauer’s thought is that contemplation of the universal ideas always turns our attention away from the frustrating particularities of our personal situations, even when those universal ideas are themselves the ideas of pain, suffering, and so on. “It is just this universality” that Schopenhauer ascribes uniquely to music, although one would think that it could be achieved by tragedy as well, “that gives it that high value as the panacea of all our sorrows.”27 Music “reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain.”28 Schopenhauer’s solution to what threatens to be the greatest paradox for art depends entirely on his theory of the redemptive power of the contemplation of universals, and thus confirms the thoroughly cognitivist and anti-emotional character of his aesthetic theory: knowledge of the essence even of our own emotions frees us from those emotions. He has transformed Kant’s idea of the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment into the idea of a literal release from painful self-interest through cognition, Kant’s conception of the aesthetic ideas as that with which the mind plays in art into that which the mind knows in art, and Kant’s conception of the genius as the one who can both more freely play with ideas than others yet communicate a sense of that free play to others into the conception of one who knows more readily than others and can communicate that knowledge and its ensuing benefit to others. Like Schelling, Schopenhauer has disrupted Kant’s synthesis of the ancient idea of aesthetic experience as a form of knowledge and the novel idea of aesthetic experience as the free play of our mental powers and turned it back into the traditional theory of aesthetic experience as a heightened form of cognition alone, although, again like Schelling, his account of the cognition in aesthetic experience naturally reflects the innovations in his 26 27 28

Schopenhauer, WWR, §52, p. 260. Schopenhauer, WWR, §52, p. 262. Schopenhauer, WWR, §52, p. 262.

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account of cognition itself; and even more clearly than Schelling he has used his cognitivist account of aesthetics to reject the emotional impact of art. The strictly cognitivist approach to aesthetics would be continued by Hegel, who first lectured on aesthetics in Berlin the year after The World as Will and Representation was published.

2. Hegel In 1823, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, concluded his popular lectures on the philosophy of art with the following statement: Art in its seriousness is for us something that is past. For us other forms are necessary in order to make the divine into an object. We require thinking. But art is an essential manner of the representation of the divine, and we must understand this form. It does not have as its object the agreeable nor subjective skillfulness. Philosophy has to consider what is truthful in art.29

The next time Hegel gave the course, which he then entitled “Philosophy of Art or Aesthetics,” on the first day he said that “the highest determination of art is in its entirety something that is past for us . . . the special representation [that is] art no longer has the immediacy for us that it had at the time of its greatest blossoming.”30 Hegel did not make these statements because he believed that for some contingent reason the fine arts of his time had all lost the creativity that they had enjoyed at earlier times. He certainly could not have believed that on any empirical grounds, for he grew up and lived in the German-speaking world that had produced the music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, the poems, plays, and novels of Goethe and Schiller, the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, accomplishments that two centuries later still stand among the greatest moments in the history of German art and in some cases among the greatest of modern Western art. If Hegel had thought that art was now something of the past on any empirical grounds, he would have been a very poor critic. But Hegel was not making a contingent claim on empirical grounds; he 29

30

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlichebuchgesellschaft, 2003); hereafter Lectures 1823. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst oder Ästhetik. Nach Hegel. Im Sommer 1826 Mitschrift Friedrich Carl Hermann Victor von Kehler, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert und Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004), hereafter Lectures 1826.

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was asserting what he took to be a metaphysical necessity. He made this claim because he took art to be a form of cognition, one that is necessary in the development of cognition but also one that is ultimately inadequate for the complete realization of cognition and therefore ultimately has only historical significance as a stage in the development of cognition. As he put it himself in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the handbook to his philosophical system as a whole, “Fine art is only a stage in liberation, not the highest liberation itself. – The true objectivity, which is now in the element of thinking, the element in which alone the pure spirit is for the spirit, in which liberation is joined with reverence, is lacking in the sensibly-beautiful of the work of art.”31 Nor did Hegel think that the inevitably superseded cognitive significance of art could be compensated for by an enduring pleasure in the free play of our mental powers with the work of art, independently of its cognitive content: he contemptuously rejected the “liveliness” of the experience of art as a mere “triviality,” and explicitly rejected Kant’s theory that the free play of our cognitive powers is the essence of all aesthetic experience and free play with ideas the essence of the experience of fine art. In 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,”32 while Kant’s specific theory that “The 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.”33 As already suggested, Hegel also rejects the idea that it is a fundamental aim of art to arouse our emotions or expose us to the range of human emotions. After rejecting the idea that art aims to imitate nature, on the ground that this would be “superfluous,” even “a presumptuous game,”34 Hegel goes on to reject the view that the aim of art

31

32 33 34

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830), ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Hans-Christian Lucer, in Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 20 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992), §562, p. 548. Lectures 1826, p. 5. Lectures 1826, pp. 17–18. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 42. This is a translation of the edition of Hegel’s lectures that his student Hotho published in 1835, five years after Hegel’s death. For discussion of the relation between this text and the lecture transcriptions thus far cited, see p. 124 below.

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is supposed to consist in awakening and vivifying our slumbering feelings, inclinations, and passions of every kind, in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, educated or not, to go through the whole gamut of feelings which the human heart in its inmost and secret recesses can bear, experience, and produce, through what can move and stir the human breast in its depths and manifold possibilities and aspects, and to deliver to feeling and contemplation for its enjoyment whatever the spirit possesses of the essential and lofty in its thinking and in the Idea – the splendour of the noble, the eternal, and true: moreover to make misfortune and misery, evil and guilt intelligible, to make men intimately acquainted with all that is horrible and shocking, as well as with all that is pleasurable and felicitous.35

This is of course precisely what a variety of eighteenth-century philosophers from Du Bos to Heydenreich had thought was the aim of art, and that such contemporaries as Wordsworth and Shelley were including among the aims of art just as Hegel was preparing his own lectures. But Hegel rejects this view on the ground that while art does have the “ability to adorn and bring before perception and feeling every possible material,” nevertheless, “confronted by such a multiple variety of content, we are at once forced to notice that the different feelings and ideas, which art is supposed to arouse or confirm, counteract one another, contradict and reciprocally cancel one another,” indeed, “the more art inspires to contradictory [emotions] the more it increases the contradictory character of feelings and passions and makes us stagger about like Bacchantes.”36 Art has to seek a “higher and inherently more universal end” than the arousal of inevitably contradictory emotions, and this will be a kind of knowledge, but not knowledge about emotions, rather knowledge of something more essential about the nature of reality itself. Although on this point Hegel and Schopenhauer are diametrically opposed, since Schopenhauer, as we have seen, thinks that the fundamental truth about reality is that it is irrational, while for Hegel what is fundamental about reality is that it is rational, Hegel shares with Schopenhauer the inference that “Art by means of its representations, while remaining within the sensuous sphere, liberates man at the same time from the power of sensuousness.”37 He also makes the further inference that since it cannot be the aim of art to arouse emotions, it also cannot be the aim of art to educate or moralize us through the arousal of emotions; if art has any educational role at all, its “aim in teaching could

35 36 37

Hegel, Aesthetics, p. 46. Hegel, Aesthetics, p. 47; “emotions” inserted in brackets by Knox. Hegel, Aesthetics, p. 49.

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only consist in bringing into consciousness, by means of the work of art, an absolutely essential spiritual content.”38 Hegel thus rejects the conception of aesthetic education that had been offered by Heydenreich and Schiller as well as by Wordsworth and Shelley. Hegel’s unequivocal commitment to the aesthetics of truth further leads him to a complete rejection of the aesthetics of play and to a thorough dismissal of the importance of pleasure in our aesthetic experience of art and nature. Although he must have enjoyed many kinds of art in order to have acquired the extensive knowledge of the history of art that he demonstrably possessed, nowhere does he admit that the pleasure we take in art might be a sufficient reason for the importance that we grant it, and he explicitly argues against the importance of the experience of natural beauty, while rejecting the importance of art altogether as anything more than a medium for access to the history of the development of thought. Of course, the conclusions that Hegel draws from his cognitivist theory of art might seem like a reductio ad absurdum of this approach and a good argument for the play theory instead. So far I have referred to Hegel’s conception of the cognitive content of art only in the most general terms, as “thinking” or “thought,” because the question of what he means by such terms, whether he means human thought or something more encompassing of which human thought is only a manifestation, is one of the most delicate and contested questions in Hegel interpretation. It should already be obvious that Hegel’s aesthetics cannot be understood apart from his entire philosophical system, so we will need to make at least a few comments about that system and take a stance on this issue before we can consider his aesthetics in any detail. But first, a few words about Hegel’s life and works are in order. Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770, thus five years earlier than his friend Schelling and eighteen before his antagonist Schopenhauer.39 Hegel entered the Tübingen Stift, the training school for ministers in the Duchy of Würtemburg, in 1788, where the precocious Schelling had already started; their age difference would not prevent them from becoming close friends and roommates, however, along with the future poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Hegel had no intention of becoming a minister, however, but unlike Schelling, who began a meteoric academic 38 39

Hegel, Aesthetics, p. 50. For Hegel’s life, see Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For Hegel’s intellectual development, see H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) and Hegel’s Development: Night Thoughts, Jena 1801–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

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career immediately upon graduation from the Stift, Hegel floundered for years before becoming established in an academic career. He initially spent several years as a tutor, and was then invited to Jena in 1801 to lecture as a Privatdozent and co-edit a Critical Journal of Philosophy with Schelling, who had already been a professor for several years. During this period Hegel published his first significant works, essays on “The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy” and “Faith and Knowledge,” a critical engagement with Kant’s general philosophy, as well as an essay on “Natural Law” in which he first charged that Kant’s categorical imperative is an “empty formalism” and set the stage for his own later social and political philosophy. During this period Hegel also worked on his first book, The Phenomenology of the Spirit. This was published in 1807 and might have led to a salaried professorship but for the disruption of the German universities (and German life in general) then caused by the French invasion led by Napoleon. Hegel had to take a job first in Bamberg as a newspaper editor (1807) and then (1808) as head of a Gymnasium in Nuremberg. The latter job did not prevent him from writing his biggest and most difficult work, the Science of Logic (1812–16), which finally earned him a professorship at Heidelberg. Once at Heidelberg, Hegel also published the first version of his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817, with further versions following in 1827 and 1830). After only two years at Heidelberg, Hegel was called to Berlin as the successor to Fichte, where he lectured with great renown until his sudden death in 1831. Whether because he was now at last securely established in Berlin, or because of the great demands of his lecturing (at least ten hours a week), or because he expected to have more time to prepare his works for publication, Hegel actually published little during his Berlin years – only his great work in political philosophy, The Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, in 1821. However, his devoted students took copious notes of his lectures, and it was on the basis of that material that his lectures on the history of philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and aesthetics were posthumously published. Hegel lectured on aesthetics once during his Heidelberg years (from which no notes survive), and four times during his Berlin years, in 1821, 1823, 1826, and 1828–29. His student, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, who would himself enjoy a distinguished career first as a professor of aesthetics and then as an art historian and the curator of the engraving collection in Berlin, compiled three stout volumes of Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art from a variety of sources, including his own detailed transcription of Hegel’s lectures from 1823. This work, first published in 1835

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and lightly revised in 1842, was long the basis for the study of Hegel’s aesthetics, having been translated into French as early as 1840–52 and then twice into English, first by F.P.B. Osmaston in 1916–20 and in a far superior version by T.M. Knox in 1975.40 Until recently, therefore, Hegel’s aesthetics has been known through this text. However, the more recent publication of a number of the original lecture notes, especially Hotho’s own notes from 1823 and those of F.C.H.V. von Kehler from 1826, have shown that Hotho made Hegel’s course unduly repetitive, made the dialectical structure of Hegel’s argument more rigid and complicated than it was in Hegel’s own lectures, and imposed some of his own views upon the material. So we must now balance our knowledge of Hegel’s ipsissima verba with our recognition of the historical influence of Hotho’s version. But the lecture courses from 1823 and 1826 will be the primary source for what follows.41 40 41

For references to these translations, see Hegel, Aesthetics, Vol. I, pp. vi–vii. Annemarie Gethmann-Seifert has been the editor responsible for the recent publication of the transcriptions of Hegel’s courses, and her Einführung in Hegels Ästhetik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005) is based primarily on these notes, as is her earlier treatment in Einführung in die Ästhetik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995), pp. 202–32. All older work on Hegel’s aesthetics has of course been based on Hotho’s version, and some newer work continues that tendency. Monographs on Hegel’s aesthetics include Jack Kaminsky, Hegel on Art: An Interpretation of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1962); William Desmond, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1986); Stephen Bungay, Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Beat Wyss, Hegel’s Art History and the Critique of Modernity, trans. Caroline Dobson Salzwedel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Benjamin Rutter, Hegel on the Modern Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Collections of papers include William Maker, editor, Hegel and Aesthetics (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2000); Ursula Franke and Annemarie Gethmann-Seifert, editors, Kulturpolitik und Kunstgeschichte: Perspektiven der Hegelschen Ästhetik, Sonderheft des Jahrgangs 2005 der Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2005); and Stephen Houlgate, editor, Hegel and the Arts (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007). Important essays elsewhere include Helmut Kuhn, “Die Vollendung der klassischen deutschen Ästhetik durch Hegel,” in Kuhn, Schriften zur Ästhetik, ed. Wolfhart Henckmann (Munich: Kosel, 1966), pp. 15–144 (see also Gilbert and Kuhn, History of Esthetics, pp. 436– 55); Dieter Henrich, “Zur Aktualität von Hegels Ästhetik,” in Hegel Studien, Beiheift II (1974): 295–301, reprinted in Henrich, Fixpunkte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), pp. 156–62, along with “Zerfall und Zukunft: Hegels Theoreme über das Ende der Kunst” (pp. 65–125) and “Kunst und Kunstphilosophie der Gegenwart” (126–55); Patrick Gardiner, “Kant and Hegel on Aesthetics,” in Stephen Priest, editor, Hegel’s Critique of Kant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 161–72; Paul Guyer, “Hegel on Kant’s Aesthetics: Necessity and Contingency in Beauty and Art,” in Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, pp. 161–83; Robert Wicks, “Hegel’s Aesthetics: An Overview,” in Frederick C. Beiser, The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 348–77; Frederick Beiser, Hegel (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 282– 306; Michael Inwood, “Hegel,” in Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, The Routledge

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We can now sketch the metaphysical background of Hegel’s cognitivist view of art and of the diminished significance of art “for us” that it implies. Hegel shared Schelling’s rejection of Fichte’s “theory of science” of the 1790s that the human self is a pure thinker that “posits” its own other as an inadequate explanation of the contents of our knowledge, and shared Schelling’s own rejection of his first system of transcendental idealism that thought is a force that manifests itself equally in both non-mental nature and human mental representation as a mysterious account of nature. But he also rejected the “identity philosophy” that Schelling was developing just at the time that he invited Hegel to Jena as diminishing the difference between nature and thought, the material and the mental.42 Instead, Hegel developed a form of idealism that does not deny that matter exists independently of thought, but that holds that what is known, even about nature, is always ultimately the structure of thought itself, whether that is thought about nature, human manifestations and expressions of thought, or the underlying nature of thought or “Spirit” itself, which Hegel does not hesitate to identify with God, although a rather Neo-Platonic or Spinozistic God who is immanent in all other forms of thought rather than a transcendent God who is numerically distinct from his creation.43 Hegel is not a subjective idealist like Berkeley, who reduces the material world to a stream of ideas in human minds that is lent continuity by the fuller stream of ideas in God’s mind,

42

43

Companion to Aesthetics, second edition (London: Routledge, 2005). pp. 71–82; and Robert Pippin, “The Absence of Aesthetics in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in Frederick C. Beiser, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 394–418. See also Scheer, Einführung in die philosophische Ästhetik, pp. 112–42, and Raters, Kunst, Wahrheit und Gefühl, ch. 3. On the relation between Hegel and Schelling, see Dieter Henrich, “Andersheit und Absolutheit des Geistes: Sieben Schritte auf dem Wegen von Schelling zu Hegel,” in Henrich, Selbstverhältnisse (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1982), pp. 142–72; for Schelling’s eventual response to Hegel, see Rolf-Peter Horstmann, “Zur Hegel-Kritik des späten Schelling,” in Horstmann, Die Grenzen der Vernunft: Eine Untersuchung zu Zielen und Motiven des Deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Anton Hain, 1991), pp. 245–68. On the Spinozistic background to Hegel’s metaphysics, see Frederick Beiser, Hegel, pp. 42–7. Beiser rightly argues that Hegel’s mature conception of God cannot be simply identified with Spinoza’s because of Hegel’s adoption from Aristotle of a teleological conception of reality as purposive that Spinoza utterly rejected (pp. 65–71), but also notes that in his lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel himself said that “When one begins to philosophize one must first be a Spinozist. The soul must bathe itself in the aether of this single substance, in which everything one has held dear is submerged” (pp. 46–7). For a defense of the traditional interpretation of Hegel’s Geist as ultimately a conception of God, see Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

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but an idealist who regards matter as ultimately irrelevant except insofar as it is conceived or modified by thought, human thought in the first instance but in the last analysis by human thought as itself a manifestation of thought as such or God. In such a metaphysics, the significance of art must be questionable because the materiality of the objects of the senses and imagination, whether that be the luminescence of marble or pigment or the sonority of music or words, is so essential to so much of our experience of art; for Hegel, the material dimension that is typically thought to be indispensable to art turns out to be a dispensable medium for thoughts that ultimately can be and have to be expressed in more purely intellectual form. In this regard one might well observe that for all of its innovation, Hegel’s thought is actually deeply rooted in the rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff of a century earlier, whose firm hold on the German mind, it turns out, Kant had hardly weakened. The recollection of Leibniz may serve as our entree to another key Hegelian notion, that of the “Absolute.” This is in a way Hegel’s version of Leibniz’s idea that every genuine substance or monad ultimately expresses the entire universe, although from its own point of view. Kant had rejected the idea of a complete comprehension of all reality as an unattainable “idea of pure reason” that has at most “regulative” use in theoretical inquiry, but Hegel rejects Kant’s rejection of the idea of complete comprehension, and resurrects it in his own conception of the “concept” (Begriff ) or “Idea” (Idee). This becomes clear in Hegel’s replacement of Kant’s pairing of “intuitions” and “concepts” (Anschauungen and Begriffe) as the only “constitutive” sources of knowledge, to which “ideas” (Ideen) add only a “regulative” dimension, with a scheme in which both “intuition” and “representation” (Anschauung and Vorstellung) must be superseded by an all-inclusive “concept” (Begriff ), “Idea” (Idee), or “thought” (Denken; Hegel uses all these terms interchangeably), which is nothing less than a completely comprehensive and thoroughly interconnected system of thought of precisely the kind that Kant had argued is never fully attainable and can at most provide a goal that we can approach asymptotically in the actual process of inquiry.44 In his lectures on religion, for example, Hegel distinguishes “immediate intuition,” “representation,” and “thought.” The last and highest of these forms of consciousness is

44

On Hegel’s rejection of Kant’s distinction between intuitions and concepts, which was the keystone of Kant’s critique of Leibnizian rationalism, see Paul Guyer, “Absolute Idealism and the Rejection of Kantian Dualism,” in Karl Ameriks, editor, The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 37–66.

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knowledge of what Hegel calls the “true” or the “absolute,” the “ideal unity that comprehends in itself as all of its powers all determinacy, the world.”45 Hegel repeats this triad in the lectures on aesthetics, saying that “the first relation to the absolute spirit, intuition, is the immediate and therefore sensible knowledge of it. The second is the representing [vorstellende] conscious of the absolute spirit, the third the thinking [denkende] consciousness.”46 What for Kant was (apart from the special use of pure reason in morality) only an ideal but never attainable end point for theoretical inquiry becomes for Hegel both ultimate reality and the self-knowledge or self-consciousness thereof. The reason Hegel mentions the triad of intuition, representation, and thought of the absolute in the lectures on religion is that he holds that art, religion, and philosophy are all three forms of “absolute spirit” or consciousness of the absolute, although art is consciousness of the absolute primarily through sensory intuition, religion is consciousness of the absolute in the form of less strictly sensory representations, but only philosophy is consciousness of the absolute as it really is, the interconnection of everything that is in all of its determinacy and yet thoroughgoing logic or generality. Thus Hegel says that all three have the same “content” but different “forms,”47 thereby making indubitable the thoroughly cognitivist character of his aesthetics. In particular, “art rests on and arises from the interest in exhibiting the spiritual Idea for consciousness and in the first instance for immediate intuition,” or for the senses, and through human action: the exhibition of truth in art is “brought forth by humans, made sensible and external,” while its content is “the harmony [Zusammenstimmung] of the object with its concept, the idea,” the “substantial, entirely universal elements, essences, powers of nature and of the spirit.”48 Here Hegel explicitly replaces Kant’s free and harmonious play of the cognitive powers with the kind of actual harmony between object and concept that Kant excluded from aesthetic experience, although he keeps this harmony in the domain of the aesthetic by insisting that in art it is represented through or to immediate intuition. Art arises from the need, of human beings but also of spirit itself, to represent the absolute in sensory form. Since Hegel also equates spirit with God or the divine, he says that art arises from the need to 45

46 47 48

Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Teil I, in Vorlesungen, ed. Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983), vol. III, p. 143. Lectures 1826, p. 33. Religion, vol. III, p. 143. Religion, vol. III, pp. 143–4.

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represent the divine in sensory form: “Art is generated through the absolutely spiritual need that the divine, the spiritual idea, be an object for consciousness and in the first instance for immediate intuition.”49 This suggests that the artistic and the religious forms of the representation of the absolute cannot be completely separated, and indeed both the history of art that comprises much of Hegel’s aesthetics and the history of religion that comprises much of his philosophy of religion ultimately tell much the same story of the emergence of an increasingly intellectual understanding of absolute spirit from initially immediate and sensory representations of it. However, while art “is not and cannot be without religion” and its “objective exhibition in sensible intuition of the image, of myths with religious content,”50 ultimately religion is not bound to sensible imagery in the way that art is and begins the process of superseding art by more purely intellectual comprehension that ultimately leads to philosophy. The decreasing importance of art for religion as religion itself becomes increasingly intellectual is in fact the starting point for Hegel’s thesis that art is ultimately something of the past: Beautiful art . . . has its future in true religion. The restricted content of the idea [in art] makes the transition in and of itself into the infinite form of identical universality – the intuition, the immediate in knowledge that is bound to sensibility, makes the transition to a knowledge that communicates itself, to an existence that is itself knowledge, to revelation, so that the content of the idea has as its principle the free intelligence, and as absolute spirit is for the spirit.51

Spirit begins by seeking sensory representation of and to itself, but ultimately seeks to know itself as pure spirit or intellect, and thus the same force that, through human artists, creates art also finds art inadequate and seeks to supersede it: “The content is the abstract God of pure thought, or a search that looks around for itself restlessly and unreconciled in all [sensible] forms, in which it can never find its goal.”52 That goal can only be found in religion and then in philosophy. Hegel repeats these premises in his lectures on the philosophy of art, and then constructs his famous division of the history of art into the “symbolic,” “classical,” and “romantic” “forms of art” (Hegel is careful to call these “forms” rather than “periods” because he recognizes that the

49 50 51 52

Religion, vol. III, pp. 144–5n. Religion, vol. III, pp. 146–7. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, §563, p. 549. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, §561, p. 546.

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real history of both art and religion is complex and that traits that might be paradigmatic for the art of one time and place can nevertheless be found in others, although perhaps less centrally). In the 1826 lectures, for instance, after some initial skirmishes with the theories of Kant and the Romantics, Hegel states his fundamental assumption that the function of art is to provide a concrete representation of the same content that is also represented by religion and philosophy: We can call the idea, the divine, the absolute in its concrete determination the spiritual in general. For the spiritual is the true, it is the spirit to which all points of view return as in their last result, in their truth. The idea is thus concrete, thus it is the spiritual and this is the true purpose, the ultimate purpose; that is then also the purpose of art. Its purpose is therefore the same as that of religion, of philosophy.53

But he quickly adds that while art represents spirit in forms accessible to the senses, “that which is called sensible reality is no reality in the sense of philosophy, rather in the sense of the spirit only that is true which is something in and for itself,”54 that is, something that is understood in the form that it actually is – through and through intellectual. He repeats the point several lectures later when he says that “Art is only the intuiting consciousness of the absolute spirit, so that it presents it in an immediate, sensible manner, in the manner of an immediate formation”; “The form of religion is then the form of representation in general, where the absolute, the true, are given for representation in a subjective manner . . . One can say that there is progress from art to religion, or that for religion art is only one side; art exhibits the truth, the spirit, in a sensible manner, religion adds the interiority of this intuiting, the piety, to it”; and finally there is philosophy, which “unmasks the spirit in and through itself; interiority no longer has the form of feeling, but of thinking, and philosophy is then the service of God that thinks and knows the content that in religion was the content of the heart.”55 Thus, as already suggested, the seed for the supersession of art is planted at the start of these lectures. Hegel then further characterizes art by means of a contrast between the “idea” and the “ideal”: the idea is, as we have already seen, the ultimate content of art, the concept or the absolute, but the ideal is this in its sensory representation. “The beautiful must be grasped not as mere idea, 53 54 55

Lectures 1826, p. 24. Lectures 1826, p. 25. Lectures 1826, pp. 34–5.

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but as ideal. The idea for itself is the true as such in its universality; the ideal is the truth at the same time in its reality in the essential determination of subjectivity. . . . The first determination is the idea in general, the second its formation [Gestaltung]. Idea and form [Gestalt]; the formed idea is the ideal.”56 We might say that Hegel’s conception of the ideal is Kant’s conception of the aesthetic idea, but with any trace of free play omitted from its sensuous aspect. It also leads to a historiography of art that is absent from Kant, and that provides the basis for the nineteenthcentury discipline of art history,57 for from here Hegel then argues that the relation between idea and ideal or content and form takes three forms in the history of art: the “symbolic,” in which both the spiritual content of art and its sensible form are indeterminate and neither fully expresses the true nature of the idea or the absolute; the “classical,” in which both the content and the form of art are determinate in their form and fully adequate to each other, but neither is completely adequate to the true nature of the absolute; and the “romantic,” in which the idea or the self-understanding of the absolute is becoming more adequate but the sensible form for representing it is therefore necessarily becoming less adequate, and thus art is separating from more primitive religion and being replaced by more developed religion, on the way to being replaced by philosophy. Hegel defines these three forms clearly in the 1826 lectures. The symbolic form of art presents the “idea in its indeterminacy . . . the idea that is not yet clear does not yet have the truthful form, its formation cannot yet yield the idea in a truthful way.” In the classical form of art, “the form of art is the adequate image [Einbildung] of the idea, of the concept in appearance . . . The concept is thus imagined [eingebildet] in the form that is proper to it. . . . The main thing is always that the suitability of the idea and its presentation is . . . natural, the formation is in and for itself suitable for the concept.” Finally, in the third form of art, romantic art, “the unification of classical art is again dissolved . . . romantic art has attained the highest, and it is only defective because it makes evident the limitation of art. This defect consists in the fact that the absolute is made into an object in sensibly concrete form, that the spiritually concrete then comes forth in a sensible form, but the idea in its truth is only in the spirit” and thus cannot after all be grasped in sensible form.58 “One can also say that in the third stage the spiritual 56 57

58

Lectures 1826, p. 26. See Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Lectures 1826, pp. 27–9.

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steps forth as spiritual, the ideal is free and sufficient in itself” (though perhaps Hegel should have said or even did say “idea” rather than “ideal” here). “As the spirit comes to be for itself, it is freed from the sensible form; the sensible is to it something indifferent and transitory, and the mind, the spiritual as spiritual, becomes the meaning of the sensible; the [sensible] form becomes again symbolic.”59 Romantic art is the form in which the progress of spirit to self-comprehension undermines the necessity and significance of art, although historically this is a very long process, beginning with the emergence of Christianity out of antiquity and continuing, so it seems, until shortly before or into Hegel’s own time, thus comprising much of what most of us now think is great rather than necessarily self-destructive in the history of art. By the indeterminacy of both content and form in symbolic art, Hegel means that the concept of the spirit that is the content of that art is both vague and opposed to rather than identified with spirit in its human manifestation, and that the sensible forms that are used to symbolize this vague content are themselves indeterminate and could mean any variety of things rather than uniquely and self-evidently signifying the one thing, spirit, that they are trying to symbolize. A symbol, Hegel argues, is different from a mere “sign” (Zeichen), because while the latter is supposed to refer to something entirely different from itself, a symbol is a “sensible existence that itself has the properties that it is supposed to signify.” An eagle, for example, is not a merely arbitrary sign for bravery (as a red octagon is an arbitrary sign for the command “Stop!”), but is used as a symbol for strength because it is itself supposed to be strong. However, there is an indeterminacy in symbols because it is not self-evident “whether such a formation is a symbol or not, whether this sensible existence as it immediately presents itself is meant or something else,” and if a symbol tried to make completely explicit that it is in fact a symbol as well as what it is a symbol of, then it would no longer be a symbol but would already be self-conscious thought.60 We can understand what Hegel means by these “forms of art” by looking at his paradigmatic examples of them. Hegel’s paradigmatic examples of symbols in their twofold indeterminacy are, first, natural objects or phenomena taken to embody supernatural powers or significance, such as light in ancient Persian religion61 or the egg or the lotus blossom 59 60 61

Lectures 1826, p. 29. Lectures 1826, p. 70. See Lectures 1826, pp. 75–7.

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in various ancient religions, which are symbols precisely because they can mean an indeterminate variety of things,62 and instances of ancient religious architecture, such as the Tower of Babel or religious compounds that contain parts, such as the “twelve steps” and “seven columns” of some (unspecified) Egyptian temples that symbolize something, such as the twelve months of the year or the seven planets,63 but do not succeed in representing something that is explicitly spiritual nor in self-evidently representing only a single content. Hegel insists that the indeterminacy of symbolic art is not merely an artifact of our own incomplete comprehension of something ancient and foreign, but is inherent to such art: “What its significance is can be clear for us only in part, as it was for those who [first] had the symbols.”64 Among symbolic art works, Hegel is particularly fascinated with the monuments of the ancient Egyptians (brought to prominence by the booty Napoleon brought back from his invasion of Egypt). “The Egyptians were the symbolic people. . . . In the Egyptian everything is symbol; a separated, self-sufficient interiority, which, however, because it is symbolic, has not gone so far as giving it a truly suitable form, which stands in essential connection to the inner.”65 The Egyptian architecture of death, for example, that is, the pyramids, represents the spiritual only indirectly, by representing death as if it were still self-conscious life. “The fixation of the spiritual first came to consciousness among them,” but only by their making “the inner, as the soul, itself something concrete,” and by representing and honoring death as if it were “perennial preservation.”66 Or by combining human and animal forms as in their representations of the gods, the Egyptians symbolized in some way the presence of spirit (represented by the human form) in nature (represented by the animal form).67 But these symbols signify inadequate conceptions of the spirit, and do so by means of sensible forms that do not exhibit even these inadequate conceptions of the spiritual self-evidently and uniquely. It is important to keep in mind, however, that although Hegel often presents architecture as the paradigmatically symbolic art, he by no means treats it as the exclusively symbolic art. On the contrary, he treats a wide range of surviving ancient materials, such as the theogony and 62 63 64 65 66 67

Lectures 1823, p. 130. Lectures 1823, p. 131. Lectures 1823, p. 139. Lectures 1823, pp. 86–7. Lectures 1823, p. 85. Lectures 1826, p. 137.

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mythology of the early Greeks (even though that is often accessible to us only through later, sometimes distorting media, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and the creation stories, sacred texts, and practices of various early religions such as Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and the like as symbolic arts.68 Wherever, for example, “the subjective is superficial, a mishmash of personality and mere natural being [Naturwesen],” there we have the symbolic.69 The second of Hegel’s forms of art is the classical. This is characterized by an anthropomorphic representation of the spirit, the representation of the divine in human form, and a sensible mode for the presentation of this conception, above all the sculptural representation of the human figure, that is fully adequate to this conception of the spirit. Greek sculptures of the gods in human form are thus the paradigmatic examples of classical art, although the transformation of the indeterminately symbolic Egyptian temple into the temple as the house for a god who is literally present in his or her own statue and the very direct interactions between gods and mortals in the Homeric epics are also prime examples of symbolic art. Whatever the specific medium, however, the anthropomorphic gods are the paradigmatic objects for classical art because they represent both the presence of spirit in nature and the superiority of spirit over mere nature. Thus Hegel writes that in classical art “significance has become self-sufficient for itself; and this self-sufficient significance is alone the spiritual, the truly inner, which is at the same time living, for itself, the universal, essential absolute that knows itself, so that it is free, self-sufficient.” He continues: To classical art there belongs the elevation of the spirit over the immediately natural. [But] since the significance has become self-sufficient in free spirituality, it must also form itself, return to nature. But then the spiritual is dominant over the natural, so that the natural as such no longer has this peculiar self-sufficiency, but is ideal and therefore only expression, sign of the spirit. This form that is brought forth through the spirit has its significance immediately, this natural is immediately the expression of the spiritual. That is the human in general, the spiritual, individual, externally existing, that is the human form. It is an animal form, in which however there is something spiritual, and thereby is that which manifests this form the spiritual itself. The form now signifies nothing other than this meaning.70

68 69 70

See Lectures 1823, pp. 119–53, and Lectures 1826, pp. 70–115. Lectures 1826, p. 81. Lectures 1826, p. 115.

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Here Hegel executes a delicate maneuver: the anthropomorphism of Greek religion, which coincides perfectly with the capacity of Greek art, above all sculpture, for brilliant representation of the human form, allows for the precise rather than indeterminate and conflicted representation of the presence of spirit in nature, above all human nature, but at the same time of the superiority of spirit over mere nature. Precisely in the way that Greek sculpture practically makes marble come alive it shows the superiority of spirit, beginning with the spirit of the sculptor, over anything merely natural like mere marble. The classical conception of the manifestation of spirit through humanity is perfectly manifested in the anthropomorphic representation of gods in human form, especially in sculpture but in other media as well. In classical art, spirit is not represented through vague and ultimately self-contradictory symbols such as animals or other aspects of subhuman nature, but through the form of the human being, who is clearly spiritual as well as natural. Thus Hegel states: The demotion of that which is animal and the distancing from the powers of nature pertains to the fact that the spiritual is established in its sublime, absolute right, and these ideals [of classical art] are evidence from the spirit . . . the human form is what is essential to the formation. . . . It is a matter of deep insight to recognize that the spiritual, insofar as it exists, must have this and only this form, animation [Lebendigkeit] and human form. One can come upon all manner of appearance, but if it is to be truly known, then it must be understood in accordance with the concept that the external appearance, the existence of the spiritual can only be the human form.71

The content of classical art must be the gods in order for it to represent the spiritual, but the gods can only be represented as human given how far the self-understanding of spirit has progressed in the classical period. This means that the form that is available to classical art – the depiction of human form and human action by “artists, poets, prophets, sculptors, and the like”72 – is perfectly suited to the content of classical art. This is the case in architecture too: the temple, which was previously an indeterminate symbol of the divine or spirit, now becomes a house for it, not merely symbolically, but literally, because the statue of the god that is housed by the Greek temple is not a symbol of the god but its literal presence.

71 72

Lectures 1826, p. 123. Lectures 1826, p. 123.

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The conflicts among the gods and the direct interactions between humans and gods that are the staples of classical art in its various media also express the very concrete conception of the spirit as not essentially different from the human spirit that has been attained in the classical conception. But while this is evidence of the perfection of classical art as such, it also reveals the limits of the classical self-conception of the spirit – as Plato had already implied in his argument that artistic representations of the gods behaving just like human beings should not be permitted in the ideal republic73 – and insofar as the most perfect art turns out to be an adequate vehicle for an inadequate self-conception of the spirit, it reveals the inherent limitation of art as a vehicle for cognition. At first Hegel makes this point paradoxically: The Greek gods are not symbols, but are immediately expressive for themselves. Nothing is hinted at that is not manifest and clear in the exteriority [of classical art] . . . The way and manner in which the form is determined is that it is the manifestation of the spiritual: anthropomorphistic character of classical art. That is no defect, rather without that classical art cannot be; it rather has the defect that its religion is not anthropomorphistic enough for the higher religion, for this requires a unification of the higher, abstract opposition . . . the unification of divine and human nature must take place in a much more fundamental way, so that the human is not only the form of the divine, but is self-sufficient for itself, and therefore has the manner of contingent existence.74

What he appears to mean by this convoluted statement is that the anthropomorphic representation of the gods is inadequate not just because spirit is something grander than mere humankind, but also because even in the human being, spirit cannot be understood through the material, natural, bodily form of the human being: not merely in the case of the gods but in our own case the physical, which is the object of the senses and therefore the proper domain of art, is ultimately inessential, or at least insignificant. Hegel makes this point more directly in his discussion of the transition from classical art to romantic art: this transition is a “separation from the natural, which is demoted to something indifferent, something bad for which the spirit must have contempt.” He continues: This is the point of view of the transition and at the same time the principle of the third sphere. It really contains the dissolution of art – since the

73 74

Plato, Republic, Book II, 377–80. Hegel, Lectures 1826, p. 116.

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manner of existence, the exhibition, is separated from the spiritual – the dissolution of the highest beauty, the dissolution of the standpoint where beauty as such is the highest. The sphere of spiritual beauty comes forth, which to be sure is burdened with this separation from the external and which either leaves this external outside . . . or relates to it in a negative, injurious, painful manner.75

In order fully to comprehend itself, spirit must turn against the material and sensible altogether, thereby destroying not merely the possibility of beauty in art, although leaving open to art some other goal, but destroying art altogether, because having a material and sensible aspect is what defines art but at the same time what makes it possible for art to complete its task, as part of absolute knowing, of making spirit self-understood.76 This inference is the basis for Hegel’s claim that the paradigmatic content of post-classical art is the central story of Christianity, in which the half-human, half-divine birth of Christ, his suffering, and his resurrection represent the transcendence of the spirit even in humans over their natural, bodily existence. This of course is not the explicit content of every post-classical work of art, but it is in Hegel’s view the paradigmatic content of such art, and in his view even romantic art that does not have this as its content still has a distanced or alienated relation to the natural, bodily existence of the human being that was so fully accepted by the Greeks that they assigned the same form of existence even to their gods. Hegel expresses this view clearly and concisely in his lectures: Romantic art is the elevation of spirituality to itself. It is characterized by interiority and innerness, so that the spirit in itself becomes the reality that was otherwise present only in an external way. Nothing can be more beautiful than classical art, there is the ideal. The beauty of romantic art can only be that where the inner stands above matter, the external becomes free like the inner, the external becomes something indifferent, is to be overcome, is not in a position to be the true manner of manifestation. Romantic art becomes the pantheon which has destroyed all forms that still have something of sensible representation about them. . . . [Its first moment] is therefore preeminently the divine story itself, this conversion, reversal, which spirit turns against its naturalness and through which it liberates itself, 75 76

Hegel, Lectures 1826, p. 133. Thus that modern art might be “saved” from Hegel’s death sentence by assigning it some other task than the representation of spirit itself, as Robert Pippin has argued, is incompatible with Hegel’s own understanding of the aims and nature of art; see Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel),” in Houlgate, editor, Hegel and the Arts, pp. 244–70, e.g., p. 247. The rejection of the dematerialization of art by the latter-day Hegelian Benedetto Croce will be a large part of the story of early twentiethcentury aesthetics, as we will see in Volume 3.

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attains to its self-sufficiency. . . . Thus it is the religious as such, the absolute story of the self-comprehending spirit. . . . The first content of romantic art is thereby the religious story of Christ, emphasizing especially the suffering and the dying and the death of Christ.77

But even where the content of romantic art is not explicitly religious, it is spiritual and alienated from the body. Even the most modern form of romantic art, Hegel remarkably argues, namely the humorous, is characterized by a turn toward subjectivity that reduces the outward form to indifference.78 Indeed, in both the classroom transcriptions of Hegel’s lectures and the version edited by Hotho, Hegel’s entire philosophy of art ends with a discussion of comedy, as if the attempt to represent spirit to the senses can ultimately be regarded only as comic: “comedy leads at the same time to the dissolution of art altogether. All art aims at the identity, produced by the spirit, in which eternal things, God, and absolute truth are revealed in real appearance and shape to our contemplation, to our hearts and minds. But . . . comedy presents this unity only as its self-destruction.”79 However, before he reaches this conclusion, Hegel presents a detailed account of romantic art. Just as architecture was the paradigmatic although not exclusive medium for symbolic art and sculpture was the paradigmatic although not exclusive medium for classical art, romantic art too has its paradigmatic although not exclusive medium, or in this case media: Hegel treats painting, music, and poesy (that is, creative literature in general rather than verse in particular) as paradigmatically romantic media of art because they are not as material, not as closely tied to their physical basis, as architecture and sculpture. Painting applies physical pigments to a physical surface, of course, but it creates an image that is more detached from its own physical components than is the image created by sculpture (as is evidenced by the fact that a two-dimensional painting can create a three-dimensional image while sculpture must be threedimensional in order to create a three-dimensional image), and by means of this detachment it can “move towards subjectivity, for the spirit is essentially subjectivity as existing-for-itself, through which it opposes every substantial art.”80 Music uses physical instruments, including of course our own bodies, to create physical disturbances in the air surrounding us, but we do not focus on this as we listen to music and thus it seems to us as “if 77 78 79 80

Hegel, Lectures 1826, p. 135. Hegel, Lectures 1826, p. 153. See Hegel, Aesthetics, p. 1236. Hegel, Lectures 1823, p. 248.

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its effect almost no longer occurs through anything material.” Instead, “the art in music lies on the subjective side,” whether it be “on the one hand the art of the deepest sentiment or on the other that of strict, cold reason.”81 That is, music can appeal either to our emotions or to our intellect, but either way, so Hegel thinks, the physicality of its production and of our hearing it is virtually irrelevant to our comprehension of it, and so it falls into the realm of the spiritual rather than the physical – like Schopenhauer, Hegel strives to suppress the potential emotional impact of music. Finally, in poesy or the verbal arts, the content is the “entire wealth of representation, the spiritual existing by itself, that is in an element that belongs to the spirit itself,” and the physical dimension of the spoken words themselves, the “tone” (as well as presumably the physical dimension of printed words) “is demoted to a mere means, is only a sign . . . and this expression is entirely different from the content itself.”82 Hegel divides poesy into three main forms − the epic, which gives the most physical description of agents and their actions, the lyric, which expresses “not the wealth of a world, but the particular sentiment, the particular judgment of the mind”;83 and finally the drama, which “can be considered as the most perfect stage of poesy and of art in general” because here the “object” is the “action” but the “subjectivity of the lyric unites itself with that.”84 The paradigmatic tragedy is, of course, the passion of Christ,85 but in fact in the final hour of his lecture course Hegel actually left this point aside in order to focus on differences between ancient and modern tragedy – above all, like Herder fifty years earlier, on the difference between Sophocles and Shakespeare – and to argue that whereas ancient tragedy depicts the spirit through the clash of social forces, such as the clash between the laws of the polis and the laws of the family in Antigone, “the centre of romantic tragedy is the individual’s sufferings and passions” – in Hamlet, for example, the royal status of the murdered king and his murderous usurper are just background machinery to set the background for Hamlet’s “personal character,” his “noble soul . . . not made for this kind of energetic activity and full of disgust with the world and life.”86

81 82 83 84 85 86

Hegel, Lectures 1823, p. 262. Hegel, Lectures 1823, p. 270. Hegel, Lectures 1823, p. 297. Hegel, Lectures 1823, p. 298. See Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. Knox, vol. II, p. 1223. Hegel, Aesthetics., pp. 1225–6, punctuation modified. Hegel’s contrast between ancient tragedy as focusing on the conflict of social forces and modern tragedy as focusing on individual

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Especially in Hotho’s posthumous compilation of Hegel’s lectures, they are characterized by a wealth of fascinating illustrations and striking interpretations, above all in the second half on the individual media of art, and these often have great interest apart from his philosophical framework. Nevertheless, at least in the 1823 version of his lectures, Hegel ended his course by reminding his auditors once again, lest they had become carried away with his obvious passion about particular works of art from all periods, of his general thesis that “for us art in its seriousness is something past” (interestingly, although Hotho recorded this conclusion in his own transcription of Hegel’s lectures in 1823, he did not include it in his posthumous compilation).87 But space will not allow us to explore Hegel’s detailed interpretation of works throughout the history of art any further. Instead, we can conclude this discussion of Hegel with some comments on his views on several of the standard topics of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aesthetics. One striking feature of Hegel’s aesthetics is his rejection of the significance of natural beauty. For Kant, natural beauty had been the starting point of his analysis of aesthetic experience because the non-intentionally produced character of natural objects leaves maximal room for the free play of the human cognitive powers in response to them, and it was also in a way the end point of his analysis because the possibility that our cognitive powers could be pleased by the discovery of beauty in nature was a hint that our moral powers should also be able to realize their goal, the highest good, in nature. The beauty of art could be fit into a framework based on our experience of the beauty of nature because even in the case of an intentionally produced object with a rational content, it is still possible for our imagination to play freely with both the form and the content of the work of art; but natural beauty remained theoretically paradigmatic for Kant and sometimes, at least, even more morally significant.88 Many other eighteenth-century authors, especially

87 88

conflicts goes back to his famous treatment of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit, e.g., §§437, 464–9. Although Hegel’s reading of the play finds its defenders, for example Stephen Houlgate, “Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy,” in his volume Hegel and the Arts, pp. 146–78, I do not find it very convincing in the face of Creon’s obsessive projection of his own personal motivation by greed on to the other characters in the play. Hegel, Lectures 1823, p. 311. I have argued that since Kant regards genius as a “gift of nature,” he ought to regard the existence of art itself as a natural phenomenon and as at least potentially as morally significant as natural beauty in the more usual sense, that is, beauty not produced by intentional human activity; see my “Nature, Art, and Autonomy” in Kant and the Experience of Freedom, pp. 229–74.

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British authors from Joseph Addison to Archibald Alison, found beauty equally in nature and fine art. But Hegel rejects the significance of natural beauty because for him beauty is significant only as an expression, even if an ultimately inadequate one, of the spirit, and works of human art are more manifestly products of the spirit than anything in mere nature. This point is put in especially striking terms at the start of the posthumous version of the lectures: The beauty of art is higher than nature. The beauty of art is beauty born of the spirit and born again, and the higher the spirit and its productions stand above nature and its phenomena, the higher too is the beauty of art above that of nature. . . . Spirit alone is the true, comprehending everything in itself, so that everything beautiful is truly beautiful only as sharing in this higher sphere and generated by it. In this sense the beauty of nature appears only as a reflection of the beauty that belongs to spirit.89

In the 1826 version of Hegel’s lectures, the attack upon natural beauty is quickly followed by the attack upon the view that the purpose of art is to “arouse agreeable sentiments through lively representations”90 and then by the attack on Kant’s theory of aesthetic response as the free play of our powers in response to objects as both inadequate accounts of the “beauty of art” (das Kunstschöne);91 this attack comes later in Hotho’s compilation, but it ultimately comes in the form of the criticism that in Kant’s aesthetics the concept of free play is present only in the form of “abstract universality.”92 So for Hegel the rejection of the significance of natural beauty is part and parcel of his rejection of the play theory of aesthetic response in favor of his own version of the cognitive theory, his theory that beauty is an apprehension of the truth of the spirit that is possible only in art although it is only imperfectly possible in art. Hegel’s rejection of the significance of aesthetic responses to nature also requires a revision of the Kantian theory of the sublime. For Kant, even more than for many writers on the sublime before him, our experience of sublimity was paradigmatically a response to the magnitude and power of nature (specifically, the response that the magnitude and power of our own reason, especially practical reason, is in its own way even greater than that of nature), and at least in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, he mentioned man-made objects such as the pyramids of

89 90 91 92

Hegel, Aesthetics, p. 2. Hegel, Lectures 1826, p. 4. Hegel, Lectures 1826, pp. 17–18. Hegel, Aesthetics, p. 60.

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Giza and St. Peter’s in Rome just to make the point that natural objects also will produce the desired response only when seen from the right distance.93 Hegel, however, is not interested in nature as a source of the experience of sublimity at all, so instead he locates the sublime in symbolic art, specifically in the way in which the indeterminacy of both the conception of the spirit and the symbol that tries to refer to it leave the spirit hovering beyond our grasp: “the idea in its immeasurability appropriates the form, but as mishandled, as distorting. The idea . . . appears as sublimity because in its form it at the same time indicates that its form is not suitable to it.”94 Thus for Hegel the experience of the sublime is not one of enduring moral importance, but a primitive experience that is left behind in the cognitive progress of art, which is in turn of course a progress toward its own supersession. Finally, Hegel’s dismissal of the importance of nature in aesthetic theory means that he must also revise Kant’s theory of genius. For Kant, of course, genius was a gift of nature, the natural inspiration and talent that allows an artist to produce a work the greatness of which can be explained neither by the artist’s antecedent conception of it nor by any of the rules of skill in the use of his medium which the artist has acquired through study and practice. For Hegel, however, it is not nature but the spirit that works through the artistic genius, and what creates a work of genius is not an inexplicable inspiration and talent that exceeds the conscious thought of the artist, but rather the depth of the artist’s thought itself. Thus, for Hegel, “Self-sufficiency in the production, the freedom of the work, is that which is called genius. In the work of art the naturalness of talent plays a role, for the work of art has the element of sensible exhibition, the side of naturalness,” but “in the deep thoughts of the artist thought must not suspend itself [aufheben], but rather must remain, so that thought forms itself, and just that, that thought forms itself in the artist, is what is more distinctive of artistic genius.”95 True to Hegel’s cognitivist approach to aesthetics in general, genius is a heightened power for knowledge of the spirit, or for the self-comprehension of the spirit

93

94 95

Kant, CPJ, §26, 5:252. In his early Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), however, Kant seems to allow that the pyramids and St. Peter’s are as literally sublime as the vistas of nature that he takes as the only proper objects of this experience in the Critique of the Power of Judgment; see Observations, 2:210, in Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 25. Hegel, Lectures 1826, p. 27. Hegel, Lectures 1826, p. 63.

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through the genius, which leads the way for others – until, of course, art has to be superseded by religion and philosophy. The contrasts between Hegel’s aesthetics and Kant’s are clear. The relations between Hegel’s approach to aesthetics and those of many others of his time are more complicated. Hegel’s description of classical art as the most perfect form of art has sometimes been taken to align him with the celebration of classical art as the model for modern art by Winckelmann, while his lengthy discussion of romantic art has sometimes been taken to align him with the celebration of art as the highest form of insight by the German Romantics and their philosophical compatriot, the Schelling of the System of Transcendental Idealism who had made art the highest “organon” of philosophy. But it should be clear that in light of Hegel’s thesis that for us art is something past that must be superseded by religion and that in turn by philosophy, he cannot accept either of these positions. For Hegel, the perfection of classical art is something that we can admire from afar but not recreate – this was in fact a point that had already been made by Schiller in his seminal essay on naïve and sentimental poetry – and romantic art cannot be an “organon” of philosophy because nothing that works through the senses, not even something that works through the senses as indirectly as poesy does, can fully grasp the spirit in all its determinacy. So both Neo-Classicism in aesthetics (and presumably in contemporary art itself) and Romanticism (likewise both in aesthetics and in contemporary art) must be rejected by Hegel, or regarded as moments in the history of art that were necessary in their own time but cannot provide serious models for the future.96 In spite of his obvious affection for classical Greek art, which he shared with so many others of his time, and the powerful impact of Romanticism that had flourished in Jena just before Hegel’s arrival in 1801, the combination of his cognitivism and his specific conception of the spirit prevents Hegel from accepting either Neo-Classicism or Romanticism as anything but historical phenomena. Turning from Hegel’s assessment of his predecessors to the continuing significance of Hegel’s aesthetics, things become even more complicated. Many subsequent movements in the arts, such as color-field painting which reduces the painting to its picture-plane, music that 96

For a brief discussion of Hegel’s attitude toward Neo-Classicism and Romanticism, see Beiser, Hegel, pp. 298–306 and 34–49. For a more detailed assessment of Hegel’s relation to his predecessors, see Helmut Kuhn, “Die Vollendung der klassischen deutschen Ästhetik durch Hegel,” in his Schriften zur Ästhetik, pp. 15–144 (originally published in his Die Kulturfunktion der Kunst, volume I [Berlin, 1931]).

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incorporates the very physical sounds of everyday life, or concrete poetry in which the shape of the print on the page is at least as important if not more important than the import of the words, could be interpreted as if they were intended to dispute Hegel’s specific analyses of the various media of the arts and more generally his theory that art is something of the past in which there can be no further significant progress; and the invention of entirely new media of art since Hegel’s time, such as photography, cinema, computer art, and so on would also seem to cast doubt on Hegel’s thesis that art is something of the past.97 But, as was mentioned at the outset, Hegel’s theory was never intended as an empirical assessment that the art of the past had discovered all the possible media of art and done everything interesting in those media that could possibly be done.98 Hegel’s argument is rather an a priori argument that art must be superseded by religion but ultimately by philosophy that is based on the inadequacy of any material, sensible medium for the complete comprehension of the spirit. However, when one turns to the conception of philosophy that is the capstone of Hegel’s theory of “Absolute Spirit” and thus of the entire system of philosophy, it is not clear that philosophy amounts to anything more than a comprehension of all the stages through which spirit had to pass on its way to self-knowledge. This would suggest that if not the further production then at least the continued contemplation of the history of art is actually part of philosophy, and thus may have greater significance than at first appears: if not the production of new art, then at least the contemplation of existing art would seem to be something that has great “seriousness” for us post-Hegelians after all. Further, if philosophy itself turns out to be nothing but the contemplation of the past of the spirit, then it is not clear that the activity of producing art can be replaced by any other genuinely productive activity, and that would seem to leave us in a strange position of enforced idleness and passivity. Unless it is clear how philosophy is supposed to be an ongoing form of activity, it is not clear how Hegel’s theory leaves us with any opportunity for ongoing activity at all. 97 98

Again, see Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” This is what makes Arthur Danto’s appropriation of Hegel’s conception of the “end of art” for the exposition of his theory that the specific project of pictorialism in painting had to come to an end after the development of photography and be replaced by some other purpose for painting, so strange, although Danto does try to keep his own approach on Hegelian territory by arguing that post-pictorial painting has actually become a form of philosophy. See Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Bollingen Series XXXV:44 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). We will return to Danto in Volume 3.

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3. Schleiermacher Hegel’s lectures in Berlin and their publication shortly after his death had an enormous influence on the development not only of philosophical aesthetics but also of the discipline of art history in Germany in the following decades.99 But not everyone was immediately converted to the Hegelian approach to art as only a way station in the progressive selfknowledge of the spirit. Hegel’s colleague at the University of Berlin, the theologian-philosopher Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768– 1834), lectured on aesthetics during the same years as Hegel did, but developed an approach in which the significance of art was not solely cognitive; instead, Schleiermacher conceived of art as a social practice involving the use of both our cognitive and practical capacities to express and communicate to one another both our emotions and the free play of our imagination or fantasy. In fact, although Schleiermacher did not name any of his predecessors or contemporaries in the surviving versions of his lectures, he was clearly resurrecting Kant’s synthesis of the truth- and playtheories of aesthetics, and perhaps doing so in intentional opposition to Hegel’s exclusively cognitive approach, while at the same time making room for the emotional impact of art as that which is communicated to its audience. Thus, Schleiermacher integrated into his aesthetics all three of the approaches that we have been chronicling. Because he saw the comprehension, expression, and communication of feeling as a constant in human life, further, Schleiermacher clearly felt no attraction at all to the idea that art for us is a thing of the past; for him it is rather an indispensable element in every form of human society. But Schleiermacher did not publish his lectures in his lifetime, and of all the aesthetic theories of early nineteenth-century Germany, his, the most comprehensive, had the least effect on his contemporaries and successors. Schleiermacher was born into a Pietist pastoral family in Silesia, and intended for the church.100 However, he defied his father in order to study 99 100

See Podro, The Critical Historians of Art. The classical life of Schleiermacher is Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1870). General accounts of Schleiermacher’s philosophy are Manfred Frank, Das Individualle-Allgemeine: Textstruktuierung und -interpretation nach Schleiermacher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977); Günter Scholz, Die Philosophie Schleiermachers (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984); and Christian Berner, La Philosophie de Schleiermacher: Herméneutique, Dialectique, Ethique (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1995). The articles in Jacqueline Mariña, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), cover Schleiermacher’s philosophy and theology, and include a valuable bibliography,

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at Halle, where the spirit of the Enlightenment represented by Christian Wolff had finally triumphed over Pietism, and where modern philological criticism of ancient texts was being pioneered by Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) and being applied to Biblical criticism by Johann Salomo Semler (1725–91), a student of Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten, the brother of Alexander Gottlieb. At Halle, Schleiermacher acquired a broad education in philosophy and the classics as well as in theology. After the usual few years as a tutor, he found a position as preacher at the Charité in Berlin (then the Prussian military hospital, now the university hospital of Berlin’s medical school), and through the salon of Henriette Herz, the wife of the physician Marcus Herz who had been a student of both Kant and Mendelssohn, he came to know the leading intellectuals of Berlin, now including the relocated Friedrich Schlegel. With Schlegel he conceived of the project of translating all of Plato’s dialogues into German, which became a major part of his life’s work. During these first Berlin years, Schleiermacher published a Theory of Social Conduct and On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers101 (both 1799), the first of which considered the relation of human individuals to each other and the second of which stressed the individual relationship to the divine rather than traditional theological issues. The focus on the feelings of the individual and his communication with others of and through his feelings would be a central theme in his later lectures on aesthetics. From 1804 to 1807, Schleiermacher was back in Halle as professor of theology, but university life in Halle was interrupted by Napoleon (as it was for Hegel in Jena in the same year) and Schleiermacher returned to Berlin, where he worked with Wilhelm von Humboldt on the foundation of the new university there, becoming professor at its inception in 1810 and remaining there for the rest of his life. Schleiermacher first lectured on aesthetics in 1819, one year after Hegel arrived at the university but two years before he began to give his own lectures on aesthetics, and then lectured on the subject again in

101

but offer little coverage of his aesthetics. For discussions specifically on his aesthetics and hermeneutics (theory of interpretation), see Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, pp. 183–220, and From Romanticism to Critical Theory, pp. 104–37; Kristin Gjesdal, Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 155–84; and Michael N. Forster, After Herder, pp. 323–468, especially pp. 339–44. Suggestions for further reading can be found in Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, ed. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. xxxiv–xxxvi. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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1825 and 1832–33 (one year after Hegel’s death and one year before his own); he also lectured on aesthetics at the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1831 and 1832. A version of his lectures was posthumously published in his collected works in 1835, thus the same year as the first posthumous edition of Hegel’s lectures.102 But Schleiermacher’s approach is very different from Hegel’s, although like Hegel he focuses on artistic rather than natural beauty. He introduces his lectures with the Baumgartian point that “The name aesthetics signifies [the] theory of sentiment [Empfindung] and is thus opposed to logic.”103 However, although the emphasis on sentiment in the definition of the field might suggest that aesthetic experience is essentially passive, Schleiermacher immediately states that “As the beautiful is for the most part produced through human activity, so is the production and the reception of it. Productivity and receptivity differ only in degree.” Here Schleiermacher introduces the terminology for the more recent distinction between “production” and “reception” aesthetics, that is, theories focusing on the experience of the artist and of the audience for art,104 but only to stress that there is no fundamental distinction between them: the artist may lead the way in the clarification and communication of feeling, but through their stimulation by the work of the artist the audience will also engage in the activity of clarifying and communicating feeling rather than just passively appreciating the work of the artist. “If the beautiful is a free human production, then one must not seek it in the form of παθημα [passions], but in the form of action.”105 Not that art has nothing to do with passion, of course; rather it has everything to do with passion, but what it has to do with passion is to comprehend and communicate it, which takes activity on the part of both the artist and the audience. As we saw earlier, the idea that the activity of the artist and the audience are essentially similar 102

103 104

105

There are two modern editions of Schleiermacher’s lectures on aesthetics, Friedrich Schleiermachers Ästhetik, ed. Rudolf Odebrecht, Veröffentlichungen der LiteraturArchiv-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Vol. 4 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1931), and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Asthetik (1819/25)/Über den Begriff der Kunst (1831/32), ed. Thomas Lehnerer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1984). The latter will be used here. Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, p. 3. See Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) and Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); and Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1984). Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, p. 4.

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was implicit in Kant’s analysis of genius, although Kant’s exclusion of passions from aesthetics did not anticipate Schleiermacher’s, because he denied the distinction that Kant drew between emotion and genuine aesthetic response. As we shall see later, Wilhelm Dilthey, Schleiermacher’s biographer and his only real successor in nineteenth-century German aesthetics, would further develop the idea of the underlying identity of the activity of artist and audience. Schleiermacher develops this theme in the first main part of the lectures, the “General Speculative” part as contrasted to the “Presentation of Individual Arts.” Here Schleiermacher begins with a version of the Kantian distinction between our theoretical and practical capacities. In his words, “Opposition between being and consciousness. Ideality and reality. [The human] forms the real in his ideality: cognizing function. He forms his ideal in reality: organizing function. Through the latter he unites things with himself, through the former he unites himself with things.”106 That is, in more Kantian language, in knowledge we try to mold our ideas to the actual world, but in action we try to transform the world to conform to our ideals. Schleiermacher then adds that both of these functions must be applied to the third basic capacity of human beings for feeling (Gefühl ), which is clearly related to Kant’s introduction (following Mendelssohn) of the capacity for feeling as a third capacity between our theoretical and practical capacities, and also adds that in applying our cognizing and organizing faculties to feeling we come to understand and to establish relations between ourselves and the world and ourselves and each other.107 The last is Schleiermacher’s own distinctive theme, or at the very least a way of making Kant’s thesis that our appreciation of the beautiful “prepares” us to love disinterestedly108 a much more concrete thesis about the social role of art. The application of our cognizing and organizing functions to our feelings and emotions takes the form of coming to understand them, moderating them, and creating forms for the expression of them which allow us to accomplish these aims and to communicate our results to others. Schleiermacher writes: What is identical between the artless and the artistic is the inner emotion [Erregung], and the externalizations [Aeußerungen] are the same. But the 106 107 108

Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, p. 9. Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, p. 10. See Kant, CPJ, General Remark following §29, 5:267.

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artless is without measure and rule (leaping for joy, storming around in rage, a scream of horror, etc.). The artistic has measure and succession and thereby becomes song and dance. Where there is measure and succession, however, there is an inner type, a prototype [Urbild], which precedes the production and comes between it and the emotion. The art is thus here the identity of the inspiration [Begeisterung] by means of which the externalization derives from the inner emotion and the clarification [Besonnenheit], by means of which it derives from the prototype.109

To be sure, Schleiermacher does not make the mere arousal of emotion the aim of art, or even the mere moderation of it. Rather, the key to both the production and the reception of art is moderation of it through coming to understand it and express it through a process of thought and action guided by a “prototype” or an image of a work, such as a dance, a song, or subsequently a painting, a statue, a poem, that is then developed in the process of creating and recreating a work of art – but a process that does not lose the original feeling either. Schleiermacher often puts this point by means of the almost untranslatable triad of Erregung, Urbildung, and Ausbildung,110 literally, emotion, prototyping, and cultivation, but more reasonably something like feeling and emotion, having an image of how it might be shaped and communicated, and then finding and working within a suitable medium and form for its actual communication. This could be said to be a version of Kant’s model of the aesthetic idea, with the modification that it is an emotion rather than an idea of reason that is being expressed and communicated through the work of art – without the emotion, there is nothing to be communicated on Schleiermacher’s account. Schleiermacher’s departure from Kant is of profound importance, but not complete, for he also stresses that every work of art, whatever its medium, involves an idea, something contributed by the understanding as the organizing function as the key to comprehending and expressing the emotion. Thus Schleiermacher is synthesizing the cognitive and the emotional approaches to aesthetic experience, and doing so even more explicitly than the British poets Wordsworth and Shelley were doing at the same time. He could be taken to be pointing the way to the theory of aesthetic experience as cognition of emotions that we will later find in both the Neo-Kantians and R.G. Collingwood, but Schleiermacher’s stress on communication means that he is not losing sight of the fact that aesthetic experience for both

109 110

Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, p. 11. Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, p. 12.

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artist and audience involves the actual experience of emotions as well as understanding them. Here we can see how Schleiermacher has connected the Kantian conception of the aesthetic idea to a non-Kantian recognition of the emotional impact of art, but we have not yet seen how he restores the Kantian conception of the free play of our mental powers to a central role in aesthetic theory, which it had been denied by Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. This is his next move. He says that “Nobody will deny that the prototype of art works lies in the domain of . . . free play,” but concedes that “most results of such play are to be sure insignificant.” But what leads from an insignificant free play of ideas, untrammeled imagination or fantasy, to genuine aesthetic experience is that the play “be brought into the light of consciousness and that it demand presentation [Darstellung].”111 Here Schleiermacher’s argument becomes very quick, and we might wish that we could have been present at his lecture so that we could have asked him to amplify his claims, but his idea seems to be that while mere play may lead to an immediate feeling, the task of art is to transform that play and that feeling into a more articulate “mood” (Stimmung) and to find a means for preserving a sense of the free play and of the feeling that it arouses through an articulation and expression of that mood. He says that in order to find the “truly identical,” presumably referring back to the identity between emotion and inspiration on the one hand and clarification and externalization on the other to which he had referred a few pages earlier, One must go back to the necessity of affection from without. This is the feeling. But music and mime do not proceed from the immediate feeling, but from the mood that arises from holding together the moments of affection. Just this however also determines the free play of fantasy . . . One also cannot say exactly that music and mime as immediate expression of feeling are passive, and the intuiting [pictorial?] arts more active, for the former too relate only to the formed [gehaltene] feeling. For this attitude [Haltung] is the original willing-to-feel [Fühlenwollen], and thus music and mime are just as self-active [as the other arts]. The difference thus consists only in this, that all the arts are the expression of mood, as it is developed in . . . objective activity, but music and mime borrow their expression from what is immediate in feeling, while the pictorial [bildenden] and verbal arts borrow theirs from the way in which the mood affects the free play of representations.112

111 112

Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, p. 16. Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, p. 17.

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We do not have room to pursue Schleiermacher’s contrasts among the arts; what is important is just that he wants to combine the idea of the free play of the imagination and the feelings that are immediately associated with that with the clarifying and expressive functions of art. In this way he argues that art is the means for the comprehension and communication of the free play of our imagination and emotions, thus combining the truth- and play-theories of aesthetic experience in a way analogous to Kant’s original synthesis of them in his theory of fine art, but through his model of communication adding that aesthetic experience involves the actual experience of emotions. Schleiermacher returns to the centrality of play in art some pages later, and also follows Kant in suggesting that through the consciousness of the free play that is a central part of aesthetic experience we also become conscious of our freedom more generally. Thus he returns to the opposed approaches, one of which regards all art as holy, the other of which regards all art as play. Both can be right only if both are not strictly opposed. Art is play in contrast to the organizing activity which is work, and in contrast to the objective cognizing that is a task, a business . . . in contrast to which art, not dependent on this opposition, is an occupation of the human being with himself, a play, and has no other object than this opposition itself.

Then he continues: In cognizing and forming the human being is conscious of the laws that he must necessarily follow and he has no determinate consciousness of whether they proceed more from the interior of the world or from his own interior. But in the case of art he has no doubt, and insofar as his free productions are symbols for that which he finds in knowledge, and in his images [Bildungen] in general the forms are borrowed from the domain of free art, so does he thereby first become conscious of his freedom. Hence art, although it is play, nevertheless stands by the side of both [knowing and organizing] and is their complement.113

In claiming that through art we obtain an awareness of our own freedom that stands alongside what we might get from our knowing and organizing capacities, or our theoretical and practical reason, Schleiermacher is clearly aligning himself with Kant’s sense of the permanent significance of art rather than with Hegel’s thesis that because cognition has progressed beyond what art can offer, art is for us something past, although also making consciousness of our freedom in aesthetic experience more 113

Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, pp. 26–7.

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prominent than Kant had done, for whom free play functioned more as an explanation of aesthetic pleasure than as its content. Schleiermacher also returns to a more Kantian conception of genius than Hegel as well as Schelling and Schopenhauer before him had adopted. Following his original statement that art requires “Erregung, Urbildung, and Ausbildung,” he argues that art can be “original” rather than “mechanical” and “receptive” only where there is “original inspiration,” a “gift for invention,” and “an organic disposition” for “execution.”114 Later in his lectures Schleiermacher says that “geniality” consists in “procreating mood, forming prototypification, and exhibiting execution” (erzeugende Stimmung, gestaltende Urbildung, darstellende Ausführung).115 With these terms, he rejects Schopenhauer’s idea that genius consists solely in a faculty of cognition that is more penetrating and quicker than that of other people, but also rejects Hegel’s idea that genius is essentially the spirit working through particular individuals, another cognitivist conception of genius. For Schleiermacher genius consists in a gift for inspiration, invention, and communication that is greater in degree than what other people have, although of course not completely different in kind, since as we saw it was the original premise of his lectures that aesthetic production and aesthetic reception differ only in degree, not in kind, and that the audience for art must be capable of re-experiencing and recreating for themselves what artists also experience and create. Finally, we may note that following his original interest in the relations of human beings both to each other and to the divine, Schleiermacher argues that there are two “styles” in art, the “religious or holy” and the “social” (indeed, even the “erotic”).116 The former express our feelings about the divine, the latter about ourselves. He argues that these two styles are found in every branch of art: in architecture we have buildings for worship and pleasure, in mime gestures for the accompaniment of religious processions and of masquerades, in music both liturgy and opera, and so on. However, not only does he think that both of these styles of art are independently necessary for human beings – thus rejecting Hegel’s view that all art is essentially religious art – he also thinks that they come together in the central activity of celebration or festival (Fest). In the festival or “festival life” (Festleben), human beings celebrate and cement both their relation to God and their relation to each other. 114 115 116

Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, pp. 12–13. Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, p. 44. Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, pp. 22–3.

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“All religious festival life, all cult is only the interaction of spontaneity and receptivity, the production and enjoyment of both domains,” the religious and the social. While hardly denying the religious significance of art that was so central to Hegel, Schleiermacher insists that art has an active as well as an intellectual component, and that it serves to create solidarity among human beings as well as to relate them individually to the divine. Schliermacher’s conception of “festival life” would later be taken up by the twentieth-century philosopher of hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer, who, as we will later see, himself uses it to effect a synthesis between the Kantian conception of free play and the purely cognitivist aesthetics that Gadamer learned from his mentor Martin Heidegger. Schleiermacher thus recreated the synthesis represented by Kant’s conception of aesthetic ideas of the free play of imagination with the organizing role of a concept in aesthetic experience, while adding to this synthesis the third element of the actual Erregung or arousal of emotion as what is shaped and communicated by the production and reception of art. His approach to aesthetics could thus have set the stage for a major advance in the field, but neither his lectures nor their posthumous publication had the same impact as Hegel’s did in the decades immediately following their deaths or as Schopenhauer’s book would have after that. As already mentioned, it is only in the work of his biographer Dilthey at the end of the century that anything like Schleiermacher’s threefold synthesis of approaches to aesthetic experience would be revived. What we will next see, however, is that while the aestheticians most influenced by Hegel did not overturn his rejection of the idea of free play, they did begin to look for ways to accommodate the emotional impact of art in their own theories.

4 In the Wake of Hegel

While Schelling had broad impact on the thought of literary writers during the first part of the nineteenth century, the aesthetics of Hegel had the greatest influence on the development of academic aesthetics in Germany during the three decades following his death in 1831 – the span of a generation, what we might call the post-Hegelian generation. The leading figures of this generation were Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Karl Rosenkranz, and Hermann Rudolf Lotze, and what is common to all of them is that they made at least tentative efforts to find room for the approaches that Hegel’s single-mindedly cognitivist approach to aesthetics had excluded, namely the Kantian idea of the free play of imagination and the ultimately Dubosian recognition of the emotional impact of art. But before we turn to these figures, we will briefly consider one who was more of a contemporary of Hegel, K.W.F. Solger, who, like Hegel, adopted an essentially cognitivist approach to aesthetics but who, unlike Hegel, did not think that the cognitive limits of art needed to be remedied by higher forms of knowledge such as religion and philosophy, because for him the content of art is essentially religious. Yet at the same time he claimed that art is essentially ironical, that it promises a reconciliation of our spiritual and material natures that it can never fully deliver, and in this sense Solger’s theory points the way toward the twentieth-century aesthetics of Theodor W. Adorno, whose own cognitivist approach to art is that it holds out to us what we might call the logical possibility of a fully reconciled life while at the same time revealing the real impossibility of such a life. In his own time, Solger’s lectures were immediately overshadowed by Hegel’s, but in the long run they may have had at least one important reverberation in the following century.

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1. Solger Along with the lectures by Hegel and Schleiermacher, yet another set of lectures on aesthetics was delivered in Berlin in 1819 by Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780–1819), also a professor at the university.1 Solger had studied jurisprudence at Halle from 1799–1802, but spent 1801–2 listening to Schelling at Jena. He then came to Berlin as a government employee, but after hearing Fichte lecture in 1804, he gave up his position to devote himself to philosophy. He became a professor at the university in 1811, and was active in securing Hegel’s appointment as Fichte’s successor in 1818. But he died the next year, and thus his 1819 lectures on aesthetics, which had been preceded by an 1815 book Erwin, Four Dialogues on Beauty, were his last work (they were posthumously published in 1829, the same year as Hegel’s last lectures on aesthetics). Solger was influenced by Fichte, but more so by Schelling and by his close association with some of the German Romantics, especially Ludwig Tieck. But through these influences he was led to an aesthetics that is in many ways similar to Hegel’s, and in Hotho’s version of his lectures Hegel referred to him respectfully, saying that he “was not content,” like the other Romantics, “with superficial philosophical culture; on the contrary, his genuinely speculative inmost need impelled him to plumb the depths of the philosophical Idea. In this process he came to the dialectical moment of the Idea . . . to the activity of the Idea in so negating itself as infinite and universal as to become finitude and particularity, and in nevertheless cancelling this negation in turn and so re-establishing the universal and infinite in the finite and particular. To this negativity Solger firmly clung.”2 This may not initially seem to be a fair assessment, but in the end it is correct. Solger was essentially a philosopher of religion: he conceived of God as the unification of all opposites, of our own “higher self-consciousness” as consciousness that in spite of our difference from God we are also united with God, and of beauty, in nature but especially in art, as the revelation of God and our higher self-consciousness in sensible form. Nevertheless, he concludes that art does not fully unify the 1

2

For information on Solger’s career, see Hermann Fricke, K.W. F. Solger: Ein BrandenburgischBerlinisches Gelehrtenleben an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Hauder & Spener, 1972). Wolfhart Henckmann has published several articles on Solger’s aesthetics, including “Die geistige Gestalt K.W.F. Solgers,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 81 (1974): 172–86, and “Symbolische und Allegorische Kunst bei K.W.F. Solger,” in Jaeschke and Holzhey, editors, Frühe Idealismus und Frühromantik, pp. 214–40. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. Knox, vol. I, p. 68.

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sensible world and the higher world, but renders the real world “nugatory,” and is in this sense inevitably “ironic,” although he emphasized that this irony has nothing to do with “common mockery, which finds nothing noble in man.”3 He thereby appears to hold, like Hegel, that art has an essentially cognitive function, that of revealing the presence of the universal, the Idea, or the divine in the particular and actual, yet that it is also incapable of fully doing that, of reconciling the gap between the particular and the universal, the real and the ideal. This is what Hegel means by claiming that Solger “firmly clung” to negativity. Unlike Hegel, however, Solger does not hold that the limits of art can be overcome by philosophy. Solger began his lectures with a brief review of the prior history of aesthetics, focusing especially on Baumgarten and Kant. He held that Baumgarten’s conception of beauty as “sensible perfection” and Kant’s conception of it as “merely the general form of purposiveness”4 were unsuccessful attempts to combine opposites at the level of common sense, in which “two entirely opposed elements,” especially the material character of imagination and moral ideas of reason, “lie in indissoluble conflict,”5 rather than a genuine recognition of the “higher self-consciousness” in which opposites really are combined. Where Kant thought he had successfully described a free play of our cognitive powers, especially in the case of fine art where our imagination plays with rational ideas to yield aesthetic ideas, Solger charged that he had merely “displayed a vacillation between empiricism and rationalism.”6 Schelling, however, more than Kant and Fichte as well, “assessed the subjective and the objective more equally,” and found in thought generally but in art in particular “an interplay (Wechselspiel ) between the subjective or conscious and the objective or unconscious activity,” a combination also represented by Schelling’s term “intellectual intuition,” which combines the sensible and the intellectual.7 Thus Solger dismissed Kant’s “free play” while being more hospitable to Schelling’s “interplay,” but in fact the idea of aesthetic experience as free play has virtually no role in his aesthetics. Aesthetic experience is an entirely serious business in which the divine in itself and the divine in us are revealed to us. 3

4 5 6 7

Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik, ed. K.W.L. Heyse (Berlin, 1829, facsimile edn.: Karben: Verlag Petra Wald, 1996), p. 125. Solger, Vorlesungen, pp. 32–3. Solger, Vorlesungen, p. 35. Solger, Vorlesungen, p. 38. Solger, Vorlesungen, pp. 40–1.

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This conception of the aesthetic is manifested in Solger’s comparison between the “standpoint of religion” and the “standpoint of the beautiful.” In the former standpoint, the “highest consciousness is something universal that can present itself in reality only successively. If this highest life itself becomes the center-point of our consciousness, then we must, insofar as we negate ourselves as something real, perceive the presence in us of the highest, universal life, or perceive our own consciousness as a manifestation of the divine consciousness. Our own individuality is merely an externalization of the divine presence.” But if we preserve a sense of “the entire world of reality as the complete image [Abbild] of the highest consciousness,” if we “see the world of reality as the revelation of the divine life,” then we occupy the standpoint of the beautiful.8 The “secret of art,” he continues, is this: We must recognize in the beautiful a living unfolding, an effect of the divine presence, through which every concept creates its own existence. The concept must be individually alive [lebendig], and conversely the individual object must not appear as abstracted from the universal concept, but as the immediate presence of the concept, as the concept itself in its particularity. Both sides must let themselves be dissolved in the third moment of relation; the point of reflection must be sublated in its entire completeness.9

The sensible and imaginative elements on the one hand and the intellectual and moral elements on the other, which Kant had failed genuinely to combine, are fully combined for Solger because the experience of beauty is in fact a revelation of divinity and its presence in the world outside of us and in ourselves. The effect of beauty, in turn, is “that it produces the feeling of unity within ourself, of consolation, of complete satisfaction.”10 It is striking that Solger makes this claim just after the publication of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art in The World as Will and Representation the previous winter, although while for Schopenhauer the calming effect of aesthetic experience was grounded in the contemplation of the thoroughly nonreligious Platonic Ideas, for Solger it is grounded in the recognition of beauty as a revelation of divinity. However, Solger makes no mention of Schopenhauer. For Solger artistic beauty is a revelation of the divine and of our identity with it, whether the explicit content of art is religious or secular, 8 9 10

Solger, Vorlesungen, p. 68. Solger, Vorlesungen, p. 69. Solger, Vorlesungen, p. 76.

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and a good part of his lectures is given over to an exposition of “divine beauty” and “earthly beauty” as the two main forms of beauty in general as the “matter of art.”11 In this part of his work he has many interesting ideas about religious art and secular art, the latter epitomized for him, as it would be for Hegel as well, by Shakespeare’s tragedies, above all Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. We will have to pass Solger’s illustrations by, however, in order to comment on his account of artistic production. While he recognizes that art is an “activity” that brings about “the unification of the idea with the appearance,”12 and therefore stresses that all forms of art must have a genuinely technical side as well as an intellectual or content-oriented one, but also that these two sides must genuinely come together so that the technical side does not appear to be a merely “mechanical” vehicle for the expression of the content,13 he nevertheless stresses that the idea that is the content of the work of art is revealed to rather than invented by the artist, and thus that the artist’s work is that of unfolding the idea that is revealed to him in a sensible medium rather than creating a vehicle for the expression of an idea, and in the course of doing that, himself refining the idea he is exploring. Thus he says that as far as its “theoretical side,” that is, its content, is concerned, “The revelation of the idea constitutes the entire consciousness of the artist as its enduring quality, and this enduring quality we call genius.”14 To be sure, we should not think that the artist is completely conscious of the full content and ramifications of the idea that animates his work as he starts the technical process of its physical production,15 but nevertheless Solger speaks throughout of the idea that is at the heart of a work, whether it is ultimately an idea of the unity of God or of our unity with God, as revealing itself to the artist in the course of his work rather than as being created by the artist. Here again Solger shares the cognitive approach of his teacher Schelling and his colleague Hegel. But for all of his emphasis that the content of artistic beauty is the unity of the world and of ourselves with God and its form the unification of the technical with the theoretical, Solger does not allow that art can

11 12 13 14 15

Solger, Vorlesungen, pp. 136–80. Solger, Vorlesungen, p. 91. Solger, Vorlesungen, p. 121. Solger, Vorlesungen, p. 119. Solger, Vorlesungen, p. 113.

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fully succeed in reconciling the spiritual and the material. This is his conception of “irony.” Solger writes: The genuine work of art develops, as a plant from its seed, through quiet and still activity. The other side of the spiritual activity of the artist [however], in which it comes to completion, is that it dissolves reality. The artist must negate [vernichten] the real world, not merely insofar as it is appearance [Schein], but insofar as it is itself expression of the idea. This mood of the artist, through which he posits the real world as nugatory [das Nichtige], we call artistic irony. No work of art can arise without this irony, which with inspiration constitutes the centerpoint of artistic activity. It is the mood through which we notice that reality is the unfolding of the idea, but that is in and for itself nugatory and first becomes truth again only when it dissolves in the idea.16

Art necessarily has a technical, material side, but, like Hegel, Solger ultimately believes that the material world is irrelevant to the real truth about the divine, and so art is doomed to fall short of its mission by its own inescapable limitation. This is the irony of art, and Solger’s theory of the irony of art is his counterpart to Hegel’s theory of the end of the significance of art, although Solger does not put his view in historical terms and does not suggest that the irony of art can and will be made good by superior means of absolute knowledge. The point remains, however, that the combination of a purely cognitive approach to art with the view that what is to be known is ultimately entirely spiritual in nature inevitably condemns art to inadequacy in one way or another. We can now turn from this contemporary and colleague of Hegel, who developed a view so close although not identical to Hegel’s, to several of the students of Hegel. Numerous students and followers of Hegel published their own systems of aesthetics, some even before Hegel’s lectures were published, including Hotho himself (1829), Christian Hermann Weisse (System der Ästhetik als Wissenschaft von der Idee der Schönheit, Leipizg, 1830), and Arnold Ruge, the left-Hegelian and early supporter of Karl Marx (Neue Vorschule der Ästhetik, Halle, 1837). But three of the most interesting and influential of these post-Hegelian aestheticians are Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Karl Rosenkranz, and Hermann Rudolf Lotze. They begin to find room within a recognizably Hegelian framework for the approaches to aesthetics that Hegel had rejected.

16

Solger, Vorlesungen, p. 125.

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2. Vischer Georg Lukács called Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–87) the most important post-Hegelian aesthetician.17 Like Hegel himself, Vischer was a Stuttgarter and attended the Tübingen Stift with the intention of pursining a career in the ministry; among his friends were David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), shortly to achieve notoriety for an historical work denying the divinity of Jesus,18 and the poet Edward Mörike (1804–75), first a pastor but later professor of literature at Tübingen. After brief service as a minister himself, however, Vischer took a Ph.D. in philosophy and aesthetics and launched an academic career. He began teaching aesthetics and literature in Tübingen as a Privatdozent, became associate professor in 1837, and was appointed professor of philosophy in 1844. But from 1845 to 1847, he was suspended from teaching, supposedly on account of his pantheism, and in 1848 he was a member of the short-lived all-German liberal parliament in Frankfurt. In 1855, he moved to the university in Zürich, but in 1866 he returned to Tübingen as professor and also began teaching at the Stuttgart Polytechnic. In addition to his philosophical writings, Vischer published widely in many media; among his nonphilosophical works are a parodic Faust, Part III, and a novel Auch Einer (1879), an exploration of the “mischief of objects.” In the style of Goethe, he also published marvelous travelogs based on his visits to Italy and Greece, and he wrote on the sociology of fashion as well.19 17

18

19

See Willi Oelmüller, Friedrich Theodor Vischer und das Problem einer nachhegelschen Ästhetik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1959), p. 7. This remains the most valuable monograph on Vischer; for an older one, see Ewald Volhard, Zwischen Hegel und Nietzsche: Der Ästhetiker Friederich Theodor Vischer (Frankfurt am Main: Kohlhammer, 1932). The source of Lukács’s remark is “Karl Marx und Friedrich Theodor Vischer,” Werke, vol. 10 (Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969). Other brief treatments are Pochat, Geschichte der Ästhetik, pp. 567– 74, and Egbert Witte, Logik ohne Dornen: Die Rezeption von A.G. Baumgartens Ästhetik im Spannungsfeld von logischem Begriff und ästhetischer Anschauung (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2000), pp. 152–62. Francesca Iannelli, Das Siegel der Moderne: Hegels Bestimmung des Hässlichen in den Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik und die Rezeption bei den Hegelianern (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), pp. 268–91, focuses exclusively on Vischer’s treatment of the ugly, not an especially prominent topic in his aesthetics. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen: Osiander, 1835– 36), translated into English by Marian Evans (George Eliot), The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, 3 vols. (London: Chapman Brothers, 1846). Vischer’s occasional writings are collected in a six-volume set, Kritische Gänge, edited by his son Robert (whom we will come to in his own right later), second edition (Munich: Meyer & Jessen Verlag, 1922). A selection of this material has recently been published as Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Kritische Skizzen, edited by Hermann Bausinger (Tübingen: Klöpfer & Meyer, 2009); several of Vischer’s essays on fashion have been republished

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Vischer’s ideas initially were close to those of Hegel, but his views developed over his long career. He ended up with a position that was in some ways more Kantian than Hegelian, but which clearly made room for an emotional aspect of aesthetic experience, and indeed treated aesthetic properties as projections of human emotions onto the forms of objects, the position his son Robert and others such as Theodor Lipps would refer to as “empathy” (Einfühlung). Vischer’s first major work in aesthetics was Über das Erhabene und Schöne (On the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1837), but his magnum opus was his six-volume Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (Aesthetics or the Science of the Beautiful), which he began during the two years in which he was prohibited from teaching and which was published from 1846 to 1857.20 A single volume based on his lectures from 1860 onward was edited by his son under the name Das Schöne und die Kunst, “The Beautiful and Art,”21 and the volumes of his essays, collected under the title Kritische Gänge (“Critical Paths”), also reached six volumes.22 Vischer composed his original Aesthetik as a handbook for his lectures divided into short numbered paragraphs followed by often much longer notes in which he revealed his remarkable erudition and engaged in detailed criticism of his philosophical predecessors as well as illustration of his claims from throughout the history of the arts. The general spirit of the work is certainly Hegelian, and is based on what sounds like a Hegelian conception of the “Idea” or “absolute Spirit.” But Vischer marks his independence from Hegel from the outset, by beginning with the argument that aesthetics must be defined as the science of the beautiful, not as the science of art, and that it must be shown by argument that art is the highest form of the beautiful;23 indeed, Vischer devotes a considerable section of his work to the beauty of nature, from the beauty of inorganic nature to the beauty of the human body, as the “one-sided existence of beauty” in which its objective but not yet its subjective element is exhibited.24 Vischer also pointedly departs from Hegel

20

21

22

23 24

as Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Mode und Cynismus, edited by Michael Neumann (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2006). Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen, eight volumes (Reutlingen and Leipzig: Karl Mäcken’s Verlag, 1846–57); second edition edited by Robert Vischer, six volumes (Munich: Meyer and Jessen Verlag, 1922–23). Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst: Eine Einführung in die Aesthetik, edited by Robert Vischer (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1898). Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Kritische Gänge, edited by Robert Vischer, second edition, six volumes (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1922). Vischer, Aesthetik, §1, vol. I, p. 1. Vischer, Aesthetik, §§232–378, Vol. II, pp. 1–356.

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in a protracted argument that although much art has religious content, art is actually superior to religion for the presentation of the idea precisely because of its immediacy, its grasp on our senses, which for Hegel had made art inferior to religion as a vehicle for absolute knowledge.25 And Vischer returned to eighteenth-century practice by recognizing the sublime and even the comic as separate aesthetic categories, rather than subsuming all aesthetic properties under beauty, as Hegel had done. Most importantly for our purposes, however, Vischer defended Kant’s conception of aesthetic experience as the free play of our mental powers against Hegel and others who had denigrated it by arguing that, although Kant had failed to recognize that his own conception of “inner purposiveness” (as Vischer calls it) is actually a conception of the manifestation of the objective existence of the Idea or spirit in the content of beauty,26 his conception of the free play of our mental powers – although it needs to be expanded to include our practical as well as our theoretical faculties – is a sound and indispensable description of our experience of beauty, its subjective rather than objective side.27 Thus, Vischer tries to reconcile Hegel and Kant, which is to say he tries to combine the truth-theory of aesthetics with the play-theory, as indeed Kant himself had attempted to do in his theory of fine art and its “aesthetic ideas.” And in his later work, as already suggested, Vischer went even further than this and made room for emotion in aesthetic experience, indeed coalesced the Kantian conception of form as the proper object of taste with the idea of the projection of emotion onto aesthetic objects in both nature and art. In the Aesthetik, Vischer conceives of the “absolute Idea” as “the unity of all opposites, which come together in the highest opposition, that between subject and object, which sublates itself through the divided but then reunited activity of knowing and willing,” which “cannot as such come to appearance at any single point of time and space but realizes itself in all spaces and in the endless course of time through a continually self-renewing process of movement.”28 Vischer says that “this highest unity is not merely a formal concept” and that in using this conception “aesthetics supports itself on metaphysics,” but his concept of the absolute Idea certainly seems more abstract than Hegel’s, for he does not explicitly identify it with mind, whether human or superhuman, and in spite of his own origins as a theologian he certainly does not explicitly 25 26 27 28

See for example Vischer, Aesthetik, §5, vol. I, p. 21. Vischer, Aesthetik, §43, vol. I, p. 128. Vischer, Aesthetik, §75, vol. I, p. 203. Vischer, Aesthetik, §10, vol. I, p. 45.

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identify the Idea with God. Rather, the Idea is real in a twofold way, “in the general, eternal course of the world and in the comprehending spirit of what thinks [das Denkenden],”29 but there is no suggestion that the former reduces to the latter. Moreover, Vischer explicitly distinguishes his position from Hegel’s by insisting that among the opposites that are united but not dissolved in the absolute Idea are necessity and contingency: contingency must be recognized to be a complement to necessity, not simply eliminated. He says that “It is the deficiency of the Hegelian system, not that it has no place for the contingent, but that it momentarily includes it only as a way of considering things from the point of view of ‘bad finitude,’ in order to immediately dissolve it in the representation of consideration in thought,”30 whereas on his view contingency should be recognized as a permanent feature of reality along with necessity. Part of the function of beauty, in turn, is to capture the appearance of necessity in the contingent, not just to present necessity – necessary forms, necessary laws, and so on – through contingent materials that are as it were made irrelevant by their own content. Indeed, for this reason, even though Vischer recognizes philosophy to be a superior medium to art for the comprehension of the Idea, art’s representation of the presence of both necessity and contingency in the “continually self-renewing process of movement” that constitutes the Idea means that in his view it can no more be superseded by philosophy itself than it could be superseded by religion. Having defined the Idea, Vischer then argues that it must present itself “in the form of immediacy or intuition,”31 and then that the “appearance” (Erscheinung) of the Idea to sensible intuition is beauty. But he also argues that “since the Idea can never be present in any single being,” the thought that it is “completely realized” in any particular object is “a mere illusion” (bloßer Schein),32 so the beautiful will always be an object (or an object that represents an object) that suggests something greater than itself, the Idea with all of its reconciliation of opposites, without ever fully realizing it. Thus the beautiful is an intimation of the Idea or perhaps, to borrow a term that would later become popular, a promise of the Idea.33 The beautiful “is a sensible particular that appears to be 29 30 31 32 33

Vischer, Aesthetik, §10, vol. I, p. 48. Vischer, Aesthetik, §41, vol. I, p. 120. Vischer, Aesthetik, §10, vol. I, p. 48. Vischer, Aesthetik, §13, vol. I, pp. 51–2. The characterization of the beautiful as a “promise of happiness” was introduced by Charles Baudelaire. For a recent discussion of this topic, see Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness, which will be discussed in the Epilogue in Volume 3.

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a pure expression of the Idea, so that in the latter there is nothing that does not sensibly appear and nothing sensibly appears that is not a pure expression of the idea.”34 Now the fact that a sensible particular can only intimate and never fully realize the Idea may be precisely why Hegel held that art must be superseded by religion and then philosophy, but for Vischer, who sides explicitly with Schelling on this point,35 the Idea needs sensible presentation, and if we interpret this to mean that we ourselves are ineluctably sensible as well as intellectual creatures who need to represent reality by means of our senses as well as our intellect, then Vischer would in fact also be siding with Kant. Vischer also distinguishes his aesthetics from the theological aesthetics of Hegel by arguing that since the highest presentation of the Idea is as “self-consciousness” and “personality,” the “highest content of the beautiful” must also be personality,36 although personality that is particular as well as universal, and thus human personality, not divine personality. But since this personality must also be universal as well as particular, he argues that the highest form of beauty concerns not so much individual personality as the “ethical world” (sittliche Welt) of the human species in its various kinds and individuals; thus “the most worthy content of the beautiful lies in the ethical powers of public life.”37 By means of this argument Vischer prepares the way for his detailed interpretation of the arts, including the arts of his own day such as the novel and novella, as by no means consisting exclusively in but as culminating in the representation of the social life of human beings (which is why Lukács so admired him, as will be evident from our discussion of Lukács in Volume 3). From this Vischer further infers that since the Idea itself is the “self-realizing moral end” of humankind, the content of the beautiful is ultimately identical with this.38 Yet at the same time, well aware of the eighteenth-century and especially Kantian conception of the disinterestedness of the judgment of the beautiful, he wants to avoid a reduction of the beautiful to the good, and especially any praise for didactic art. He does this by arguing that while the problem with religion is that it presents the good as something that already exists but entirely apart from us,39 and the problem with ordinary morality is that it presents the good as something 34 35 36 37 38 39

Vischer, Aesthetik, §14, vol. I, pp. 52–3. Vischer, Aesthetik, note to §13, vol. I, p. 52. Vischer, Aesthetik, §19, vol. I, p. 72. Vischer, Aesthetik, §20, vol. I, p. 75. Vischer, Aesthetik, §22, vol. I, p. 77. Vischer, Aesthetik, §24, vol. I, p. 81.

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that we are always striving for but that is never attainable in our actual existence, the beautiful presents the possibility of a harmonious existence in reality,40 of course not suggesting that all the contradictions of life are already fully resolved but at the same time not presenting them as resolvable only in an indefinite future or indeed in an afterlife. To borrow a later phrase, the beautiful is only a promise of happiness, but it is least more of a genuine promise of happiness than religion and ordinary morality have to offer.41 Let us turn now from Vischer’s internecine battle with Hegel to his rehabilitation of Kant. Vischer observes that Kant characterized the “unity which combines the manifold in that which is perfect” as an “end in the sense of Wolff,” but that while Wolff’s conception of an end remained completely external, “Only Kant himself grasped the concept of an end in its depth.” In his critique of teleological judgment, Vischer holds, Kant conceived of the end as an understanding that is “active” and “constructive” in the object itself, but that because of his inclination toward “subjective idealism” he insisted on interpreting the self-realizing end in both teleology and aesthetics as something subjective, something that exists only in our response to the beautiful and the organic, not something genuinely internal to them. But there was in his view nothing in Kant’s conception of purposiveness itself that necessitated his subjectivism, so Kant could have led the way to a more satisfactory conception of the Idea as manifesting itself in beauty.42 Independent of this claim, however, and more convincing, is Vischer’s argument that Kant’s conception of the free play of our cognitive powers is a correct description of what is properly subjective in beauty, namely our experience of it, and moreover that Kant is correct in emphasizing the pleasure in this experience, something largely neglected by Hegel and the idealists of the previous generation (again excluding Schleiermacher). Thus Vischer writes: The aesthetic disposition (Stimmung) in the subject is as a reflection (Reflex) of the object also considered in itself a pure mean of the opposed forms of its activity. This mean is determined by Kant as a free play and the pleasure that is connected with it as a pure satisfaction, i.e., as one that excludes every interest. . . . The beautiful is therefore not to be confused with the interesting. 40 41

42

Vischer, Aesthetik, §56, vol. I, p. 158. Oelmüller argues that Vischer gives up this optimistic view of aesthetic experience in his later works (Vischer und das Problem, pp. 183–6). The interpretation of Das Schöne und die Kunst to be offered will suggest that in his later career Vischer gives up Hegelian metaphysics but not the underlying optimism of his aesthetics. Vischer, Aesthetik, §43, vol. I, pp. 128–31.

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All satisfaction of this unfree sort can be called with Kant pathological, but free, aesthetic satisfaction can be called contemplative.43

Vischer endorses Kant’s interpretation of aesthetic experience. He says that it was a mistake for Kant to limit the free play to our cognitive powers alone, and that Kant “would have done well to take it in a wider sense” that would include the free play rather than normal, rule-bound activity of our practical powers as well, but that with this correction having been made, Kant was quite right to characterize our experience of the beautiful as a free play; his only mistake was to take this as exhausting what we can say about the beautiful, without realizing that this free play is the subjective “reflection” of the manifestation of the Idea in beautiful objects, which is after all itself always a harmonious but never completely resolved interaction between the universal and the particular, the necessary and the contingent, in objects, to which it is entirely appropriate for us to respond with a free play of all of our mental powers. In this context, Vischer also invokes Schiller, whom he thinks deepened Kant’s notion of play in his notion of the “play-drive” as reconciling the “form-drive” and the “matter-drive” while successfully combining it with an account of the objective content of beauty as the appearance of freedom itself.44 Vischer thus argues against all those who would criticize the Kantian conception of play as “too contemptible” that it can be successfully combined as an account of the experience of the beautiful with a proper account of the Idea as the content of the beautiful. Like so many other readers before and since, Vischer concentrates more on Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful than on his later account of fine art,45 and so he might be criticized for having failed to see that in his concept of aesthetic ideas Kant himself had anticipated at least some aspects of Vischer’s own approach. From his premise that the absolute Idea reconciles the difference between the subject and the object without erasing it, Vischer constructed an elaborate system of natural and artistic beauty. Thus, he first divides beauty in general into a more subjective side, which includes the sublime and the comic (and the sublime itself includes a subjective sublime, an objective sublime, and a “sublime of the subject-object, or the tragic”); a more objective side, namely natural beauty; and then a form that brings out both the subjective and the objective, namely the beauty of art. The arts are in turn divided into the more objective ones, namely 43 44 45

Vischer, Aesthetik, §75, vol. I, p. 203. Vischer, Aesthetik, §75, vol. I, pp. 204–7. CPJ, §§43–53.

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architecture, sculpture, and painting; a more subjective one, namely music, which he conceives of as primarily an art for the expression of emotion through sound; and finally an art form that combines the objective and the subjective, namely literature. But even within the latter there is again a division among the most objective form, namely the epic; the most subjective form, the lyric; and finally the objective-subjective form, the drama (Vischer subsumes modern prose forms under all of these traditional poetic categories). Vischer illustrates these categories with a wealth of illuminating examples, much in the spirit of Hegel. Thus far we have seen how Vischer synthesizes a metaphysical approach to art inspired by Hegel with a concession that Kant had gotten something right about the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, but we have not seen much reference to the emotional impact of art. Not surprisingly, this aspect of aesthetic experience becomes more prominent in Vischer’s account of literature than it was in his accounts of the other arts. He describes lyric poetry as the product of “the poetic fantasy that presents itself from the standpoint of one who feels [der empfindenden],” a form in which “the subject expresses himself, his mood” and carries over “his own thoughts . . . and movements of will into the atmosphere of mood [Stimmungs-Atmosphäre].”46 “The lyrical subject introduces to us outer objects that tell and depict a story . . . while it sets its and our fantasy into a determinate condition.”47 Here Vischer reveals that the experience of art has an effect on the mood as well as the thought of the audience: an “atmosphere” is more emotional than intellectual.48 The emotional impact of art on its audience is even more explicit in Vischer’s contrast between modern and ancient drama. “Classical tragedy takes place on mythic-heroic ground,” and its “characters are more types than individuals,”49 commented upon by a chorus that blends music into the drama. But modern tragedy deals with a wealth of individual characters, from high to low – of course Vischer has Shakespeare in mind – and the chorus is dropped, thus combination between drama and music is replaced with a combination between tragedy and comedy. And what is crucial about the disappearance of the chorus is that the response of an 46 47 48

49

Vischer, Aesthetik, §885 (vol. 5, pp. 1324–5). Vischer, Aesthetik, pp. 1326–7. The contemporary German aesthetician Gernot Böhme has based his theory on the concept of “atmosphere,” anticipated if not influenced by Vischer, whom he does not mention. See Böhme, Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag: 2001). Vischer, Aesthetik, §905, vol. 5, p. 1408.

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“ideal observer” within the work to the characters and events it depicts is replaced by the “actual feelings of the empirical observer,” that is, the real audience: this is “the subjective echo of the multitude of persons involved and of their deepened, more variegated mental life [vielsaitigeren Gemüthsleben].”50 The characters of modern drama are depicted as having a full range of both intellectual and emotional life, and their audience hears an “echo” of that, or experiences some of it for themselves. So at least with regard to some forms of modern art, Vischer recognizes that the experience of the audience will be emotional as well as intellectual and imaginative. In his later lectures, Vischer’s Hegelian metaphysics fades away, his appreciation of Kant becomes more pronounced, but most importantly he suggests that there may be an emotional dimension to the experience of any form of beauty, indeed that beauty must be regarded as form but as also the projection of our emotional responses on to objects: experiencing objects as embodying our own emotions replaces the Hegelian conception of beauty as the sensible appearance of the Idea. This dimension of aesthetic experience is what Vischer calls Einfühlung, and represents a decided turn away from the metaphysical cognitivisms of Hegel, Schelling, and Schopenhauer.51 Robert Vischer edited Das Schöne und die Kunst after his father’s death on the basis of Friedrich Theodor’s own lecture notes, which were apparently just sketches, although much worked-over, and several student transcriptions of his classes, including some of his own, dating from 1866 to 1883. Vischer begins the lectures with the statement that “the value that the object of aesthetics, the beautiful, has over the content of the sciences, and the real ground of its incomparable effect, lies in the fact that it has immediately comprehensible significance [Bedeutung], which is just as present to sense and nerve [Sinn und Nerv] as to spirit and mind [Geist und Gemüt].52 Vischer’s assertion of the equal importance in aesthetic experience of the sensory and the intellectual makes it clear from the outset that he is now distancing himself from Hegelianism, and his inclusion of both “sense” and “nerve” on the sensory side makes it clear that emotion (“nerve”) will be as important as perception (“sense”) in his 50 51

52

Vischer, Äesthetik, §907, vol. 5, p. 1416. On Vischer’s response to Schopenhauer and the early work of Nietzsche, as well as his disgust at what had become, at the hands of Richard Wagner, of his own suggestion that the Nibelungenlied might make good material for an opera, see Oelmüller, Vischer und das Problem, pp. 188–206. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, edited by Robert Vischer (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1898), pp. 3–4.

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account. Vischer then continues in a way that sounds Schopenhauerian for a moment, but is clearly moving in the direction of Kant. Like Kant, he emphasizes the disinterestedness of aesthetic experience, although he will not introduce that terminology until later: “What life, the state, society, the law demands, does not weigh upon us” in the aesthetic sphere; the aesthetic “charms, strengthens, elevates [us] without any practical relation. It releases us from the stress and coercion [Drang und Zwang] of the ought, for it presents the final end of the world as attained and shows life in the splendor of perfection.” Vischer describes the effect of this presentation in terms that are momentarily Schopenhauerian – “This release from the pain of unattained . . . ends” – but then turn Kantian – “is essentially a unification.” In particular, this “release is also in the intuiting subject a unification of [its] powers.” And then his account takes a Schillerian turn as well: “The beautiful, I have said, produces a whole again out of the divided human being.”53 The idea is that aesthetic experience involves the harmonious activity of all of our powers, and this has a beneficial effect on the person, unifying what is otherwise divided. Vischer is explicit that this is not just a precondition for the artist, but a result for the audience, the “intuiting subject,” as well. Later in the work, Vischer will make his increasing affinity with Kant even clearer by describing his theory of beauty as one of “interestless interest.”54 But he has also already suggested that his view goes beyond Kant because the unification in aesthetic experience involves all our powers, “nerve” as well as “sense,” and the focus of his lectures is the emotional impact of various forms and our projection of that emotional impact back on to the forms of objects. Vischer states that “aesthetic intuition is not directed to the what, but only to the how, not to the matter [Stoff ] but to the form. Form is the ordering of the matter into unity in multiplicity, thus harmony. It is not itself matter, only the collective effect [Gesamtwirkung] of all the parts of the matter, in this sense only surface, thus sensible-nonsensible [sinnlich-unsinnlich].”55 This sounds like a traditional definition of form, and it would seem that Vischer’s theory has now become the Kantian theory, indeed the theory of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” indeed perhaps the Schopenhauerian version of the Kantian theory, that what provides us with release from the unsatisfied ends of state, society, and so on, is the focus of our attention solely on the 53 54 55

Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 4. E.g., Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, pp. 61, 83. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 48.

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relations among the aspects of the objects before us without any regard to the significance of the aspects so related. But it is clear that Vischer is taking a different path as soon as he illustrates what he has in mind by an account of our experience of a beautiful landscape (by which he seems to have in mind an actual scene in nature, not a painting thereof ). We abstract from the matter itself in the sense that “we do not ask what is the content [Gehalt] of the stone, the water, the plants,” but instead respond to the way in which the air and light and our perspective on these things “affect us with a mood [so stimmungsvoll . . . wirken].”56 Thus form is not a relation among things that we could capture with a mathematical formula, but that in the appearance of objects that we capture with a mood. Vischer rejects the kind of formalism that he associates especially with Herbart and his student Robert Zimmermann (1824–98),57 who says, “it is indifferent, what the matter of the part that are put together is in itself, only the relation matters,”58 and instead writes that while “matter is 1. sensible material, 2. the object, as it lies before us before being seen (the subject), 3. the living content [Lebensgehalt] in this object, the beautiful abstracts from 1 and 2 but not from 3”59 – the beautiful does not abstract from the living content of the object, or from its effect on our emotions. He continues: “So does the inner essence and life of the object, as it is, reveal itself in its form, according to the way in which [nachdem] the spirit of the apprehender (of the observer and of the artist) has laid itself in that and made it into its own property.”60 Everything depends here on precisely how the little word “nachdem” should be understood, but Vischer’s meaning seems to be that there is not a one-way passage of mood or emotional impact from object to subject, but rather an interchange, in which the form of the object stimulates a certain mood or emotion in an artist making an artwork about it or in an audience responding to either a natural object or a work of art, which is then transposed back onto the object, so that mood seems to be essential to the object itself. The pleasure in such an intuition is a “pure unity of ideal and sensible pleasure,” and for us to be able to experience objects in such a way we must exclude our ordinary interests in using them for specific ends, thus 56 57

58 59 60

Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 49. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, pp. 56–60; see Robert, Edler von Zimmermann, Aesthetik (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1858–65), and Studien und Kritiken zur Philosophie und Aesthetik (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1870). Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 58. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 61. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 61.

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there must reign “interestless interest (play).”61 The Kantian provenance of these terms could not be more clear, but what Vischer is arguing is that the Kantian state of disinterested mental play with the appearance of an object is only the precondition for the emotional response to and the projection of that emotional response back on to the object, which are the core of aesthetic experience and aesthetic qualities. Vischer describes the triggering of mood or emotion by objects and our projection of that mood back onto objects as “a peculiar kind of symbolism [Symbolik], an unconscious empathy [Einfühlens] of the soul,”62 but he uses many other terms for this phenomenon as well. He says that “the spirit” – although here he means the human spirit, nothing more – “sinks itself into a given object and creatively transforms it,”63 that form is “penetrated by free life,”64 that a work of art is “something magically ensouled [ein zaubrisch Beseeltes],”65 that “we lend our soul” to a natural or artistic work “and without this symolism would never call” it “beautiful,”66 that beauty is something that “especially arouses [anregen] us,”67 and that “In the beautiful we must always start from the form, but we feel in it something inner.”68 Beautiful objects touch our emotions, not just our senses; thus, for example, “In the magnificent materials, the glowing and shimmering velvet, silk, gold, silver that are imitated in the paintings of Metsu, Terborch, Netscher and other Dutch painters, there lie wonderful charms, that are not merely sensory, but arouse our emotions in such a special way that it cannot be described,” and likewise in nature, “we hear threatening spirits in a storm, and even milder noises, such as the murmuring of a stream, the gentle blowing of the wind in the trees, speak to us. Through these impressions on the senses we at the same time feel impressions on our souls.”69 “Everything beautiful moves us, touches us deeply,”70 and we project this back onto the objects that so move us. Vischer’s followers would prefer his term “empathy” (Einfühlung) for this response, but perhaps his own favorite was

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 61. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 61. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 65. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 66. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 66. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 74. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 76. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, pp. 76–7. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 76. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 82.

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“ensoul,” as when he speaks of our “ensouling all of nature” (Beseelung der ganzen Natur).71 Vischer recognizes that his insistence that beautiful objects must touch and move us, cause an emotional response that we then project back on to them as the very content of their beauty, could seem to threaten the Kantian conception of the disinterestedness of aesthetic response that he has explicitly endorsed. He agrees with Kant, and, he explicitly adds, Goethe and Schiller, that “theoretical interest, the interest of use, moral, political, and religious interest,” all “wishing or willing, desiring or aversion in relation to the existence” of beautiful objects must be “absolutely excluded” from our properly aesthetic response to them.72 How is this requirement to be reconciled with the fact that “the beautiful will touch” us? Vischer’s answer is analogous to the answer that Schopenhauer gave in the case of music: “The beautiful says to us something about the content [Gehalt] of life, it is an appearance, a seeming, in which content [Inhalt] appears; only it is not the individual case, not an empirical truth that it puts before the soul, but it is always an inner and general truth.” In the beautiful we let everything please us: images from ancient mythology, gods, genies. . . . We Protestants allow the approach of the Catholics to please us and we do not struggle against it. We are charmed by the view of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, like everyone, but it does not occur to us to believe in the Maria myth. We know that here the ancient mythical belief in female deities has had an effect on Christianity. But we do not ask about that when we see the Sistine Madonna. There it is not a matter of the truth of the Catholic belief in the mother of God, but of an inner, universal truth. We see the woman, who as a mother remains as pure as a virgin, the elevated image of motherly purity, the most noble virginity. That is the universal, the inner truth, that we here experience73 –

that is to say, both know and feel. In other words, Vischer’s conception of the disinterestedness of aesthetic response is really the original, Shaftesburian, even Neo-Platonic conception: our sense of beauty is not a response to some abstract form that has nothing to do with the whole range of human ideals, hopes, passions, and so on; our sense of beauty has everything to do with all of that, it is a response that unifies all of our human powers and feelings, but beautiful objects, many of them made in very different context and belief systems than our own, can only have their full effect on us if we leave the particularities of our own beliefs 71 72 73

Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 90. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 82. Vischer, Das Schöne und die Kunst, p. 83.

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and interests aside. If we focus on the general rather than the particular, then we can even enjoy ideas and feelings that would be disturbing if we personalized them, connected them specifically to our own interests and beliefs. We can enjoy in general what we might not enjoy in particular. Of course, Vischer’s view is not the same as Schopenhauer’s, which is that by focusing on the “Platonic Form” even of the terrifying or frustrating, we will be relieved from our own particular terrors or frustrations and enter into the negative state of relief from pain; his view clearly is that there is a positive pleasure in experiencing the full range of human emotions and in experiencing art and even nature as ensouled by them, a pleasure that we can often experience only if we set our own personal interests aside. In moving from Vischer’s Aesthetik to his later lectures, we have traversed several decades and entered into the period in which his idea of empathy or ensoulment became the slogan of a whole school of aestheticians. Before we see what some of those writers added to Vischer’s idea, however, let us turn the clock back and see what followed his earlier work. For there were further developments within Hegelian aesthetics before it was displaced by newer trends, and many of those newer trends also need to be discussed before we can look back to the later development of the idea of empathy. The next Hegelian that we can consider is Karl Rosenkranz.

3. Rosenkranz Even though he himself worried that he was merely an epigone of Hegel, Karl Rosenkranz (1805–79), was also an innovator in the Hegelian tradition. His innovation was not merely an extended analysis of the “aesthetics of the ugly” in his book of that name (1853), but the foundation of that analysis on a conception of the Idea as freedom that led to the argument that just as in the moral sphere an unavoidable concomitant of freedom is the possibility of evil, so in the aesthetic sphere an unavoidable concomitant of beauty as the sensible expression of freedom is the possibility of ugliness as the distorted expression of freedom. Unlike Vischer, Rosenkranz restricted his analysis to the objects of aesthetic experience rather than to the subjective side of aesthetic experience itself, so his emphasis on freedom as the ultimate source of both beauty and ugliness did not lead him to a renewed appreciation of Kant’s conception of the free play of our cognitive powers as the basis of aesthetic experience or to Vischer’s emphasis on the emotional experience of natural and artistic beauty. His account of aesthetic experience remains purely

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cognitivist. Nevertheless, his emphasis on freedom within the Hegelian, cognitivist approach to aesthetics, while explicitly aimed at broadening Hegel’s conception of aesthetic qualities, what can be presented or represented, might also prepare the way for a broader conception of aesthetic experience itself. Rosenkranz began his university studies at Berlin in 1824, but was influenced more by Schleiermacher than by Hegel while he was there. Only after transferring to Halle in 1826 did he begin an intensive study of Hegel. Displaying the combination of interests that would remain with him throughout his career, he earned his doctorate at Halle in 1828 for a work on German literature in the Middle Ages, but earned his habilitation only eight months later with a work on Spinoza. He became a professor at Halle in 1831, but moved to Königsberg in 1834 to take over the chair once held by Kant – the chair for which Kant had had to wait until he was forty-six, but that Rosenkranz enjoyed at age twenty-eight. He spent the rest of his extraordinarily productive career in Königsberg, where he produced the first collected edition of Kant’s works and an accompanying History of the Kantian Philosophy (1840), a study of Schelling (1843), biographies of Hegel (1844 and 1870), Goethe, and Diderot, as well as systematic works such as Psychology or the Science of Subjective Spirit (1837), a System of Science (1850), and a Science of Logical Ideas (1858–59). He also published poetry and political writings, and was active in the short-lived liberal Prussian government in 1848–49, including a stint as Minister of Culture.74 But the work for which Rosenkranz is best remembered is the Aesthetics of the Ugly, distinguished among works in the Hegelian school for the clarity, indeed elegance, of its style as well as for its originality. The thesis of the work is that the ugly is the negation of the beautiful, although since the beautiful itself and therefore the ugly as well are both products of freedom, in the broadest possible sense of a force at work in nature as well as in intentional human conduct, there is no dialectical necessity that the ugly exist, and moreover, in the form of the comic, the ugly can be transformed back into the beautiful; the comic is thus for Rosenkranz the most complex and interesting, one might say the most redemptive form of art, and what was for him the greatest work of comic art, namely

74

Work on Rosenkranz includes Holger Funk, Ästhetik des Häßlichen: Beiträge zum Verständnis negativer Ausdrucksformen im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Agora Verlag, 1983); Werner Jung, Schöner Schein der Häßlichkeit oder Häßlichkeit des schönen Scheins (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1987); and Iannelli, Das Siegel der Moderne, pp. 249–59.

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Don Quixote, may have been the greatest work of art of all.75 Thus, while for Hegel the comic represented the end of art, for Rosenkranz the possibility of the comic is nothing less than the apotheosis of art. Rosenkranz begins The Aesthetics of Ugliness with an analysis of the ugly in nature, the ugly in spirit, and the ugly in art. Ugliness in nature results when the free development of natural objects, including nonorganic objects such as crystals but paradigmatically organisms, that is, their development toward the ideal form for their type or species, is distorted by external forces such as agents of disease or harshness of environment. Ugliness in spirit results when the free, self-determining will chooses evil instead of goodness and purity, thus, “The cause of evil and the ugliness that is transmitted to the external appearance of a human being by it is his freedom, not a transcendental essence outside of him.”76 Rosenkranz points out that it is natural for the beauty of the will, that is, its goodness and purity, to have a beautifying effect on the outward appearance and deportment of a person, and natural for us to expect that, and likewise natural for ugliness or evil in the will to have an ugly effect on outward appearance, but the ethical and the aesthetic properties are not identical, and in particular not all ugliness in human appearance is a sign of moral evil – it can also be a product of interference with the unhindered development of the human organism that would otherwise produce natural beauty. Finally, ugliness in art is a possibility just because art is the appearance of the spirit and the spirit is freedom itself, which means that it cannot be necessitated to produce beauty but can also produce ugliness; moreover, insofar as art is not just the appearance or sensible manifestation of the spirit but also the representation or depiction of it, it would not be complete unless it could represent all the expressions of freedom, the misuse or perversion of freedom as well as its optimal use. Rosenkranz writes: The realm of the ugly is . . . as great as the realm of sensible appearance in general. . . . Since the ugly is [the negation] of the beautiful, it can be the negation of each of its forms, generated by the necessity of nature or by the freedom of the spirit. . . . In order for the beautiful to be enjoyed in and for itself, the spirit must produce it . . . Thus arises art. It is externally connected with human needs, but its true ground remains the longing of spirit for the pure, unmixed beautiful. 75

76

See the trenchant analysis of Don Quixote that concludes the first section of the Ästhetik des Häßlichen (Königsberg: Gerüder Bornträger, 1853) ed. Dieter Kliche (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1996), pp. 57–9. Rosenkranz, Häßlichen, p. 32.

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But if the production of the beautiful is the task of art, must it not appear to be the greatest contradiction if we see that art also produces the ugly?77

No, Rosenkranz answers, because it is inherent in the freedom of the spirit that it be able to produce ugliness as well as beauty and necessary to a complete representation of the spirit that its capacity to produce ugliness as well as beauty be truly represented. The possibility, indeed the necessity, of ugliness in art is not just that it serves to highlight beauty by its contrast, but “must lie deeper than in that external relation of reflection”: It lies in the essence of the Idea itself. The sensible element is necessary for art – and this is its limit in comparison with the freedom of the good and the true – but in this element the appearance of the idea will and should express itself in its totality. It belongs to the essence of the idea to leave the existence of its appearance free and thereby to establish the possibility of the negative. . . . If nature and spirit are to be presented in their full depth, then the naturally ugly, the evil and the diabolical cannot be lacking. . . . For this reason, therefore, to depict the appearance of the idea in its totality, art cannot avoid offering an image of the ugly.78

Rosenkranz argues, in traditional Hegelian fashion, that spirit or idea needs to present itself to the senses, but adds that it needs to do so freely, and therefore needs to do so through art, a free production of human beings, as well as in other forms that do not pass through human freedom. But then, just because art is freely produced, it is possible for it to be ugly as well as beautiful. Moreover, since the task of art is to depict (schildern) spirit – Rosenkranz is still working with a fundamentally mimetic conception of art – and spirit can freely manifest itself in natural and moral ugliness as well as beauty, art must be able to depict these too. Rosenkranz’s argument works at two levels: as a product of freedom, art must be capable of producing ugliness as well as beauty, and as a representation of freedom, art must be capable of representing ugliness as well as beauty. It might be objected to this analysis that art does not simply copy nature, but that it idealizes nature, and that since idealization produces beauty, truly successful art must be beautiful. Rosenkranz answers this objection by agreeing that art always depicts the essential rather than the accidental, the true rather than the merely “empirical,” but that this is the case in art’s representation of the ugly as well as the beautiful. 77 78

Rosenkranz, Häßlichen, p. 35. Rosenkranz, Haßlichen, pp. 37–8.

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Rosenkranz’s view that art must exclude the accidental seems more conventional than Vischer’s view that the task of art is to represent the contingent as well as the necessary, but he puts this conventional premise to use in his unconventional defense of the possibility of the representation of ugliness in art: It is true that art also idealizes the ugly, i.e., it must treat it in accordance with the general laws of the beautiful that it injures through its existence; art must not hide the ugly, dress it up, falsify it, distort it with alien decoration, but must form it, without injury to truth, in accordance with the measure of its aesthetic significance. This is necessary, for art proceeds in this way with all reality. The nature that art presents to us is the real but not the common, empirical nature. It is nature as it would be if its finitude allowed it such perfection. And likewise the history that art gives us is the real and yet not the common, empirical history. . . . In the common reality there is never any lack of the most enraging and repulsive uglinesses; art is not to take these up without anything further. It must put the ugly before us in its negative essence, but it must do this with the same ideality with which it treats the beautiful. It must leave out of its content everything that belongs merely to the contingent existence of the ugly. . . . It must bring out those determinations and forms that make the ugly into the ugly.79

Rosenranz’s aesthetic cognitivism is, so to speak, an essentialist cognitivism, a theory that art represents the essences rather than the accidents of things (a precedent for this is of course Schopenhauer’s theory of the Platonic Ideas as the content of natural and artistic beauty), and thus the depiction of the ugly is possible for art precisely insofar as art depicts the essence of ugliness. The multiple levels of Rosenkranz’s analysis of the possibility of ugliness in art are also evident in the “Division” that concludes the introductory section of his book. Here he says that “The first requisite for beauty is . . . the need for boundaries,” and that “The negation of this general unity of form is thus formlessness”; thus the first form of ugliness is formlessness.80 He immediately points out that at the most abstract (“metaphysical”) level everything has some form, so from that point of view there is no such thing as formlessness; the formlessness of an ugly work of art must therefore be a “relative” formlessness, and this turns out to be a form that “contradicts” or is inappropriate to the content of the work of art. “Thus the beautiful demands unity of content and form in certain relationships.”81 The second demand of beauty is truthfulness to nature, 79 80 81

Rosenkranz, Häßlichen, p. 41. Rosenkranz, Häßlichen, p. 50. Rosenkranz, Häßlichen, p. 51.

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but since this must be idealized nature, not common nature with all of its accidents, the beautiful demands “correctness” or the representation of objects in accordance with the laws of nature, and the ugly is what violates these laws: “The beautiful cannot do without this correctness. Thus if a form violates the lawfulness of nature, from such contradiction there arises unmistakable ugliness.”82 But beyond or, better, beneath formlessness and incorrectness, the real source of ugliness lies in the freedom that expresses itself as beauty but that also includes the possibility of its own perversion: Formlessness was thus the first and incorrectness the second main form of the ugly. But there remains that form that really contains the ground for both, the internal malformation that also manifests itself as exterior disharmony and unnaturalness, because it is turbid and confused itself. For beauty freedom is the true content, freedom in the general sense, under which is understood not only the ethical freedom of the will but also the spontaneity of intelligence and the free movement of nature. The unity of form and its individuality become perfectly beautiful only through selfdetermination. . . . The principle of the ugly, however, is constituted by unfreedom, from which the individual aesthetically or rather unaesthetically characteristic flows; unfreedom taken in the general sense that includes not merely art but also nature and life in general. Unfreedom as the lack of self-determination or as the contradiction of self-determination with the necessity of the essence of a subject generates that which is ugly in itself, which comes to appearance in the incorrect and the formless. . . . True freedom is in all ways the mother of the beautiful, unfreedom that of the ugly.83

Rosenkranz’s term “unfreedom” is vague, but it should not be taken to mean the absence of freedom; at least in the case of art, it means rather the willful misuse of freedom, the use of freedom in contradiction to both the laws of nature and the law for the will, that is, the moral law. Rosenkranz thus seems to mean that ugliness in art manifests itself in the content of the work, in the misrepresentation of the real laws of nature and in tension between the content and the form of the work, but that more generally it arises from the misuse of the freedom of the artist in the production of the work. Again, then, beauty seems to be both the expression of the freedom of the spirit in the artist and the representation of freedom in all the expressions of the spirit, and ugliness can arise from the same freedom of the spirit in the artist as well 82 83

Rosenkranz, Häßlichen, p. 52. Rosenkranz, Häßlichen, pp. 54, 56.

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as from the content of the work, its representation of ugly manifestations of the freedom of the spirit in all its form. There seems to be a difference between these two forms of ugliness that Rosenkranz does not mention, however, namely that ugliness as part of the content of art seems necessary to its mission of representing the manifestation of the spirit but ugliness as a result of the misuse of the freedom of the artist in the production of the work seems merely unfortunate although perhaps also inevitable. Rosenkranz’s work includes an interesting commentary on the possibility for ugliness in different media of art, in which he argues that where the freedom of the artist is constrained by both the non-artistic purpose of his work and the cost of its materials and production – as is almost always the case in architecture and often the case in sculpture (which is often part of a larger architectural program or has a specifically celebratory or memorial function) – there is less room for freedom and therefore for ugliness as well, but that in arts that are not so constrained by function and in which the costs of materials and production are lower – such as painting, music, and literature – there is also more room for the misuse of freedom, and therefore for ugliness.84 The bulk of the book is then taken up with detailed analyses of formlessness, incorrectness, and disfiguration or malformation. In the last of these sections, he analyzes in turn the vulgar, the repulsive, and caricature, and then makes the argument that caricature is the most important form of ugliness because it is the contrast to the ideal of beauty, but also such a direct expression of freedom that it allows for the reemergence of beauty. The details of Rosenkranz’s analyses are fascinating. But for our story the interest of his work is his emphasis on the freedom of the spirit in general as the object that is portrayed through ugliness in art (in one sense) and the freedom of the artist himself as a source of ugliness in art (in another sense). In spite of this emphasis on freedom throughout his account, however, Rosenkranz remains within a cognitivist approach to art and does not recognize the free play of our mental powers as the source of the pleasure of aesthetic experience in both artist and audience. Nor does he give any special attention to the emotions that might be aroused by either beauty or ugliness or by the depiction of either.

84

Rosenkranz, Häßlichen, pp. 44–8.

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4. Lotze The idea of aesthetic experience as a free play of our mental powers would, however, play a central role in the work of Hermann Rudolf Lotze (1817–81). Lotze was a transitional figure between the idealism of the first half of the nineteenth century and some of the most important movements at the end of the century, including both Neo-Kantianism and American pragmatism. In an essay on “The Concept of Beauty” from as early as 1845, thus contemporaneous with the early work of Vischer, he said that “the thoughtful contemplation of the beautiful owes more to Kant, who found beauty in the suitability of the relations of the object to the play of our cognitive faculties, than is now customarily acknowledged.”85 Lotze went further than Vischer in his appreciation of the concept of free play, regarding it not merely as a good description of the subjective side of aesthetic experience but as absolutely essential to the comprehension of the beautiful. But he also argued that it could be regarded as the basis for the value of beauty only if the play of our mental faculties was itself of value. That this is so, however, he is prepared to argue: in his view, the free play of our mental powers has both intrinsic value as part of our harmonious life and relative or more precisely representative value as an intimation of our place in a harmonious universe. In this way Lotze may be regarded as developing Kant’s claim, in his analysis of “intellectual interest” in the beautiful, that (natural) beauty gives us a “sign” of a correspondence between nature and our own purposes86 into a theory of the objective value of beauty that is part of a theory of the objective value of the universe. Unlike Kant, Lotze also applies his version of the theory of our “intellectual interest” in beautiful to art.87 Lotze studied both medicine and philosophy at Leipzig, where he came under the influence of the Hegelian aesthetician Christian Hermann Weisse, and earned doctorates and teaching qualifications in both fields. He actually began as an instructor in medicine before he 85

86 87

Hermann Rudolf Lotze, Über den Begriff der Schönheit (1845)(“On the concept of the Beautiful”), reprinted in his Kleinere Schriften, vol. 1 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1885), pp. 291– 341, at p. 295. Kant, CPJ, §42, 5:300. Little of the literature on Lotze focuses on his aesthetics. The only recent monograph on Lotze is Reinhard Pester, Hermann Lotze–Wege seines Denkens und Forschens: Ein Kapitel deutscher Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte im 19 Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 1997).

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switched to philosophy, and made his name by criticizing the prevailing approach to medicine based on Schelling’s philosophy of nature in favor of a more empirically grounded approach. Even after he devoted his efforts fully to philosophy, his thought was always marked by an emphasis on the place for empirical research within a speculative, teleological metaphysical framework. (This was certainly a reason for his influence on William James and George Santayana, whose first work was a study of the philosophy of Lotze published in 1889.)88 Lotze began teaching philosophy in Leipzig, where he published a Metaphysics in 1841 and a Logic in 1843. In 1844 he was appointed as professor in Göttingen, where he would remain until 1881, when he was called to the university in Berlin, although he died a few months after starting his appointment there. During his Göttingen years, Lotze published a three-volume version of his system, the Microcosmos (1856–64, translated into English in 1885),89 and then started another version of it with more detailed volumes on logic and metaphysics, which were translated into English by the British idealist philosopher and aesthetician Bernard Bosanquet.90 Lotze did not live to complete the third part of his final system, which would have included aesthetics, but aesthetics was central to his thought from the outset, and his views are well represented in the essay on the concept of beauty, already mentioned; another long essay from 1847, “On the Conditions of Beauty in Art”;91 and in Fundamentals of Aesthetics, one of a series of posthumously published outlines of his lecture courses based on Lotze’s own dictation.92 Lotze also published an important History of Aesthetics in Germany that covers figures from Baumgarten to Herbart in its first book, but in its second book provides a “history of individual aesthetic concepts,” making the work more of a systematic treatise than might first appear.93

88

89

90

91

92

93

George Santayana, Lotze’s System of Philosophy, ed. Paul Grimley Kuntz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). Hermann Lotze, Microcosmus: An Essay concerning Man and his relation to the World, trans. Elizabeth Hamilton and E. E. Constance Jones, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. Clark, 1885). Hermann Lotze, Logic, in Three Books, of Thought, of Investigation, and of Knowledge, translated by Bernard Bosanquet, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888). Lotze, Über Bedingungen der Kunstschönheit (1847) (“Conditions”), in Kleinere Schriften, vol. 2 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1886), pp. 205–72. Lotze, Grundzüge der Ästhetik: Diktate aus den Vorlesungen (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 1990) (“Fundamentals ”). In the case of aesthetics, this volume included the first nine chapters, comprising all of the general theory plus the chapters on music and architecture, from 1865, and the final three chapters on sculpture, painting, and literature from 1856. Hermann Lotze, Geschichte der Ästhetik in Deutschland (Munich: Cotta, 1868).

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The central idea of Lotze’s system is that the universe is purposive, that its purposes are expressed and achieved through natural laws that must be gleaned from empirical research and not deduced a priori as in his opinion earlier idealists had attempted to do, but that the infinite extent and complex but harmonious interrelations of empirical phenomena can never be completely captured by the laws that we can discover. The free but harmonious play of our own mental powers in our experience of beauty is of central importance and value because it is not only an instance of the harmonious purposiveness of the universe as a whole but also an intimation of the vastness and the purposiveness of the universe that goes beyond anything that patient scientific research, indispensable as it is, can ever offer us. He gives us a concise statement of this general theory and of the significance of beauty, in particular art, for the representation of it, in the 1847 essay on beauty in art: Our sensible observation of the world sees three powers intertwined in the course of things: universal laws of coming-to-be and passing-from-being, exceptionless for every individual form of succession, from the eternal fate of appearances; subjected to them is a fullness of living reality, which overlay these stiff limits with wonderful inborn drives of formation and internal liveliness; and in these we believe that we sometimes finally detect more clearly the traces of an ordering thought, which leads the connectionless noise of appearances to a common goal. This goal-directed movement does not form of the sense of the course of the world by itself, but the meaning of the latter lies precisely in the fact that this gradual progress includes within itself those contradictory powers, the never-progressing laws and the wilful liveliness of things. If art is to give us an image of this entire course of the world in its works, then none of these features can be lacking from it, and its procedures must leave every space for the development of this meaning. Now if the individual features stand before the eyes of the experience of life only as riddles, the unification of which through a common solution can occupy the entire power of a human heart, then art also should not set out from a well-known and certain solution of all the questions that force themselves upon one here, but it is this solution itself.94

Now while it clearly suggests the general form of Lotze’s metaphysics and the importance of the inexhaustible wealth of empirical reality within it, which Lotze took to distinguish his philosophy from that of Schelling and Hegel, this passage could also suggest that he continued the purely cognitive approach to aesthetics that they had adopted. That conclusion would be wrong, however. Rather, Lotze’s view is that the free play of our mental powers is the core of our experience of beauty, including artistic 94

Lotze, Conditions, vol. 2, p. 219.

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beauty, but that this free play must be recognized as valuable precisely because it is both an instance and a representation of the purposive harmony of the world in all its fullness and complexity. Lotze thus offers his own synthesis of the approaches to aesthetic experience as a form of free play and as a form of cognition: While for Kant the fact that aesthetic experience is an experience of free play allowed it to become a symbol of the morally good, for Lotze this fact is what allows aesthetic experience to offer insight into the purposiveness of the world that is beyond the grasp of our scientific methods. Lotze makes this clear in the discussion of Kant with which he began both his early essays on aesthetics and his lecture course twenty years later. He begins the latter with Kant’s distinction between the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, arguing that what is crucial to the beautiful is not so much that it pleases universally, unlike the former, yet without a concept, unlike the latter,95 but that it pleases because of our mental activity in the free play of the faculties. With regard to the distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful in particular, he writes: A more correct distinction between them would be that those impressions seem “merely agreeable” to us that we merely suffer [erleiden] through stimuli, without being conscious of exercising an activity through which their apprehension is first completed. “Beauty” by contrast can only pertain to those impressions whose apprehension does not consist in an unanalyzable well-being, but arises from a manifold of relating, connecting, comparing activities of our power of representation or imagination. It is consistent with this that the “agreeable” pertains primarily to sensibility, and indeed to its simple impressions, while “beauty” pertains to the objects of the higher faculties of the spirit [Geist] and to composite sensible impressions, whose whole content cannot be grasped merely by the senses, but only through an additional reconstruction of the interconnection of their manifold through the imagination.96

Lotze thus takes Kant’s idea of free play to be indispensable to the analysis of the experience of beauty. He also takes it to be incomplete, because “We must demand that that which is called ‘beautiful’ insofar as it has an effect upon us also have, considered in itself, an unconditional value, which justifies our aesthetic pleasure and our honor of it, i.e., we demand an objective significance of the beautiful.”97 Yet, he immediately adds, “Such a justification is not entirely lacking in Kant’s point of view.” 95 96 97

Lotze, Fundamentals, §3, p. 7. Lotze, Fundamentals, §5, p. 9. Lotze, Fundamentals, §9, p. 12. See also “Concept,” pp. 296–8.

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In an unmistakable allusion to Kant’s analysis of our intellectual interest in beauty, he explains: For the individual “beautiful object” beauty in general remains merely a form of how it appears to us; and without a doubt it can appear to us as beautiful through a contingent correspondence between some properties of it that are in themselves quite insignificant and the habits of our apprehending activity. Only that reality is so ordered in general that such a friendly concomitance between the forms of things and the needs of the life of the spirit is possible is a general fact of the world-order that we must cherish as an infinite good. And each individual object that through [its] forms (no matter how contingent they may be in themselves) reminds us of this universal being-for-each other of things and of the world of spirit has, as a testimony to that goodness, the objective value on account of which it also appears as beautiful in itself.98

Lotze’s view is that our harmonious mental activity, or as he also calls it “elasticity,” is not only pleasurable but also valuable as part of the purposive harmony of the world as a whole, and that beautiful objects are valuable both because they induce this pleasurable activity and also represent the harmony of the world as a whole. Lotze considers the objection that this approach might conflate the beautiful with the good, but he responds that while the good concerns our actions in particular, the sense of value that we get from the experience of the beautiful extends over the whole of our being and spreads itself onto objects as well.99 Lotze also addresses this point by resurrecting another Kantian idea, namely that the beautiful offers us a bridge between the realm of nature and the moral realm of the spirit. Coming at the point from the opposite side, that is, from the question of how the mere play of mental powers could have any moral significance at all, he writes in the essay on the concept of beauty: The appearances of that liveliness, of the constant flow of alterations or of sudden interruptions and violent new beginnings, in short all those forms of transition, of coalescence and opposition, which run through all the arts as important means of presentation, reawake the recollection of a special moral condition of the soul and of its value. The power of the ruling efforts however concern not only the course of representations and feelings; it also manifests itself through inborn necessity in outer bodily motions, which throw a bridge from the spiritual values of thought to sensible presentation.100 98 99 100

Lotze, Fundamentals, §9, p. 12. Lotze, Fundamentals, §13, p. 15. Lotze, “On the Concept of the Beautiful,” p. 299.

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For Lotze, the possibility of real interaction between body and mind through which the spiritual purposes of the universe are realized is essential, and art is a crucial medium for this interaction as well as a reminder of its possibility. “Without being related to any purpose the fulfillment of which . . . would be insignificant in comparison to the world as a whole and the sense of the world-course,” the beautiful, “partly in the movements of a mind, partly in the forms of that which exists,” exhibits the “peaceful result” of both.101 On this general basis, Lotze, like other nineteenth-century thinkers, builds a classification of the particular arts, although not in such detail as Hegel or Vischer. Indeed, he derives the necessity of a variety of art forms from the infinite multitude and complexity of the world that the arts represent for us: since the world is so multiform, there must also be a variety of ways of experiencing and representing its harmoniousness, thus a variety of arts. Lotze denies that there can be any single “ideal of beauty” and insists upon the multiplicity of the ways in which beauty may appear: Precisely because beauty is not an appearance, but the sense of a general occurrence, the whole wealth of its depth is exhausted only if we consider the infinite multiplicity of its forms of externalization. Just as every external circumstance that forces a soul to the development of an activity does not alter this soul but rather enriches it through the reality and the recollection of a deed the possibility of which lay within it, so does the beautiful of beauty, if we may speak like this, consist not as much in a simple concept of its determination as in the infinite multiplicity of its confirmation through the course of appearances.102

There can be no single ideal of beauty, for beauty “is the sense of the entire cosmos with all of its blessedness, suddenly coming to appearance in some particular, which through its evocative features decisively places itself in the interconnection of this world and on all sides resonates through gentle but recognizable relations with the totality of the fullness and of the wealth of which it is a part.”103 Among the different media of art, Lotze pays particular attention to architecture, music, and painting. One passage from his treatment of landscape painting will have to suggest his approach as a whole: We place ourselves in a twofold way into the gentle waves of the spirit of nature that we here admire. For first we coalesce with every individual form

101 102 103

Lotze, “The Concept of the Beautiful,” p. 304. Lotze, “The Concept of the Beautiful,” p. 319. Lotze, “The Concept of the Beautiful,” p. 334.

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and its internal conditions; we feel the fresh force of the vegetation . . . we sense the silent rest of the massive layers of sandstone or the thrusting power of elevated basalts tumbled upon one another, the restless motion, finally, with which the sea struggles against its banks. But a second, greater pleasure lies in the apprehension of the relations and affinities that everywhere penetrate this manifold life . . . so from the picture as from nature itself our imagination sways over the outline of the land . . . of the mountain . . . of the valleys, and the manifold feelings of constant forward motion, sudden leaps or . . . free turnings, lovely enclosures or wide vistas come together into a total intuition of the life that announces itself in the entire region.104

Here we have a concrete instance of the abstract idea that there is a harmony between the free play of our mental powers and the harmony of the larger universe of which we are a part that is the core of Lotze’s aesthetics. Lotze thought that his theory gave due weight to the infinite wealth of nature and its contingency at least relative to any laws that we can formulate in a way that the views of other idealists, especially his contemporary Vischer, did not.105 Since, as we saw, Vischer himself thought that he had given fuller credit to contingency and the necessity of its represention in art than Hegel had, this criticism of Vischer may not have been entirely fair. But there can be no question that Lotze more fully rehabilitated Kant’s idea of the free play of the faculties itself as well as his idea that the occurrence of this free play is a sign that we are at home in the world – as illustrated by his approach to landscape painting – than any of his immediate predecessors or contemporaries did. Lotze may thus have opened the way for the renewed emphasis on the aesthetics of play in the later nineteenth-century theories that we will encounter in subsequent chapters. On the other hand, Lotze did not explicitly emphasize the emotional dimension of our response to nature or art as Vischer had, let alone allow such emotional response to become transformed into beauty itself. Thus, although Lotze had resurrected Kant’s conception of play and Rosenkranz had emphasized the idea of freedom as both the source and the object of art, while Vischer had emphasized the emotional side of aesthetic experience, a full synthesis of the three approaches to aesthetic experience, though hinted at by Schleiermacher, had not yet appeared in German aesthetics by the end of the period of Hegel’s greatest influence, around 1860.

104 105

Lotze, “The Conditions of Beauty in Art,” p. 253. See Lotze, Fundamentals, §17, pp. 19–20, where he explicitly refers to Vischer.

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We could now turn to German aesthetics in the remaining decades of the nineteenth century to see if and when such a threefold synthesis finally reemerges. But instead of doing that immediately, we will first turn our attention to developments elsewhere, primarily in Great Britain, and then return to the German scene in the third part of the present volume.

Part Two

(MOSTLY) BRITISH AESTHETICS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

I

n Part One of this book, we have seen how the leading aestheticians of German Idealism, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, all adopted a cognitivist approach to aesthetics, supposing that the goal of aesthetic experience and particularly of art was to provide insight into the nature of reality, either for its own sake, as in Schelling and Hegel, or as a means to relief from the pain of ordinary life, as in Schopenhauer. We also saw how for Hegel the supposition that art aims at delivering metaphysical truth is its justification but also its own death sentence. We then saw how many of those influenced by these philosophers struggled to escape from the restrictions and consequences of their positions. Schelling’s influence was transmitted to England through Coleridge, but Wordsworth, personally close to Coleridge, Shelley, Emerson in the United States, and even John Stuart Mill, on whom the influence of Coleridge ameliorated the utilitarianism bequeathed to him by Bentham and his own father, sought ways to make room for the emotional impact particularly of art in their own aesthetics. Among German aestheticians after Hegel, there were similar struggles with the confines of his reductive approach to aesthetics, and while Rosenkranz, for example, aimed to broaden Hegel’s approach to the cognitive value of art, Vischer over the course of his long career, devoted almost exclusively to aesthetics, sought to make room for both the Kantian idea of aesthetic experience as the free and harmonious play of our mental powers and the non-Kantian idea of the emotional impact of aesthetic experience of both nature and art. Lotze too sought for at least some common ground between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. At this point, we could continue the story of the development of German aesthetics in the second half of the nineteenth century, which was largely a response to these developments in Germany in the first half of the century, unlike German aesthetics in the latter part of the

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eighteenth century, which, as we saw in Volume 1, was very much a response to the French and British aesthetics of the middle part of that century as well as to the domestic development of aesthetics from Wolff to Meier. But to avoid too much disruption to chronology, as well as to introduce a little variety into our narrative, at this point instead of now continuing the history of German aesthetics we will turn to developments outside of Germany beginning around the 1840s, thus after the earlier works of Emerson and Mill and at the same time as the earlier works of Vischer and Lotze considered in the last chapter. As the title of this part suggests, we will focus primarily on the development of aesthetics in Britain from the 1840s to the 1890s, but will also consider at least some developments in France in this period as well. After this, we will return to Germany for the final part of the present volume, with some consideration of the influence of late nineteenth-century German aesthetics in Britain and the United States as well. Yet the development to be traced in the present part has a certain similarity to the narrative arc of German aesthetics in the first part of the century. Just as the German Idealists adopted an exclusively cognitivist approach to aesthetics that then had to be broadened to allow room for the other approaches that had been identified in the previous century, so outside of Germany we will also see a development from an essentially cognitivist approach to a more multi-sided approach. In this case we will see that the dominant aesthetics of mid-nineteenth century Britain, the aesthetics of John Ruskin, himself not a professional philosopher of course but the inescapable critic of art and society of his time and place, is above all an aesthetics of truth and truthfulness, but that in this case the immediate response was not simply an attempt to amplify his approach but an attempt to reject it completely: the movement of aestheticism or “art for art’s sake” that emerged in later nineteenth-century Britain, although with some French and even American antecedents, can be considered a violent rejection of Ruskin’s approach to aesthetics. We will then see that this movement itself produced responses, equally violent in the case of the Russian Leo Tolstoy, who might be regarded as having combined a narrow interpretation of the aesthetics of truth with an equally narrow interpretation of the aesthetics of emotional impact in his 1896 tract What is Art?, and more irenic in the case of the British Neo-Hegelian Bernard Bosanquet. The latter’s career bridges the divide between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, and so once we have considered his work we will interrupt the flow of our narrative yet again to return to the further development of German aesthetics in

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the last third of the nineteenth century. In Volume 3, we will resume the story of the development of British aesthetics in the twentieth century, continue the history of German aesthetics, but also turn to a new scene, namely the United States, where we will consider the development of aesthetics from the first book of George Santayana until the end of the twentieth century. Santayana’s book The Sense of Beauty appeared in 1896, the same year as Tolstoy’s work, but introduces ideas that will only be more fully developed in the next century, and so we will count him as belonging to the twentieth century while Tolstoy still counts as part of the nineteenth.

5 Ruskin

1. Ruskin, Turner, and Truth The most significant figure in nineteenth-century British aesthetics was not a professor of philosophy, nor a professor of any kind at all until late in his career, when John Ruskin (1819–1900), art critic and social critic, became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. But the history of aesthetics can hardly be told without an account of Ruskin, who, although he only occasionally mentioned names from the British and German philosophical aesthetics of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, clearly drew much while rejecting some from these traditions, and who would in turn become both an influence on and target for much of British aesthetics into the twentieth century. The works that made Ruskin’s name – the five volumes of Modern Painters (1843–60), the Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and the three volumes of The Stones of Venice (1851–53) – were, as their titles suggest, works of description and criticism focused on the fine arts of painting and architecture, indeed, in the case of the last-named work even travel literature, but they also had a theoretical dimension that aligned Ruskin squarely with the philosophical aesthetics that, as we have seen, dominated the first half of the nineteenth century, the aesthetics of truth. As already suggested, Ruskin’s version of the aesthetics of truth would then produce a powerful reaction, in the first instance the movement known as aestheticism or “art for art’s sake,” which does not so much try to amplify Ruskin’s theory as to undercut the need for aesthetic theory altogether, arguing that aesthetic experience is a domain of pleasure that needs no explanation or justification from other areas of human experience. Modern Painters, the first volume of which Ruskin published at the age of twenty-four, began as a brief in behalf of the English landscape painter 191

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Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), to whose work and person Ruskin had been introduced at a very early age by his father. Ruskin defended Turner’s work on the grounds that it contained more of both truth and beauty than anything else that had yet been done. Ruskin began the Preface to the work with these words: The work now laid before the public originated in indignation at the shallow and false criticism of the periodicals of the day on the works of the great living artist to whom it principally refers. It was intended to be a short pamphlet . . . I now scarcely know whether I should announce it as an Essay on Landscape Painting, and apologize for its frequent reference to the works of a particular master; or, announcing it as a critique on particular works, apologize for its lengthy discussion of general principles. . . . But when public taste seems plunging deeper and deeper into degradation day by day, and when the press universally exerts such power as it possesses to direct the feeling of the nation more completely to all that is theatrical, affected, and false in art; while it vents its ribald buffooneries on the most exalted truth, and the highest ideal of landscape, that this or any other age has ever witnessed, it becomes the imperative duty of all who have any perception or knowledge of what is really great in art, and any desire for its advancement in England, to come fearlessly forward, regardless of such individual interests as are likely to be injured by the knowledge of what is good and right, to declare and demonstrate, wherever they exist, the essence and authority of the Beautiful and the True.1

This passage suggests that the painting of Turner is to be defended as realizing more fully than any other work the separate desiderata of beauty and truth, and one might infer from this that Ruskin belongs in the tradition of those who, like Kant, separated the value of truth as the content of art from the value of our free play with the beauty of its form while also recognizing that the best art is a synthesis of both of these values. However, although in his general statements of principles for both painting and architecture, Ruskin does separate truth and beauty, his account of beauty itself turns that into a vehicle for a certain kind of truth, so his aesthetics as a whole is dominated by the aesthetics of truth. At the same time, Ruskin clearly distinguishes a number of different kinds of truth in art, and although metaphysical truth is one of the kinds of truth that art can deliver, Ruskin certainly does not interpret art as a vehicle of metaphysical truth that might be better delivered by other means, as Hegel had. Further, Ruskin also adds to the multiple kinds of truth that art can realize truthfulness or sincerity as a property of both artists and artworks. 1

John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume I – Of General Principles and of Truth. Boston: Estes and Lauriat, n.d., pp. 5–6.

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Here he emphasizes a value that a later writer such as Leo Tolstoy will celebrate, although Ruskin certainly does not anticipate Tolstoy in making sincerity the sole value of art. Rather, what is distinctive of Ruskin’s aesthetics among nineteenth-century theories is the variety of forms of truth and truthfulness that it recognizes; the challenge in reading Ruskin is to understand all that he means by truth. This was long ago recognized by one of Ruskin’s most sympathetic readers. Referring to a passage in The Stones of Venice in which Ruskin comments on the irony of the proximity of the seat of the often sinful government of Venice to St. Mark’s Cathedral, Marcel Proust wrote: This passage from The Stones of Venice is of great beauty, rather difficult though it be to give an account of the reasons for this beauty. It seems to us that it rests on something false and we feel some scruples in giving in to it. And yet there must be some truth in it. Properly speaking, there is no beauty that is entirely deceitful, for aesthetic pleasure is precisely what accompanies the discovery of a truth. To what kind of truth may correspond the very vivid pleasure we experience when reading such a page is rather difficult to say.2

What Proust writes about Ruskin’s own prose is true of the object of that prose, namely aesthetic pleasure itself: it is essentially connected to truth, but to truth understood in a way that will bring out what is distinctive about aesthetic experience yet without simplifying that experience. Ruskin was the only child of devoted parents, both of whom took a great interest in his education in art as well as religion. His mother was a pious Evangelical who hoped to make a minister out of her son, and as we will see there is a strong religious dimension in Ruskin’s early writing, and a religious tone that remained strong even after his eventual loss of faith. His father was a Scottish-born wine merchant, one of the original founders of the sherry firm of Pedro Domecq, and when he went on sales trips to the great houses of England he took along his son, who was thus exposed early to the private art collections of the nation. From John’s sixth year on, the prospering family also took annual trips to see the landscape, architecture, and paintings of Europe, above all France, Switzerland, and Italy, and Ruskin gained a great knowledge of and love for both natural and painted landscape on these trips. His father also began his own small collection of art, especially of Turner, and Ruskin 2

Marcel Proust, On Reading Ruskin: Prefaces to La Bible d’Amiens and Sésame et les Lys. Trans. and ed. Jean Autret, William Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 52–3.

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met the famous artist when he was still quite young, indeed wrote his first defense of Turner when he was just seventeen, although the artist himself deterred him from publishing it then. At the same age, after being educated primarily at home, Ruskin (accompanied by his mother) went up to Oxford, where, after a promising start as the winner of a prestigious poetry prize, he had to take time off on account of illness, and graduated, without distinction, only six years after entrance. However, no sooner had he finally graduated than he published the first volume of Modern Painters under the anonymous title of “A Graduate of Oxford,” and his extraordinary literary career was under way. The posthumous collection of Ruskin’s published works eventually ran to thirty-nine stout volumes.3 In addition to the three works already mentioned, Ruskin’s works directly pertaining to art include Pre-Raphaelism (1851), Giotto and his works in Padua (three parts, 1853–60), Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854–55), catalogues of the works of Turner bequeathed to the National Gallery of Britain (1857–58, 1881) and to the Fitzwilliam Museum (1861), The Political Economy of Art (1857, expanded in 1880 as A Joy Forever), The Elements of Drawing (1857), Lectures on Art (1870), and The Laws of Fésole (four parts, 1877–78). His works of social criticism written after 1860, following his final loss of religious faith in 1858, include Unto this Last (1862), Sesame and Lilies (1865), Fors Clavigera (1871–84), Munera Pulveris (originally “Essays on Political Economy”) (1872), and The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884); he also wrote numerous works on the geology, botany, and natural history of both Britain and the Alps, numerous travel works on Italy and Britain, a study of Greek mythology, The Queen of the Air (1869), and the autobiography Praeterita (three volumes, 1885–89).4 Ruskin never had to work for a living, and following the death of his father in 1864, he became wealthy; his only formal employment was as the Slade Professor at Oxford, a position that he held, with interruptions for bouts of mental illness between 1879 and 1883, from 1869 until 1885, when he finally resigned in protest at the introduction of vivisection into scientific instruction at the university. But in spite of his wealth, Ruskin was unhappy in love, first entering an allegedly unconsummated marriage in 1848 that ended in 1854 when his wife left him for the painter J.E. Millais, and then falling in love with 3

4

E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds., The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (London: George Allen, 1903–12). A compendious although still “select” bibliography of Ruskin’s works is provided in Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, introduction by Sir Arnold Lunn (London: Dent, 1956), pp. xii–xiv.

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a ten-year-old girl, Rose La Touche, a student at a school that Ruskin was sponsoring. Ruskin proposed to her when she turned eighteen, but she would herself die insane, at age twenty-seven, without ever having agreed to marry her nearly thirty years older suitor. Ruskin suffered increasingly from bouts of mental illness in his later years, and after his final breakdown in 1888 lived as an invalid, with only occasional periods of lucidity, at his estate in the Lake Country, under the care of his cousin Joanna Severn. He died in 1900, the sad final chapter of his life thus paralleling the nearly simultaneous breakdown and eventual death of Friedrich Nietzsche, although Ruskin enjoyed twenty-five more years of productivity than did Nietzsche.5 As noted, Ruskin began Modern Painters with the claim that the work of Turner manifested both truth and beauty to an unparalleled degree. In his formal statement of general principles, however, Ruskin distinguishes five sources of “greatness in art”: “ideas of power,” “ideas of imitation,” “ideas of truth,” “ideas of beauty,” and “ideas of relation.”6 This list is somewhat misleading, however, for power is a general source of value that is not restricted to art, while imitation, although it would seem to be closely related to truth, is dismissed by Ruskin as of no great value. This leaves truth, beauty, and relation as the distinctive sources of value for art, but both beauty and relation turn out, on closer analysis, to be forms of truth. So the distinctive sources of greatness in art are all forms of truth, although by no means all the same sort of truth. Power is the “excellence” by means of which “difficulty” is overcome, so to “prove a work excellent” in this regard “we have only to prove the difficulty of its production.”7 Ruskin is explicit that whether a work that 5

6

7

Ruskin has been well-treated by biographers, from The Life of John Ruskin by W.G. Collingwood, the father of the philosopher R.G. Collingwood who will be a central figure later in this narrative (London: Methuen & Co., 1893), to the magisterial work by Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), and John Ruskin: The Later Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). For a survey of Ruskin’s intellectual career, see also John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). Works on Ruskin’s aesthetics include George P. Landow, The Aesthetical and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), and Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). A brief survey is George P. Landow, Ruskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); I have drawn on pp. 1–3, 92–95 for the brief account of Ruskin’s life here. See also Raters, Kunst, Wahrheit und Gefühl, pp. 260–89. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Synopsis of Contents, p. 57, and Part I, Section I, chapters II–VII, pp. 85–106. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, p. 88.

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demonstrates power “be useful or beautiful is another question,” that is, there is nothing distinctively aesthetic about the manifestation of power. As he also puts it, “the nature and effects of ideas of power . . . are independent of the nature or worthiness of the object from which they are received,” so “whatever has been the subject of a great power, whether there be intrinsic and apparent worthiness in itself or not, bears with it the evidence of having been so, and is capable of giving the ideas of power, and the consequent pleasures, in their full degree.”8 Ruskin’s point is simply that there is something admirable and pleasing about the display of human power – he is not talking about the power of nonhuman nature or of the divine here, although as we will shortly see, both of those powers do play a large role in his aesthetics – and that our pleasure in the power manifested in a work is independent of its other sources of pleasure. His suggestion that we are capable of enjoying the manifestation of power in a work in “full degree” independent of the other values of the work is misleading, however, for Ruskin goes on to argue that “men may let their great powers lie dormant, while they employ their mean and petty powers on mean and petty objects; but it is physically impossible to employ a great power, except on a great object.”9 Presumably this means that there is no logical impossibility in devoting great effort to trivial (or even bad) ends, but that it is psychologically impossible for human beings to devote their greatest effort to something that does not seem worthy of that effort on independent grounds. So Ruskin’s position seems to be that the power – the effort as well as the skill – devoted to a work of art is something that we admire for its own sake, just as we admire such power when manifested in other forms of human work, but that we cannot expect to find the greatest manifestations of such power, and thus the greatest pleasure in it, except in works that have other sources of value to a high degree, and thus, in the case of works of art, except in works that manifest the other sources of specifically aesthetic value to a high degree. Is imitation such an independent source of genuinely and uniquely aesthetic value? Ruskin dismisses ideas of imitation and the pleasure in them as “the most contemptible which can be received from art,” as no better than “the mean and paltry surprise which is felt in jugglery.”10 This is because he defines imitation as “anything look[ing] like what is not, 8 9 10

Ruskin, Modern Painters I, pp. 86–7. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, p. 87. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, pp. 92–3.

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the resemblance being so great as nearly to deceive,” which produces “a kind of pleasurable surprise, and agreeable excitement of mind, exactly the same in its nature as that which we receive from juggling.”11 The pleasure that we take in imitation in this sense can perhaps be understood as the pleasure in being threatened with deception but of being able to resist it, a pleasure that is (to borrow terms from Edmund Burke, whom Ruskin mentions in this chapter) negative rather than positive, and also, we might say, a pleasure that turns us toward ourselves, that is, toward an admiration of our own cleverness in resisting the deception, rather than toward what ought to be the object of our attention, the work of art and its genuine merits as well as what is represented by the work of art, the glory of nature itself. Ruskin makes the latter point in stating that “Ideas of imitation are contemptible . . . because not only do they preclude the spectator from enjoying inherent beauty in the subject, but they can only be received from mean and paltry subjects because it is impossible to imitate anything really great. We can ‘paint a cat or a fiddle, so that they look as if we could take them up;’ but we cannot imitate the ocean, or the Alps”12 (classical examples, of course, of the sublime rather than the beautiful). By “subject” in this sentence Ruskin appears to mean not the work of art but its subject, for example, in the case of a painting of the Alps, the Alps themselves, and then his first point here is that the self-directed pleasure we take in escaping from actually being deceived distracts us from the proper admiration of what is actually depicted; his second point would be that given the impossibility of being even nearly deceived into taking a painting of the Alps for the Alps themselves, the kind of imitation he is attacking could hardly be the source of our pleasure in such a painting. Finally, Ruskin objects that the kind of skill required for such imitative work is not real power, but “requires nothing more for its attainment than a true eye, a steady hand, and moderate industry – qualities which in no degree separate the imitative artist from a watch-maker, pin-maker, or any other neat-handed artificer,”13 so this sort of imitation blocks the possibility of our enjoyment of real power in a work of art, which, although it is not a source of pleasure that is unique to art, is a genuine source of pleasure in art. Ruskin’s comparison of the imitative artist to a pin-maker cannot but put one in mind of Adam Smith’s famous example of the manufacture of pins in The Wealth of Nations, and at least suggests that Smith’s analysis of 11 12 13

Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part I, §1, ch. IV, §2, p. 91. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part I, §1, ch. IV, §5, p. 93. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part I, §1, ch. IV, §6, p. 94.

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imitation, in which what we admire in imitation is the fact that an object can be successfully represented in a medium that would not appear to be naturally well-suited for that purpose, might be Ruskin’s unstated target here. One might also question Ruskin’s dismissal of the pleasures of neardeception in light of the success of trompe l’oeil painting, especially in the United States by such painters as William Harnett and John Frederick Peto, not long after Ruskin wrote these words. But perhaps Ruskin suggests that our pleasure in such paintings is not in their mere verisimilitude, but in something else, perhaps in the mood of nostalgia created by the depicted objects. For present purposes, however, the important question is, if the kind of imitation that Ruskin has here dismissed is not the kind of truth in art that he is celebrating, then what is? Ruskin begins his chapter “Of Ideas of Truth” with the straightforward explanation that “The word truth, as applied to art, signifies the faithful statement, either to the mind or senses, of any fact of nature.”14 This suggests the classical definition of truth as adequatio rei et intellectus, the adequacy of a representation to its object. But interpretation is needed to accommodate the fact that the art with which Ruskin is primarily concerned, namely painting, deals with images, not statements, indeed that the genre of painting with which he is particularly concerned, namely landscape painting, does not typically carry a readily verbalizable message, as perhaps some other genres of painting, such as historical painting, might be thought to do. Interpretation will also be needed to prevent this definition of truth from collapsing the truth of painting back into the kind of trompe l’oeil imitation that Ruskin has just dismissed. In fact, the theme that Ruskin will develop under the rubric of truth, which will occupy the first volume of Modern Painters and half of the second, is that painting should not represent its object in a mechanically imitative way but rather that it should suggest to the viewer what it is like to experience the object. What Ruskin has in mind here might be thought of as a phenomenological sense of truth: truth in painting is not a correspondence between an image and an object that might be analogized to the truth of a statement about a fact, but is rather a correspondence between the experience afforded by a painting and the experience afforded by an actual view of its subject. Once we have developed this theme, however, we will also see that phenomenological truth is only the first sort of truth that Ruskin finds in art.

14

Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part I, §1, ch. V, §5, p. 94.

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Ruskin’s initial chapter on truth concentrates on the difference between what he means by imitation and what he means by truth. The difference between the two is summed up in the following points. First, “Imitation can only be of something material, but truth has reference to statements both of the qualities of material things, and of emotions, impressions, and thoughts. There is a moral as well as material truth, – a truth of impression as well as of form, – of thought as well as of matter; and the truth of impression and thought is a thousand times the more important of the two.”15 This brief passage really anticipates the gist of Ruskin’s full account of both truth and beauty, for as he continues it will become clear that what he means by truth in art is the recreation and communication of our impressions or experiences of nature, while what he means by beauty is not a superficial aspect of the forms of works of art but rather the communication of the underlying order and divine source of nature – the truth of thought rather than of impression, what we might conceive of as metaphysical rather than phenomenological truth. That will emerge only later, however. For now, Ruskin continues his attack on mere imitation. His next point is that “Truth may be stated by any signs or symbols which have a definite signification in the minds of those to whom they are addressed, although such signs be themselves no image or likeness of anything”;16 in other words, truth is not an isomorphic relation between sign and signified, but rather a question of whether a work can in any way communicate a veridical experience or thought of its subject to its audience. With this brief remark, Ruskin anticipates the attack upon the idea that successful artistic depiction is a matter of resemblance that would be developed by the art historian Ernst Gombrich and the philosopher Nelson Goodman in the middle of the twentieth century.17 Third, Ruskin maintains that imitation is inimical to concentrated attention to an object or to our impression or thought of it, because “an idea of imitation requires the resemblance of as many attributes as we are usually cognizant of in [the] real presence” of an object, while “an idea of truth” as he conceives of it “exists in the statement of one attribute of anything.”18 Here Ruskin continues to talk about 15 16 17

18

Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part I, §1, ch. V, p. 95. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part I, §1, ch. V, p. 95. For Gombrich, see Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Bollingen Series XXXV:5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), Part One; for Goodman, see Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1968), to be discussed in Volume 3. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part I, §1, ch. V, p. 96.

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truth as a property of statements, but the requirement of focus that he suggests will be central to the phenomenological conception of truthful impression that he actually develops. Finally, Ruskin insists “on the last and greatest distinction between ideas of truth and of imitation – that the mind, in receiving one of the former, dwells upon its own conception of the fact, or form, or feeling stated, and is occupied only with the qualities and character of that fact or form, considering it as real and existing, being all the while totally regardless of the signs or symbols by which the notion of it has been conveyed.”19 In enjoying mere imitation, we must be conscious of both the signified and the sign – on Adam Smith’s account, we must be conscious of the disparity between the sign and the signified which makes the successful representation of the latter by the former a feat, on Ruskin’s account we must become conscious of the difference between what is signified and the mere sign in order to escape from the deception to which we almost succumb – but in enjoying artistic truth, the sign disappears from our consciousness, leaving us with something like an impression of nature itself. Our experience of nature is immediate, without consciousness of any of the machinery by which it may be effected, such as retinal images; in the case of art our focus should also be on the experience that is produced and not on the device that produces it. Since immediacy is a characteristic of our experience of nature, it must also be a feature of the phenomenological truth of art. In the extended discussion of truth in art that, as already noted, occupies most of the first and half of the second volume of Modern Painters, it becomes even clearer that what Ruskin really intends by this rubric is the truth of impression, or phenomenological truth. But Ruskin’s idea is perhaps best epitomized in a passage on “Turnerian Topography” in the fourth volume of Modern Painters. Here Ruskin first gives a sarcastic account of the mechanical procedure of ordinary painters, who make sure they have enough ruins in the background and figures in the foreground to make their paintings “generally interesting . . . all this being, as simply a matter of recipe and practice as cookery,” and then contrasts this to the work of the “artist who has real invention” – that is, Turner – who first “receives a true impression from the place itself, and takes care to keep hold of that as his chief good . . . and then sets himself as far as possible to reproduce that impression on the mind of the spectator of his picture.” The artist’s experience of his subject is not a momentary glimpse of it: “this impression on the mind never results from the mere 19

Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part I, §1, ch. V, p. 99.

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piece of scenery which can be included within the limits of the picture. It depends on the temper into which the mind has been brought, both by all the landscape round, and by what has been seen previously in the course of the day”; but this is of course true of any real experience of objects outside of some artificial setting like a cognitive psychology laboratory. Ruskin then continues, still using the language of “facts” which seems best suited to the conception of truth as correspondence between statements and facts: Any topographical delineation of the facts, therefore, must be wholly incapable of arousing in the mind of the beholder those sensations which would be caused by the facts themselves, seen in their natural relations to others. And the aim of the great inventive landscape painter must be to give the far higher and deeper truth of mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts, and to reach a representation which, though it may be totally useless to engineers or geographers, and when tried by rule and measure, totally unlike the place, shall yet be capable of producing on the far-away beholder’s mind precisely the impression which the reality would have produced, and putting his heart into the same state in which it would have been, had he verily descended into the valley from the gorges of Airolo [a specific landscape painted by Turner].20

By “higher and deeper” truth Ruskin here means phenomenological rather than, say, cartographical truth, although he also could have used these terms for the metaphysical sense of truth that we will encounter in his subsequent treatment of beauty. Ruskin organizes his detailed discussion of the truth of impressions first around the “general truths” of the means used in all painting, namely the truths of tone, color, chiaroscuro, and space,21 and then around the main classes of objects depicted in landscape, namely the truth of skies,22 the truth of earth (or of geology and topography), the truth of water, and the truth of vegetation.23 In all of these sections, his aim is to show how veridical experiences of the objects of painting can be created through the means of painting. There is no room here for a discussion of Ruskin’s immensely detailed account of these forms of truth, which contrasts many of Turner’s works to the vast range of paintings from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries already known to the still only 20

21 22 23

Ruskin, Modern Painters IV, LE 6.32–9, cited from John Ruskin, Selected Writings, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 86–8; the last passage is also cited by Landow, Ruskin, p. 32. Modern Painters I, Part II, section II, chs. I–V. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part II, section III, chs. I–V. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part II (continued), sections IV–VI.

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twenty-seven-year-old Ruskin. But several passages from his chapter on “The Truth of Space” can illustrate his approach throughout this wealth of material. The first emphasizes in general terms Ruskin’s conception of truth as truthful impression, or his view that the aim of truth in painting is the aim of capturing not nature itself but the character of our impressions of nature, with all the ways in which those are both precise and not, self-contained yet reaching beyond themselves. It also suggests the character of Ruskin’s argument for the superiority of Turner’s landscapes even over those traditionally regarded as the greatest: Nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing. Now, I would not wish for any more illustrative or marked examples of the total contradiction of these two great principles, than the landscape works of the old masters, taken as a body: – the Dutch masters furnishing the cases of seeing everything, and the Italians of seeing nothing. The rule with both is indeed the same, differently applied. “You shall see the bricks in the wall, and be able to count them, or you shall see nothing but a dead flat;” but the Dutch give you the bricks, the Italians the flat. Nature’s rule being the precise reverse – “You shall never be able to count the bricks, but you shall never see a dead space.”24

The last is what our ordinary experience of nature is like (here taking the built environment as part of nature), and the aim of truth in art is to capture that. The second passage exhibits Ruskin’s conception of truth through a specific example: Perhaps the truth of this system of drawing is better to be understood by observing the distant character of rich architecture, than of any other object. Go to the top of Highgate Hill on a clear summer morning at five o’clock, and look at Westminster Abbey.25 You will receive an impression of a building enriched with multitudinous vertical lines. Try to distinguish one of those lines all the way down from the one next to it: You cannot. Try to count them: You cannot. Try to make out the beginning of or end of any one of them: You cannot. Look at it generally, and it is all symmetry and arrangement. Look at it in all its parts, and it is all inextricable confusion. Am not I, at this moment, describing a piece of Turner’s drawing, with the same words by which I describe nature. . . . Turner, and Turner only, would follow and render on the canvas that mystery of decided line, – that distinct, sharp, visible, but unintelligible and inextricable richness, which, examined 24 25

Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part II, section II, ch. V, §5, p. 301. This might still have been possible in 1843; one could hardly do it now.

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part by part, is to the eye nothing but confusion and defeat, which, taken as a whole, is all unity, symmetry, and truth.26

It may not be entirely fair of Ruskin to attribute the achievement of such phenomenological truth only to his contemporary Turner and not to any Dutch master – Ruskin certainly captures the experience I had the first time I saw Vermeer’s incomparable View of Delft in the Mauritshuis in the Hague. But the point remains: truth in painting is phenomenological truth to what would be our experience of its subject, not any form of truth that is independent of the phenomenological character of experience. It is like what Baumgarten called “aesthetic truth” or verisimilitude, something felt to be true by the senses rather than known to be true by the intellect. We must now turn from Ruskin’s discussion of what he labels truth to his discussions of beauty and relation as sources of pleasure and value in art, and show that he conceives of these too as forms of truth. Ruskin begins his account of beauty with a definition of beauty that makes it sound as if it has nothing to do with truth and can be apprehended without the involvement of anything beyond the external senses: “Any material object which can give us pleasure in the simple contemplation of its outward qualities without any direct and definite exertion of the intellect, I call in some way, or in some degree, beautiful.” There seems to be no room for thought here: “Why we receive pleasure from some forms and colors, and not from others, is no more to be asked or answered than why we like sugar and dislike wormwood. The utmost subtilty of investigation will only lead us to ultimate instincts and principles of human nature, for which no father reason can be given than the simple will of the Deity that we should be so created.”27 However, this initial, strictly noncognitivist account of beauty, so reminiscent of Hume’s limited definition of the sources of beauty in “Of the Standard of Taste,” which leaves no room for a free play of higher mental capacities with the beautiful object, but seems to make beauty into a stimulus of a purely physiological response, is immediately qualified: Observe, however, I do not mean by excluding direct exertion of the intellect from ideas of beauty, to assert that beauty has no effect upon nor connection with the intellect. All our moral feelings are so interwoven with our intellectual powers, that we cannot affect the one without in some degree addressing the others; and in all high ideas of beauty, it is more than 26 27

Ruskin, Modern Painters I, section II, ch. V, §12, pp. 307–8. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part I, §1, ch. VI, §1, p. 100.

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probable that much of the pleasure depends on delicate and untraceable perceptions of fitness, propriety, and relation, which are purely intellectual, and through which we arrive at our noblest ideas of what is commonly and rightly called “intellectual beauty.”28

Ruskin gestures toward his initial characterization of beauty with his remark that no exertion of the intellect is involved in the response to beauty, which makes this response at least analogous to a purely sensory response in involving no voluntary activity of thought – Ruskin’s model of beauty in this passage seems reminiscent of Hutcheson’s account of our response to beauty as immediate and involuntary, and in that regard like a sense, even though this response is a “reflex” response to sense perceptions and not itself a sense perception. But even this characterization of our response to beauty as intellectual but immediate does not reveal what Ruskin means by “high ideas of beauty.” His full account, presented in the second volume of Modern Painters, is that our response to beauty is a theoretic but not merely intellectual response; it is nothing less than a response to the moral significance of various formal and relational properties of objects, a significance that at least in the earlier stages of Ruskin’s career depends on the recognition or interpretation of the divine origin of the elements of beauty, even if this recognition or interpretation does not require an “exertion” of the intellect. Ruskin’s elaboration of his initial account of the “ideas of beauty” thus begins with a discussion of the “theoretic faculty” that distinguishes our response to beauty from a merely sensual or a merely intellectual response: The term “æsthesis” properly signifies mere sensual perception of the outward qualities and necessary effects of bodies . . . But I wholly deny that the impressions of beauty are in any way sensual, – they are neither sensual nor intellectual, but moral, and for the faculty for receiving them, whose difference from mere perception I shall immediately endeavor to explain, no term can be more accurate or convenient than that employed by the Greeks, “theoretic,” which I pray permission, therefore, always to use, and to call the operation of the faculty itself Theoria.29

Ruskin’s argument is that beauty is ultimately of moral significance, but to make this argument he first has to distinguish his conception of morality from anything merely utilitarian. He starts his argument by arguing that the “Utilitarians” (he uses this term as the name of a party, 28 29

Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part I, §I, ch. VI, §4, pp. 101–2. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. II, §1, p. 201.

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but mentions no individuals) have not even understood the true nature of utility. His critique of utilitarianism reveals the premise for his own account of beauty, even though the traditional conception of the beauty of utility, as found for example in Hume, will be fundamentally transformed in Ruskin’s account: Men in the present century understand the word Useful in a strange way . . . it will be well in the outset that I define exactly what kind of utility I mean to attribute to art . . . That is to everything created, pre-eminently useful, which enables it rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed to it by its Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what is chiefly useful to man, it is necessary first to determine the use of man himself. Man’s use and function (and let him who will not grant me this follow me no farther, for this I propose always to assume) is to be the witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness. Whatever enables us to fulfill this function, is in the pure and first sense of the word useful to us. Pre-eminently therefore whatever sets the glory of God more brightly before us. But things that only help us to exist, are in a secondary and mean sense, useful.30

Although Ruskin will preserve a distinction between “typical” and “functional” beauty in the account to follow, this passage (which could have been written by Christian Wolff a century earlier) shows that anything that is useful to us in any ordinary sense is only a means to the support of our theoretical capacity, and that the latter is in turn led through its recognition of beauty in nature to a recognition and glorification of God. This is the sense in which the faculty for beauty is “theoretic” but “high ideas of beauty” are ultimately “moral” rather than merely “intellectual.” This comes out in stages in his further elaboration of his conception of our “theoretic faculty.” First, he distinguishes between the merely useful and that which is more properly theoretical by distinguishing between mere craft or technology and pure science: All science and all art may be divided into that which is subservient to life, and which is the object of it. As subservient to life, or practical, their results are, in the common sense of the word, useful. As the object of life or theoretical, they are, in the common sense, useless; and yet the step between practical and theoretic science is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apothecary and the chemist . . . so that the so-called useless part

30

Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section 1, ch. I, §§3–4, pp. 192–3.

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of each profession does by the authoritative and right instinct of mankind assume the superior and more noble place.

However, the merely intellectual contemplation of the laws of geology and chemistry in their own right is still not the real end or “use” of mankind; that is realized only in the recognition of the glory of the God who is the ultimate source of these laws: [A]ll the great phenomena of nature, the knowledge of which is desired by the angels only, by us partly, as it reveals to farther vision the being and the glory of Him in whom they rejoice and we live, dispense yet such kind influences and so much of the material blessing as to be joyfully felt by all inferior creatures, and to be desired by them with such single desire as the imperfection of their nature may admit.31

The value of apothecary, for example, depends upon the value of the contemplation of the laws of chemistry that it makes possible, rather than, as the “Utilitarian” might assume, the converse, but the value of the contemplation of the laws of chemistry in turn is that they reveal to us the nature of their divine source. Ruskin then uses the same twofold structure for his account of beauty: beautiful objects please us through the recognition of various formal and relational properties, but those in turn ultimately please us only insofar as we recognize or interpret them as products of their divine source. Our response to beauty is thus far more cognitive than sensual, but it also depends not merely upon the cognition of formal features or relations but upon the further recognition of their source, and is in that regard not merely “intellectual” but “moral.” Thus Ruskin concludes, “the mere animal consciousness of the pleasantness I call æsthesis; but the exulting, reverent, and grateful perception of it I call theoria. For this, and this only, is the full comprehension and contemplation of the beautiful as a gift of God, a gift not necessary to our being, but added to, and elevating it.”32 The first stage of the experience of beauty may be the sensual and intellectual apprehension of material, formal, and relational features of objects, but the experience of beauty is complete only with the comprehension of the moral significance of the existence of those features. At this stage of his career there seems to be no distinction between the moral and the religious for Ruskin. This structure is at work throughout Ruskin’s detailed account of beauty. Rejecting what he takes to be Archibald Alison’s indiscriminate 31 32

Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. I, §8, pp. 198–9. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. II, §6, p. 205.

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associationism, in which beauty can be created by any pleasing association, Ruskin actually returns to more standard eighteenth-century models by dividing beauty into two specific varieties: By the term beauty, then, properly are signified two things. First, that external quality of bodies already so often spoken of, and which, whether it occur in a stone, flower, beast, or in man, is absolutely identical, which, as I have already asserted, may be shown to be in some sort typical of the Divine attributes, and which, therefore, I shall, for distinction’s sake, call typical beauty; and, secondarily, the appearance of felicitous fulfillment of function in living things, more especially of the joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man. And this kind of beauty I shall call vital beauty.33

In each kind of beauty, surface features of objects must be interpreted as expressions of deeper truths about nature or humanity in order to complete the experience of beauty. In the case of typical beauty, what is to be interpreted are traditionally recognized formal elements of beauty. Ruskin’s list of these elements includes infinity, exemplified, for instance, by “subtilty and constancy of curvature in all natural forms whatsoever”;34 unity, by which he means interrelation among things, “so that there is not any matter, nor any spirit, nor any creature, but is capable of an unity of some kind with other creatures, and in that unity is its perfection and theirs, and a pleasure also for the beholding of all other creatures that can behold”;35 repose, “either a simple appearance of permanence and quietness, as in the massy forms of a mountain or rock, accompanied by the lulling effect of all mighty sight and sound . . . or else . . . repose proper, the rest of things in which there is vitality or capability of motion actual or imagined”;36 symmetry, the “opposition of one part to another and a reciprocal balance obtained” between them “in all perfectly beautiful objects”;37 purity, found in light and color but also in “every healthy and active organic frame,” for example “the young leaves when first their inward energy prevails over the earth, pierces its corruption, and shakes its dust away from their own white purity of life”;38 and finally moderation, such as “chasteness, refinement, or elegance” and “finish, exactness, or refinement, which are commonly desired in the works of men, owing both to their difficulty of accomplishment and consequent expression 33 34 35 36 37 38

Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. III, §17, p. 219. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. V, §15, p. 237. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. VI, §2, p. 241. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, §1, ch. VII, §2, p. 257. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. VIII, §1, p. 263. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. IX, §8, p. 271.

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of care and power . . . and from their greater resemblance to the working of God.”39 The last element of typical beauty, moderation, seems to be a merit of works of art, whereas the preceding elements appear to be features of nature that can in turn be captured in artistic representations of nature. But what is important to Ruskin’s conception of beauty is that all of these features are not enjoyed, whether sensually or intellectually, only for their own sake, but are interpreted as “types,” that is, signs, or in the case of nature rather than its artistic representation, effects, of attributes of God. Thus, Ruskin interprets infinity as “the type of divine incomprehensibility,”40 unity (under which rubric he also discusses proportion) as “the type of the divine comprehensiveness”,41 repose as “the type of divine permanence,”42 symmetry as “the type of divine justice,”43 purity as “the type of divine energy,”44 and, finally, moderation as the “type of government by law,” “that acting of God with regard to all his creation, wherein, though free to operate in whatever arbitrary, sudden, violent, or inconstant ways he will, yet he, if we may reverently so speak, restrains in himself this omnipotent liberty, and works always in consistent modes, called by us laws.”45 Ruskin does not claim that his has “enumerated all the sources of material beauty,” but he does take it to be adequate “to show, in some measure, the inherent worthiness and glory of God’s works.” Understood as signs thereof, the pleasures of beauty can even be called “visionary pleasures,” and in them can be found “cause for thankfulness, ground for hope, anchor for faith, more than in all the other manifold gifts and guidances, wherewith God crowns the years, and hedges the paths of men.”46 Beauty understood this way clearly cannot be merely sensual nor an object for the mere play of our mental powers, but represents a profound form of cognition. Ruskin’s second main kind of beauty is “vital beauty,” the beauty of living things (although any boundary between this and typical beauty has already been breached at least once by the beauty of purity). Vital beauty is divided into three subspecies – relative vital beauty, generic vital beauty, and vital beauty in human beings – and again, these seem

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. X, §§1, 3, p. 272. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. V, p. 228. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. VI, p. 240. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. VII, p. 256. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. VIII, p. 263. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. IX, p. 266. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. X, p. 271 and §6, pp. 274–5. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. XI, §§1, 4, pp. 277, 279.

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to be categories of beauty that can be realized by both natural objects, in this case organisms, and their artistic representation. Relative vital beauty, in spite of its misleading name, is the beauty of a healthy individual, our pleasure in it “the pleasure afforded by every organic form . . . in proportion to its appearance of healthy vital energy; as in a rose-bush, setting aside all considerations of gradated flushing of color and fair folding of line, which it shares with the cloud or the snow-wreath,” and which would be instances of typical beauty, “we find in and through all this, certain signs pleasant and acceptable as signs of life and enjoyment in the particular individual plant itself.”47 Generic vital beauty is what is manifested in an individual insofar as it realizes “The perfect idea of the form and condition in which all the properties of the species are fully developed,” and insofar as a work of art represents such beauty it is “ideal,” although “Ideal works of art . . . represent the result of an act of imagination,” because actual instances of natural species never fully realize the idea of that species.48 Vital beauty in man is more complex than either of these, not merely because the variety of human form and physiognomy is so much greater than that in any other single biological species, but because vital beauty in man is the visible expression of virtue, and there are not only a myriad of ways in which humans can be vicious but also a myriad of ways in which virtue can be expressed – so there can be no simple rule for the depiction of human virtue (here Ruskin discusses at length the challenge of portraiture). But this is all the more reason why the recognition of human vital beauty whether in a living person or in a portrait must be an act of insight that engages all of our cognitive powers, and hardly a mere sense-perception or even a rule bound act of intellection. That Ruskin’s aesthetics is based on truth becomes even clearer as he turns from the “theoretic” to the “imaginative faculty.” Imagination is needed for art because “those sources of pleasure which exist in the external creation . . . in any faithful copy . . . must to a certain extent exist also,” but these “sources of beauty . . . are not presented by any very great work of art in a form of pure transcript. They invariably receive the reflection of the mind under whose shadow they have passed, and are modified or colored by its image,” this modification being “the Work of the Imagination.”49 Imagination is divided into three functions, “imagination 47 48 49

Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. XII, §4, p. 283. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section I, ch. XIII, §2, pp. 293–4. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. I, §1, p. 334.

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associative,” “imagination penetrative,” and “imagination contemplative.” The first of these is the artist’s power to grasp parts and form them into a whole that is more illustrative of the real experience of nature than is any mere transcription of nature. This is more than mere skill at composition (Ruskin criticizes Dugald Stewart for reducing imagination to composition),50 for “in composition the mind can only take cognizance of likeness or dissimilarity, or of abstract beauty among the ideas it brings together,”51 but the imagination associative is not limited to mechanically tracing patterns as it finds them in nature: it “is never at a loss, nor ever likely to repeat itself; nothing comes amiss to it, but whatever rude matter it receives, it instantly so arranges that it comes right; all things fall into their place and appear in that place perfect, useful, and evidently not to be spared.”52 (Of course no artist has had the gift of imagination associative more than Turner.)53 Yet although the imagination associative grasps unities that are greater than those that nature presents, at least to causal observation, Ruskin interprets what we might regard as the idealization of natural connections as recognition of the deeper truth about the organization and unity of nature: “Let it be understood once for all, that imagination never designs to touch anything but truth, and though it does not follow that where there is the appearance of truth, there has been imaginative operation, of this we may be assured, that where there is appearance of falsehood, the imagination has had no hand.”54 Imagination penetrative, the middle but highest of the three functions of the imagination, is described as directly penetrating beneath a superficial image of nature: It never stops at crusts or ashes, or outward images of any kind, it ploughs them all aside, and plunges into the very central fiery heart, whatever semblances and various outward shows and phases the subject may possess, go for nothing, it gets within all fence, cuts down to the root, and drinks the very vital sap of that it deals with . . . it looks not in the eyes, it judges not by the voice, it describes not by outward features, all that it affirms, judges, or describes, it affirms from within.55

In this flood of metaphor, it is hard to see exactly what the object of the imagination penetrative is, but it seems to be deep truth of every kind: 50 51 52 53 54 55

Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. II, §3, p. 341. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. II, §6, p. 243. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. II, §15, p. 350. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. II, §20, pp. 353–4. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. II, §22, p. 355. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. III, §3, p. 358.

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deep truth about the laws and energies of nature, deep truths about the passions and motivations of humans – “the heart and inner nature”56 – and deep truths about the divine that lies behind all that. What Ruskin stresses is rather that although this form of insight is not rule-driven or inferential, it is nevertheless “the highest intellectual power of man. There is no reasoning in it, it works not by algebra, nor by integral calculus, it is a piercing . . . mind’s tongue that works and tastes into the very rock heart, no matter what be the subject submitted to it . . . whatever utmost truth, life, principle, it has laid bare, and that which has no truth, life, nor principle, dissipated into its original smoke at a touch.”57 The imagination penetrative, whether it works with paint or words, gets beneath surfaces, and what it finds can only be described as truth: “there is in every word set down by the imaginative mind an awful under-current of meaning, and evidence and shadow of the deep places out of which it has come.”58 “In all these instances . . . the virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity of gaze (not by reasoning, but by its authoritative and opening power,) a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.”59 “The life of the imagination is in the discovering of truth.” Finally, imagination contemplative, although its name might seem to suggest passivity, is the function of imagination by which the truths grasped by the imagination penetrative and the connections among them grasped by the imagination associative are fixed in memorable form. Here Ruskin’s first examples are from poetry rather than painting, and that the following passage appears in a discussion of Milton’s rendition of Death, not as a condition but as an agent, and Satan, a force of evil not visible to humans, explains his contrast between the immaterial subject and more material images of the imagination contemplative; but what is crucial is the idea that the latter is the function of imagination by which truths once grasped are fixed and thereby enabled to be communicated: “depriving the subject of material and bodily shape, and regarding such of its qualities only as it chooses for particular purposes, it forges these qualities together in such groups and forms as it desires, and gives to their abstract being consistency and reality, by striking them as it were with the die of an image belonging to other matter.”60 Turning 56 57 58 59 60

Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. III, §7, p. 360. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. III, §4, p. 358. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. III, §5, p. 359. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. III, §29, p. 383. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. IV, §4, p. 389.

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to the visual arts, he seems to reverse direction, and to suggest that the imagination contemplative fixes the immaterial meaning behind the material surface. This passage seems to combine the functions of imagination both penetrative and contemplative: “it is of no small importance to prove how in all cases, the imagination is based upon, and appeals to, a deep heart feeling; and how faithful and earnest it is in contemplation of the subject matter, never losing sight of it, or disguising it, but depriving it of extraneous and material accidents, and regarding it in its disembodied essence.”61 But perhaps this is exaggerated; a few pages later, Ruskin may suggest more clearly what he means when he says of the greatest painters that “they all paint the lion more than his mane, and the horse rather than his hide”:62 the essence sought and found by the imagination contemplative need not be immaterial, but is always free from the merely accidental. Ruskin sums up his treatment of the imagination by appeal to truth: “in all its three functions” the imagination is “associative of truth, penetrative of truth, and contemplative of truth; and having no dealings nor relations with any kind of falsity.”63 The imagination is the faculty for discerning and communicating beauty, so beauty is a function of truth. Though we might ordinarily think of beauty as superficial or subjective, for Ruskin beauty is not the truth of appearance that he first discussed under the rubric of truth, but truth about what lies behind appearance, and about the further source of even that: beauty is essential and ultimately metaphysical or theological. What is grasped by imagination and understood in beauty is not always propositional in nature, although presumably in some cases, such as those of the divine attributes grasped in typical beauty, what is grasped could readily be given propositional form. In other cases, the truths of “heart” to which Ruskin often refers, it might be more difficult to give propositional form to the truth that is grasped in beauty. So it would be misleading to try to reduce Ruskin’s conception of beauty to a single form of truth. But in a general way, it should not be too misleading to say that his account of beauty adds a metaphysical dimension to the initially merely phenomenological conception of truth that he had discussed under the rubric of truth. The last of Ruskin’s five sources of pleasure in art is “ideas of relation,” a term that he says he uses “as one of convenience than as adequately 61 62 63

Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. V, §7, p. 396. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. V, §11, p. 399. Ruskin, Modern Painters II, Part III, section II, ch. IV, §22, p. 406.

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expressive of the vast class of ideas” he intends “to be comprehended under it, namely, all those conveyable by art, which are the subjects of distinct intellectual perception and action, and which are therefore worthy of the name of thoughts.”64 Under this head, he says, “must be arranged everything productive of expression, sentiment, and character, whether in figures or landscapes.” Under this rubric Ruskin thus intends to capture the dimension of our experience of art that earlier theorists had tried to capture through the concept of the association of ideas. As the organization of Modern Painters drifted away from its original plan – the third volume, which is titled simply “Of Many Things,” marks the breakdown of the original organization – Ruskin did not end up writing a detailed section on ideas of relation as he had done for truth and beauty in volumes I and II. But as will become evident especially in his writings on architecture, to which we can now begin to turn, one of the things that he clearly had in mind for this dimension of aesthetic experience is the historical associations suggested by works of art, the way in which we interpret both the meanings originally intended by their authors but also, and equally important, the many historical associations works pick up along their historical way from original creation to contemporary reception. Buildings, for example, acquire relations or associations to events that take place within them, whether originally intended or not, as well as to events they witness, whether foreseen or not, and all of these become part of the meaning of the objects for later generations. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, published in 1849 (thus in the interval between the second and third volumes of Modern Painters), Ruskin describes this dimension of aesthetic experience under the rubric “The Lamp of Memory.” Historical associations can color our experience of nature; thus Ruskin describes his experience of a favorite spot in the Alps by writing that “Those ever springing flowers, and ever flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue; and the crests of the sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joux, and the four-square keep of Granson” (where the Swiss Confederates defeated Charles the Bold of Burgundy in 1476, a key victory for the cause of Swiss independence).65 But the recollection of human history is better preserved by monumental works of human hands, although of course it is preserved in human words as well: 64 65

Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part I, section I, ch. VII, §1, p. 104. Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. VI, section I, p. 181.

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It is as the centralisation and protectress of this sacred influence, that Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all that history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears! – how many pages of doubtful record might we not often spare, for a few stones left one upon another! The ambition of the old Babel builders was well directed for this world: there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality: it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld . . . it is in becoming memorial or monumental that a true perfection is attained by civil and domestic buildings; and this partly as they are, with such a view, built in a more stable manner, and partly as their decorations are consequently animated by a metaphorical or historical meaning.66

We might take Ruskin’s disjunction between metaphorical and historical meaning to suggest the distinction between meanings originally intended in the design and construction of buildings and monuments and associations accrued in the course of their subsequent history. Perhaps some instances of the former could be subsumed under one of the categories of truth we have already found in Ruskin: for example, the intended meanings of works of religious architecture may well be cases of what Ruskin has in mind as moral or metaphysical truth. But the accrued historical associations of buildings and monuments seem to fall into a different category: they suggest neither phenomenological truths about our sensory experience of objects nor metaphysical truths about what might lie behind appearances, but historical truths about human ambitions, accomplishments, failures – the whole range of human actions. Thus we might find under Ruskin’s rubric of ideas of association a third form of truth, historical truth, to add to phenomenological and metaphysical truth. Ruskin’s remarks about the relations between architecture and poetry suggest what might be particularly aesthetic about the historical associations of art: we may need the information conveyed by poetry or other verbal sources to interpret the historical significance of a physical artifact, whether ruined or intact, but we need the physical object and its impact upon our senses to make that historical significance fully alive for us. This suggests that for Ruskin the aesthetic dimensions lies in the interaction between sense perception and intellectual or moral

66

Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. VI, sections II–III, pp. 181–2.

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cognition, although as elsewhere there is no suggestion that this interaction should be understood as a form of play.

2. Truth as Sincerity Yet a fourth conception of truth that is central to Ruskin’s aesthetics is that of truthfulness or sincerity, a category that he applies both to artists and to works of art. Part of what Ruskin has in mind is straightforward: if the merits of works of art are any or all of the forms of truth we have so far distinguished, that is, phenomenological, moral and metaphysical, and historical truth, then of course the artist who is to create successful works of art must be committed to the discovery and communication of truth in these several forms. Thus Ruskin writes at the outset of his discussion of Truth in Modern Painters I: We shall . . . find that no artist can be graceful, imaginative, or original, unless he be truthful; and that the pursuit of beauty, instead of leading us away from truth, increases the desire for it and the necessity of it tenfold; so that those artists who are really great in imaginative power, will be found to have based their boldness of conception on a mass of knowledge far exceeding that possessed by those who pride themselves on its accumulation without regarding its use67 –

and presumably to be acquired only by means of an exceptional commitment to the pursuit of truth. Ruskin also applies this requirement of truthfulness to his own work as a critic, even though he is also an advocate: I shall endeavor . . . to enter with care and impartiality into the investigation of the claims of the schools of ancient and modern landscape to faithfulness in representing nature. I shall pay no regard whatsoever to what may be thought beautiful, or sublime, or imaginative. I shall look only for truth: bare, clear, downright, statement of facts; showing in each particular, as far as I am able, what the truth of nature is, and then seeking for the plain expression of it, and for that alone68 –

and finding that, of course, above all in the works of Turner. What Ruskin means here by disregarding “what may be thought beautiful, or sublime, or imaginative” is not that he is disregarding beauty, sublimity, and imaginativeness themselves, for his argument is precisely that these are constituted by various forms of truth; he means rather that he will disregard 67 68

Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part II, section I, ch. I, §9, p. 126. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, Part II, section I, ch. I, §10, p. 127.

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received opinion, accepting as true in any of the aesthetically relevant senses only what his own experience confirms to be true. In this regard, his commitment to truthfulness is not different from that of any sincere scientist. Ruskin develops this theme more fully in a chapter on “The Real Nature of Greatness of Style” in Modern Painters III. Here he argues that “great” or “high” art requires “Choice of Noble Subject,”69 for example, “sacred subjects, such as the Nativity, Transfiguration, Crucifixion,” but only, he qualifies, “if the choice be sincere” – that is, an artist who paints these things without himself believing in them cannot produce great art; “Love of Beauty”;70 “Sincerity”;71 and “Invention,” that is, “it must be produced by the imagination.”72 What he has to say about “love of beauty” and “sincerity” in this chapter deserves special comment. About the former, he says that “The second characteristic of the great school of art is, that it introduces in the conception of its subject as much beauty as is possible, consistently with truth,” and then immediately adds a lengthy footnote in which he argues against the popular (or Neo-Platonic or Romantic) identification of truth with beauty: Only “People with shallow powers of thought, desiring to flatter themselves with the sensation of having attained profundity . . . who desire to be thought philosophical, declare that ‘beauty is truth’ and ‘truth is beauty.’”73 Ruskin explains his rejection of this identification by claiming that “truth and beauty are entirely distinct, though often related things. One is a property of a statement, the other of objects.” This conforms to modern usage of the term “truth,” but seems to belie everything that Ruskin has said about both truth and beauty in the first two volumes of Modern Painters. It does not, however, because Ruskin holds that through a work of art the artist makes a statement: The painter asserts that this which he has painted is the form of a dog, or a man, or a tree. If it be not the form of a dog, a man, or a tree, the painter’s statement is false; and therefore we justly speak of a false line, or false color; not that any line or color can in themselves be false, but they become so when they convey a statement that they resemble something which they do not resemble.74

69 70 71 72 73 74

Ruskin, Modern Painters III, Part IV, ch. III, §5, p. 43. Ruskin, Modern Painters III, Part IV, ch. III, §12, p. 49. Ruskin, Modern Painters III, Part IV, ch. III, §16, p. 52. Ruskin, Modern Painters III, Part IV, ch. III, §21, p. 56. Ruskin, Modern Painters III, Part IV, ch. III, §12, p. 49n. Ruskin, Modern Painters III, Part IV, ch. III, §12, p. 49n.

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Ruskin is not retracting what he has previously said about the importance of either truth to experience or beauty as moral or metaphysical truth in this passage, but is only using “beauty” in a restricted and perhaps more ordinary sense, to mean superficial, merely sensory beauty, and what he is arguing now is that beauty in this sense cannot be placed above truth or beauty in the deeper sense in truly great art. He is talking about beauty in the superficial sense when he continues: For although truth and beauty are independent of each other, it does not follow that we are at liberty to pursue whichever we please. They are indeed separable, but it is wrong to separate them; they are to be sought together in the order of their worthiness; that is to say, truth first, and beauty afterwards. High art differs from low art in possessing an excess of beauty in addition to its truth, not in possessing an excess of beauty inconsistent with truth.75

There is no serious contradiction between Ruskin’s subordination of surface beauty to truth here and his identification previously of a deeper sense of beauty with moral and metaphysical truth. Ruskin’s elaboration of the requirement of sincerity for great or high art also requires comment. We would ordinarily think of this as a character trait, the commitment of a person to tell only truth and not to withhold truth from another who should know it, and something like that was what Ruskin required of artists and himself in Modern Painters I. Ruskin, however, adds a quantitative dimension to sincerity: it is the pursuit of maximal possible truth in any work, thus it is “characteristic of great art that it includes the largest possible quantity of Truth in the most perfect possible harmony.” No work of art can present all possible truths, however, not even about its chosen subject matter, but sincerity is demonstrated in revealing as much truth as possible as is harmonious with the full aim of the work. The inferior artist chooses unimportant and scattered truths; the greatest artist chooses the most necessary first, and afterwards the most consistent with these, so as to obtain the greatest possible and most harmonious sum. For instances, Rembrandt always chooses to represent the exact force with which the light on the most illumined part of an object is opposed to its obscurer portions. In order to obtain this, in most cases, not very important truth, he sacrifices the light and color of five sixths of his picture . . . Veronese, on the contrary, chooses to represent the great relations of visible things to each other, to the heaven above, and to the earth beneath them. . . . All this, moreover, he feels to be harmonious, – capable of being 75

Ruskin, Modern Painters III, Part IV, ch. III, §12, p. 50n.

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joined in one great system of spacious truth. And with inevitable watchfulness, inestimable subtlety, he unites all this in tenderest balance . . . restraining, for truth’s sake, exhaustless energy, reining back, for truth’s sake, his fiery strength; veiling, before truth, the vanity of brightness; penetrating, for truth, the discouragement of gloom . . . subduing all his powers, impulses, and imagination, to the arbitrament of a merciless justice, and the obedience of an incorruptible verity.76

Ruskin does not deny the brilliance of Rembrandt, his “magnificent skill and subtlety” and “picturesque and forcible expression.” But Rembrandt is not committed to revealing as much truth as is possible in a work, and that is what sincerity as Ruskin understands it requires. Ruskin sums up his account of the qualities required for greatness of artistic style with the claim that “the sum of them is simply the sum of all the powers of man.” For as (1) the choice of the high subject involves all conditions of right moral choice, and as (2) the love of beauty involves all conditions of right admiration, and as (3) the grasp of truth involves all strength of sense, evenness of judgment, and honesty of purpose, and as (4) the poetical power involves all swiftness of invention, and accuracy of historical memory, the sum of all these powers is the sum of the human soul. Hence we see why the word “Great” is used of this art.77

It would be hard to find a passage that epitomizes the Victorian seriousness of Ruskin’s aesthetics better than this. Before we leave the subject of sincerity, however, we must turn back to Ruskin’s work on architecture, where he introduces sincerity as a quality of the work rather than the artist. Ruskin’s writing on architecture was his earliest vehicle for social criticism because architecture is “distinctively political,”78 that is, in most of its forms produced by and for a polity of some kind or other, and because like every other form of political activity it is exposed to the tension between the higher and lower aims of human societies. Moral and political considerations are thus interwoven with aesthetic considerations throughout this work. This is immediately evident in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, which aims to show “how every form of noble architecture is in some sort the embodiment of the Polity, Life, History, and Religious Faith of nations.”79 The “seven lamps” are the

76 77 78 79

Ruskin, Modern Painters III, Part IV, ch. III, §16, pp. 52–3. Ruskin, Modern Painters III, Part IV, ch. III, §24, p. 59. Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, Introductory, p. 2. Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. VII, p. 203.

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sources of value in architecture. Some of them are familiar from Ruskin’s treatment of painting; others are even more directly moral and political than the former, which is part of the reason why there are seven sources of value in architecture but were only five for painting. The complete list of the “lamps” is Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedience. By “sacrifice” Ruskin means the expenditure of effort and wealth in building as an expression of honor and reverence; by “power” the achievement of sublimity and majesty through architectural means; by “beauty” the pleasing imitation of natural forms, in structural elements like columns that capture the spirit of tree trunks, but even more so in ornamentation, such as capitals and tracery that capture the essence of foliage; by “life,” particularly “the vivid expression of the intellectual life which has been concerned in [the] production” of the works of architecture;80 by “memory,” as we have already seen, the record of human history embodied in works of architecture and even in their ruins; and by “obedience” “that principle . . . to which Polity owes its stability, Life its happiness, Faith its acceptance, Creation its continuance”81 – the freely self-imposed restraint, or balance between liberty and self-constraint, that makes all human institutions possible, and which is both reflected in successful buildings as works of art and facilitated by them as objects with social, political, and liturgical functions. In discussing the “Lamp of Obedience,” Ruskin stresses the value of tradition rather than originality for the health of society, and here he seems his most conservative: thus he suggests that for his own time there are only four historical styles that can be used without vulgarity, namely the “Pisan Romanesque,” the “early Gothic of the Western Italian Republics,” the “Venetian Gothic,” and the “English earliest decorated,”82 that is, English Gothic before the Perpendicular period. These recommendations were certainly not without influence on the historicist architectural movements of the mid- and later nineteenth century. But the most influential of Ruskin’s “lamps,” as well as the one most germane to our present theme, is the lamp of “truth.” Here what Ruskin means is that architecture must be truthful or non-deceitful, that it must not pretend to be other than what it is – in other words, that it must be sincere, or like sincerity as a quality of the conduct and character of a person.

80 81 82

Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. V, p. 151. Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. VII, p. 203. Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. VII, p. 213.

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Ruskin begins the discussion of truth in architecture with a moral premise: what does “the largest sum of mischief in the world” is not “calumny nor treachery,” because they are readily recognized and resisted; rather, it is the glistening and softly spoken lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast the black mystery over humanity, through which we thank any man who pierces, as we would thank one who dug a well in a desert; happy, that the thirst for truth still remains with us, even when we have willfully left the fountains of it.83

Architecture, like other art forms, can be directly used for the lies and pretenses of an insincere or self-deceitful regime, religion, or individual, and of course that should be avoided. But what is also to be avoided, in order to promote rather than injure our fragile commitment to truthfulness, is deceitfulness about the nature of building itself: In architecture another and a less subtle, more contemptible, violation of truth is possible; a direct falsity of assertion respecting the nature of material, or the quantity of labour. And this is, in the full sense of the word, wrong; it is as truly deserving of reprobation as any other moral delinquency; it is unworthy alike of architects and nations; and it has been a sign, wherever it has widely and with toleration existed, of a singular debasement of the arts; that it is not a sign of worse than this, of a general want of severe probity, can be accounted for only by our knowledge of the strange separation which has for some centuries existed between the arts and all other subjects of human intellect, as matters of conscience.84

Of course, Ruskin, as is evident from all that we have seen, is opposed to the “strange separation . . . between the arts and all other subjects of human intellect,” so he cannot tolerate deceitfulness in the arts: were the barrier between the arts and all other subjects of human intellect – and conduct – to be removed, then deceitfulness in the arts would inevitably lead to deceitfulness elsewhere. In an aesthetically ideal world where the practice of the arts is unified with all our other practices, there must instead be sincerity or honesty in the arts to foster sincerity and honesty everywhere else. There are three main varieties of “Architectural Deceits” that Ruskin proscribes: 83 84

Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. II, p. 30. Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. II, pp. 33–4.

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1st. The suggestion of a mode of structure or support, other than the true one; as in pendants in late Gothic roofs. 2nd. The painting of surfaces to represent some other material than that of which they actually consist (as in the marbling of wood), or the deceptive representation of sculptured ornament upon them. 3rd. The use of cast or machine-made ornaments of any kind. Now, it may be broadly stated, that architecture will be noble in exactly the degree in which all these false expedients are avoided.85

A detailed discussion of Ruskin’s elaboration of these three forms of architectural deceit is beyond our present purview, but several points are worthy of note here.86 First, Ruskin’s discussion of deceitfulness and sincerity in modes of support casts light on the historicism suggested in the “Lamp of Obedience”: Ruskin is cautious about the use of iron in styles of architecture that have been “practised for the most part in clay, stone, or wood,” even though he recognizes that “there appears no reason why iron should not be used as well as wood; and the time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction.” Nevertheless, he argues, “every idea respecting size, proportion, decoration, or construction, on which we are at present in the habit of acting or judging, depends on presupposition of such materials” as clay (brick), stone, and wood; in other words, our expectations about how buildings should look are based on traditional materials, and so while they will in due course change, they cannot be expected to change overnight – for the present, therefore, that is, in Ruskin’s own present, “metals may be used as a cement, but not as a support.”87 Of course, the possibilities of the use of metal for support in buildings was to develop rapidly after Ruskin wrote but before he died, along with associated technologies such as elevators, plumbing, and lighting, and expectations about what the proper size, proportion, decoration, and construction should be would change along with them, whether as rapidly or more rapidly than Ruskin expected, and Ruskin’s insistence on honesty in the expression of the structure of buildings would become a core value of architecture in the twentieth century while the outward forms of buildings adhering to this value departed 85 86

87

Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. VII, pp. 34–5. For discussion of Ruskin from the vantage point of architectural theory, including a discussion of this passage, see Hanno Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present, trans. Ronald Taylor, Elsie Callander, and Antony Wood (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), pp. 331–4. Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. II, §X, pp. 40–1.

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radically from anything Ruskin knew. Historically, Ruskin’s own predilection toward early historical styles in the “Lamp of Obedience” would give way to his requirement of structural honesty in the “Lamp of Truth,” and given the primacy of truth in Ruskin’s aesthetics that seems like the appropriate outcome. The second point to be noted is Ruskin’s attitude toward ornament. “Ornament,” he says, “has two entirely distinct sources of agreeableness: one, that of the abstract beauty of its forms, which, for the present we will suppose to be the same whether they come from the hand or the machine; the other, the sense of human labour and care spent upon it.” In the name of truth, he argues that the “true delightfulness” of ornament “depends upon discovering in it the record of thoughts, and intents, and trials, and heart-breakings – of recoveries and joyfulness of success . . . and in that is the worth of the thing, just as much as the worth of anything else we call precious.” For this reason Ruskin argues that “our consciousness of its being the work of poor, clumsy, toilsome man” makes ornament far more pleasurable than the greater formal excellence that might be achieved by machine or, for that matter, by nature, as when “a cluster of weeds growing in a cranny of ruin . . . has . . . a beauty in all respects nearly equal, and, in some, immeasurably superior, to that of the most elaborate sculpture of its stones.”88 The premise of Ruskin’s argument here is that just as a building should reveal rather than hide the true nature of its construction and support, so should it reveal rather than hide the fact that it is the work of human hands; we will value truthfulness about this fact, as well as the fact itself, more than we value the greater formal beauty possible in machine-made ornamentation. Ruskin’s thought here is entirely consistent with his valuation of truth over superficial beauty, that is, beauty insofar as it does not itself consist in truth, in his chapter on “Greatness of Style” in Modern Painters III. Ruskin’s attack upon superficial ornament would be taken up in the cause of twentieth-century modernist architecture by Adolf Loos, in his famous 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,”89 although Loos would not complement his attack upon superficial ornament – the decorated stucco tacked on to late nineteenth-century Vienna apartment houses – with a valorization of handmade ornament instead, as Ruskin did. (In

88 89

Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. II, §XIX, p. 53. Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime and Other Essays, trans. Michael Mitchell (Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1998), pp. 167–76.

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fact, the plain exteriors of Loos’s buildings, mostly residences, were complemented by rich materials and oriental carpets in the interiors.) This discussion of architectural ornament in The Seven Lamps of Architecture prepares the way for one of the most famous passages in all of Ruskin’s work, his chapter on “The Nature of Gothic” in the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853). In this passage, Ruskin praises the irregular exuberance of Gothic decoration in contrast to the exact regularity of the decorative elements in ancient Greek or Renaissance buildings because it is, he supposes, the concomitant and expression of treating the laborers, the stonemasons and sculptors, as free men who have minds of their own and the right to express them rather than as slaves. Ruskin writes: You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. . . . On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability . . . but out comes the whole majesty of him also.90

The phrase “engine-turned precision” indicates that Ruskin’s argument is aimed as much at the modern industrial economy as at the architecture of Greece, the Renaissance, and the Greek and Renaissance Revivals of the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries: to get precise ornamentation, e.g., dentilation or egg-and-dart moldings, you must either turn men into machines or produce the ornamentation by machines. The latter might not seem objectionable, might indeed seem to free men up for the free pursuit of their other activities (that is at least what the young Marx, in the manuscripts written a few years before, seems to have hoped), but Ruskin’s view is the opposite: the workers who operate modern machinery must become as machine-like as their machines. Thus he writes, in a passage that once again must be aimed at Adam Smith, but is also clearly reminiscent of the sixth of Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind:91 90

91

Ruskin, The Stones of Venice II, ch. VI; cited from Ruskin, Selected Writings, ed. Philip Davis (London: J.M. Dent, 1995), p. 196. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 30–43.

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We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in the making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished, – sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is – we should think there might be some loss in it also. . . . And all the evil . . . can be met only by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; or by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.92

Ruskin’s reference to “cheapness” is necessary to save his argument from the objection that hand labor is only a necessary, not a sufficient condition of freedom, for people can be made to do hand work under conditions that are as degrading as feeding a machine all day (for instance, small children being made to spend their time knotting carpets). But that point only makes clear that what is at issue for him is freedom, not beauty, or at least not superficial beauty: given the connection between moral truth and the deeper kind of beauty that was his concern in Part III of Modern Painters, surely he can claim that deep beauty is not inconsistent with moral value, in this case the moral value of individual freedom and self-expression, but is rather an expression of it. The celebration of individual freedom that is “The Nature of Gothic” is thus part and parcel of Ruskin’s conception of beauty as moral truth. Ruskin’s emphasis on hand work as an expression of an individual freedom would be taken up in the “Arts and Crafts” movement in English architecture and decoration, led by William Morris (1834–96), for whom reading The Stones of Venice was a decisive moment in his education. Although both Ruskin and Morris alternately became political socialists, paradoxically their emphasis on the freedom and dignity of hand work led to the creation of homes and furnishings available only to the quite well-off.93 92 93

Ruskin, The Stones of Venice II, Ch. I; Selected Writings, pp. 198–9. Like Ruskin, Morris was a prolific writer, as well as designer, manufacturer, and publisher of the beautiful Kelmscott Press books. His collected works were published in twenty-four volumes, The Collected Works of William Morris, edited by May Morris (London: Longmann, Green and Co., 1910–15). A modern edition of his Utopian novel, which also includes his preface to Ruskin’s “Nature of Gothic,” is News from Nowhere and Other

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3. Conclusion, with an excursus on Arnold Ruskin ultimately emphasizes freedom in art, but particularly the expression of freedom as a moral value. His position is thus not a return to the view that the pleasure of the free play of our powers, especially our powers of imagination, is the primary source of aesthetic pleasure, and thus not a challenge to the dominant value of truth in his theory of our pleasure in the beauties of nature and art; his view is rather that room for the free play of the imaginative power of individual artisans and craftsmen is a measure of the moral health of a society, not an end in its own right. For Ruskin, freedom is the most fundamental moral value, and the expression of the value of freedom is the most important truth that art can convey. And while we no doubt have deep emotional associations with the expression of freedom, Ruskin does not make them explicit, nor does he explain how other emotions would enter into our response to art. Complex as his view of artistic truth is, his aesthetic theory still remains within the confines of the cognitivist approach to truth. For the synthesis either of the theory of free play or of emotional impact as the fundamental source of aesthetic value in their own right in British aesthetics, we will have to wait. It might seem that we need not have to wait very long, for another eminent Victorian, the poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88). Son of Thomas Arnold, the famous Headmaster of Rugby School, Matthew was educated there and then at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied from 1841 to 1844. His early years at Oxford thus overlapped with Ruskin’s later years there, and in 1843 Arnold won the Newdigate Prize in poetry that Ruskin had won several years earlier. But their subsequent careers were very different, not just because Arnold made an early and enduring mark as a poet that Ruskin never did – his “Dover Beach” (1867), for example, is still one of the best known poems in English – but also because, lacking Ruskin’s personal fortune, he had to make a career. He did find one as a national Inspector of Schools, in which post he spent much of his adult life. Consequently, much of his prose work concerned education, and then more broadly social and cultural criticism. His best known work in this vein is Culture and Anarchy (1869), Writings (London: Penguin, 1993). Works on Morris include Paul Thompson, The Work of William Morris (London: Heinemann, 1967); E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, revised edition (New York: Pantheon, 1977); and Peter Stansky, Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Crafts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

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in which he defined culture as “a study of perfection,” where perfection is “a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature, and is not consistent with the overdevelopment of any one power at the expense of the rest,” and where “culture seeks the determination of this question” – what human perfection actually is – “through all the voices of human experience which have been heard upon it, of art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion, in order to give a greater fulness and certainty to its solution.”94 The book is essentially a brief for the importance of culture in this broad sense in contrast to narrowly scientific or practical education, and as such it remains of enduring importance; it does not, however, offer any detailed analysis of the nature of poetry or the arts more broadly as part of culture. In other works, however, Arnold did say more about his own chosen art, and in particular in an essay on “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” published in 1864 and then used as the introduction to his Essays in Criticism in 1865, he seems to point toward the free play tradition in aesthetics and thus to precisely what has here been argued was missing from Ruskin’s approach to aesthetics. In this essay, Arnold says that “creative literary genius does not principally show itself in discovering new ideas, that is rather the business of the philosopher,”95 and instead, not only using but appearing to endorse the language of the free play tradition of eighteenth-century aesthetics, he suggests that the foundation of creative literary genius is instead the “disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake,” and that both art and also “criticism, real criticism, is essentially the exercise of this very quality.”96 However, not only does Arnold not offer any further account of the pleasure of the free play of the mind for its own sake; on the contrary he goes on to suggest that the value of free play is rather “the creating of a current of true and fresh ideas.”97 In other words, his view seems to be that the value of criticism and by implication of art itself is after all cognitive, the discovery and communication of truth, and that free play is only a necessary stage in the discovery of truth – a view not that different from that underlying John Stuart Mill’s nearly contemporary argument in On Liberty.

94

95 96 97

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and other writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 59, 61–2. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and other writings, p. 28. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and other writings, p. 35. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and other writings, p. 38.

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This impression is only confirmed by Arnold’s later essay on “The Study of Poetry” (1880). Here Arnold places himself squarely in the Aristotelian and thus cognitivist tradition, saying that “as to the substance and matter of poetry” we should guide ourselves by “Aristotle’s profound observation that the superiority of poetry over history consists in its possessing a higher truth and a higher seriousness.” Thus, “the substances and matter of the best poetry acquire their special character from possessing, in an eminent degree, truth and seriousness.” In this essay, which is essentially a Humean argument that one can learn to judge the merits of poetry only from intimate acquaintance with its best examples, Arnold goes on to argue that the best is distinguished by the quality of its “diction” and “movement” as well as by the truth of its content, but he is not arguing for a separate source of pleasure in poetry, and thus for an at least twofold rather than monistic cognitivist approach to poetry or art more generally. Rather, his argument is that quality of truth and quality of diction are necessarily interdependent, thus that “So far as high poetic truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet’s matter and substance, we may be sure, will a high poetic stamp of diction and movement be wanting to his style and manner. In proportion as this high stamp of diction and movement, again, is absent from a poet’s style and manner, we shall find, also, that high poetic truth and seriousness are absent from his substance and manner.”98 Arnold does not explain the causal assumptions on which these “dry generalities” rest, but we may safely assume that he thinks a clear insight into truth is the foundation of great poetry and brings clear expression in its train, not that a gift for distinctive expression by itself necessarily leads to the discovery of important truth. Thus, in spite of the tantalizing hint of his essay on “The Function of Criticism,” Arnold, like his great peer Ruskin, remains firmly within the cognitivist tradition in aesthetics. The ensuing movement of “art for art’s sake” or “aestheticism,” which in the realm of visual arts may be considered a response to Ruskin, may in more general form also be considered a response to Arnold. As we shall now see, the immediate response to these great cognitivists was not an amplification of their approach by means of the recognition of the elements of free play and emotional impact in our experience of art, but rather the rejection of their moralistic version of cognitivism altogether with the idea of “art for art’s sake,” an approach that eschewed the explanation of the value of aesthetic 98

Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” cited from the Poetry Foundation at http:// www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237816?page=4.

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experience in terms of any other theoretical or practical values. Or at least that is what may initially seem to be the impetus of this movement. For what we shall see in the next chapter is that the greatest proponents of this approach, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, are more subtle thinkers than they may at first appear, and that they do not reject the moral and cultural ambitions of Ruskin’s and Arnold’s cognitivism but instead aim to embed those ambitions in a broader conception of the sources of our pleasure in art.

6 Aestheticism The Aestheticist Movement

One of the characteristic cultural movements of the nineteenth century was “aestheticism,” the movement captured by the slogans “l’art pour l’art ” or “art for art’s sake.” In large part, this was a movement of artists and writers rather than of professional philosophers, yet it responded to the moralism not only of John Ruskin, but also of some more academic aesthetics early in the century, and it prepared the way for some of the more academic aesthetics of the end of the century and the beginning of the next, especially in Britain. So it cannot be overlooked here. In its earlier phase, the aestheticist movement did not offer a positive theory of what aesthetic experience or art is, but rather protested against other, especially moralistic accounts of what the function of art is – the slogan “art for art’s sake” does not explain what art is, but only implies that it is not for the sake of something else, for example, morality, religion, the state, or metaphysics. In other words, the slogan “art for art’s sake” was the banner of a protest movement, not the name of a philosophical theory. But as we previously saw, an academic aesthetician in mid-century such as Friedrich Theodor Vischer also emphasized that beauty was not for the sake of religion, state, or society, without denying the possibility of a theory of beauty, so an insistence upon the autonomy of aesthetic experience and art from societal constraints does not necessarily lead to a rejection of serious aesthetic theory. And, later in the aestheticist movement, obviously in the works of the Oxford classicist and critic Walter Pater, the theory of beauty that was offered was broader rather than narrower, and suggested the possibility for a comprehensive rather than reductive approach to aesthetic theories. Perhaps a bit more beneath the surface, the theoretical writings of Oscar Wilde implied that aesthetic pleasure was not a distinct phenomenon cut off from other human concerns and emotions, but that in fact art is 229

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a vehicle for the communication of the deepest human emotions. It was rather some British art theorists of the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly Clive Bell and others associated with the Bloomsbury group in literature and painting, who isolated aesthetic response from other human interests and thus closed the door to a comprehensive and integrative approach to aesthetic experience that Pater and Wilde had actually opened under the banner of aestheticism. But we will return to those reductionists in the next volume; for now, we will begin with the earlier aestheticists and then see how different were the views of Pater and Wilde in spite of some similar language.

1. Moralism and “Art for Art’s Sake”: From Cousin to Baudelaire A protest movement is a protest against something, of course, and one way to begin the examination of the aestheticist movement is by seeing what it was protesting. Aestheticism actually began in France, rather than Britain, or at least the slogan “art for art’s sake” first appears in French literature, so we can begin by adding to our previous discussion of Ruskin a French example of the kind of thinking about aesthetic experience and art against which the slogan was a protest.

Cousin This is the example of the French “eclectic” philosopher, Victor Cousin (1792–1867), professor at the Sorbonne for most of his career (except during the years 1821–28 when he was stripped of his position for political reasons) and from 1830 until his death a member of the Académie française.1 Cousin was early influenced by Scottish common-sense philosophy, above all by Reid, and later came to know the work of both Hegel and Schelling, all of whose views influenced his own. His vast output included a thirteen-volume translation of Plato, editions of Proclus and Descartes, numerous works on all periods of the history of philosophy including monographs on Locke and the Scottish philosophy, and several presentations of his own philosophy, including Fragments philosophique (1826) and the lectures Du vrai, du beau, et du bien. The latter work, although published in both French and English in 1854, thus late 1

The only work on Cousin’s aesthetics is Frederic Will, Flumen historicum: Victor Cousin’s Aesthetic and its Sources (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965).

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in Cousin’s life, was a revision of lectures he had given in Paris during the first phase of his teaching from 1815 to 1821, and thus represents the thought of the early nineteenth century published just in time to stimulate the reaction of the middle and later parts of the century. In the first part of this work, on “The True,” Cousin draws on both Reid and Kant to argue for the existence of universal and necessary truths at the foundation of all knowledge, but argues against what he takes to be Kant’s pure rationalism and skepticism that these principles necessarily apply to concrete and real objects. With appeals to Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, and others, he argues that God is the “principle of principles,”2 that God’s “thoughts are truths, eternal as himself, which are reflected in the laws of the universe, which the reason of man has received the power to attain,” thus that “Truth is the offspring, the utterance . . . the eternal word of God.”3 He then develops a theory of the beautiful deeply influenced by Reid, and thus through him if not directly by Shaftesbury, according to which beauty is an objective property of the world that is perceived by the mind of man and is in turn an expression of the mind of God. Thus far, Cousin’s approach belongs firmly within the cognitivist tradition. Cousin begins with a “psychological analysis”4 of beauty in which, following eighteenth-century models, he stresses the distinction between the enjoyment of the beautiful and that of mere “agreeable sensation,”5 and emphasizes that judgments of beauty, unlike mere judgments of agreeableness, claim universal rather than idiosyncratic validity. But unlike both Kant and the Scots, at least before Reid, he asserts that such intersubjective validity is possible only on the authority of reason, that “when we say: this is true, this is beautiful, it is no longer the particular and variable impression of our sensibility that we express, it is the absolute judgment that reason imposes on all men.”6 He also insists that “The sentiment of the beautiful is so far from being desire, that each excludes the other. . . . It is the property of beauty not to irritate and inflame desire, but to purify and ennoble it.”7 He does not offer a detailed explanation of the role of reason in the experience of beauty, but true to his attempt 2

3 4 5 6 7

Victor Cousin, Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, trans. O.W. Wight (New York: Appleton, 1873), p. 75. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, p. 101. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, p. 125. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, p. 126. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, p. 128. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, p. 132.

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to combine the insights of both rationalism and empiricism, he does say that “When we have before our eyes an object whose form is perfectly determined, and the whole easy to embrace . . . each of our faculties attaches itself to this object, and rests upon it with an unalloyed satisfaction. Our senses easily perceive its details; our reason seizes the happy harmony of all its parts.”8 So to some extent Cousin’s emphasis on reason is only a verbal difference with previous aestheticians, who described aesthetic experience as an immediate grasp of harmony but attributed it to an analogon rationis (as in Baumgarten) or the imagination working in harmony with understanding (as in Kant) rather than to reason alone. Cousin reveals this affinity when he adds that “In order to complete the study of the different faculties that enter into the perception of beauty, after reason and sentiment, it remains to us to speak of a faculty not less necessary, which animates and vivifies them, – imagination,”9 although he offers no explanation of what the imagination is beyond insisting that it is more than mere memory. He seems forced to recognize the role of imagination in aesthetic experience in order to mark some difference between the perception of the true and that of the beautiful, and thus at least to open the door to adding the idea of play to the idea of truth in the explanation of our experience of beauty. Nevertheless, he remains more interested in what the beautiful has in common with the true, namely dependence upon reason, than in what distinguishes the two. In any case, any hint of a rapprochement between the theories of aesthetic truth and aesthetic play quickly disappears when Cousin turns from the “psychological analysis” of the experience of beauty to “The Beautiful in Objects.”10 Here, tacitly following the third part of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, he first argues that the objective basis of beauty lies neither in fitness to an end nor in proportion alone,11 and claims rather that “The most probable theory of the beautiful is that which composes it of two contrary and equally necessary elements, unity and variety,” thus of “order, proportion, symmetry even,” yet combined with diversity, for example, “How many shades in the color, what richness in the least details!”12 But he then shows his interest in what unifies the beautiful with the true and ultimately the good rather than in what separates them by arguing for a 8 9 10 11 12

Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, pp. 132–3. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, p. 134. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, p. 140. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, pp. 141–2. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, p. 143.

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scale of beauties in which “Unity and variety are applied to all orders of beauty.” This scale begins with “sensible objects,” the “colors, sounds, figures, movements” of which “are capable of producing the idea and the sentiment of beauty,” in other words, what we call “physical beauty,” but then rises “from the world of sense . . . to that of mind, truth, and science,” where we find “beauties more severe, but not less real,” the “intellectual beauty” of the “universal laws that govern bodies, those that govern intelligence,” and even of “the great principles that contain and produce long deductions,” and finally reaches “the moral world and its laws,” where in “the idea of liberty, virtue, and devotedness, here the austere justice of an Aristides, there the heroism of a Leonidas . . . we shall certainly find a third order of beauty . . . to wit, moral beauty.”13 Nor does Cousin content himself with asserting a structural similarity between the beautiful on the one hand and the true and the good on the other, namely that they are all forms of harmony or unity amidst variety that are recognized by reason even if in the case of the beautiful the imagination is also somehow involved. Rather, he seeks “the unity of these three sorts of beauty” and asserts “that they resolve themselves into one and the same beauty, moral beauty, meaning by that, with moral beauty properly so called, all spiritual beauty.”14 Drawing explicitly on Winckelmann and implicitly on Kant’s concept of the “ideal of the beautiful,” Cousin argues that what we admire in a statue is “the character of divinity stamped upon” it and that what we admire in a living human being is the “beauty of the soul” that underlies the beauty of the face.15 Thus he concludes that “Physical beauty is . . . the sign of an internal beauty, which is spiritual and moral beauty; and this is the foundation, the principle, the unity of the beautiful.”16 Beyond that, Cousin argues that “above real beauty, is a beauty of another order – ideal beauty,” which “resides neither in an individual, nor in a collection of individuals,” but in God. God, being the principle of all things, must for this reason be that of perfect beauty, and, consequently, of all natural beauties that express it more or less imperfectly; he is the principle of beauty, both as author of the physical world and as father of the intellectual and moral world.17

13 14 15 16 17

Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, pp. 143–4. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, p. 145. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, pp. 146–7. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, p. 149. Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, p. 150.

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Physical beauty, whether in the human being or the artistic representation of the human being, is an expression of moral beauty, and both physical beauty and moral beauty are ultimately grounded in and refer us to God. The door seems to have been shut after all to any theory that would emphasize anything as unimportant as free play in aesthetic experience.

Gautier It is easy to imagine how such a doctrine could have appealed to many, especially when published in the central decade of the period we call “Victorian.”18 It is equally easy to imagine how such an expression of traditional piety could have triggered a vehement rejection. The early use of the slogan “art for art’s sake” actually expresses disdain for recent utilitarian accounts of the value of art as well as for a view such as Cousin’s.19 The expression may have been previously used by Benjamin Constant in his diary in 1803–4, but was popularized by the 1834 Preface to the 1835–36 novel Mademoiselle du Maupin by Théophile Gautier (1811–72), who would have a diverse career as a poet, playwright, novelist, and critic, his other accomplishments include the libretto for the ballet Giselle, and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal would be dedicated to him.20 Actually, the precise words “art for art’s sake” (or “l’art pour l’art ”) are not to be found there, but the thought certainly is. The novel is a story of sexual ambiguity, loosely based on a seventeenth-century figure, in which a chevalier and his mistress both fall in love with the same, cross-dressing woman, 18

19

20

For a recent critique of the assumed conservatism of “Victorian” aesthetics, however, see Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). While rejecting a clear distinction between aestheticism on the one hand and cognitivism and/or moralism on the other in the Victorian period, Teukolsky accepts a traditional genealogy of the idea of aestheticism, tracing it back to a supposed assertion of the “autonomy of art” by Kant (The Literate Eye, p. 8). But while Kant asserted the autonomy of aesthetic judgment, he never maintained the autonomy of art, claiming instead that “If the beautiful arts are not combined . . . with moral ideas, which alone carry with them a self-sufficient satisfaction, then . . . their ultimate fate” is to make “the spirit dull, the object by and by loathsome, and the mind . . . dissatisfied with itself ” (Critique of the Power of Judgment, §53, 5:326). Nineteenth-century aestheticism cannot be considered “a neoKantian philosophy in which art’s only function [is] to exist in and of itself ” (Teukolsky, The Literate Eye, p. 8). See John Wilcox, “The Beginnings of L’art pour L’art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 11 (1953): 360–77, at p. 360, cited by Crispin Sartwell, “Art for Art’s Sake,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. I, pp. 118–21, at pp. 118–19.

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one thinking she is a woman and the other that she is a man, who is in turn accompanied by a cross-dressing page. It may well be imagined that the author of such a racy novel (it would not be translated into English for more than forty years) might have thought that it needed to be preceded by an apologia in the bourgeois France of Louis-Philippe. Clearly operating on the premise that the best defense is a good offense, Gautier attempts to undercut those who would object to his work on moral grounds, whether traditional Christian morality or modern utilitarianism, and then for good measure attacks all journalistic criticism as well. He lampoons the “current affectation” for Christianity, objecting to the hypocrisy of people who “pretend to be St. Jerome, just as they used to pretend to be Don Juan,” who “talk about the sanctity of art, the noble mission of the artist, the poetry of Catholicism . . . the painters of the Angelic School, the Council of Trent, the progress of civilization and a thousand other fine things.”21 He then attacks “utilitarian critics,” who object to a book if it contains “Not one word about the needs of society, nothing that is a civilizing or progressive influence,” and thus cannot be applied “to the moralization and well-being of the poorest and most numerous classes” of society.22 In this case, Gautier goes beyond the accusation of hypocrisy to suggest three arguments against the moralistic assumption that works of art should make direct contributions to increasing utility in society. First, he notes that works of art do not determine the moral condition of the society in which they are made, but reflect it: “Pictures are created according to the model, not the model according to the picture. . . . Trees bear fruit, fruit doesn’t bear trees . . . Books are the fruits of manners.”23 Second, Gautier suggests that utilitarianism is an inadequate moral theory because utility is always relative to some particular way of life, but the value of life itself cannot be explained by utility: “Does anything exist on this earth of ours, in this life of ours, which is absolutely useful? In the first place there is very little use in our being on earth and alive.”24 In other words, it cannot be utility that gives meaning to human life; utility is what is useful to the pursuit of a meaning in life that comes from some other source (if we are to speak of the “meaning of life” at all). And finally, Gautier observes that it takes very little to satisfy basic human needs – “Soup and a bit of meat twice a day,” “a hollow 21

22 23 24

Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle du Maupin, trans. Helen Constantine (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 5. Gautier, Mademoiselle du Maupin, p. 20. Gautier, Mademoiselle du Maupin, p. 19. Gautier, Mademoiselle du Maupin, p. 20.

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cube, seven or eight feet square, with a hole to breathe through,” and a blanket, all of which could be had for “twenty-five sous a day.” Beauty is what adds pleasure to life rather than what satisfies basic needs: Nothing that is beautiful is indispensable to life. If you did away with flowers, the world would not suffer in any material way. And yet who would wish there not to be flowers? I could do without potatoes more easily than roses and I think there is only one utilitarian in the world capable of tearing out a bed of tulips to plant cabbages. . . . The only things that are really beautiful are those which have no use.25

After this somewhat ill-considered outburst (of course, without flowers there would be little food, though it is true that many of the most showy flowers, natural or cultivated, do not produce food), Gautier launches a general attack upon the surfeit of criticism in popular publications, arguing that “Reading the journals prevents people from having real savants and real artists; it’s like a daily excess which causes you to arrive all enervated and fatigued on the couch of the Muses, those harsh and difficult women who want their lovers to be vigorous and fresh. The journal is killing the book . . . just as artillery killed courage and muscular strength.”26 Reading about books or other forms of art becomes a substitute for directly experiencing the art, both occupying the time that might be spent with the latter and making the reader too lazy for the real thing. With such a general attack upon criticism, of course, Gautier can defang any particular attacks upon his own work (never mind the reams of criticism he would write in his own subsequent career).

Poe In this bit of polemic, Gautier hints at some sound reasons why it should not be piously assumed that all valuable art is in the service of moral or religious goals, as Cousin for example did, but he does not offer a positive account of what beauty is or do more than hint that the intrinsic pleasure that we take in beauty is a sufficient account of its value. Gautier’s close contemporary, the American poet and fabulist Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), had somewhat more formal education than Gautier – a year at the University of Virginia and a semester at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point – and some more exposure to British aesthetic theory of the preceding century, then a part of the American college curriculum. 25 26

Gautier, Mademoiselle du Maupin, pp. 20–1. Gautier, Mademoiselle du Maupin, p. 36.

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Thus he not only came closer to formulating the slogan “art for art’s sake,” but expressed his position within a more traditional philosophical framework. During his abbreviated career, Poe supported himself not only with his poems and stories, but with a vast number of book reviews and a few more general essays on poetry and poetics. In the first of these pieces, the “Letter to B –” published as the preface to his second volume of Poems in 1831, Poe, in a passage that could easily have been written by Beattie half a century earlier, rejects the view that the primary purpose of poetry is instruction about some important truth in favor of the view that its purpose is pleasure and that insofar as it engages in instruction, that is only because under some circumstances instruction can be pleasurable. At all of twenty-two, but not hesitating to oppose the biggest names in philosophy as well as poetry, Poe writes: Aristotle, with singular assurance, has declared poetry the most philosophical of all writing – but it required a Wordsworth to pronounce it the most metaphysical. He seems to think that the end of poetry is, or should be, instruction – yet it is a truism that the end of our existence is happiness; if so, the end of every separate part of our existence – every thing connected with our existence should still be happiness. Therefore the end of instruction should be happiness; and happiness is another name for pleasure; – therefore the end of instruction should be pleasure: yet we see the above mentioned opinion implies precisely the reverse.27

Unlike Gautier, Poe is willing to work within a utilitarian framework, affirming that happiness or pleasure is our most fundamental value and goal, but he then argues that poetry contributes directly to this goal and need not be justified by any putative facilitation of some other means to this goal. As he puts it a few pages later, “A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.”28 No doubt the acquisition of truth through science can yield pleasure in various ways – directly, through our sheer pleasure in knowing, and indirectly, through its contribution to the technological amelioration of our living conditions – but poetry need not depend upon the pleasures of truth for its own pleasure; that is immediate. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” an essay written fifteen years later to explain “the precision and rigid consequence” of his famous poem “The Raven,” Poe maintains that the specific way in which a poem 27

28

Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G.R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 7. A rare discussion of Poe in the context of the history of aesthetics is in Raters, Kunst, Wahrheit, und Gefühl, pp. 159–73. Poe, Essays and Reviews, p. 11.

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pleases is by “intensely excit[ing], by elevating, the soul,” and that anything that does not do this, such as many stretches in a long composition like Paradise Lost, even if it has the outward structure of poetry, is really prose, not poetry at all.29 He continues that when people “speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality that is presupposed, but an effect – they refer, in short, to that intense and pure elevation of soul – not of intellect, or of heart.” “The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart,” Poe argues, are “far more readily attainable in prose” than in poetry, and require a precision (for truth) and a “homeliness” (for passion) that are “absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which . . . is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul.”30 Poe’s distinction between passion as the “excitement of the heart” and beauty as the “elevation of the soul” is far from clear, but it does seem likely that he is writing here against the background of such eighteenth-century distinctions as Kames’s distinction between passion and emotion, that is, between an affective state that leads to desire and action – passion – and one that does not – the elevation of the soul rather than the excitement of the heart. So here Poe is continuing into the nineteenth century the eighteenth-century division of the mind into intellect and conation or will on the one hand and the special province of aesthetic experience on the other hand, a division he could have been familiar with in writers such as Hutcheson or Kames. Poe would come to be seen as the avatar of literary modernism, but his aesthetic theory, such as it is, is deeply rooted in the eighteenth-century alternative to an aesthetics of truth. The continuity of Poe’s thought with eighteenth-century aesthetics is also evident in a detailed essay on poetics from 1848, “The Rationale of Verse”: here Poe illustrates with detailed examples how harmony, “equality,”31 and rhyme realize the abstract “Principle of Variety in Uniformity” and thus account for our “undeniable” “enjoyment” of poetry.32 But the character of Poe’s thought is most apparent in “The Poetic Principle,” published only after his death, in 1850. Here, although Poe still does not use the generic slogan “art for art’s sake,” he deploys a specific application of it, championing the idea of “a poem simply for the poem’s sake.” He opposes his conception of the intrinsic dignity or value of the poem – or work in any other medium of art, insofar as it shares the 29 30 31 32

Poe, Essays and Reviews, p. 15. Poe, Essays and Reviews, p. 16. Poe, Essays and Reviews, p. 33. Poe, Essays and Reviews, pp. 34, 33.

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“Poetic Sentiment”33 – to what he calls “the heresy of The Didactic,” a heresy that lies in the supposition that art has value only insofar as it offers instruction in truth – a heresy with which Poe in particular taxes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the leading “establishment” poet of the United States at the time.34 Thus Poe writes: Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans, especially, have patronised this happy idea; and we Bostonians have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true Poetic dignity and force: – but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified – more supremely noble than this very poem – this poem per se – this poem which is a poem and nothing more – this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.35

No more than Karl Philip Moritz had done a half century earlier when he introduced the idea of the “internal purposiveness” of a work of art does Poe actually explain what it means to write a poem for the poem’s sake, and while we know what it means for one purposive agent to do something for the sake of another purposive agent, that is, to make the end of the other her own end, it is by no means obvious what it would mean for a human agent to perform an action – write a poem or produce another work of art – for the sake of something that is not an agent at all, namely, the poem or work of art itself. But as Poe continues, it becomes clear that this talk of the poem for the poem’s sake does not really impute an end or goal to the poem itself, but is rather a colorful way of saying for which of our own human ends poetry or art more generally should be created: not for our end of discovering truth, which is of course our proper end in the pursuit of science, nor for the end of arousing or controlling our passions, which may be our proper end in the pursuit of morality, but for the end of achieving an elevated state of the soul and in that state enjoying “supernal Loveliness.”36 Poe makes this clear by once again “Dividing the world of mind into its three most immediately obvious distinctions” and revealing that to write a poem for the poem’s own sake is actually 33 34

35 36

Poe, Essays and Reviews, p. 77. See the long polemic against Longfellow conducted from 1842 to 1845 at Poe, Essays and Reviews, pp. 670–777. Poe, Essays and Reviews, pp. 75–6. Poe, Essays and Reviews, p. 77.

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to serve one aspect of our own minds rather than either or both of the other two. If we make this division, Poe writes, we have the Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense. I place taste in the middle, because it is just this position, which, in the mind, it occupies. It holds intimate relations with either extreme; but from the Moral Sense is separated by so faint a difference that Aristotle has not hesitated to place some of its operations among the virtues themselves. Nevertheless, we find the offices of the trio marked with a sufficient distinction. Just as the Intellect concerns itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with displaying the charms: – waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity – her disproportion – her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious – in a word, to Beauty.37

This passage both makes clear that Poe’s slogan “the poem for the poem’s sake,” revolutionary as it may sound, is actually founded upon the traditional distinction of the mind into the three departments of intellect, moral sense, and taste, but also reveals that in spite of its fundamental independence from knowledge of truth on the one hand and the demands of morality on the other, the experience of beauty can be brought into close connection with either without losing what is distinctive about it: we saw earlier that Poe allows that the pleasure of instruction in truth can contribute to the pleasure in beauty without being identical to it, and here he allows that beauty can be found in the harmonious character of what is morally appropriate without being reduced to the latter. Poe continues to explore the difference but close connection between beauty and truth on the one hand and the passions characteristic of morality and the elevation of soul characteristic of beauty in the concluding pages of “The Poetic Principle,” and here again shows how deeply rooted in tradition his thought actually is. Here he claims again that the “Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty . . . is always found in an elevating excitement of the soul,” which is “quite independent of that passion which is the intoxication of the Heart” on the one hand and “of that Truth which is the satisfaction of the Reason” on the other. Yet what “supernal beauty” produces is “Love,” which is not so easy to distinguish from “passion.” Poe has to appeal to mythology to suggest the difference he is trying to capture: “Love, on the contrary – Love – the true, the divine Eros – the Uranian, as distinguished from the Dionæan Venus – is unquestionably 37

Poe, Essays and Reviews, p. 76.

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the purest and truest of all poetical themes.” The difference between mere passion and the elevation of the soul in genuine aesthetic experience can be expressed in these terms, or perhaps captured by an enumeration of objects of genuine taste, beauties that appeal not to personal passion or desire but to something higher and more general. The person with true taste “recognises the ambrosia which nourishes his soul” in such things as “the bright orbs that shine in Heaven – in the volutes of the flower – in the clustering of low shrubberies – in the waving of the grain-fields – in the slanting of tall, Eastern trees – in the blue distance of the mountains” and so on, that is, in things that cannot be objects of personal, especially sexual passion and desire, and he – of course, he – “feels it in the beauty of woman – in the grace of her step – in the lustre of her eye – in the melody of her voice,” even “in the harmony of the rustling of her robes,”38 only after and in the same manner as he has experienced the impersonal, sexless, and passionless beauty of the heavenly bodies, mountains, and flowers. Mere passion and the love of beauty – or the beauty of love – are closely related, but on a different plane. In this final passage, Poe also returns to the relation between beauty and truth, once again insisting that they are different although they can be related. Here what he suggests is that we can have knowledge that some harmony obtains, as we can have knowledge that any other fact obtains, but that what pleases us in the aesthetic experience is not the knowledge that this harmony exists but simply and immediately the harmony itself: “if, to be sure, through the attainment of a truth, we are led to experience a harmony where none was apparent before, we experience, at once, the true poetical effect – but this effect is referable to the harmony alone, and not in the least degree to the truth which merely served to render the harmony manifest.”39 Knowledge and the experience of beauty may be simultaneous, as it were, but their objects are still different: one, harmony itself, the other, the fact that such harmony exists and whatever else might follow from that for the intellect.

Baudelaire Poe, then, came closer than did Gautier to formulating the principle “art for art’s sake” in order to express the independence of art from the demands of morality as well as knowledge that Gautier also prized. In so doing, however, he also revealed that this modern-sounding slogan 38 39

Poe, Essays and Reviews, p. 93. Poe, Essays and Reviews, p. 93.

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is but a way of expressing the alternative to an aesthetics of truth that eighteenth-century philosophers beginning with the Scots and then following them some German thinkers had already entertained. Poe did not talk in terms of the aesthetics of play or free mental activity, however, rather using only the traditional terminology of harmony and unity amid variety. Nor does Poe’s admirer in France, the Parisian poet and critic Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), explicitly develop an aesthetics of play: he too works within what is still essentially the same eighteenth-century framework within which Poe worked, indeed to a considerable extent his theoretical writings consist of a translation of Poe’s “Poetic Principle” – with one exception, however, namely that he transforms the eighteenthcentury requirement of “variety” for beauty, still accepted by Poe, into the requirement of “strangeness.” In so doing, Baudelaire draws the boundary between the beautiful on the one hand and the true and the good on the other more firmly than Poe had done, and thus says even more emphatically than Poe that “poetry has no other aim or object but herself; she can have no other, and no poem will be as great, as noble, as supremely worthy of the name as one that has been written for the sole pleasure of writing a poem.”40 This statement, it may be noted, unlike Baudelaire’s earlier statement about Poe that “True poet that he was, he held that the aim and object of poetry is of the same nature as its principle, and that it ought to have nothing else in view but itself,”41 not only makes it sound as if a poem or work of art is itself a goal-directed agent of some kind for whose sake something (its own composition) could be done; rather, although its first clause (“poetry has no other aim or object but herself”) is in that vein, the second clause (“ . . . written for the sole pleasure of writing a poem”) clearly asserts that it is for the human end of pleasure that a poem is written (of course, by a human), as contrasted to any other human end such as the acquisition of truth or the achievement of morality. Poetry for its own sake – the closest that Baudelaire comes to the slogan “art for art’s sake” – means nothing more mysterious than that poetry should be written for the sake of pleasure rather than for the sake of truth or morality. It is in the same spirit that Baudelaire quotes the famous remark by the novelist Stendahl (Henri-Marie Beyle, 1783–1842) that “Beauty is nothing else but a promise of happiness.”42 40

41 42

Charles Baudelaire, “Further Notes on Edgar Poe,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1965), p. 107. Baudelaire, “Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Works,” in The Painter of Modern Life, p. 79. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, p. 3. The editor of Baudelaire provides references to two works of Stendahl for this quotation, De l’Amour (1822), ch. XVIII, and Histoire de la Peinture en Italie (1817), ch. 110.

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What Baudelaire actually says about Stendahl’s own slogan is somewhat strange; he follows his quotation of it with the statement that “This definition doubtless overshoots the mark; it makes Beauty far too subject to the infinitely variable ideal of Happiness; it strips Beauty too neatly of its aristocratic quality: but it has the great merit of making a decided break with academic error.”43 Presumably the “academic error,” the break from which Baudelaire praises, is the identification of the beautiful with the morally good rather than with what makes us happy, the identification promulgated in his Parisian lectures by Cousin at the same time that Stendahl was making his statement; but what is strange is that Baudelaire criticizes Stendahl for his association of beauty with the “infinitely variable ideal of Happiness” when it is precisely the infinite variability of beauty itself that Baudelaire himself praises and ultimately identifies with its strangeness. Baudelaire asserts the variety and in turn the strangeness of beauty in a review of the art displayed in the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where he objects to any attempt to find rules for beauty: Anyone can easily understand that if those whose business it is to express beauty were to conform to the rules of the pundits, beauty itself would disappear from the earth. since all types, all ideas and all sensations would be fused in a vast, impersonal and monotonous unity, as immense as boredom or total negation. Variety, the sine qua non of life, would be effaced from life. So true is it that in the multiple productions of art there is an element of the ever-new which will eternally elide the rules and analyses of the school! That shock of surprise, which is one of the great joys produced by art and literature, is due to this very variety of types and sensations. . . . With all due respect to the over-proud sophists who have taken their wisdom from books, I shall go even further, and however delicate and difficult of expression my idea may be, I do not despair of succeeding. The Beautiful is always strange. I do not mean that it is coldly, deliberately strange, for in that case it would be a monstrosity that had jumped the rails of life. I mean that it always contains a touch of strangeness, of simple, unpremeditated and unconscious strangeness, and that it is this touch of strangeness that gives it its particular quality as Beauty.44

The inclusion of novelty among the sources of beauty was not a novelty, of course; that had been one of the three chief “pleasures of the 43 44

Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, pp. 3–4. Baudelaire, “Exposition Universelle I,” from Jonathan Mayne, ed., Art in Paris 1845– 1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire (London: Phaidon, 1964), pp. 121–8, reprinted in Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, Art in Theory: 1815–1900 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 485–9, at p. 487.

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imagination” for Joseph Addison in 1712, and had been included in many subsequent lists of aesthetic categories, notably Alexander Gerard’s in 1759. What is novel is Baudelaire’s transformation of the traditional category of novelty into that of strangeness as well as his suggestion that it is the touch of strangeness alone that gives a work its beauty. Baudelaire does not explain why the variety expected in a beautiful work must take the form of strangeness, nor does he offer an example of what he means by strangeness that is yet not monstrous, although examples are readily to be found in his own poetry or in the exoticism that swept through so many forms of art in the second half of the nineteenth century, not merely poetry but also painting, architecture, and music. Not only does Baudelaire not explain the necessity of strangeness; for that matter, he does not explain the necessity of variety itself as a condition of beauty. He only hints that variety is necessary to avoid boredom – thus revealing the continuing influence on French thought of Du Bos’s foundational Critical Reflections of 1719 – and indeed that is in some way necessary for life itself. But he does not explain why variety is the sine qua non of life. We find more by way of an explanation of this assertion in the work beginning in the next decade of the author who seems to have been the first to speak entirely generally of “the love of art for its own sake,”45 the Oxford don and man of letters Walter Pater. As we shall see, however, Pater does not use this expression to express a view that separates the value of art from all other human values, but rather one that prizes art because it integrates human values.

2. “This hard, gem-like flame”: Pater Walter Pater (1839–94) spent his career as a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, but his only book of the sort that might have been expected from a scholar occupying such a position is Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures, published in 1868, just a year before his death.46 Otherwise, his reputation in his own lifetime was and has remained founded on three slender collections of essays – The Renaissance, which was first published in 1873 and went through three further editions in his lifetime,47 45

46

47

Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Adam Philips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), “Conclusion” (1868), p. 153. Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1893; reprinted New York: Macmillan, 1903). Pater removed the 1868 conclusion of The Renaissance from the next (1873) edition, but then restored it to subsequent editions.

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Imaginary Portraits in 1887,48 and Appreciations, a collection of reviews, in 1889, as well as one completed novel, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas,49 published in 1885, and one uncompleted novel, Gaston de Latour, published posthumously in 1897.50 Two other posthumous volumes were Greek Studies and Miscellaneous Studies. In spite of this slender output, which did not include a systematic work in philosophical aesthetics, Pater may be considered the most significant British writer on aesthetic topics between Ruskin and the turn of the twentieth century.51 As noted at the end of the previous section, Pater did explicitly use the expression “the love of art for its own sake,” and has been regarded as the preeminent advocate of the complete independence of aesthetic experience and thus of art from the demands of knowledge on the one hand and of morality on the other, thus the independence of aesthetic experience from truth about either theoretical or practical matters. His famous statement, a page before his introduction of the phrase “the love of art for its own sake” in the penultimate sentence of the original conclusion to The Renaissance, that “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life,”52 as well as the final sentence of the introduction, “For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake,”53 certainly seem to confirm the view that Pater advocates the independence of aesthetic experience from all other sources of value in human life, and indeed the supremacy of the value of aesthetic experience over all other forms of value. These statements seem to justify such a statement as that “the achievement of Pater is precisely to purify the aesthetic vision represented so intensely by Ruskin of its inconvenient moral bias.”54 However, such an interpretation is a 48

49

50

51

52 53 54

Walter Pater, Imaginary Portraits, with The Child in the House and Gaston de Latour, with introduction by Bill Beckley (New York: Allworth Press, 1997). Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, ed. Michael Levey (London: Penguin, 1985). Levey is also the author of a biography, The Case of Walter Pater (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978). The existing chapters of Gaston de Latour are reprinted in the 1997 edition of Imaginary Portraits. A monograph on Pater’s aesthetics is Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). A monograph on Pater’s aesthetics is Kenneth Daley, The Rescue of Romanticism: Walter Pater and John Ruskin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), and a collection of essays is Elicia Clements and Leslie J. Higgins, Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Pater, The Renaissance, p. 152. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 153. Stephen Bann attributes this interpretation, without further information, to Harold Bloom, in his entry on Pater in Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Vol. 3, pp. 445–7, at 447.

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simplification of Pater’s position. His conception that art should be valued for “its own sake” and for the sake of the “moments” of our intense experience of it is not meant to separate our experience of art from other sources of value in our lives, but rather expresses his view that in the experience of art all of the sources of value in our lives can come together most fully and completely. Pater employs the language of aestheticism, but his aesthetics is integrative rather than reductive. The compatibility between Pater’s idea of art for art’s sake and his conception of the integrative rather than divisive character of aesthetic experience is evident in a comment in his description of Plato’s aesthetics in Plato and Platonism, where Pater writes: Art, as such, as Plato knows, has no purpose but itself, its own perfection. The proper art of the Perfect City is in fact the art of discipline. Music, all the various forms of fine art, will be but the instruments of its one overmastering social or political purpose, irresistibly conforming its so imitative subject units to type.55

Pater himself does not accept Plato’s assumption that the perfection of art consists in the perfection of its contribution to societal discipline, but he does accept the idea that the perfection of art in its own terms includes rather than excludes a connection to morality. No more than Poe, to be sure, does Pater think that successful art is didactic. On the contrary – and here is Pater’s substantive advance beyond such writers as Gautier, Poe, and Baudelaire, that is, his advance beyond simply generalizing the formula “poetry for poetry’s sake” into the formula “art for art’s sake” – he thinks that successful art results from and produces a free play of all our mental powers that he sums up in the superficially contradictory phrase “imaginative reason.”56 Unlike his predecessors in the aestheticist movement, then, Pater does not just distance himself by rejecting the subordination of aesthetic experience to truth and especially to moral truth, but positively aligns himself with the conception of aesthetic experience as free play, while also emphasizing that such free play involves all of our powers, thus includes a connection to morality. Precisely what form that connection should take we will now see. Pater’s view is that aesthetic experience is concrete and complex, transcending traditional boundaries among domains of human concern and especially the supposed boundary between form and content,

55 56

Pater, Plato and Platonism, pp. 248–9. Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” The Renaissance, p. 83.

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and that the objects of such experience and such experience itself can only be produced by a free play among our various sensory and intellectual capacities. He opens the Preface to The Renaissance by abjuring any attempt to “define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it,” and argues instead that “To see the object as in itself it really is, has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever.” He amplifies this point in a way that suggests an assertion of subjectivism, that is, that each person’s response to any beautiful object is necessarily idiosyncratic: “in æsthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. . . . What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me ? What effect does it really produce on me?”57 But an assertion of subjectivism is not Pater’s chief point; his point is rather that aesthetic experience is always an engagement between an object in all its concreteness and a subject in all of his or her concreteness; no doubt some variation in aesthetic response among different subjects is therefore to be expected, because both objects and subjects in their full concreteness will inevitably differ from one another in some regard or another, but that those differences will lead to significant disagreements among subjects about the features or merits of any particular aesthetic objects is not any part of Pater’s argument. What is part of his argument is that the individuality of particular works of art as well as of the several art forms must be fully recognized by “æsthetic criticism” or theory. The preface stresses the individuality of different works of art: The æsthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. . . . To him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure. . . . Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety.58

One noteworthy feature of Pater’s aestheticism is that we are here enjoined to regard objects of nonhuman nature (the hills of Carrara), 57 58

Pater, The Renaissance, p. xxix. Pater, The Renaissance, p. xxx.

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human beings (Pico de Mirandola), and works of art, whether representations of particular human beings (La Gioconda) or not (just pictures), equally as “powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations”: this might seem to undercut the importance of cognitive and moral stances toward nature and human beings, but it need not, because, as has already been suggested, aesthetic experience on Pater’s account includes rather than excludes these crucial human attitudes. As already remarked, the preface to The Renaissance stresses the concreteness and therefore the individuality of particular works of art (as well as of particular locales in nature and particular people themselves), and therefore requires of the critic or appreciator more generally not “a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect” nor any sort of determinate rule for aesthetic appreciation and judgment, but rather “a certain kind of temperament, the power of being moved by the presence of ” particular beautiful objects. Such a critic will “remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal.”59 In the central essay on “The School of Giorgione” in the body of the text, Pater stresses the point that each art form has its own powers and potentials, and thus argues against general rules for beauty ranging over the several arts as well as against such rules ranging over particular works: Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibilities to the material. One of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations; to estimate the degree in which a given work of art fulfils its responsibilities to its special material; to note in a picture that true pictorial charm, which is neither a mere poetical thought or sentiment, on the one hand, nor a mere result of communicable technical skill in colour or design, on the other; to define in a poem that true poetical quality, which is neither descriptive nor meditative merely, but comes of an inventive handling of rhythmical language, the element of song in the singing; to note in music the musical charm, that essential music, which presents no words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separable from the special form in which it is conveyed in us.60

“Pictorial charm,” “true poetical quality,” and “musical charm, that essential music,” do not work in the same way, so there can be no general 59 60

Pater, The Renaissance, p. xxx. Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” The Renaissance, p. 83. Pater adds in a footnote that Lessing’s differentiation between the means of representation available to sculpture and poetry is an anticipation of his own more general claim.

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rules for beauty that efface the boundaries between pictures, poems, and music. Now if this claim were taken to imply that there are general rules for achieving pictorial charm within the domain of pictures, poetical quality within the domain of poems, and musical charm within the domain of music, then it would seem to contradict Pater’s earlier point that there can be no abstract definition of beauty because each work of art (or beauty of nature or beautiful person) is a concrete individual. But Pater clearly intends to exclude such a contradiction precisely by asserting that true pictorial charm cannot be reduced to “a mere result of communicable technical skill in color or design” and that “true poetical quality” requires an “inventive handling” of rhythm and other aspects of poems; this implies that individuality within the various media of art is an ineluctable aspect of genuine beauty, although of course each art has its own characteristic media within which individuality can be achieved. Pater might again seem to undercut this conclusion when, a page later, he makes the famous statement that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”61 But the point that Pater is making here is compatible with the existence of fundamental differences among the means and ends of the different media of art. What Pater takes to be particularly characteristic of music – and here he must be thinking especially of instrumental music without a verbal text or program – is that it effaces the customary distinction between form and content, instead achieving whatever particularity of expression of mood or thought it strives for through its use of the formal devices of melody, harmony, rhythm, and so on. Thus he states: It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire. In music, then, rather than in poetry, is to be found the true type or measure of perfected art.62

Although the ideal fusion of form and matter is most readily found in music, however, other arts can at least aim for such a fusion, each in its own way: For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, 61 62

Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” The Renaissance, p. 86. Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” The Renaissance, p. 88.

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for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situations – that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape – should be nothing without the form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.63

Perhaps this aspiration that every work of art should achieve the musical goal of effacing the distinction between form and content, though not by musical means but by its own means, may be seen as a corollary of the requirement of concreteness in aesthetic experience and its objects: the concrete object presents itself in experience as a fully integrated unity, although of course in subsequent reflection upon that experience a distinction between form and content can no doubt always be drawn. As suggested earlier, in Pater’s view aesthetic experience can efface the boundaries among what are ordinarily regarded as the different domains of human concern as well as the usual boundary between form and content. As in the latter case, the effacement of the usual boundaries among different human concerns and activities should be regarded as an aspiration of art that is by no means always achieved, but that is achieved by the most successful art. Pater suggests this point in his initial explanation of what is distinctive about the Renaissance, or more generally renaissances, since he writes not only about the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century but also about what some have called the renaissance of twelfth-century France64 and about some other historical moments that might be considered renaissances as well. Here is what he says: The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads. As products of the same generation they partake indeed of a common character, and unconsciously illustrate each other; but of the producers themselves, each group is solitary, gaining what advantage or disadvantage there may be in intellectual isolation. Art and poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that other life of refined pleasure and action in the conspicuous places of the world, are each of them confined to its own circle of ideas, and those who prosecute either of them are generally little curious of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from time to time, eras of more favorable conditions, in which the thoughts of men draw nearer together than is their wont, and the many interests of the intellectual world combine in one complete type of general culture. The fifteenth 63 64

Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” The Renaissance, p. 86. See Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927).

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century in Italy is one of these happier eras, and what it is sometimes said of the age of Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo: – it is an age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralized, complete. Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other’s thoughts.65

The sharp boundaries between knowledge, action, and aesthetic experience that Hutcheson and Kant seem to have suggested and that even such more modern figures as Poe and Baudelaire still accepted turn out to be characteristic of some, even many periods of history, but not of history’s finest hours. In those periods, science, morality, and art inspire one another, or even join in the person of a single human being, such as Leonardo da Vinci, who naturally has his own chapter in The Renaissance. This is not yet to say that the aesthetic is somehow higher or more valuable than the scientific or the moral. But if what is characteristic of the aesthetic is concreteness and individuality, or the integration of experience, then it may be by means of the aesthetic achievement of unity that all of the domains of human experience are integrated; such integration may be something that is possible only through art. This is at least suggested by Pater’s attribution of artistic creation and aesthetic appreciation to a free but also coherent play of all of our powers, something that can be captured only by the superficially paradoxical expression “imaginative reason” that Pater adopts from Matthew Arnold.66 Pater first introduces the terminology of free play in his opening chapter on the French renaissance of the twelfth century, speaking both specifically of the poetry of the period and then more generally of the cast of mind of one of the heroes of this essay, Peter Abelard (1079–1142). Pater writes, In that poetry, earthly passion, with its intimacy, its freedom, its variety – the liberty of the heart – makes itself felt; and the name of Abelard, the great scholar and the great lover, connects the expression of this liberty of the heart with the free play of human intelligence around all subjects presented to it, with the liberty of the intellect, as that age understood it.67

65 66

67

Pater, The Renaissance, pp. xxxii–xxxiii. The phrase comes from Arnold’s 1864 essay “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment,” where he writes that “the main element of the modern spirit’s life is neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason” (cited from Pater, The Renaissance, p. 166). Pater, “Two Early French Stories,” The Renaissance, p. 2.

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Here Pater describes the state of mind that he admires as one in which both passion and thought are free from external constraints and free to interact with each other. He does not explicitly include the senses in this description, and thus does not yet explicitly generalize his idea beyond the case of poetry to arts that involve the senses more directly. But he alludes to the senses on the next page when he describes the spirit of this early renaissance as moving from the side of the Seine into the “early literature of Italy” and “even in Dante” “with its qualities already well defined, its intimacy, its languid sweetness, its rebellion, its subtle skill in dividing the elements of human passion, its care for physical beauty, its worship of the body”;68 and at the end of the first essay, Pater describes Abelard’s admirable cast of mind in general terms that do not explicitly include a role for the senses and imagination but also do not exclude it: “The opposition of the professional defenders of a mere system to that more sincere and generous play of the forces of the human mind and character, which I have noted as the secret of Abelard’s struggle, is indeed always powerful.”69 Here what Pater has in mind as the ideal form of human experience is the free play of all our powers of mind independent of the constraints of “system” or any arbitrary and conventional rules. Pater returns to the idea of play in a complicated passage in “The School of Giorgione” in which he connects the idea of play as moments of heightened life to his theme that all art aspires to the condition of music in order to arrive at a characterization of the art of this school: In these then, the favourite incidents of Giorgione’s school, music or the musical intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a sort of listening – listening to music, to the reading of Bandello’s novels,70 to the sound of water, to time as it flies. Often such moments are really our moments of play, and we are surprised at the unexpectedness of what may seem our least important part of time; not merely because play is in many instances that to which people really apply their own best powers, but also because at such times, the stress of our servile, everyday attentiveness being relaxed, the happier powers in things without are permitted free passage, and have their way with us. And so, from music, the school of Giorgione passes often to the play which is like music; to those masques in which men avowedly do but play at real life.71 68 69 70

71

Pater, “Two Early French Stories,” The Renaissance, p. 3. Pater, “Two Early French Stories,” The Renaissance, p. 17. Matteo Bandello (1480?–1562) published four volumes of Novelle from 1554 to 1573, the later volumes, obviously, posthumously (see Pater, The Renaissance, p. 167). Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” The Renaissance, pp. 96–7.

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In the opening sentence of this passage, Pater characterizes the aesthetic condition as one that we may enjoy in response either to real life – listening to the sound of water – or to art – listening to music or to the reading of novellas – but in the remainder he describes play first as a phenomenon of real life, which can then be recaptured by art. His characterization of play also moves from passivity – listening to water, allowing free passage to the “happier powers in things” and letting them “have their way with us” – to activity, applying our “own best powers.” Here Pater reconstructs Kant’s synthesis of what started out as two separate ideas in eighteenth-century aesthetics, the idea that aesthetic experience takes place in a space freed from the ordinary concerns of life or “everyday attentiveness” that was suggested in the idea of disinterestedness first introduced by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson and the idea of aesthetic experience as an especially pleasurable form of mental activity stressed by such as Gerard and Kames. Kant recognized that in the absence of the satisfaction of an ordinary practical interest, our pleasure in beauty could be explained only by the free activity of our own cognitive powers, and Pater’s account of play makes a similar transition from a negative to a positive characterization of it. To be sure, Pater himself does not mention Kant in The Renaissance, but its final essay concerns another German of Kant’s time, namely Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and it is perhaps not surprising that Pater uses Kantian language in characterizing Winckelmann’s aesthetic experience. Describing Winckelmann’s first protracted experience of Greek art in the Saxon royal collections at Dresden, Pater says that “Winckelmann here reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the Renaissance.” On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and the understanding, when once we have apprehended it! Here, surely, is that more liberal mode of life we have been seeking so long, so near to us all the while. . . . Here, then, in vivid realisation, we see the native tendency of Winckelmann to escape from abstract theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch. Lessing, in the Laocoon, has theorised finely on the relation of poetry to sculpture; and philosophy may give us theoretical reasons why not poetry but sculpture should be the most sincere and exact expression of the Greek ideal. By a happy, unperplexed dexterity, Winckelmann solves the question in the concrete. It is what Goethe calls his Gewahrwerden der griechischen Kunst, his finding of Greek art.72 72

Pater, “Winckelmann,” The Renaissance, pp. 118–19.

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Here Pater describes Winckelmann’s aesthetic experience, which the rest of us would be lucky to share, as a facile – that is, not superficial but easy, unconstrained – cooperation between the senses and the understanding, and equates this with the freedom of the imagination. The freedom of the imagination is thus negative, that is, freedom from constraint, but also positive, that is, a “liberal mode of life” or activity. Pater also takes the opportunity to return to his opening theme that aesthetic experience is concrete rather than abstract and to praise Winckelmann over Lessing for the concreteness rather than abstraction of his experience and his writing about it. Perhaps one thinks that abstractions leave room for the free play of the mind precisely because they do not specify all the details of particular objects, while concreteness might seem to tie the mind down to the details of a given object; but Pater associates abstractness with rules, thus with constraint, and by contrast finds room to play in the richness of detail of the concrete. Pater returns to the theme of play later in the essay on Winckelmann, and there gives perhaps his most explicit account of the free play between imagination and reason, between our sensory and intellectual powers, that is captured in his borrowed phrase “imaginative reason.” Here he does not move from play as a feature of life in general to play as what is characteristic of aesthetic experience, but rather suggests that the free play of our powers in art creates new possibilities for human life in general: The basis of all artistic genius lies in the power of conceiving of humanity in a new and striking way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of our common days, generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a variety of subjects almost unlimited.73

Here Pater employs the typical eighteenth-century characterization of the activity of the imagination – it selects, transforms, and recombines images and ideas given to it by the senses and the intellect from ordinary life – but adds that the new ideas so created are not simply ideas of an alternative reality, but can be ideas of a better reality to which we can aspire. This is perhaps the real force of his transition from speaking of a free play between imagination and reason to a single, integrated imaginative reason or intellect. 73

Pater, “Winckelmann,” The Renaissance, p. 137.

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That the free play of the imaginative reason or intellect ultimately leads to ideas of a better and happier world reveals that Pater’s idea of art for art’s sake is certainly not incompatible with the idea that aesthetic experience can play a role in envisioning and at least to that extent realizing a better world, thus that aesthetic experience is not unconnected to moral ideals. As his later discussion of Plato’s aesthetics suggests, he does not object to Plato’s idea that the perfection of art can serve the perfection of life, but objects only to Plato’s particularly rigid, joyless image of a better life for human beings. That Pater objects not to any connection between art and morality but only to the subservience of art to the rigid constraint of particular moralities is in fact clear throughout The Renaissance. Pater praises renaissance art for breaking with the particular, constraining morality of its time, but precisely because it can do so in the hope of a new and better way of living, art need not break with morality in general; rather it can have a moral inspiration, and does so at the moments of its renaissance: One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak of the reason and the imagination, of that assertion of the liberty of the heart, in the middle age, which I have termed a medieval Renaissance, was its antinomianism, its spirit of rebellion against the moral and religious ideas of the time. In their search after the pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their care for beauty, in their worship of the body, people were impelled beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal; and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a rival religion.74

To free art and, through art, life from the constraints of Christianity is not to free art from morality in general, but from a particular morality, one that has often enlisted art in its own cause but which may be found hostile to the aesthetic impulse as such, that is, to the aspiration to the freedom of the imagination. Of course, the freedom of imagination, or at least some particular form of it, can become a shibboleth or idol itself, and thus the rejection of one religion runs the risk of degenerating into just another religion. But, Pater’s implication seems to be that at its best art can achieve freedom without collapsing into constraint and point the way to a life that does so as well, and this is clearly a moral ideal for him even if it is not identical to the goal of this or that particular, conventional morality. If the moral goal of art becomes too particular and too explicit, too much of an abstraction, that can undermine the concrete unity of form 74

Pater, “Two Early French Stories,” The Renaissance, p. 16.

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and content to which art properly aspires. That is always a risk for art with a moral impetus, and perhaps more of a risk for some media of art than for others, but it is not an inevitability. Thus Pater writes: Poetry . . . works with words addressed in the first instance to the pure intelligence; and it deals, most often, with a definite subject or situation. Sometimes it may find a noble and quite legitimate function in the conveyance of moral or political aspiration, as often in the poetry of Victor Hugo. In such instances it is easy enough for the understanding to distinguish between the matter and the form, however much the matter, the subject, the element which is addressed to the mere intelligence, has been penetrated by the informing, artistic spirit. But the ideal types of poetry are those in which this distinction is reduced to its minimum; so that lyrical poetry, precisely because in it we are least able to detach the matter from the form, without a deduction of something from that matter itself, is, at least artistically, the highest and most complete form of poetry.75

So not only are some media of art more susceptible to the separation of content from form in the name of some moral or political ideal; even within a particular medium, such as poetry, some specific forms (perhaps drama) are more susceptible to this risk and others (here lyric) are more resistant to it. But just as all art can aspire to the condition of beauty, that is, to a complete synthesis of form and content, so all art can at least aspire to complete freedom of the imaginative reason or intellect from the constraints of the morality of its time and place. But that aspiration, again, itself seems to be inspired by a moral ideal of the value of freedom itself. So Pater’s idea of art for art’s sake does not cut art off from all connection to morality, but rather connects it to a particularly generous conception of morality. Unlike others typically regarded as part of the aestheticist movement, then, Pater does not explicitly reject the moral significance of art; on the contrary, his view that the best art involves all our faculties makes room for the idea that the free play of imagination in art involves our practical as well as theoretical capacities. Pater’s idea that the best art involves all our faculties also at least implies that our response to such art must involve our capacity to feel emotions as well as our other capacities of sense, imagination, and thought. Thus, from his study in Brasenose College, Pater suggested the possibility of a comprehensive approach to aesthetics. The last great figure of nineteenth-century British aestheticism, Oscar Wilde, did not overtly endorse such a comprehensive approach to aesthetic experience as Pater had; but far from suggesting 75

Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” The Renaissance, p. 87.

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that our pleasure in artistic beauty has nothing to do with any other human interest, he actually implied that art concerns the deepest human emotions. He and Pater thus at least together offered the possibility of a comprehensive approach to the experience of beauty as involving our sensory, intellectual, and emotional capacities. We will subsequently see that this possibility was by no means immediately exploited in British aesthetics. But first, Wilde.

3. Wilde The celebrity with the marvelous name Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854–1900) was the son of Sir William Wilde, a prominent AngloIrish surgeon and philanthropist, and his wife Lady Jane Francesca née Elgee. He was born in Dublin and took his first degree there, at Trinity College (1871–74). He then went to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with double firsts in classical moderations and Litterare humaniores (1874–78). While at Oxford, he was exposed to the work and influence of Ruskin and Pater, both active there at the time. He also developed a reputation as an aesthete for his personal style of dress and the décor of his rooms, for which he may have taken some punishment from more conventional students. But his reputation as well as his wit led to his first career as a poet, as the target of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (1881), and a successful lecturer on the aestheticist movement in Britain and the United States (1882–86). In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, the daughter of a prominent London barrister, with whom he shortly had two sons. Soon thereafter, however, he began a series of homosexual affairs. Professionally, he gave up lecturing and focused on writing and reviewing, and also edited a magazine, The Woman’s World, for several years (1887–89). Following that, he wrote his most important works: the essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891); the four essays included in the volume Intentions in 1891, namely “The Decay of Lying,” “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” “The Critic as Artist” (in two parts), and “Masks”; his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; and his series of successful, still often performed plays, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1891), A Woman of No Importance (1892), An Ideal Husband (1893), and finally The Importance of Being Earnest (1894). Salomé, written in French in 1891, was banned from the British stage; Richard Strauss’s daring and dissonant opera of 1905 was based on Wilde’s play, and while widely successful in Europe, also suffered from censoriousness if not censorship, lasting only one night in its initial production at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

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These few years of brilliance were quickly followed by disaster. Wilde’s unsuccessful libel suit against the Marquess of Queensbury, the pugnacious father of Wilde’s young companion Lord Alfred Douglas, led to Wilde’s own prosecution and conviction for homosexual conduct, then still of course criminalized, and to his imprisonment from 1895 to 1897. Upon his release, he moved to Paris (having chosen not to when he still had time to do so before the trial) and, though now penniless, lived openly as a homosexual. But he did not have long to enjoy his freedom, dying of cerebral meningitis in 1900. His letter to Lord Douglas from Reading Gaol, De Profundis, was first published posthumously in 1905, but waited until 1962 for a full edition. Wilde was regarded and, as already noted, caricatured as a leading advocate of the idea of “art for art’s sake.” It is certainly not difficult to find statements in his works that support this assessment of his position. In “The Decay of Lying,” for example, we find such statements as “Art never expresses anything but itself . . . and it is this, more than that vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the arts.”76 This is repeated in the character Vivian’s summary of his new aesthetics as “Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.”77 It having been argued throughout that art should not imitate nature or real life but should describe something better, thus that it is actually a form of lying, Wilde’s character also asserts that “The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is Lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is . . . Lying in Art. Just as those who do not love Plato more than Truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art.”78 However, these words are spoken by a character in a dialogue, as indeed are all the words of the following essay “The Critic as Artist,” and thus cannot automatically be assumed to represent Wilde’s own view without qualification; indeed, his substitution of “lying” for “art” in the phrase “Lying for its own sake” may be meant as a parody of the idea of “art for art’s sake” rather than as a straightforward assertion of it. A careful reading of both “The Artist 76

77 78

Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Intentions (London: Oscar, McIlvaine, 1891), reprinted in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Random House, 1969; reprinted Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 313–14. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Artist as Critic, p. 319. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Artist as Critic, p. 318.

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as Critic” and Dorian Gray may suggest that while art’s search for beauty should certainly be free from constraint by truth if that is superficially understood as the mere imitation of nature and equally free from the superficial constraint of conventional morality, art’s deepest mission may be to allow its audience to experience and understand the deepest and finest human emotions, and that the most profound form of immorality may be to confuse superficial images of beauty, of the kind that art can all too easily make, with the grounds for true love. The argument of “The Decay of Lying,” to be sure, does not reach such a conclusion. The dialogue takes the arch form of Wilde’s main character Vivian reading his own essay titled “The Decay of Lying: A Protest”79 to his friend Cyril while interrupting himself with lengthy comments on it. Vivian attacks contemporary naturalists, above all Zola, for describing characters whose lives are “absolutely without interest,” and asserts instead that “In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power.”80 Departing from the reading of his essay, Vivian then, as we previously saw Gautier, Poe, and Baudelaire do, maintains generally that “As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art.”81 Returning to his script, Vivian then states that Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage. Then life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment.82

Some pages later, Vivian returns to his script, continuing his attack on any theory that art creates beauty by imitating the beauty of nature: “Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by an external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.”83 His claim is that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,”84 that our conceptions and perceptions of natural beauty 79 80 81 82 83 84

Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Artist as Critic, p. 293. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Artist as Critic, p. 296. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Artist as Critic, p. 299. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Artist as Critic, p. 301. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Artist as Critic, p. 306. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Artist as Critic, p. 311.

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are determined by ideals of beauty created by art rather than those ideals of beauty being provided by nature. Thus, “At present, people see fogs” – see them at all, as well as seeing them as beautiful – “not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London,” but “They did not exist till Art invented them”;85 and, conversely, to see a Turneresque sunset as beautiful “is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament” once Turner is no longer “the last note in art.”86 Vivian’s view is that through our own powers of imagination art creates decorative forms and styles for the representation of nature, and that our perception of beauty in nature is dependent upon the creation of such forms and styles by art rather than vice versa. This is what leads up to his first assertion that “Art never expresses anything but itself.” Vivian then sums up his argument to Cyril with three doctrines, a corollary, and a “final revelation.” The first doctrine follows his second assertion that “Art never expresses anything but itself,” and consists in the affirmation of the independence of art from the conventions of its time: “It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it.” His second doctrine is that “All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals”; rather, he holds, “Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything.”87 Then comes Vivian’s third doctrine, that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy.” The corollary of this is “that external Nature also imitates Art. The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings.” And all of this leads to the revelation that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”88 Vivian’s position is thus that the human imagination creates beautiful forms and styles in art that beautify our representations of nature and that even

85 86 87 88

Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Artist as Critic, p. 312. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Artist as Critic, p. 313. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Artist as Critic, p. 319. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” The Artist as Critic, p. 320.

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transform our experience of nature itself, but that since these forms and styles are not found in nature they cannot be considered true to nature and their use must instead be considered as a form of lying. In all of this, Wilde seems to be celebrating the freedom of imagination in art above any other possible value in it, thus to be confirming the customary understanding of aestheticism rather than suggesting a more comprehensive approach to aesthetic experience. That the creation of beauty requires human powers of selection and imagination and that the experience of such beauty is intrinsically pleasurable, requiring no external justification, certainly seem to be part of Wilde’s own view, and will be further developed in “The Critic as Artist”: what that title means is precisely that the exercise of intellectual powers that we might typically think of as characteristic only of criticism is essential to the production of art because art is not a mere imitation of nature, thus artistic beauty is not a mere imitation of natural beauty. That the creation of beauty in art and the perception of nature through the forms created by art are a lie is equally clearly a provocation, because the beautification of nature or its perception is not an assertion that nature is something that it is not; it is not an assertion at all. This provocation seems to be a pose of the character Vivian, and not a commitment on Wilde’s own part; it is in any case not part of the argument of the following “Critic as Artist.” But more than simply dropping the equation of beautification with lying, the “Critic as Artist” goes beyond developing a purely formalistic account of artistic beauty and of the transformation of our perception of nature by art. Instead, it suggests that an even deeper source of our pleasure in art is the access it offers us to the deepest and finest human feelings and emotions. This suggests that there is a connection between beauty and truth after all – not between beauty and truth about metaphysical ideas but between beauty and the truth about our own experience. And if the lesson of Dorian Gray is that the deepest form of immorality is to settle for superficial beauty and pleasure instead of seeking a life of deeper and finer feelings, then beauty will turn out to be intertwined with morality as well as with truth, not independent of and irrelevant to both of those. Wilde’s version of “art for art’s sake” may turn out to be that art must be allowed to “follow its own lines” independent of conventions about truth and morality, but that by doing so it is ultimately linked to truth and beauty as such. The two-part essay “The Critic as Artist” names one of its speakers “Ernest,” a name that might suggest that the views presented by this speaker are the author’s own. However, this may be a trick, for it is not

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the interventions of “Ernest” but the impassioned speeches of “Gilbert” that appear to have authorial authority. Ernest seems to advocate a conception of beauty in art independent of all other human concerns, as when he asks, “Why cannot the artist be left alone, to create a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth the world we already know, and of which, I fancy, we would each one of us be wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection, did not, as it were, purify it for us, and give to it a momentary perfection?”89 Even Gilbert can seem to advocate art for art’s sake when he praises Aristotle’s Poetics for treating art “not from the moral, but from the purely æsthetic point of view.” The latter remark precedes a subtle restatement of Aristotle’s own famous enumeration of the elements of a tragedy. Aristotle’s definition concludes with the claim that a tragedy should present “incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”90 Gilbert, however, speaks thus: Aristotle, like Goethe, deals with art primarily in its concrete manifestations, taking Tragedy, for instance, and investigating the material it uses, which is language, the subject matter, which is life, the method by which it works, which is action, the conditions under which it reveals itself, which are those of theatric presentation, its logical structure, which is plot, and its final æsthetic appeal, which is to the sense of beauty realized through the passions of pity and awe. That purification and spiritualizing of the nature which he calls καθαρσις is, as Goethe saw, essentially æsthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied.91

While exactly what Aristotle meant by catharsis continues to be debated after more than two millennia,92 this intimation that the point of tragedy’s evocation of pity and fear is a purely aesthetic gratification of the “sense of beauty,” nothing moral, surely goes beyond any plausible interpretation of Aristotle’s text, and would seem to be explicable only by aestheticism’s own separation of beauty from everything necessary and useful, its interpretation of the slogan “art for art’s sake” as meaning that art is created for the experience of beauty alone. However, interpreting

89 90

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Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” Intentions, www.wilde-online.info/the-critic-as-artist.html, p. 3. Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 6 (1449b20–30); translation by Ingram Bywater from The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. II, p. 2320. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, p. 9. See Alexander Nehamas, “Pity and Fear in the Rhetoric and Poetics,” and Jonathan Lear, “Katharsis,” both in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 291–314 and 315–40.

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Wilde’s stance in this essay as endorsing such a version of aestheticism is too simple. For Gilbert begins his speech on Greek art criticism with the claim that “our primary debt to the Greeks” is to their recognition that the “two supreme and highest arts are” Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life. The principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not realize in an age so marred by false ideals of our own. The principles of the latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that we can hardly understand them. Recognizing that the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they elaborated the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere material of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system of reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say, with much keener æsthetic instinct. . . . Even the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of English prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of effect that such rhythmical life produces.93

Here Gilbert praises the high level of formal refinement developed in Greek literature and promoted by Greek literary theory not for its own sake, not because it gratifies some entirely detached sense of beauty, but rather because it is what allowed Greek literature to “most fully mirror man in all his infinite variety.” Wilde’s interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics, in other words, is not a perversion of Aristotle’s concept of catharsis into a late nineteenth-century doctrine of aesthetic formalism, but rather a claim that artistic beauty lies in the use of formal devices to effect an experience of pity and fear and all the other infinite variety of human emotions; beauty is not contrasted to the representation or even arousal of emotions, but intimately connected to it. Sometimes Gilbert’s argument seems to be that art must be an alternative to ordinary life because such life is sordid, not beautiful. Thus he says of the critic that He will always be showing us the work of art in some new relation to our age. He will always be reminding us that great works of art are living things – are, in fact, the only things that live. So much, indeed, will he feel this, that I am certain that as civilization progresses and we become more highly organized, the elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow

93

Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, pp. 7–8.

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less and less interested in actual life, and will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what Art has touched. For Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.94

This is followed by a suggestion that through art we can experience emotions that are not only more refined than those of the more grotesque levels of vulgar life, but that are free of the pains of ordinary life altogether. Thus, once again appearing to twist Aristotle’s meaning, Gilbert expostulates that Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter. In the actual life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to a lesser perfection. But the sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates, if I may quote once more from the great art-critic of the Greeks. It is through Art, and through Art alone, that we can realize our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

This position leads Gilbert to accept Ernest’s inference that “there is something radically immoral” in art, an inference that he affirms by stating that “emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organization of life that we call society . . . which is the beginning and basis of morals.”95 The sterility of the emotions aroused by art is precisely that they are free from any disposition to action and thus any significance for morality, which can hardly have been what Aristotle intended. However, Gilbert puts his position in a different light several pages later when he maintains that art “can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us by the mist of familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims are marring the perfection of our development. It can help us to leave the age in which we were born, and to pass into other ages . . . It can teach us how to escape from our experience, and to realize the experiences of those who are greater than we are.”96 Here the suggestion is that the point of art is not to transpose us into a domain of beauty disconnected with the emotions of real life altogether, but rather to liberate us from the constraints of our own limited 94 95 96

Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, p. 24. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, pp. 27–8. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, p. 30.

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and usually petty lives and put us into contact with human emotions far greater than we can ordinarily experience. Gilbert strengthens this suggestion a page later when he appropriates the famous expression of Matthew Arnold that great art, conveyed to us with the accompaniment of great criticism, exposes us to “the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of myriad generations”; the “true man of culture” is one to whom “no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure,” and who has learned through art and its criticism “‘the best that is known and thought in the world’” and “lives – it is not fanciful to say so – with those who are the Immortals.”97 The distance between Wilde and the paradigm of high Victorianism may not be as great as it sometimes seems. To be sure, Wilde tries to maintain distance between his own position and any conventional moralism by having Gilbert insist that “what the critical spirit can give us” is “the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming,” and by invoking the authority of Aristotle’s recommendation of the “theoretical life” as the highest good.98 But the aim of his argument ultimately seems to be not to assert that exposure to the greatest emotions of humankind through art can and should never have any impact on action at all, but rather to distance himself from the “philanthropists and sentimentalists of our day, who are always chattering to one about one’s duty to one’s neighbor,”99 to make sure that aesthetic experience does not lead one to become a “prig.”100 In other words, what he wants to separate the aesthetic from is not morality as such, but moralism, a real danger in Victorian England as Wilde was soon to learn. Anti-moralism rather than anti-morality may also be the lesson of Wilde’s position on individualism, a central theme in his theory of criticism as well as in his famous essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” One might suppose that Wilde’s emphasis on exposure to the greatest human emotions and to “the best that is known and thought in the world” through art would lead to an emphasis on the universal validity of aesthetic judgments: since the greatest emotions that have ever been felt by any human beings should

97

98 99 100

Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, p. 30; the phrase “the best that is known and thought in the world” comes from Matthew Arnold’s essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism: First Series (London: Macmillan, 1865); in Matthew Arnold, Poetry and Prose, ed. John Bryson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 372. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, pp. 30–1. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, p. 32. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, p. 31.

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presumably be valid for all, so the works of art that most successfully convey them, it might seem, should be valid, be the most beautiful, for all. However, Gilbert emphasizes the role of the individual in the critical reception of art: “it is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.”101 If the interpretation of a work of art is necessarily an interaction between the work (or its original artist) and the critic (or audience in general), then, it would seem, each interpretation must be at least partially determined by the individual interpreter, and thus be necessarily even if only partially idiosyncratic. However, the point may rather be that it is only by being genuinely personal rather than conventional that the interpreter can obtain a valid experience of a work that does not, after all, come from himself: “the æsthetic critic rejects those obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as . . . by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations true and no interpretation final.”102 What is vital is to avoid convention in interpretation and indeed in art itself, for only so can an individual at one time open herself to the great art of all times and thus to the greatest that has been and will be felt as well as known and thought at all times. Finality may be lost along with conventionality, but that is only because by being individual rather than conventional one opens oneself up to the infinite variety of mankind. This also seems to be the lesson of the final discussion of criticism in “The Critic as Artist.” Here Ernest proposes that “a critic should above all things be fair,” “rational,” and “sincere.” Gilbert argues against the first proposition that “The man who sees both sides of a question, is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all. Art is a passion, and, in matters of Art, Thought is inevitably colored by emotion, and so is fluid rather than fixed.” Against the second proposition Gilbert argues that in order to experience art fully one must experience it “beyond all other things in the world,” that is, beyond reason. And against the third, he argues that “The true critic will, indeed, always be sincere in his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will seek for beauty in every age and in each school, and will never suffer himself to be limited to any settled custom 101 102

Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, p. 23. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, p. 21.

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of thought, or stereotyped mode of looking at things.”103 The last objection sums up all three: the true critic, that is, the true appreciator of art, must be open to the full range of human emotions rather than being passionless, locked into a single conception of reasonableness, and trapped within a single point of view. What is needed instead of these high-sounding but actually confining limitations is rather “a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.”104 But what such a temperament makes possible is precisely openness to “a richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought,” the transformation into something finer and greater of “acts and passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile.”105 This is “dangerous,” to be sure, but nothing great is achieved without danger. To return to the starting point of the argument, the truly critical temperament, true susceptibility to the beauty of art, makes possible catharsis in the sense of initiation into “noble feelings of which [one] might else have known nothing, the word καθααρσις having, it has sometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the rite of initiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occasionally tempted to fancy, its true and only meaning here.”106 But that is true only if initiation here means not initiation into an esoteric religious rite but rather initiation into the full variety of the greatest human emotions. In his penultimate speech in “The Critic as Artist,” Gilbert claims that aesthetic experience is “higher” than morality: The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian always. To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability. Æsthetics are higher than Ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong. Æsthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilization, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, makes existence possible. Æsthetics, like sexual selection, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change. And when we reach the true

103 104 105 106

Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, p. 36 Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, p. 31. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, p. 46. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, p. 9.

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culture that is our aim, we attain to the perfection of which the saints have dreamed.107

Wilde clearly enjoyed tweaking Victorian sensibilities, by having his character imply that it is harder to create beauty than to be good – although he carefully says that what is easy is to be good according to a vulgar standard, not to be good tout court, and his dismissal of compliance with moral standards out of terror of punishment is no different from the contempt for morality if motivated by nothing more than hope of divine reward and fear of divine punishment evinced by Enlightenment thinkers from Shaftesbury to Kant – and by linking the beauty prized by aesthetics directly with sexuality (although Burke had also done this a century earlier). Even when testifying in his own voice in his libel suit against the Marquess of Queensbury, he asserted that no “book or work of art ever had any effect whatever on morality,” agreed that he did “not consider the effect in creating morality or immorality,” and objected only to the opposing counsel’s assertion that his claim not to care about morality in his artistic work was a “pose.”108 But it is difficult not to read Wilde’s chef d’oeuvre, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as a moralistic although not didactic work. The point of the book is surely that it is fatal to mistake the pleasures of art and outward beauty for the deepest springs of human happiness. The action of the novel is begun by Dorian Gray’s foolish wish that he himself should enjoy the permanent beauty of a work of art while his portrait rather than his own visage suffers the inevitable damage of even ordinary life (for at that point he does not foresee the life of extraordinary corruption that he will come to live). Presented with his first opportunity for a morally significant choice, he reveals his preference for the artificial beauty of the fictional characters the actress Sybil Vane portrays over the possibility of genuine love for the real human being that she is, and that is when his portrait begins to change. After a lifetime of sins, including his murder of the artist and once friend who had painted the portrait, all of which had corrupted the portrait but none of which had marred his own beauty, he attempts to destroy the record of his immorality by slashing the portrait, only for it to turn out that his own beauty was merely a fiction after all and that he has plunged the knife into his own heart, in his own body that bears the record of his every misdeed, and that the superficial beauty of the artistic image is intact after all. It is difficult to see this novel as a work that places art above morality rather 107 108

Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” wilde-online, pp. 15–6. “Oscar Wilde on the Witness Stand,” The Artist as Critic, p. 436.

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than as a tale about morality: while through the characters of his essays Wilde has argued that art can offer access to deeper and greater human feelings and thoughts than we experience in our quotidian existence and that contemplation of these need have no immediate effect on our actions, through his novel he has surely argued that even if art can add a level of pleasure and meaning to life beyond what morality has to offer, the beauty of art certainly cannot compensate for immorality. Far from being an aesthete who believed in the independence of art and aesthetic experience from every other human concern, Wilde in fact conceived of art as a medium for the fullest exercise of human imagination, the communication of the broadest possible range of human emotions, and for the exploration of the deepest truths about morality rather than for the celebration of superficial social conventions. He thus did not take the slogan “art for art’s sake” as the banner of a reductive or isolationist approach to aesthetic experience, but rather took it to express the power that art can have precisely when it fully exploits all these possibilities. Thus, like the German academic Vischer and the Oxford don Pater, the “aesthete” Wilde actually understood the claim of autonomy for art to be justified by art’s potential for comprehending rather than isolating human concerns. Neither Pater let alone Wilde were philosophy professors. The leading British academic philosopher of their time writing on aesthetics, Bernard Bosanquet, who published his History of Æsthetic the year after Wilde published his essays, wrote from within the framework of the NeoHegelianism that dominated Oxford in the later nineteenth century, the Oxford of Benjamin Jowett and T.H. Green, but advocated a broader conception of aesthetic experience than Hegel himself had accepted, one that came close to the breadth of spirit we have found in Pater and Wilde. A few years later, however, the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy reacted violently against a much narrower conception of aestheticism than he could have found in Pater, Wilde, or Bosanquet, none of whom he cites in his otherwise wide-ranging catalogue of recent aestheticians, and promulgated a correspondingly narrow moralism as an alternative to that aestheticism as he narrowly conceived it. In the next chapter, we will first consider Bosanquet’s broadening of Hegelian aesthetics, and then conclude our survey of aestheticism with a look at Tolstoy’s angry attack upon it.

7 Bosanquet and Tolstoy

In this chapter, we look at two more figures who wrote on aesthetics during the 1890s, a period as fruitful as the final decade of the previous century – from Britain, Bernard Bosanquet, and from outside Britain, Leo Tolstoy. Bosanquet, though working within the framework of British Hegelianism, broadened Hegel’s own conception of art in ways compatible with the breadth of spirit we found in Pater and Wilde. Tolstoy, however, in spite of the breadth of mind and spirit manifest in his great novels of earlier decades, above all War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), reacted against a narrow conception of aestheticism with an equally narrow conception of art as exclusively a vehicle for the communication of religious feelings. We might then see the narrowness of aesthetic theory in Britain in the first decades of the twentieth century, to be considered in Volume 3, as a defense of the narrow conception of aestheticism that Tolstoy had attacked in his 1898 tract What is Art?, which was in fact first published in Britain rather than Russia.

1. Bosanquet Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923) was born in Northumberland, the son of an evangelical clergyman, and attended Harrow School and Balliol College, Oxford, where his teachers included the leading British NeoHegelian idealists Benjamin Jowett, Thomas Hill Green, and Edward Caird. Upon graduation, he was elected to a fellowship at University College, which he held from 1871 to 1881, when he received an inheritance from his father, moved to London, and devoted himself to philosophy, social work, and adult education. He was active in the Charity Organization Society from 1881 until his death; in the Home, Arts, and 270

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Industries Association; in the Ethical Society, where he gave many of the courses of lectures that would later become books; and he chaired the School of Sociology and Social Economics from 1903 until its incorporation into the London School of Economics in 1912. Also in 1903, he returned to academic life as Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews University in Scotland, but served in that position only five years. Most of his many works were written during his years as an independent scholar and activist in London. Among his early contributions were his translations of the introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Arts (1886) and Lotze’s System of Philosophy (1888). During the 1880s he also laid down the general outlines of his philosophy in Knowledge and Reality, a critique of F.H. Bradley (1885), and Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge (1888). In his work on logic, which continued as late as his 1920 Implication and Linear Inference, and which he understood in the broad sense comprising metaphysics and epistemology that was characteristic of the use of this term by the British idealists, Bosanquet argued for a coherence view of truth, on which individual claims to knowledge are true because of their consistency with a larger body of knowledge, for the absence of rigid boundaries between individuals and larger wholes as well as between body and mind, neither of which can be understood without the other, and for the infinitude of reality and thus the incompleteness and provisional character of knowledge at any particular time. In his political philosophy, epitomized in his Philosophical Theory of the State (1899), Bosanquet argued that individuals can develop only through cooperation in the larger whole of society although society should not be thought of as having a value independent of the individuals who constitute it. Bosanquet summarized his metaphysical views and their moral and political implications in his two volumes of Gifford lectures, The Principle of Individuality and Value (1912) and The Value and Destiny of the Individual (1913). Bosanquet was unique among the British idealists of his and the previous generation (thus Caird, Jowett, Green, and Bradley) in writing on aesthetics throughout his career, and unique among all Anglophone aestheticians in making his major statement in aesthetics in the form of A History of Æsthetic (1892, revised 1904),1 although as we will see, Bosanquet’s suggestion of his views in this work needs to be supplemented by his Three Lectures on Aesthetic, published in 1915.2 Indeed, the 1

2

Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Æsthetic (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892), second edition (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1904). Bernard Bosanquet, Three Lectures on Aesthetic (London: Macmillan, 1915).

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History needs to be supplemented by the Lectures precisely because it is in the latter work that Bosanquet most fully recognizes the importance of the element of play in aesthetic experience and attempts to synthesize it with the synthesis of formalist and expressivist theories of art that dominates the History. Thus Bosanquet ultimately endorses a threefold synthesis of approaches to aesthetics, but only over the course of a pair of works bridging the divide between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bosanquet’s aesthetics as well as his philosophy as a whole is very loosely Hegelian,3 and his Hegelianism is expressed in the fact that he first presents his aesthetic theory in the form of a history, indeed a history in which what he calls “aesthetic consciousness” or the actual aesthetic experience of historical periods evolves simultaneously with more self-conscious philosophical theory about aesthetic experience, a form of experience that existed, of course, long before the eighteenth-century invention of the term “aesthetic.”4 Bosanquet’s History thus purports to be a history of the development of artistic style at the most general level as well as a history of theorizing about art. The argument of the work is that ancient art and ancient art theory were focused on the pleasures of form, that modern art and modern art theory have focused on the expression of feeling, but that the ultimate aim of art and the most satisfying kind of beauty must be the expression of both concrete content and our feelings about it through peculiarly appropriate form – what Bosanquet calls “the characteristic,” as had Goethe before him. As he puts it, “Among the ancients the fundamental theory of the beautiful was connected with the notions of rhythm, symmetry, harmony of parts: in short, with the general formula of unity in variety,” while “Among the moderns we find that more emphasis is laid on the idea of significance, expressiveness, the utterance of all that life contains; in general, that is to say, on the conception of the characteristic,” and that the two elements of form and expression must be synthesized in artistic practice and recognized to be conjoined in aesthetic theory, leading to a definition of beauty in a broad rather than narrow sense that identifies it exclusively with pleasing form: If these two elements are reduced to a common denomination, there suggests itself as a comprehensive definition of the beautiful, “That which has

3

4

In a rare recent treatment of Bosanquet’s aesthetics, Marie-Luise Raters describes it as part of “Second Oxford Hegelianism”; see Kunst, Wahrheit und Gefuuhl, pp. 325–35, 346–98. Bosanquet, History, p. 1.

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characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense-perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium.”5

By “general” or “abstract” expressiveness in a medium Bosanquet refers to beauty of form in the narrow sense, by “characteristic or individual expressiveness” to the particular content and the feeling about it that a successful work of art must communicate; and by distinguishing “senseperception” from “imagination” Bosanquet leaves room for the idea that the pleasure of aesthetic experience comes not just from the cognition of content and feeling through form but also from creative free play with these elements. But that idea is not much developed until his Lectures, published twenty years after the first edition of the History. Bosanquet stresses that the movement from purely formal beauty to the expressive “characteristic” in aesthetic consciousness and artistic practice as well as in aesthetic theory does not take place in a single stage, but in a series of moves including the recognition of the sublime in the eighteenth century (by both Burke and Kant)6 and the artistic representation of ugliness (as by Rosenkranz)7 in the nineteenth. He writes: But when with the birth of the modern world the romantic sense of beauty was awakened, accompanied by the craving for free and passionate expression, it became impossible that impartial theory should continue to consider that the beautiful was adequately explained as the regular and harmonious, or as the simple expression of unity in variety. The theory of the sublime now makes its appearance, at first indeed outside the theory of the beautiful; but it is followed by the analysis of the ugly, which develops into a recognized branch of aesthetic inquiry, with the result of finally establishing both the ugly and the sublime within the general frontier of beauty. The instrument by which this conciliation is effected is the conception of the characteristic or the significant; and the conflict between the harsher elements thus recognized and the common-sense requirement that all beauty should give pleasure, is mitigated, on the one hand by a de facto enlargement of average æsthetic appreciation, and on the other hand by the acceptance of such primary relations as harmony, regularity, or unity, in the light of essential elements organically determining all imaginable contents, and demanding, in their degree, characteristic expression for sense.8

What Bosanquet means by this is that aesthetic consciousness has come to accept and aesthetic theory has come to recognize that beauty lies not 5 6 7 8

Bosanquet, History, pp. 4–5. Bosanquet, History, pp. 203–6 and 275–9. Bosanquet devotes a section of his History to Rosenkranz (pp. 400–9). Bosanquet, History, pp. 5–6.

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just in pleasing formal properties and relations that are independent of all content, nor just in the formally pleasing representation of formally pleasing objects, but in the formally apt, indeed uniquely or “organically” suitable expression of reality in all its complexity, including the sublime and the ugly, and of the human feelings associated with all of these aspects of life. The recognition that even the ugly in the narrow, everyday sense can be the content of art that is beautiful in the wide sense of being aptly and organically expressive is for Bosanquet the final step in modern aesthetic consciousness and theory. And he stresses that from this enlightened point of view, the only kind of art that can be truly ugly is art in which, whether from confusion or from insincerity, reality is badly expressed and our feelings about it falsified: We must look for insuperable ugliness in its highest degree in the falsely beautiful produced by the confusion of aims and feelings in conscious representation, i.e. in art. We shall find it in the sentimental presented as touching, the effeminate as tender, in the feeble taken to be delicate, the tawdry taken to be brilliant, and the monstrous taken to be strong. Its lower degrees we shall find in the utilitarian works of man, not always as ugly in themselves, except when they present a simulated show of ornament devoid of interest or vitality, or as in discords of sound and colour introduce an artificial definiteness that has no æsthetic relations, but creating by their simple abstract shapes and ungraded colours an element of interference with the subtle and variously graduated content of external nature. In external nature itself it is hard by this standard to pronounce anything insuperably ugly except perhaps those disfigurements of individuality which indicate an alien life asserting itself victoriously within a higher form of existence.9

What is ugly is not reality as such, but conflict, in part conflict within nature, such as between a creature and a parasite or infection destroying it from within, but, more relevant to aesthetics, conflict between form and content and form and feeling, produced by confusion but even more so by deception and pretense. Here aesthetic and moral theory come close to one another: ugliness is as much a moral as a purely aesthetic phenomenon, disharmony and falsehood produced by negligence or malevolence. Bosanquet’s statement of the thesis that ugliness lies in failed expressions anticipates Bendetto Croce’s now better-remembered version of it from a decade later, although with the difference, as we will see in the next volume, that while Croce thought it necessary to rigorously separate the aesthetic and the moral, Bosanquet did not, and

9

Bosanquet, History, pp. 435–6.

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held instead that failed and especially insincere expression is common to both aesthetic and moral dysfunction. Bosanquet’s History covers the ancients, the medievals, and many modern figures from the Renaissance to his own time, but the central characters in its story are Kant, Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel on the side of the philosophers, the developers of aesthetic theory, and Winckelmann, Goethe, and Ruskin on the side of the artists and critics who are closer to aesthetic consciousness itself. Winckelmann is a central figure for Bosanquet, but not because he introduces the notion of the idealization of nature, which for Bosanquet would be the falsification of nature and therefore ugliness, but rather because he finds in the “tranquil soul” something in nature that can jointly satisfy the demands of beautiful form and beautiful expression. Winckelmann begins with conceptions of beauty and expression that are “a direct antithesis” or “opposing qualities” because “Beauty is in the first instance the beauty of pure form, which appears to mean the beauty of shape as exhibiting unity in variety,” while “Expression in art, on the other hand, is the imitation of the acting and suffering condition of our soul and body of passions as well as of actions.” “But in spite of this abrupt antagonism between the two,” Bosanquet continues, when we turn to Winckelmann’s “analysis of actual artistic portrayal, and to the history proper,” we see that he has glimpsed the possibility of a reconciliation of formal beauty with expressiveness in at least one case, namely the case of the tranquil soul: The style which is called the “beautiful” par excellence is compatible with more expression than the earlier or grand style, and . . . the grand style itself has not the beauty of a mere vase-outline or geometrical pattern, but is beautiful as the expression of a tranquil soul. And thus, though according to the strict theory of formal beauty it would seem to be like pure water, best when most flavourless, and so to be an easy and simple matter, needing in the artist who is to represent it no knowledge of man nor experience of passion, yet really “beauty without expression would be characterless, expression without beauty unpleasant”10 . . . He does not find that beauty is in inverse ratio to expression; and he shows conclusively that in the concrete the two are never divorced, and that beauty breaks up into kinds and types in accordance with the mental content from which it issues. Though he fails to reduce the two elements to a common denomination, and they remain antagonistic in theory, he has done all that is necessary, in the realm of plastic art, to exhibit that correspondence between phases of the beautiful and

10

Bosanquet quotes these words from Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity, Book V, 3.4.

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the development of its content which holds a chief place among the data of modern æsthetic.11

Winckelmann does not cross the Jordan into the promised land of modern aesthetic theory, because he sees the compatibility of formal beauty and the beauty of apt expression only in the case of one kind of feeling and in one medium of art. But his treatment of at least this one case is prophetic for Bosanquet. He mentions both Goethe and Hegel as successors who saw the importance of what Winckelmann had glimpsed and were able to generalize it. Kant is the next key figure in Bosanquet’s history, because, although in Bosanquet’s view somewhat grudgingly, he creates philosophical space for the combination of beauty of form with the expression of content, and at the more concrete level moves past Winckelmann’s recognition of the reconciliation of these two terms in the case of the “tranquil soul” to a more general account of human beauty as a synthesis of form and content. Bosanquet stresses the systematic role of judgment as the bridge between the sensible world of theoretical cognition and the supersensible domain of freedom for Kant: To be the meeting point of these two worlds, the representative of reason in the world of sense, and of sense in the world of reason, is the high position which Kant is here preparing to assign to the content of the æsthetic and teleological judgment. This content coincides . . . with the sublime and the beautiful in reality and in art, and the products of organic nature. The preeminent importance thus assigned to real objects in which an idea seems indissolubly embodied, was the germ from which concrete idealism was to spring.12

For Bosanquet, Kant’s central contribution was the thought that a form that pleases our senses could also be recognized to embody an intellectual idea in a way that neither “sensationalist” nor “intellectualist” philosophy could recognize,13 the former inevitably eliminating all content from the strictly sensory and the latter allowing the sensory only as a confused consciousness of the intellectual. Kant does this, on Bosanquet’s account, by affirming rather than rejecting the paradoxes represented by his four “moments” of the judgment of taste: a pleasure in an object that is not an interest in its existence, an “object of a pleasure which is universal and necessary, but without the intervention of a reflective idea,” 11 12 13

Bosanquet, History, pp. 248–51. Bosanquet, History, p. 261. Bosanquet, History, p. 266.

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and a form of purposiveness that lies “in a harmonious relation to our faculties of imagination and understanding” rather than in a determinate relation to an end.14 Summing up Kant’s account of these four moments of aesthetic judgment, Bosanquet writes: The æsthetic consciousness is now recognised in its positive essence as the meeting-point of sense and reason. All that we have thus far learnt about it has pointed to this conclusion, but Kant, with his usual calm audacity, was the first to lay down the principles which felicitously describe our everyday experience of the beautiful, while in the light of abstract metaphysic they appear to the flattest self-contradictions. A feeling of pleasure which has no relation to practical interest, which depends on the purposiveness of a perceived content, and lays claim to universality and necessity, though remaining at all time a pure feeling, wholly free from explicit conceptions of purpose or class or antecedent and consequent, – such a feeling is a sheer impossibility alike to a sensationalist and to an intellectualist philosophy. It is not a clarified form of sense-gratification; it is not a confused idea of perfection; these are merely efforts to explain it upon wholly inadequate bases. It is bonâ fide feeling, and bonâ fide reasonable. Such is the paradox which Kant propounds.15

Because Kant recognized that even the simplest case of aesthetic judgment breaks down the presumed boundaries between the sensory and the intellectual, the contingent and the necessary, and so on, Bosanquet reasons, Kant was also prepared to recognize in abstract terms that the boundary between form and content is not rigid either, even though he was still sufficiently under the sway of the “sensationalist and empiricist prejudices” of a British model of the “judgment of taste” to insist that when taste is in “close association with objective and abstract ideas” it must be “set down” as “impure.”16 But this inability of Kant to appreciate what he had done, as well as his insistence that the sublime is an alternative to beauty rather than a variety of it,17 does not change the fact that he had created theoretical room for the conception of the beautiful as the formally pleasing but also apt expression of significant content. On Bosanquet’s account, moreover, Kant exploited the room for such a conception of beauty that he had created in his account of the ideal 14

15 16 17

Bosanquet, History, pp. 263–4. Kant’s four moments are reduced to three in this statement because Bosanquet correctly recognizes that Kant’s second moment (universality) and fourth moment (necessity) really make the same point; see Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, second edition, pp. 142–7. Bosanquet, History, pp. 265–6. Bosanquet, History, pp. 266, 268. Bosanquet, History, pp. 275–8.

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of beauty, although again with some ambivalence because of his initial commitment to the “pure,” sensationalist conception of the judgment of taste. As Bosanquet correctly saw, for Kant the ideal of beauty cannot be reduced to correctness or regularity in an individual’s instantiation of the features of its species, but rather “consists in the revelation of moral import through bodily manifestation in the human form,” something that can be seen in outward form only by “great powers of imagination” on the part of an artist and perhaps on the part of an audience as well.18 For Kant, the ideal of beauty is an instance of “dependent” or “adherent” rather than “free” beauty because the appreciation of it does depend upon a determinate concept of what a thing, namely a human being, ought to be, but Bosanquet objects that That beauty which is the largest and deepest revelation of spiritual power is not the most dependent but the freest beauty, because it implies no purpose whatever excepting that which constitutes its own inmost nature, the expression of reason in sensuous form. It is plain that Kant felt this and practically recognized the true rank of such beauty, but was baffled in attempting to include it in his formal datum, the judgment of taste.19

Winckelmann had failed to cross the Jordan into modern aesthetics because he saw the possibility of recognizing the beauty of form and the expression of content in only one case, the case of the tranquil soul, and did know how to generalize from this case. Kant, obviously, thinks at a less concrete and more general level than Winckelmann, and offers a more general possibility of the expression of content in a form that is not merely harmonious in itself but also uniquely apt for what it is to express – that is the import of the fact that the ideal of beauty is more than merely “correct” or average – but because of his initial commitment to a simplistic conception of the judgment of taste he cannot quite recognize what he has done. As Bosanquet argues in his discussion of the concluding thesis of Kant’s treatment of aesthetic judgment, namely his thesis that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, Kant’s revolution in aesthetic theory is also limited by the fact that he sees beauty as an expression only of moral ideas, and still does not have the conception of beauty as the apt expression of any aspect of reality and our feeling about it: “Only in Kant a trace of moralism remains in as far as the permanent value of

18 19

Bosanquet, History, p. 272. Bosanquet, History, pp. 272–3.

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the beautiful is referred by him exclusively to its representation of moral ideas and the moral order, in consequence of the subjectivism which hinders him from plainly asserting the existence of any more general system which might express itself not only through morality in the world of conduct, but otherwise in other spheres.” Or rather, Bosanquet is willing to recruit Kant for his own cause by some gentle reinterpretation, we might say pushing Kant back toward Shaftesbury: “In pointing however to a supra-sensuous unity common to the world of nature and of freedom, he really transcends this false subordination; and we might say that beauty is for him a symbol of morality only because and in as far as he understands morality to symbolize the order of the universe.”20 This statement must be qualified, of course: for Kant it could be morally dangerous to think that morality ever already is the order of the universe, as opposed to the order that we ought to strive to impose upon the universe and that we may rationally believe that we can so impose. But though Bosanquet may be too generous in his account of Kant’s contribution to his own conception of aesthetics, it does seem fair enough for him to conclude that in Kant “The formal principle of unity and variety, which stood in the way of a concrete analysis of beauty, is being transformed into the principle of expressiveness, characterisation, significance.”21 On Bosanquet’s account, the next steps from the ancient to the modern theory of beauty were taken by Schiller, Goethe, Schelling, and Hegel. Bosanquet regards Schiller as a key figure in the history of aesthetics because he stresses that aesthetic experience is not just passive response to beautiful form, but involves activity as well: he sees that “in the enjoyment of beauty or of æsthetic unity there takes place an actual union and interpenetration of matter with form and of receptivity with activity.”22 (Of course, since for Kant sensibility is defined by receptivity and understanding by activity, it could be argued that Schiller is just making explicit what was implicit in Kant’s conception of aesthetic experience as the imagination’s free play between sensibility and understanding.) That aesthetic experience involves both matter and form also means that it is the experience of an embodied being, an experience that involves the senses as the link between embodied human beings and the world in which they are embodied: in Schiller’s own words, quoted by Bosanquet and endorsed in his own philosophy, “man is not obliged 20 21 22

Bosanquet, History, p. 283. Bosanquet, History, p. 283. Bosanquet, History, p. 290.

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to escape from matter in order to assert himself as spirit.”23 In particular, he credits Schiller with clearly recognizing that what activity in aesthetic experience must add to the traditional notion of formal beauty passively apprehended is expression: He is quite sure that the pseudo-classical idea of beauty cannot be stretched so as to cover romantic art . . . Therefore he thinks a new term must be chosen, which merely indicates the need of expression and of a matter to be expressed, and he sees that this characteristic matter will be found among the Greeks as in modern art. Now that the valuable quality of art, whether we call it “beauty” or by some other name, is understood to be a necessary and objective expression of human life and the unit of nature, there is no reason for trying to narrow the scope of its manifestations. And therefore the thinker who was the first to proclaim its concrete objectivity was also the first who in set terms discarded all formal and traditional limitations to the compass of its unity.24

Bosanquet does not make it clear exactly what in Schiller gives rise to this appreciation of his contribution, but he evidently believes that Schiller has taken a major step beyond Winckelmann and Kant in recognizing that beauty in the broadest sense consists in the apt expression of an unlimited range of human conditions and human emotions, not just the particular “tranquil soul” of Winckelmann or the broader but still limited concept of morality as in Kant’s ideal of beauty. However, at this stage of his own thought, Bosanquet is critical of Schiller’s use in the Letters on Aesthetic Education of the concept of play, more precisely the “play-impulse,” to characterize the distinctive activity involved in making and experiencing beauty, the creation and recognition of forms of expression. He claims that Schiller is “under stress” from the “metaphor which he adopts”: The two real links between beauty and the play-impulse are their common freedom from practical ends, and their common tendency to simulation or, in the very largest sense, the ideal treatment of reality. In other respects “play” suggests to us amusement and the relaxation of our faculties, and seems not to do justice to the serious need of self-utterance, nor to the element of expressiveness involved in all work in which the craftsman has any degree of freedom. The play impulse is in short only æsthetic where its primarily negative freedom is charged with a content which demands imaginative expression; and any impulse which takes such a form is æsthetic, whether or not it chances to remind us of “play.”25 23 24 25

Bosanquet, History, p. 291, quoting from a letter to Goethe. Bosanquet, History, p. 303. Bosanquet, History, pp. 295–6.

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The basis for Bosanquet’s rejection of Schiller’s conception of play would appear to be that it does not capture the value of expression as a form of cognition of the outer and inner realities of human life, and that any pleasure that play as a characteristic of artistic or spectatorial activity might generate apart from the cognitive significance of expression would be trivial in comparison with the latter. As we will see later in this volume and in the next, Bosanquet’s reservation that interpreting aesthetic creation and experience as a form of play does not do justice to its seriousness was not an uncommon criticism. Bosanquet credits Goethe with the first unequivocal recognition of the “characteristic” as the essence of beauty in the wide sense. The core of his discussion is a long quotation from Goethe’s famous essay “On German Architecture,” his plaidoyer for Gothic architecture originally published in 1773 in the collection On German Style and Art together with Herder’s essay on Shakespeare.26 In his meditation on the cathedral at Strassburg, Goethe praises the way in which in this building individually “capricious” forms nevertheless “agree together; for a single feeling has created them into a characteristic whole.” Here Bosanquet thinks that Goethe has put his finger on the essence of beauty in the wide sense: the apt expression of a distinctive sort of human feeling by means that considered apart from their expressive function might not satisfy formal standards of harmony but that are in utter harmony with what they are to express. He quotes Goethe further: “Now this characteristic art is the only true art. When it acts on what lies round it from inward, single, individual, independent feeling, careless and even ignorant of all that is alien to it, then whether born of rude savagery or of cultivated sensibility, it is whole and living.”27 He also stresses that unlike Winckelmann, who started with a formalist conception of beauty but who recognized the value of expression in at least the one case where what is expressed is not in tension with that formalist beauty, Goethe “approached” the beauty of form and expression “in the reverse order ”: “His point of departure was the idea of the characteristic as the excellent in art, that is to say, as the beautiful in the wider sense of the word which we have determined to adhere to,” only “supplemented . . . by the limiting postulate of formal beauty, beauty in the narrower sense, chiefly as a safeguard against 26

27

In a review of Bosanquet’s History published in 1893, John Dewey perceptively noted the complete absence of Herder from Bosanquet’s story; given the anti-formalist impetus of Herder’s work throughout his career, there is indeed no good reason for this absence. See Philosophical Review 2 (1893): 63–9, at p. 67. Bosanquet, History, p. 310.

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misunderstandings and eccentricities.”28 (One might also think here of Kant’s claim that taste may sometimes have to clip the wings of genius.)29 In Bosanquet’s view, subsequent progress in the history of philosophical aesthetics is only a matter of giving abstract expression to this concrete insight of the artist Goethe. Schelling and Hegel then made indispensable steps toward giving philosophical expression to Goethe’s advance in aesthetic consciousness. “With Schelling we are fairly launched on nineteenth century æsthetic,” he writes, because in Schelling “The objectivity and necessary historical continuity of the sense of beauty – Schelling will have it to be the supreme expression – of the absolute or divine reality as uttering itself through man, has become an axiom of philosophy.”30 However, Schelling tends to conceive of the absolute or infinite as being constrained by the necessity of appearing in sensuous and finite form, of “the infinite (ideal) [as] narrowed down to the finite (sensuous), and . . . the finite (sensuous) [as] racked and stretched and brought to an expressiveness more like that of feeling and thought, to admit the import of the ideal,” and, according to Bosanquet, “It is indeed painful to us, and we hold it false, when we are told that modern art is essentially allegory, which is the conclusion that Schelling draws from the entire subordination of symbol to import in the modern imagination.”31 In other words, Schelling does not recognize that beauty lies in a true harmony between matter, form, and content, but thinks that intellectual content must always exceed the grasp of sensuous matter and form. In Schelling’s view, “In the modern or Christian world . . . the intellectual or spiritual import is dominant, and refuses to be measured by the carrying capacity of any object or person presented to fancy or perception.”32 This leads Schelling to regard mythology as the paradigm of art, and Bosanquet will not accept this conclusion or the “supra-sensuous and theosophic world of beauty, into which pseudo-Platonic abstractions Schelling fell in later years.”33 Bosanquet thinks that Hegel developed a more balanced view of expression, recognizing the necessity that the absolute or what Hegel calls the “Idea” show itself to sense, but he also holds that this recognition remains abstract for Hegel, and that he fails to give full weight to 28 29 30 31 32 33

Bosanquet, History, p. 305; emphasis in the original. Kant, CPJ, §50, 5:319. Bosanquet, History, p. 333. Bosanquet, History, p. 324. Bosanquet, History, pp. 323–4. Bosanquet, History, p. 321.

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the beauty of nature as something that is itself perfused with human thought and feeling. Bosanquet approves of Hegel’s formulations that “Beauty is the Idea as it shows itself to sense”34 or “the Idea so translated into the terms or tendencies of the imagination as to be capable of direct or indirect presentation to sense.”35 He likewise approves of Hegel’s view that “However concrete and particular may be the forms of art, they must be different for having passed through the mind, which is the faculty of universals,” which implies a genuine synthesis of sensuous media and intellectual and emotional content, and of Hegel’s application of this insight at least in principle to the case of nature as well: “If the artist imitates nature, it is not because she has done this or that, but because she has done it right,” obviously a judgment that can only be made from the human point of view – natural beauty is also human, nature as humans think it ought to look. But he thinks that Hegel nevertheless did not “fully feel” the beauty of nature, which is to say he did not appreciate how extensively human beings may use the forms of nature, whether directly or in artistic representation, for the expression of their own thoughts and emotions, how fully human beings may infuse nature with humanity. The beauty of nature, as distinguished from man, which Hegel begins by considering, was something that he did not fully feel. He understood that inanimate nature may be in apparent sympathy with human moods, but he had no detailed justification to offer for their coincidence, nor any sense of character and import in mountain form or cloud formation or water movement. His gaze is concentrated on the individual organism and its progressive manifestation of life, in which for the first time the idea seems to him to attain a partially adequate self-revelation, and he devotes more attention to the plant than to the rocks, more to the animal than to the plant, and subsequently more to the human being than to the animal.

But, speaking for himself, Bosanquet continues, We do not feel, I believe, this exact progression of æsthetic value in the ratio of organic development. The landscape, and plant life as the vesture of the earth, seem to us more yielding and sympathetic to our moods than the concentrated life of the individual animal.36

This is a way of saying that Hegel did not fully appreciate the power of human imagination and its centrality to aesthetic expression. He favored 34 35 36

Bosanquet, History, p. 336. Bosanquet, History, p. 340. Bosanquet, History, p. 337.

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the beauty of animals over that of landscape and plants because he thought that animals themselves approximate more of the powers of the human being as in turn the vehicle for the manifestation of the spirit; in other words, he evaluated natural beauty from a strictly cognitive point of view – how much can it reveal to us of the essence of Spirit? – and did not regard the creation of expression as valuable in its own right. Bosanquet, on the contrary, values the beauty of landscape and flora, whether in nature or in artistic representation, precisely because the human imagination can use that as a vehicle for the expression of human feelings more freely than it can use the beauty of animals for that purpose. Bosanquet sums up this part of his discussion of Hegel with the comment that “Hegel’s treatment of the Ideal is the greatest single step that has ever been made in æsthetic,” but “Subject to the reservation which has been indicated, and which is practically represented by the life-work of Ruskin.”37 His History concludes with a chapter on Ruskin and William Morris, in which he argues that “at least within the theory of formative art a new vitality of connection is supplied by the work of our great writers, which precisely justifies, by an undesigned coincidence, the conception of the early concrete Idealists of Germany, and supplements what is defective in the arid formalism of their successors,” by whom he means especially “exact” aestheticians such as Gustav Fechner (to be briefly discussed later in this volume), who merely reproduced “the theory of antiquity armed with the methods of modern science,”38 and writers such as Robert Zimmerman39 and Max Schasler,40 who primarily rang permutations on Schelling’s and Hegel’s systems for classifying the arts, although in Bosanquet’s view those were the least valuable part of their work. Bosanquet calls Ruskin’s affinity with the “early concrete Idealists” “undesigned” because he believes that “True English æsthetic has not sprung from philosophy or philosophers, except through the negative contact of Mr. Ruskin with Alison and Burke,” and that any transmission of “pregnant” German ideas to Ruskin through Coleridge and Carlyle remains unproven.41 Bosanquet’s assessment of Ruskin’s philosophical sources and lack thereof is consistent with the judgment reached in the present work, where Ruskin was presented as having arrived at an aesthetics of truth and truthfulness similar in spirit to the aesthetics of German 37 38 39 40 41

Bosanquet, History, p. 342. Bosanquet, History, p. 387. Bosanquet, History, pp. 373–81. Bosanquet, History, pp. 414–24. Bosanquet, History, pp. 441–2.

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Idealism but independent of any actual influence from that quarter. But what Bosanquet stresses is that Ruskin recognized, at least for the visual arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, that all of nature is a candidate for the apt or truthful expression of its essential forms and character, and also that all of nature is a potential vehicle for the expression or reflection of human feelings. The first point Bosanquet makes by saying that Ruskin’s Modern Painters – the first volume of which he takes some glee in pointing out was published the same year as John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843) – brought nature nearer to man, and showed him his own intelligence both mirrored in its causation and rooted in its evolution; and secondly, it revealed in all phenomena, inorganic, organic, and belonging to humanity, the definite distinctive characteristics which on the one hand had stamped them for what they individually were, and on the other displayed them in their microcosmic relations as meeting-points of the complex influences that permeate the universe.42

That is, natural beauty reveals the continuity between humankind and the rest of nature, and consists in the first instance in the expression of the individual essence of the beautiful natural object, whether seen directly or as captured by the likes of Turner, and in the second instance in the expression of the relation between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic, the relation between the individual character of the object at hand and the rest of nature. The second point is that Ruskin recognized that beauty is not only the expression of the essence of the natural object perceived or depicted but also the expression of human feeling about that: The characteristic thus apprehended, including in its expression signs of the feeling with which the sympathetic or idealised self enters into the worldlife thus symbolised, is fully in the sense of Hegel, but possesses a wealth and vigour which in the beauty of landscape scenery his eye was never trained to appreciate. And here, in its simplest form, if we bear in mind the nature of the curves and graduated surfaces demanded according to the above exposition, is the vital bond between content and expression.43

For Bosanquet in his History of Æsthetic, then, the history of both aesthetic consciousness and aesthetic theory culminates with Ruskin’s recognition that beauty lies in the truthful expression of the essential character of nature without us and of our own feelings in the presence of nature, 42 43

Bosanquet, History, p. 444. Bosanquet, History, p. 451.

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which of course are also part of nature. Beauty is a form of cognition, but cognition of the essential characteristics of nature and of that special part of nature that consists of human feelings about the rest of nature. The Bosanquet of the History thus remains within the cognitivist framework of most nineteenth-century aesthetics, but clearly adds human feelings and emotions to the subject matter of aesthetic cognition. And as we saw in his comments on Schiller, he shared with most of his contemporaries the rejection of play as an essential component of aesthetic experience. In the Three Lectures on Aesthetic published more than two decades after the first edition of the History, however, Bosanquet gives much more scope to the role of imagination in aesthetic experience, and therefore to the idea of play. In the Lectures, Bosanquet also drops the use of the term “characteristic” and the suggestion that beauty lies in the apt expression of essential characteristics of objects, and instead explains beauty primarily as the expression or, as he more often says, embodiment of feeling. The Lectures thus point toward a threefold synthesis of the cognitivist approach to aesthetics with the emotional impact of aesthetic experience and a more generous attitude toward the conception of aesthetic experience as a form of play. Bosanquet begins the first lecture, on “The General Nature of the Aesthetic Attitude – Contemplation and Creation,”44 by enumerating the criteria of aesthetic experience: it is (i) “a stable feeling,” which does not “pass into satiety, like the pleasures of eating and drinking”; (ii) “a relevant feeling,” that is, “it is attached, annexed, to the quality of some object – to all its detail – . . . a special feeling, or a concrete feeling”; and (iii) “a common feeling,” that is, “You can share it; and its value is not diminished by being shared.”45 But the object that can satisfy these criteria in Bosanquet’s view is nothing other than feeling itself: we get a feeling that is stable, relevant, and common in response to the organization or “incarnation” of feeling itself. It is “feeling which has found its incarnation or taken plastic shape” that “cannot remain the passing reaction of a single ‘body-and-mind,’” but instead produces a stable, shareable, and object-directed feeling of pleasure.46 The remainder of the first lecture is then devoted to the description of the transformation of feeling itself into an object by means of imagination: “the aesthetic attitude is

44 45 46

Bosanquet, Lectures, p. 1. Bosanquet, Lectures, pp. 4–5. Bosanquet, Lectures, p. 7.

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that of feeling embodied in ‘form.’”47 And now, unlike in the History, Bosanquet gives an account of form. First, “Form means outline, shape, general rule, e.g. for putting together a sentence, or an argument; or it means the metre in poetry, or the type of poem, sonnet, or what not” – in other words, an organization that is imposed upon some material from without, “something superficial, general, diagrammatic.” But second, “when you push home your insight into the order and connection of parts, not leaving out the way in which this affects the parts themselves; then you find that the form becomes (as a lawyer would say) ‘very material’; not merely outlines and shapes, but all the sets of gradations and variations and connections that make everything what it is – the life, soul, and movement of the object.”48 This might make it seem as if form in the second sense is something that is inherent in the object rather than externally imposed upon it, and that the activity of both artistic creation and aesthetic appreciation is simply a matter of letting the real character of the object come forth without distortion by anything superficial imposed upon it (as Schopenhauer’s earlier account of beauty or Heidegger’s later account of truth would suggest). But this is not what Bosanquet wants to say. Rather, he claims that form in this deep rather than superficial sense is created only by the interaction of the object and the subject, and in the case of feeling as the aesthetic object in the interaction of the feeling as we first encounter it with our efforts to give it shape, to find a vehicle for expressing it. You always, in contemplating objects, . . . experience bodily tensions and impulses relative to the forms which you apprehend, the rising and sinking, rushing, colliding, reciprocal checking, etc. of shapes. And these are connected with your own activities in apprehending them; the form, indeed, or law of connection in any object, is . . . just what depends, for being apprehended, upon activity of body-and-mind on your part. And the feelings and associations of such activity are what you automatically use, with all their associated significances, to compose the feeling which is for you the feeling of the object or the object as an embodied feeling.

The object of the aesthetic attitude is embodied feeling; in the interval between his two works in aesthetics, Bosanquet was clearly influenced by the “empathy” theorists whom we will discuss shortly. Indeed, feeling must be embodied, that is, though of course it emanates from our bodies, it does not come with a distinctive form for its expression, but one 47 48

Bosanquet, Lectures, p. 13. Bosanquet, Lectures, pp. 15–16.

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must be created for it, through the activity of our body directly, as in song or dance, or through the creation of further bodies by the use of our own bodies, as in painting or sculpture. In addition to stressing that it is feeling itself which is embodied in aesthetic creation and appreciation, Bosanquet also now emphasizes that these activities are imaginative, free from the constraints of antecedent theory and free to create new and appropriate form: The aesthetic attitude must be imaginative. That is to say, it must be the attitude of a mind which freely tracks and pursues the detail of experience for the sake of a particular kind of satisfaction – not the satisfaction of complete and self-consistent theory, but the automatic satisfaction, so to speak, of a complete embodiment of feeling. The important point seems to me to be that “contemplation” should not mean “inertness,” but should include from the beginning a creative element.

This is what Bosanquet now calls “expression.”49 Bosanquet stresses the creativity of expression by arguing that “We must not suppose that we first have a disembodied feeling, and then set out to find an embodiment adequate to it.” Rather, “imaginative expression creates the feeling in creating its embodiment, and the feeling so created not merely cannot be otherwise expressed, but cannot otherwise exist, than in and through the embodiment which imagination has found for it.”50 Bosanquet does not explicitly say so, because he does not explicitly discuss aesthetic pleasure at all, but it seems obvious that even though part of the pleasure of aesthetic experience must arise from the satisfaction in the fact of having found a suitable form for the expression of some feeling, part of it must also arise from the satisfaction in the act of creating such a form – that there is pleasure in aesthetic creation and appreciation because it is not just a matter of recognizing the true form of a feeling, but of actively creating a form for the expression of the feeling without the guidance and domination of some rule for doing this. This also seems implicit in one of the central points of the second lecture. In a passage reminiscent of Adam Smith’s argument that the pleasure in imitation comes not from the antecedent similarity of the medium of a representation to the thing represented but rather from the feat of overcoming the dissimilarity of the medium of representation to its object, Bosanquet says about “the Homeric description of the metal-working deity’s craftsmanship in the shield of Achilles”: 49 50

Bosanquet, Lectures, p. 33. Bosanquet, Lectures, p. 34.

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Surely the miracle lies in what Homer accents when he says, “Though it was made of gold.” It lies here; that without the heavy matter and the whole natural process of the reality, man’s mind possesses a magic by which it can extract the soul of the actual thing or event, and confer it on any medium which is convenient to him, the wall of a cave, or a plate of gold, or a scrap of paper. And when these great poets insist on the likeness of the imitation, I take it that the real underlying interest is in the conquest of the difference of the medium. So that really, in the naïve praise of successful imitation, we have, if we read it rightly, the germ of the fundamental doctrine of aesthetic semblance. That is to say, what matters is not the thing, but the appearance which you can carry off, and deal with apart from it, and recreate.51

Aesthetic semblance is a central concept for Bosanquet in the Lectures, but what is crucial to his conception of semblance is precisely that it is an invention, a product of imagination, rather than something given, a product of passive perception. The aesthetic “semblance of external things” is “that which imaginative perception freely apprehends, and remodels in the interest of feeling.”52 “Imagination finds in experience the instrument of that immense embodiment of feeling which it constructs,”53 and it seems clear that the stable, shareable pleasure of imagination comes as much from the act of construction – itself first performed by the artist but re-performed by the audience – as well as from the product of the construction, the embodiment. For, as Bosanquet concludes the third lecture, “Beauty is above all a creation, a new individual expression in which a new feeling comes to exist. . . . If we understand it otherwise, as a rule previously prescribed, then it is something which must be hostile to free and complete expression for expression’s sake.”54 In making the transition from his own aesthetics of the nineteenth century to his aesthetics of the twentieth century, Bosanquet stressed the imaginative, creative element of embodying feeling as well as the cognitive significance of the embodiment of feeling, and suggested that the pleasure of aesthetic experience has as much to do with the former as it owes with the latter. Bosanquet thus resurrected the idea of play and gave it a novel interpretation that straddles the boundary between the physical and mental. Had Bosanquet explicitly combined this new theory of play with his previous theory of the “characteristic” as the combination of form and feeling, where indeed the latter element is both the cognition and the experience of feeling, he would have counted 51 52 53 54

Bosanquet, Lectures, pp. 50–1. Bosanquet, Lectures, p. 54. Bosanquet, Lectures, p. 55. Bosanquet, Lectures, p. 109.

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among the great synthesizers of the history of modern aesthetics. He did not quite make this synthesis explicit – he did not write a third book in aesthetics to combine his first two. But his approach was certainly far more comprehensive than that of many of his contemporaries. In the remainder of this chapter, we will see how Leo Tolstoy produced a much narrower response to his narrow interpretation of nineteenth-century aestheticism. When we return to the further development of aesthetics in early twentieth-century Britain in Volume 3, we will see how a philosophical defense of a narrow aestheticism emerged, as if in reaction to Tolstoy’s attack upon it, while the more comprehensive approaches of Pater, Bosanquet, and even Wilde were ignored.

2. Tolstoy The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art? first published not in his native language but in an English translation in 1898,55 and thus at least in part a British as well as a Russian document, is an attack upon both the art and the aesthetic theory of the nineteenth century that had culminated in the aestheticist movement in the arts and the theory of art for art’s sake, as Tolstoy understood that movement. British aesthetics after the turn of the twentieth century can then be considered a response to Tolstoy, but was at first a defense of aestheticism conceived as narrowly as Tolstoy had conceived it in his attack. Only gradually did anything like a defense of the more comprehensive aestheticism of Pater and Wilde emerge in twentieth-century Britain – although, as we will see, a more comprehensive aesthetic theory was advanced earlier in the United States, by George Santayana, even before the nineteenth century was over. But all that will be considered later. For now, we will complete our survey of nineteenth-century aestheticism with Tolstoy’s attack upon it, and then return to Germany to survey the later nineteenth-century developments in aesthetics there, before we fully plunge into the twentieth century in Volume 3. Count Leo (Lev Nikolayevich) Tolstoy (1828–1910) was born to a family of ancient Russian nobility on their estate of Yasnaya Polyana in the Tula province of central Russia, which he would inherit after the death of several brothers. After failing to complete studies in Oriental 55

Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? trans. Alymer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1930); trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin Books, 1995). The latter translation will be cited here.

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languages and law at the university at Kazan and a period of gambling and womanizing in Moscow, he published a translation of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1851) and then served in the Russian army during the Crimean war, during which period he published Childhood (1852) and, while the siege of Sevastopol was still going on, the three historical fictions Sevastopol Sketches (1855). After a further period of traveling among European literati, he settled down on his estates, where he turned to the education of his peasants and married in 1862. The following years saw his greatest literary accomplishments, War and Peace (serial publication completed in 1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). While writing Anna Karenina he turned toward Christianity, first toward the Orthodox church but after 1880 toward his own brand of Christian communitarianism. Many of his writings after that time, even his remaining fictions, were polemical, and What is Art? is part of that polemical work, arguing as it does that the mere enjoyment of beauty cannot justify the great social and financial costs of the production of art, but that only art’s communication of sound religious feeling can. What is Art? begins with a scathing but hilarious indictment of the costs of putting on a full-dress production of a nineteenth-century grand opera to be enjoyed by a wealthy elite that could only have been written by a member of that elite who had detailed familiarity with such productions. It then continues with a well-informed survey of (continental) aesthetic theories from Baumgarten to his own time (he evinces no familiarity with any of the British work we have just been considering). Tolstoy implausibly ascribes to Baumgarten the view that “The aim of beauty itself is to be pleasing and to arouse desire,”56 and then argues that although many after Baumgarten opposed such a conception of the value of beauty with an “objective and mystical one, which merges this concept with the highest perfection, with God,” such a definition is “fantastic . . . not based on anything.”57 In his view, the only informative definition to have come out of the tradition of aesthetic theory is the subjective one that beauty is simply “that which affords us a certain kind of pleasure,”58 supposedly “without awakening lust,”59 but a pleasure that cannot in fact be clearly separated from the pleasure of for example eating as understood “by people who stand at the lowest level of moral development (savages, for instance).” Tolstoy thinks that it is possible for 56 57 58 59

Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. III, p. 17. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. IV, p. 31. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. IV, p. 32. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. IV, p. 33.

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people to ascribe a higher meaning than mere pleasure to eating if they have a higher understanding of the meaning of life, but “Just as people who think that the aim and purpose of food is pleasure cannot perceive the true meaning of eating, so people who think that the aim of art is pleasure cannot know its meaning and purpose, because they ascribe to an activity which has meaning in connection with the other phenomena of life the false and exclusive aim of pleasure.”60 Mere pleasure cannot justify the sacrifice of “the labours of millions of people, the very lives of people,”61 which art costs. Instead, “In order to define art precisely, one must first of all cease looking at it as a means of pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Considering art in this way, we cannot fail to see that art is a means of communion among people.”62 This leads to Tolstoy’s definition of art as the communication of feeling from one person (the artist) to others (the audience) through external means (artistic media), a process that Tolstoy describes, remarkably, as “infection”: feeling is communicated from artist to audience in the way that a cold is, thus without any special activity, especially any free play of the imagination, at least on the part of the latter. Of course, such a definition can also be a justification of art only if the feelings that are so communicated are valuable ones. This requirement is reflected in the two stages of Tolstoy’s exposition of his alternative to the merely pleasureseeking conception of art. First he emphasizes with his own italics the communication of feeling: To call up in oneself a feeling once experienced and, having called it up, to convey it by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, images expressed in words, so that others experience the same feeling – in this consists the activity of art. Art is that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.63

But then Tolstoy adds the requirement that the communication of feeling will justify the cost of art only when the feelings communicated are “necessary for life and for the movement towards the good of the individual man and of mankind,” in other words, what he considers to be religious feelings once religion has been stripped of all that is unessential or even contradictory to its true message: 60 61 62 63

Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. IV, p. 35. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. IV, p. 36. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. V, p. 37. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. V, pp. 39–40.

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This special significance has always been given to all people to the part of this activity which conveys feelings coming from their religious consciousness, and it is this small part of the whole of art that has been called art in the full sense of the word.64 Always, in all times and in all human societies, there has existed this religious consciousness, common to all people of the society, of what is good and what is bad, and it is this religious consciousness that determines the worth of the feelings conveyed by art.65

All art that aims at beauty for its own sake, that is, merely for the sake of the pleasure that it affords, is degenerate, even though that may indict most Western art since the Middle Ages: “The concept of beauty not only does not coincide with the good, but is rather the opposite of it, because the good for the most part coincides with a triumph over our predilections, while beauty is at the basis of all our predilections.”66 What is genuine and valuable is not the beauty sought by the elite who have lost their faith, beauty that has inevitably become “fanciful and unclear,” “artificial and cerebral,”67 but art that “must then be accessible to all people,”68 for example heartfelt stories about peasants that can be understood and appreciated by peasants. Tolstoy’s “infection” model of artistic creation and communication might seem to impute a remarkable degree of passivity to artist as well as audience, to leave no room for the activity of imagination on the part of either – after all, when one person passes a cold on to another, it is not usually as a result of some intentional, voluntary action on the part of the former (although perhaps there might have been some voluntary actions that the former could have taken to reduce the likelihood of infecting others if he had sufficiently understood his own condition or cared about the health of others). And indeed, Tolstoy never suggests that the audience needs any preparation or activity on their own part to understand the message of genuinely accessible art; for the audience, apparently, the unchanging “properties of human nature” will suffice.69 However, Tolstoy’s description of art as an “activity” by which the artist uses a medium to “consciously convey” his own experience to others seems to impute intentional, voluntary action to the artist, action

64 65 66 67 68 69

Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. V, p. 41. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. VI, p. 43. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. VII, p. 52. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. IX, p. 59. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. VIII, p. 57. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. XVI, p. 125.

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that presumably draws upon both trained technique and thought or indeed imagination in the artist. So it might seems as if “infection” could describe the passive reception of art but not the active creation of art. However, Tolstoy’s emphasis upon sincerity as the fundamental quality of the artist minimizes the importance of activity and imagination in artistic creation. What Tolstoy requires is that the artist have experienced religious feeling deeply and then let his expression of it flow naturally from his experience rather than obscuring it with complicated technique and clever invention. The artist should avoid “borrowing,” “imitation,” “effectfulness” (or “being Striking” as Alymer Maude translated), and “diversion,”70 as well as professionalization, advanced training, and refined art criticism;71 instead, the essential task for the artist is negative, that of avoiding the disruption of the communication of his genuine feeling “by the superfluity of details.”72 The work of art is more a matter of stripping away barriers to the transmission of feeling than of the invention of elaborate means for that communication. All the artist really needs is sincerity, “the chief and most precious property of art”;73 all that is necessary for art will be found when and “only when a man gives himself to his feeling. . . . And therefore schools can teach what is required for creating something resembling art, but never art itself.”74 The reduction of artistic creation to sincerity might seem too simple; even Tolstoy himself seems to suggest that there are several conditions for successful communication in art, not just this one. Thus he writes: Art becomes more or less infectious owing to three conditions: (1) the greater or lesser particularity of the feeling conveyed; (2) the greater or lesser clarity with which the feeling is conveyed; and (3) the artist’s sincerity, that is, the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself experiences the feeling he conveys.75

It might seem as if finding out how to make a feeling particular and clear requires both training and imagination, and it might also seem as if by listing these requirements first Tolstoy means to suggest that they are at least as important if not more important than sincerity. However, he quickly makes it clear that he thinks that the first two conditions for successful art follow directly from the third: 70 71 72 73 74 75

Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. XI, p. 84; in the Oxford translation, p. 181. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. XII, p. 93. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. XI, p. 88. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. XII, p. 93. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. XII, p. 100. Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. XV, p. 121.

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I am speaking of three conditions of infectiousness and worth in art, but in fact only the last is a condition, that the artist must experience an inner need to express the feeling he conveys. This condition includes the first, because if the artist is sincere, he will express his feeling as he has perceived it. And since each man is unlike all others, this feeling will be particular for all others, and will be the more particular the more deeply the artist penetrates, the more heartfelt and sincere he is. And this sincerity will force the artist to find a clear expression of the feeling he wishes to convey. And therefore this third condition – sincerity – is the most important of the three.76

Sincerity presumably may take effort – surely it will take effort for the artist growing up in an artificial, elite culture with a professional education virtually forced upon him – but once sincerity has been achieved, it seems as if everything else necessary for art will flow automatically from it; the sincere artist will not be able to avoid successfully communicating his feeling, and to that extent “infection” seems to be an apt characterization for Tolstoy’s conception of artistic creations as well as of the reception of art. One point that needs to be made here is that Tolstoy’s notion of particularity cannot be confused with any idea of idiosyncrasy, that is, any idea that individuality is as such an intrinsic value in art. That cannot be his idea, for his position is that art is valuable just insofar as it communicates from one person to others feelings on which a genuine community can be based, feelings that bring people together rather than separate them. His view can only be that people differ within a common framework, and that the function of the artistic transmission of feelings must be to create empathy, that is, an identification with the feelings of others that allows all to recognize that they share more than they differ, that they can be members of a single community in spite of their superficial differences. Tolstoy’s conception of art is not that art is a vehicle for the communication of metaphysical truth, but it is oriented toward truth nevertheless: the artist must be truthful to his own feelings, and by being so he will communicate to others feelings that will be the true basis for genuine human community. Such a theory is of course profoundly moralistic, and thus the furthest thing from the original idea of art for art’s sake, in which the value of beauty was strictly separated from the values of truth and goodness. Tolstoy certainly emphasized the emotional impact of art, but so restricted the emotions that art should communicate and so minimized the role of either knowledge or imagination on the part 76

Tolstoy, What is Art? ch. XV, p. 122.

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of either artist or audience that he hardly contributed to a broadening of aesthetic theory – instead, he offered as narrow an aesthetic theory as we have seen throughout our survey of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And we will see that, at least in Britain, it took some time in the twentieth century for this narrowness to be overcome, although what initially prevailed was a narrow version of aestheticism as if in defiance of Tolstoy’s narrow attack upon it. But before we can begin our survey of twentieth-century aesthetics, we must first return to Germany and see how aesthetic theory developed there following the post-Hegelian period with which we ended our earlier survey.

Part Three

GERMAN AESTHETICS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

8 In the Shadow of Schopenhauer

In Part One of this volume, we saw how Schelling cast a large shadow over much thought about art both within and beyond Germany in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and that Hegel then cast an equally large shadow, especially on aesthetics in the German academy, in the three decades following his death. In the later years of that period, especially in the time between 1848 and his own death in 1860, Schopenhauer’s star began to rise. Following our discussion of British aesthetics from Ruskin to Bosanquet, we now return to the German scene to consider the influence of Schopenhauer on a new generation of aestheticians. Friedrich Nietzsche will be our primary subject, but we will also touch upon the aesthetic theory of Eduard von Hartmann. In the subsequent two chapters of this volume, we will examine the reviving influence of Kant, first among philosophers who considered themselves to be Neo-Kantians – although the most selfavowedly Neo-Kantian among them did not in fact revive Kant’s concept of free play – and then among a group of philosophers, all Germaninfluenced although not all German, who did not think of themselves as Neo-Kantians but some of whom did revive Kant’s concept of play. Among this group, some, such as Herbert Spencer, revived the concept of play; others, such as Theodor Lipps, opposed the concept of empathy to it; and some, such as Karl Groos, tried to find room for both notions. But among all the philosophers to be considered in this part, it was probably Wilhelm Dilthey, an unorthodox Neo-Kantian who was also deeply influenced by Friedrich Schleiermacher, who developed the most comprehensive view of aesthetic experience, synthesizing, as Schleiermacher had before him, the aesthetics of truth, the aesthetics of feeling, and the aesthetics of play.

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1. Nietzsche: Introduction In 1872, the twenty-seven-year-old professor of classical philosophy at Basel, Friedrich Nietzsche, published not the scholarly monograph that had been expected from him following his early appointment, but The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, a speculative interpretation of the sources of Greek tragedy leading to an apologia for the music of Richard Wagner that would do as much to damage his academic career as did the poor health that required him to resign his position seven years later. Fourteen years later, he issued a new edition of this first work, now entitled The Birth of Tragedy: Or Hellenism and Pessimism, not with a new preface but with “An Attempt at Self-Criticism” of this “questionable book.”1 The older Nietzsche complained that his youthful work is “impossible,” “badly written, clumsy, embarrassing, with a rage for imagery and confused in its imagery, emotional . . . lacking the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore too arrogant to prove its assertions, mistrustful even of the propriety of proving things, a book for the initiated, ‘music’ for those who were baptized in the name of music,” and more2 – yet in spite of these faults, he was willing to reissue it, and it has remained one of his most popular books ever since. But what really seems to have bothered the older Nietzsche was, in personal terms, that his youthful work had “the bad manners of a Wagnerite,” and that, philosophically, it had sought to justify its “provocative sentence . . . that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon” by appeal to the “true metaphysical activity of man.”3 The older Nietzsche, in addition to having come to see the intoxicating music of Wagner as inimical rather than advantageous to the development of human freedom, had also come to 1

2 3

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Henceforth “BT.” Other works of Nietzsche cited in this section will include Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, tr. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) (“HAH ”); The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) (“GS ”); Beyond Good and Evil, ed. RolfPeter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) (“BGE ”); On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pierson, trans. Carol Diethe, revised edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) (“AC ”); and Writings from the Early Notebooks, ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, trans. Ladislaus Löb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) (“EN ”). BT, pp. 6–7. BT, p. 8.

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doubt that art could reveal a metaphysical justification of human existence. In The Birth of Tragedy, the young Nietzsche, adapting the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, his enthusiasm for which he then shared with Wagner, had argued that art – first in the form of the Greek tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles and now at last again in the form of the operas of Richard Wagner – can reveal the metaphysical truth that makes human life bearable, the joyous truth that beneath the level of appearance that is full of suffering and destruction humans are really at one with each other and with the world in a “primordial ground” that is “indestructible and eternal.”4 The older Nietzsche rejected the domineering music of Wagner and the dualistic metaphysics of Schopenhauer – which he had in fact already mistrusted before coming under Wagner’s spell5 – and in some moments seems to have mistrusted art altogether. In some moments he continued to see the possibility of art as a sign of the possibility of human freedom, however, although a playful freedom by means of which we can make our lives bearable or even joyous in the real world of our natural existence rather than a freedom from the natural world, the flight into a metaphysical fantasy of primordial being that Schopenhauer had imagined. Nietzsche rejected the eighteenth-century ideal of disinterestedness, whether in aesthetics or in morality itself, and never considered art outside of his primary project of “transvaluing” conventional morality into a new model of the potential for human flourishing for “free spirits.” Thus he never accepted the idea of aesthetic experience as a free play of our cognitive powers that has nothing to do with the rest of our lives. But in his later work he at least suggested that art’s false promise of solace through metaphysical truth might be replaced with a genuine possibility of free play throughout our lives. Nietzsche was born in Saxony in 1844 to a Lutheran pastor and his wife, herself the daughter of a pastor.6 His father died when he was five, and the following year he moved with his mother and younger sister Elizabeth to live with his paternal grandmother and great-aunts in Naumburg. 4 5

6

BT, §17, p. 81. See EN, “October 1867 – April 1868: On Schopenhauer,” EN, pp. 1–8. In these notes, Nietzsche balks at Schopenhauer’s attempt to identify Kant’s supposedly unknowable “thing in itself” with something that is after all known, namely the will, as well as asking how Schopenhauer could suppose that the mind evolves in time if time is supposed to be the product of the mind, as it is for Kant. Even in his enthusiasm in The Birth of Tragedy for Schopenhauer’s idea of something nonrational at the basis of reality, Nietzsche does not make the mistake of also insisting that this must be unknowable. For a magisterial biography of Nietzsche, see Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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After attending local schools, from 1858 to 1864 he was a scholarship student at the selective school founded in 1543 by the Elector of Saxony at Pforta, an hour’s walk away. The curriculum at Pforta emphasized classical languages and literature above all else, and it had produced some of Germany’s most famous writers and intellectuals (eighty years earlier, Johann Gottlieb Fichte had also been a student there). Nietzsche started university at Bonn in 1864 as a theology student, but after one year followed the classical philologist Friedrich Ritschl to the university in Leipzig, where his philosophical interests were inflamed by reading Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation and Friedrich Lange’s Neo-Kantian History of Materialism,7 and where he was first introduced to Richard Wagner. Nietzsche was an intimate of Wagner and his family for the next several years, and his turn toward philosophy was considerably influenced by Wagner, himself also an enthusiast for Schopenhauer. Nietzsche’s student work in the classics was brilliant, and in 1869 his teacher Ritschl successfully recommended him for the professorship at Basel before he had even completed his Ph.D. (hastily granted by Leipzig on the basis of philological articles already published). With minimal financial resources of his own, Nietzsche could hardly turn down this surprisingly early opportunity for a secure position.8 However, Nietzsche was not really committed to a career as a scholarly classicist – he tried without luck to get himself moved to the chair in philosophy after just two years in the classics chair9 – and the imaginative and speculative Birth of Tragedy was met with harsh criticism by professional classicists upon its appearance in 1872, notably from the equally youthful Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, who had been a classmate at Pforta. This response cost Nietzsche most of his students,10 but did not dissuade him from his new philosophical path. Between 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche published four Untimely Meditations, the second of which still adulated Schopenhauer but the fourth of which, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” already showed signs of distance from the cult that Wagner was establishing around himself with the establishment of his personal opera house in Bayreuth – Nietzsche would flee from the 7

8 9 10

R.J. Hollingdale provides an incisive analysis of the tensions between the philosophies that Nietzsche imbibed from Schopenhauer and Lange, which he only gradually and perhaps never entirely resolved; see Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, revised edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 36–7. See Hollingdale, Nietzsche, pp. 41–3. Hollingdale, Nietzsche, pp. 50–1. Hollingdale, Nietzsche, p. 82.

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debut of the complete Ring cycle there in 1876. In 1878, Nietzsche published Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, dedicated to Voltaire rather than to Schopenhauer and Wagner, which rejected the metaphysical claims for the importance of art made by the former and accepted by the latter as well as by Nietzsche himself six years earlier. After resigning his position in 1879 (receiving a pension for six years, supplemented by a small inheritance), Nietzsche led a nomadic life in Switzerland and Italy, devoting himself to bursts of writing between terrible migraines and other ailments. He published Daybreak in 1881 and The Gay Science in 1882, a year in which his life was thrown into further turmoil by a falling out with his best friend Paul Reé over the affections of a young Russian woman who had turned up in their lives, Lou Salomé, and by a break with his family over this incident. From 1883 to 1885 he published what he regarded as his central work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in four parts, and then published what are now considered along with The Birth of Tragedy his most important works, Beyond Good and Evil in 1886 and The Genealogy of Morality in 1887. In 1888, in a spurt of writing, he produced several short books, including The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, as well as the essay “The Case of Wagner,” all of which would be published under the supervision of others after the complete mental breakdown that Nietzsche suffered in Turin in January 1889. Nietzsche’s mental collapse is generally attributed to syphilis, with which he is assumed to have been infected by a prostitute during his university years. After being retrieved from Turin by his loyal friend Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche spent the remainder of his life under the care first of his mother and then his sister. Elizabeth, who had been close to Nietzsche when they were younger, had by this time been married to a notorious anti-Semite, Bernhard Förster, who had then killed himself over the failure of an attempted colony in Paraguay.11 Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for Förster and his anti-Semitism, but after his death Elizabeth would misrepresent her brother’s intellectual legacy and ultimately foster his misappropriation by the Nazis, whose rise to power she would witness before her death in 1935. After the early, mostly negative publicity that had greeted The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had largely been ignored during the remainder of his creative years – at the end, he had to pay to have his works printed. But he was becoming noticed again just at the time of his breakdown, and then remained popular with European intellectuals 11

On Förster and Elizabeth Nietzsche, see Hollingdale, Nietzsche, pp. 176–8.

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of many political persuasions throughout the twentieth century. In the United States and Britain, the highly selective use of Nietzsche by the Nazis – Nietzsche held that the “slave morality” of Christianity originated with the Jews,12 but at the same time utterly rejected the German nationalism and anti-Semitism of the 1870s and 1880s13 – had a chilling effect on his reception during the decades around World War II, but interest in his work waxed again after the publication of works by Walter Kaufman in 195014 and Arthur Danto in 1965,15 and has been unabated since in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France (where he was a major influence on Michel Foucault),16 and many other places.17

2. Nietzsche: “The Dionysiac World View” Nietzsche first stated the central idea of The Birth of Tragedy, but with only hints at the Schopenhauerian metaphysics of the subsequent work and without its promotion of Wagner, in a lecture on the “Dionysiac World View” that he gave in 1870. In this early piece, it looks as if Nietzsche is on the verge of a wholehearted revival of the aesthetics of play after its long rejection by German idealism. Nietzsche begins by stating that 12 13

14

15 16

17

E.g., GM, Part I, §7, pp. 17–18. For a few examples, see HAH, §475, pp. 174–5; BGE, §251, pp. 141–3; GM, Part I, §16, p. 32; Part II, §3, pp. 38–9; Part III, §26, p. 117. For further discussion, see Hollingdale, Nietzsche, p. 176. Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Macmillan, 1965). See Eric Matthews, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 147–56; Foucault’s best known works, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), and The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), employ a Nietzschean “genealogical” method. The literature on Nietzsche is extensive. In addition to the works already mentioned, valuable surveys of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole include Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 1983); Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Valuable work on Nietzsche’s aesthetics includes M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Philip Pothe, Nietzsche and the Fate of Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Aaron Ridley, Nietzsche on Art (London: Routledge, 2007); and the collection edited by Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell, and Daniel W. Conway, Nietzsche, Philosophy, and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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“there are two states in which human beings attain to the feeling of delight in existence, namely in dreams and in intoxication.” He maintains that each of these sources of pleasure leads to a style in art, that of “playing with dream” in making images, on the one hand, and, on the other, “play with intoxication,” which involves the “two principal forces which bring naive, natural man to the self-oblivion of intoxication, namely the drive of spring,” or drive to sex, “and narcotic drink,” which leads to song and dance. Nieztsche associates the pleasure of playing or dreaming with Apollo, the god of light and form, and the pleasure of intoxication with the “Asian” (Thracian) deity Dionysos. He claims that “In the realm of art these names represent stylistic opposites which exist side by side and in almost perpetual conflict . . . and which only once, at the moment when the Hellenic ‘Will’ blossomed, appeared fused together in the work of art that is Attic tragedy.”18 What he means by this is that tragedy arose from the fusion of the intoxicating exuberance of Dionysiac (or Bacchic) celebrations, basically fertility rites, with the calm image-making of epic poetry. By means of this unique combination, Nietzsche argues, “the principium individuationis is disrupted, subjectivity disappears entirely before the erupting force of the general element in human life, indeed of the general element in nature. Not only do the festivals of Dionysos” – to which the Apollonian images of the drama have now been added, but which nevertheless retain their original force – “forge a bond between human beings, they also reconcile human beings and nature. . . . All the caste-like divisions which necessity and arbitrary power have established between men disappear; the slave is a free man, the aristocrat and the man of lowly birth unite in the same Bacchic choruses. In ever-swelling bands the gospel of ‘universal harmony’ rolls on from place to place; as they sing and dance, human beings express their membership in a higher, more ideal community.”19 Although Nietzsche uses some Schopenhauerian language here, which would entail that we could sense primordial unity only by transcending the individuated level of appearance, he nevertheless seems to conceive of the possibility of harmonious life held out by the unification of the Dionysian and Apollonian elements of tragedy as something that can be found in nature as we ordinarily understand it, not in some realm of primordial being beyond mere appearance. And he also seems to think that the metaphor of play is the best way to characterize the aesthetic 18 19

Nietzsche, “The Dionysiac World View,” BT, pp. 119–20. Nietzsche, “The Dionysiac World View,” BT, p. 120.

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experience of tragedy, which is no part of Schopenhauer’s account of tragedy: If intoxication is nature playing with human beings, the Dionysiac artist’s creation is a playing with intoxication. If one has not experienced it for oneself this state can only be understood by analogy; it is rather like dreaming and at the same time being aware that the dream is a dream. Thus the attendant of Dionysos must be in a state of intoxication and at the same time he must lie in ambush, observing himself from behind. Dionysiac art manifests itself, not in the alternation of clear-mindedness and intoxication, but in their co-existence.20

In spite of his invocation of the Greek deities and his use of the image of intoxication, neither of which were any part of the eighteenth-century discussion of aesthetic experience, Nietzsche here seems ready to embark on an interesting expansion of earlier analyses of the experience of fiction, using the idea of play to characterize the bifurcated way in which we both give ourselves over to a fiction and yet at the same time retain our distance from it, our knowledge of its fictionality; and this in turn would suggest how we must balance an awareness of our own particularity and yet also our commonality with other human beings in order to achieve a harmonious form of life. This opening toward the idea of play is not immediately taken up in Nietzsche’s next work, however.

3. Nietzsche:

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

There is no mention of Wagner in “The Dionysiac World View.” But The Birth of Tragedy, which Nietzsche wrote about a year later than this lecture, has a more complicated agenda: it aims to give not only an historical but also a more metaphysical analysis of the origin and significance of Greek tragedy, to criticize the “rationalism” of both Euripides and Socrates, whom Nietzsche saw as jointly ending the magic moment of Hellenic tragedy, now confined to Aeschylus and Sophocles, and to herald the work of Richard Wagner as the first rebirth of the spirit of Greek tragedy since the time of those giants. In Ecce Homo, what turned out to be the valedictory work of 1888 in which Nietzsche summed up his previous books, Nietzsche gives The Birth of Tragedy work credit for the rising fame of Wagner21 (when in fact it may have been the urging of Wagner that pushed Nietzsche to make his original account of the Dionysian 20 21

Nietzsche, “The Dionysiac World View,” BT, p. 121. Nietzsche, AC, p. 107.

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and Apollonian both more Schopenhauerian and more Wagnerian),22 but also gives a perceptive account of his interpretation of tragedy and his critique of Socratism. Nietzsche exaggerates in saying that the book “smells offensively Hegelian and only a few formulas are tainted with the cadaverous fragrance of Schopenhauer”: “the opposition between Dionysian and Apollonian – translated into metaphysics” which is the core of his understanding of tragedy is his version of Schopenhauer’s distinction between the phenomenal world of appearance and the noumenal reality of the will in itself. (It might seem as if Nietzsche violates the conventions of transcendental idealism by treating the Dionysian as well as the Apollonian as something we can actually experience, but neither does Schopenhauer himself keep the will entirely on the other side of the fence around what can be experienced.) Nevertheless, Nietzsche accurately sums up the gist of his interpretation of tragedy as the lifeaffirming emergence of the Dionysian primordial unity of being into the Apollonian world of illusory individuality, and of the radical difference between his own understanding of tragedy and the classical one: “Saying yes to life, even in its strangest and harshest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I understood as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to escape fear and pity, not in order to cleanse yourself of a dangerous affect by violent discharge – as Aristotle mistakenly thought –: but instead, over and above all fear and pity, in order for you yourself to be the eternal joy in becoming, – the joy that includes even the eternal joy in negating . . .” In this sense, I have the right to understand myself as the first tragic philosopher – which is to say the most diametrically opposed antipode of a pessimistic philosopher.23

By saying that he was the “diametrically opposed antipode of a pessimistic philosopher,” the late Nietzsche means to say that he had rejected the fundamental attitude of Schopenhauer. The Birth of Tragedy did indeed express a more optimistic philosophy than Schopenhauer’s, but within a metaphysical framework that was more Schopenhauerian than that employed in “The Dionysiac World View.” To appreciate the development of Nietzsche’s view of the value of art from this early lecture to The Birth of Tragedy and then beyond, we must first see how he valued art while he was most committed to Schopenhauer’s framework and then see how he thought about art once he had left Schopenhauer behind.

22 23

See Hollingdale, Nietzsche, pp. 78–9. Nietzsche, AC, pp. 109–10.

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Schopenhauer, as we saw earlier,24 began from Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal world of spatio-temporal appearance and the noumenal reality that lies behind it, although while Kant thought that we could describe the noumenal only from the standpoint of morality as a pure will governed by the moral law, Schopenhauer thought that our own experiencing of willing requires us to describe the noumenal ground of phenomenal appearance as a willing of ceaseless activity with no rationally explanatory beginning and no morally rational end – Schopenhauer’s use of our own experiencing of willing to characterize reality as it is in itself is precisely what makes the boundary between the phenomenal and the noumenal more permeable for him than it was for Kant, and prepares the way for Nietzsche to treat both the Apollonian and Dionysian as possible objects of aesthetic experience. The young Nietzsche accepted Schopenhauer’s transformation of Kant’s dualism, and indeed would argue throughout his career that Kant’s moral ideal of a universally valid moral law – the “categorical imperative” – was neither a true description of any reality nor a norm that is valid for all human beings; here too he can be thought of as following Schopenhauer’s attack upon the validity of Kant’s categorical imperative.25 In aesthetics, Schopenhauer began by transposing Kant’s doctrine of “aesthetic ideas” as the “spirit” of the fine arts out of its decidedly moral key. He claimed that all the arts from architecture through literature represent essential, “Platonic” forms of the “objectification of the will,” that is, the paradigmatic forms in which the will manifests itself in appearance, while music copies not the objectifications of the will but the will itself – in Platonic terms, it is not at two removes from truth but only one. In his transposition of Kant’s idea of disinterestedness, Schopenhauer located the value of art in the fact that it can induce a state of pure will-less, subject-less, painless knowing. It is initially hard to see how anything that represents the ever-striving, unsatisfied, and unsatisfiable character of the will as it really is could be painless, but as we saw Schopenhauer’s idea was that precisely because art deals with universally valid forms, whether of the will itself in the case of music or of the objectifications of the will in the case of all the other arts, it distracts one from the frustration of one’s own will, the source of all pain – paradoxically, 24

25

See also the illuminating sketch of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and aesthetics in Hollingdale, Nietzsche, pp. 67–72. See Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. E.F.J. Payne, introduction by David E. Cartwright (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1995), Part II, §7, pp. 88–94.

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the contemplation of the will and its inevitable frustration is pleasurable rather than painful as long as what is contemplated is universal rather than particular. (As we also saw, Friedrich Theodor Vischer used a similar strategy to reconcile the emotional impact of aesthetic experience with its disinterestedness.) But Schopenhauer also held that the contemplation of the Platonic ideas of the objectifications of the will in the nonmusical arts or of the will itself in the case of music offers only momentary respite from the painful frustration of the individual will; real relief from phenomenal willing is offered only by ascetic renunciation of one’s own desires and compassion with all others, whom one recognizes to be identical with oneself at the ultimate level of reality. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche transforms the deities Apollo and Dionysos, whom he had already identified in the 1870 lecture as the “god of all image-making energies,” of image-makers such as sculptors, and in general “the magnificent divine image of the principium indivuationis,26 on the one hand, and the god of intoxication, orgy, and music,27 on the other, into images for the distinct realms of rationally organized appearance and arational underlying reality from Schopenhauerian metaphysics, which he had not done in the earlier piece, and then finds art to promise us harmony not within nature but beyond it.28 As in the earlier work, he sees tragedy as arising from the imposition of the limpid imagery of epic poetry onto the Dionysian or Bacchic rites through the vehicle of the tragic chorus. “Both the sculptor and his relative, the epic poet, are lost in the pure contemplation of images. The Dionysiac musician, with no image at all, is nothing but primal pain and the primal echo of it.”29 They are unified in the tragedy: “At this point our gaze falls on the sublime and exalted art of Attic tragedy and the dramatic dithyramb as the common goal of both drives whose mysterious marriage, after a long preceding struggle, was crowned with such a child – who is both Antigone and Cassandra in one”30 – those two being, of course, paradigmatic figures in Sophoclean and Aeschylean tragedy respectively. In the first instance, it is not the audience for tragedy but the artist who maximally benefits from its creation: 26 27 28

29 30

Nietzsche, BT, §1, pp. 14, 16, and 17. Nietzsche, BT, §1, pp. 14, 17; §2, pp. 19–21. Although there are still traces of the earlier, more naturalistic assessment of the benefits of art in the opening section of The Birth of Tragedy, §1, p. 18. Nietzsche will return to the more naturalistic stance in later works. Nietzsche, BT, §5, p. 30. Nietzsche, BT, §4, p. 28.

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The entire opposition between the subjective and objective (which Schopenhauer . . . still uses to divide up the arts, as if it were some criterion of value) is absolutely inappropriate in aesthetics since the subject, the willing individual in pursuit of his own, egotistical goals, can only be considered the opponent of art and not its origin. But where the subject is an artist, it is already released and redeemed from the individual will and has become, as it were a medium, the channel through which the one truly existing subject celebrates its release and redemption in semblance. For what must be clear to us above all . . . is that the whole comedy of art is certainly not performed for us, neither for our edification nor our education, just as we are far from truly being the creators of that world of art; however, we may very well assume we are already images and artistic projections for the true creator of art, and that our highest dignity lies in our significance as works of art – for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified – although, of course, our awareness of our significance in this respect hardly differs from the awareness which painted soldiers have of the battle depicted on the same canvas. Thus our whole knowledge of art is at bottom entirely illusory, because, as knowing creatures, we are not one and identical with the essential being which gives itself eternal pleasure as the creator and spectator of that comedy of art. Only insofar as the genius, during the act of artistic procreation, merges fully with that original artist of the world does he know anything of the eternal essence of art; for in this condition he resembles, miraculously, that uncanny image of fairy-tale which can turn its eyes around and look at itself; now he is at one and the same time subject and object, simultaneously poet, actor, and spectator.31

This passage is remarkably complex. Its latter part characterizes “the act of artistic procreation” as one in which the subject is both fully absorbed in its object and yet still conscious of itself, but without suggesting that this is the essence of aesthetic play, as Nietzsche’s earlier lecture had. Its first part rejects Schopenhauer’s division of the arts into more subjective and more objective ones, although this might have seemed to be one way of parsing the distinction between Dionysian (more subjective) and Apollonian (more objective) arts; but it does this precisely because it is Nietzsche’s view that the true synthesis of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy overcomes the distinction between subjective and objective by revealing the ultimate identity of the individual with the primordial ground of being – the ultimate aim of Schopenhauerian metaphysics and ethics, after all. But it reserves this experience for the artist, not for the audience, although Schopenhauer had stressed that the artistic genius is one who obtains the metaphysical insight and ethical benefit of art before his audience can but who can also communicate these to 31

Nietzsche, BT, §5, pp. 32–3.

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his audience. Finally, Nietzsche hints at the idea that in order to flourish, the individual must turn his own life into a work of art, an idea that will be emphasized more in later works.32 Without resolving all of the tensions lurking in this passage, Nietzsche subsequently extends the benefit of the experience of tragedy from the artist to his audience, first of all the Greek audience, but then, since this passage actually comes in the transition to his paean for his contemporary palladin, Wagner, to his potential audience, that is, all of us. Here there is no contrast between artist and audience, but all are subsumed in a single “we”: Dionysiac art . . . wants to convince us of the eternal pleasure of existence; but we are to seek this pleasure not in appearances but behind them. We are to recognize that everything that comes into being must be prepared for painful destruction; we are forced to gaze into the terrors of individual existence – and yet we are not to freeze in horror: its metaphysical solace tears us momentarily out of the turmoil of its changing figures. For brief moments we are truly the primordial being itself and we feel its unbounded greed for existence and pleasure in existence; the struggle, the agony, the destruction of appearances, all this now seems to us to be necessary, given the uncountable excess of forms of existence thrusting and pushing themselves into life, given the exuberant fertility of the world-Will; we are pierced by the furious sting of these pains at the very moment when, as it were, we become one with the immeasurable, primordial pleasure in existence and receive an intimation, in Dionysiac ecstasy, that this pleasure is indestructible and eternal. Despite fear and pity, we are happily alive, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative pleasure we have become one.33

Nietzsche’s central thought here, indeed his central contribution to the century-old debate about the paradox of tragedy, is that while the depiction of tragic events, all of which he interprets as symbols for the rending of the body of Dionysos by the Titans,34 might seem painful, it is actually profoundly pleasurable because it intimates our underlying unity with the fertile unity of being that underlies all merely apparent individuality. Or, as he puts it later in this section, “In the old tragedy” – pre-Euripidean, pre-Socratic, that is – “the spectator experienced metaphysical solace, without which it is quite impossible to explain our pleasure in tragedy; the sounds of reconciliation from another world can perhaps be heard at their purest in Oedipus at Colonus.”35 This is the basic metaphysical 32 33 34 35

On this see Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, especially ch. 6. Nietzsche, BT, §17, pp. 80–1. See Nietzsche, BT, §10, p. 52. Nietzsche, BT, §17, p. 84.

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claim of Schopenhauer, read back into a specific moment in the history of art. Even while accepting this core of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, however, Nietzsche makes two key modifications to his master’s view. First, for Nietzsche the medium of art that reveals the underlying nature of reality or the Dionysian is not music, as Schopenhauer thought it was, but tragedy, which is born “out of the spirit of music” in the sense that it historically arises from a Greek form of music – the satyr chorus dedicated to the god Dionysos – but also in the sense that it philosophically replaces music within Schopenhauerian aesthetics. But second, for Nietzsche art does not offer a solace from the frustration of the will that needs to be and can be superseded by the genuinely ethical solace of ascetic resignation and compassion; rather, it offers the only but sufficient “metaphysical solace” without any taint of either asceticism or compassion, both of which Nietzsche violently rejected as healthy values throughout his work.36 This is to say that even at his most Schopenhauerian, Nietzsche replaces Schopenhauer’s view that the truly enduring relief of pain can only come through asceticism and compassion, with an even grander claim for joy based solely on metaphysical cognition through art. One might even say that this departure from Schopenhauer happens within the passage before us: at the start of this passage, Nietzsche suggests, like Schopenhauer, that the solace offered by Dionysiac art is only momentary, but by the end of it he suggests that its intimation of our own identity with all existence, which taken as a whole is certainly indestructible though any given piece of it is equally certainly destructible, offers us a pleasure that is “indestructible and eternal.” But whether or not Nietzsche holds that the pleasure offered by art is permanent, it is clear that in The Birth of Tragedy he does not think that our pleasure in art is only an anticipation of a more permanent pleasure offered by an ethical attitude toward underlying reality; our understanding of our metaphysical identity with reality through Dionysian art is our only source of metaphysical solace. In Nietzsche’s historiography of tragedy, “the tendency of Euripides . . . was to expel the original and all-powerful Dionysiac element from tragedy and to rebuild tragedy in a new and pure form on the foundations of a non-Dionysiac art, morality, and view of the world,”37 “putting

36 37

For Nietzsche’s polemic against compassion and asceticism, see GM, Part III. Nietzsche, BT, §12, p. 59.

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drama on to purely Apolline foundations.” The art of Euripides was in turn the exemplification of “aesthetic Socratism, whose supreme law runs roughly like this: ‘In order to be beautiful, everything must be reasonable’ – a sentence formed in parallel to Socrates’ dictum that ‘Only he who knows is virtuous.’ With this canon in his hand, Euripides measured every single element – language, characters, dramatic construction, choral music – and rectified it in accordance with this principle.”38 The scorn dripping from Nietzsche’s unusual latinate word “rectified” – rectificirte – is palpable. “Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist whose belief that the nature of things can be discovered leads him to attribute to knowledge and understanding the power of a panacea”39 instead of recognizing that redemption lies only in Dionysian absorption into the one primordial ground of being. Nietzsche then introduces Wagner into his argument by claiming that Wagner “has put his own stamp” on Schopenhauer’s “insight, the most important in all aesthetics,” that music – but now transformed into true tragedy – “represents the metaphysical in relation to all that is physical in the world.” Wagner did this by writing, in his essay on Beethoven, “that music is to be assessed by quite different aesthetic criteria from those which apply to all image-making arts, and not at all by the category of beauty,” and by inventing, in his Gesamtkunstwerk, a wholly new, or renewed, relation of music “to image and concept.”40 This leads Nietzsche to a remarkable historiography of opera: “Nothing can define the innermost substance of . . . Socratic culture more sharply than the culture of the opera”41 as it has been practiced before Wagner, because the essence of pre-Wagnerian (“Alexandrian”) opera has been to purchase clarity of word and concept at the cost of the music. “Are we not driven to assume that its idyllic seductions, its Alexandrian arts of flattery, will cause the supreme and truly serious task of art to degenerate into an empty, amusing distraction . . . ? What will become of the eternal truths of the Dionysiac and the Apolline . . . where the music is regarded as the servant and the libretto as the master . . . ? – where music is deprived of its true dignity, which consists in being a Dionysiac mirror of the world, so that all that remains to music, as the slave of the world of appearances, is to imitate the forms of the world of appearances and

38 39 40 41

Nietzsche, BT, §12, p. 62. Nietzsche, BT, §15, p. 74. Nietzsche, BT, §16, p. 77. Nietzsche, BT, §19, p. 89.

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to excite external pleasure in the play of line and proportion.”42 With that last remark, Nietzsche condemns not only opera from “the amusement-hungry luxury of certain circles in Florence”43 to contemporary Italy and France but also an entire line of aesthetic thought in modern times, from Hutcheson and Hogarth to Gerard and Kant: the aesthetics of play with beautiful form. Through the example of Tristan and Isolde, however, Nietzsche argues that in the music of Wagner the Dionysian element in art is finally restored to its rightful place. Nietzsche describes this opera as a struggle between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, in which the Apollonian aspect of the work first “tears us away from Dionysiac generality and causes us to take delight in individuals” and in “compassion” with them, but in which “In the total effect of tragedy the Dionysiac gains the upper hand once more,” the opera “closing with a sound which could never issue from the realm of Apolline art. Thereby Apolline deception is revealed for what it is: a persistent veiling, for the duration of the tragedy, of the true Dionysiac effect, an effect so powerful, however, that it finally drives the Apolline drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and where it negates itself and its Apolline visibility.”44 It does this both with its music – no “true musician” could “fail to be shattered” by its third act, “having once put their ear to the heart of the universal Will, so to speak, and felt the raging desire for existence pour forth into all the arteries of the world”45 – and in its words, ending with the verses “In the surging swell/ Where joys abound/ . . . /To drown thus – sink down thus/ – all thought gone – delight alone!”46 – but with words and music together, not through the former at the expense of the latter. Thus, Nietzsche claims, for the first time since Aeschylus and Sophocles Wagner has produced an art “whose enormous Dionysiac drive . . . consumes this entire world of appearances, thereby allowing us to sense, behind that world and through its destruction, a supreme, artistic, primal joy in the womb of the Primordial Unity.”47 Thereby Wagner brings Schopenhauer to the stage, tragedy having originated from the spirit of music and music now being recreated in the spirit of tragedy.

42 43 44 45 46 47

Nietzsche, BT, §19, p. 93. Nietzsche, BT, §19, p. 89. Nietzsche, BT, §21, pp. 102–4. Nietzsche, BT, §21, p. 100. Nietzsche quoting Wagner at BT, §22, p. 205. Nietzsche, BT, §22, p. 205.

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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

Although art would never again be as central to Nietzsche’s thought as it was in The Birth of Tragedy – all of Christian morality and Schopenhauer’s beloved Vedic asceticism awaited their transvaluation, after all – much of what he did subsequently have to say about art consisted in the repudiation of both the music of Wagner and the metaphysics of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche repudiated Wagner in “The Case of Wagner,” written in Turin in 1888 – five years after the death of Wagner, with whom Nietzsche had ultimately broken after seeing the spectacle of Wagner’s self-deification at Bayreuth in 1876, but against whom he perhaps could never have so openly turned while his one-time patron was still alive. Always an enthusiast, however, Nietzsche turned against Wagner and Tristan by replacing him with new idols, Bizet and Carmen, which he first saw in Genoa in 188148 and which he claimed to have seen twenty times by 1888.49 Nietzsche writes of Carmen: “This music seems perfect to me. It approaches lightly, supplely, politely. It is amiable, it does not sweat. ‘All good things are light, everything divine runs along on delicate feet’: first principle of my aesthetics. . . . Has anyone noticed that music” – this music, that is – “makes the spirit free ? gives wings to thought? that you become more of a philosopher, the more of a musician you become? – The grey sky of abstraction illuminated as if by lightning; the light strong enough for the whole filigree of things.”50 The “orchestral timbre” of Wagner, on the other hand, is “brutal, artificial, . . . harmful.”51 “Does Wagner liberate the spirit? ” Quite the contrary, “he wages war on us, us free spirits! How his magic-maiden tones pander to every type of cowardice in the modern soul! – There was never such a deadly hatred of knowledge! – You need to be a cynic to stop being seduced here, you need to be able to bite in order to stop worshipping here.”52 This comes after some sarcastic parodies of Wagner’s characters and plots, reminiscent of Tolstoy’s attack upon opera a few years later, but makes a point that at least some feel in listening to Wagner: beautiful as the music may be, it is also manipulative, the Gesamtkunstwerk designed to employ all of the arts of stage and pit not in order to free the imagination of the audience but to ensure that they respond precisely and only as the composer intends, seducing 48 49 50 51 52

Hollingdale, Nietzsche, p. 130. Nietzsche, AC, p. 234. Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” AC, pp. 234–5. Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” AC, pp. 234–5. Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” AC, p. 257.

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them rather than liberating them. Nietzsche’s critique may have had its origin in his revulsion against his earlier domination by Richard Wagner the man, but raises an objection against his music that resonates with at least some listeners. Of course, this sea change in Nietzsche’s view of Wagner goes with a sea change in his view of art: the point of art is not to absorb all its audience into one primordial being, to offer them, so to speak, the negative freedom of liberation from self, but rather to free those who are capable of being so to be themselves. The repudiation of the music of Wagner thus goes with a repudiation of the metaphysics of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche repudiated the metaphysical interpretation of art in Human, All Too Human in 1878, long before he was ready to formalize his break with Wagner. In the section of the work entitled “From the Souls of Artists and Writers,” he recognizes the overwhelming attraction of attributing metaphysical meaning to art, but says that the test of “intellectual probity” for the “free spirit” – though it is not clear whether this refers to artist, audience, philosopher, or all of these – is the ability to withstand this temptation: Art makes the thinker’s heart heavy. – How strong the metaphysical need is, and how hard nature makes it to bid it a final farewell, can be seen from the fact that even when the free spirit has divested himself of everything metaphysical the highest effects of art can easily set the metaphysical strings . . . vibrating in sympathy; so it can happen, for example, that a passage in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony will make him feel he is hovering above the earth in a dome of stars with the dream of immortality in his heart . . . – If he becomes aware of being in this condition he feels a profound stab in the heart and sighs for the man who will lead him back to his lost love, whether she be called religion or metaphysics. It is in such moments that his intellectual probity is put to the test.53

The interpretation of the greatest art as revealing Dionysian truth beneath Apollonian imagery had not promised personal immortality, to be sure, but had offered a substitute for it in the absorption of the individual in the greater unity of primordial being, and now Nietzsche rejects that. Of course, that raises the question of what the value of art might be instead, and Nietzsche answers that by maintaining that art shows how individuals may affirm life and find joy within it without demoting the natural, spatio-temporal world to mere appearance and seeking solace in identification with a supposed reality beyond it: 53

Nietzsche, HAH, Vol. I, Part 4, §153, p. 82.

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What is left of art. – It is true, certain metaphysical presuppositions bestow much greater value on art, for example, when it is believed that the character is unalterable and that all characters and actions are a continual expression of the nature of the world: then the work of the artist becomes an image of the everlastingly steadfast . . . The same would be so in the case of another metaphysical presupposition: supposing our visible world would come to stand quite close to the real world, for there would then be only too much similarity between the world of appearance and the illusory world of the artist; and the difference remaining would even elevate the significance of art above the significance of nature . . . – These presuppositions are, however, false: after this knowledge what place still remains for art? Above all, it has taught us for thousands of years to look upon life in any of its forms with interest and pleasure, and to educate our sensibilities so that at last we cry: “life, however it may be, is good!”54 –

a line that comes from Goethe’s poem “Der Bräutigam” (“The Bridegroom”), “Wie es auch sei, das Leben, es ist Gut ” (“However life is, it is good”), but that also perhaps looks forward to Nietzsche’s later use of the idea of “eternal recurrence” as a test of how you live your life: have you lived your life to the fullest, so that you would be able to will its eternal recurrence even with all of its pains, knowing that those are the necessary price for the joys you have created for yourself ?55 However, Nietzsche does not expand upon how art may teach us to find interest and pleasure in all forms of life in Human, All Too Human. Indeed, in the second volume that he added in 1886 he suggests that it might be embarrassing for poets to pretend to be “teachers of adults” in the modern age,56 and then adds that in order to “reach out” for the art of such wise artists as “Homer, Sophocles, Theocritus, Calderón, Racine, Goethe” we – the audience – “must already have grown wiser and more harmonious.”57 In other words, instead of accepting Schiller’s theory of aesthetic education, that aesthetic experience is the only route to a harmonious life, he seems to consider the reverse, that only a life that is independently harmonious allows for the appreciation of great art. However, a few key passages in The Gay Science, four years after the first volume of Human, All Too Human, suggest that although Nietzsche would become critical of the traditional German ideal of aesthetic education, 54 55

56 57

Nietzsche, HAH, Vol. I, Part 4, §222, p. 105. For this approach to the eternal recurrence, see Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, ch. 5, “This Life – Your Eternal Life,” pp. 142–69. For a more traditional approach that sees eternal recurrence as a fact about temporal reality rather than a purely normative idea, see Hollingdale, Nietzsche, pp. 164–7. Nietzsche, HAH, Vol. II, Part I, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” §172, p. 254. Nietzsche, HAH, Vol. II, Part 1, §173, p. 254.

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he was willing to consider that the idea of free play might be a way to bring out the continuity between aesthetic experience and what he had come to recognize as the greatest aim of life and of his transvaluation of all values, the development of individual freedom and creativity. One passage in this 1882 work, halfway between Nietzsche’s early adulation of Wagner and his later repudiation of him, calls for us to “remain faithful to Wagner in what is true and original in him.” “It doesn’t matter that as a thinker he is so often wrong,” Nietzsche continues: Enough that his life is justified before itself and remains justified – this life which shouts at every one of us: “Be a man and do not follow me – but yourself! Yourself!” Our life, too, shall be justified before ourselves! We too shall freely and fearlessly, in innocent selfishness, grow and blossom from ourselves!58

Nietzsche then concludes this Book of The Gay Science with an expression of “Our ultimate gratitude to art ” in which he argues that art’s imagination of better possibilities for human life is a necessary complement to the scientific investigation of the failures of human will – this is how he is now characterizing an essential part of his own work – and then suggests that these better possibilities are to be understood precisely as forms of play. He writes: Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now our honesty has a counterforce that helps us avoid such consequences: art, as the good will to appearance. We do not always keep our eyes from rounding off, from finishing off the poem . . . As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable to us, and art furnishes us with the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make such a phenomenon of ourselves. At times we need to have a rest from ourselves by looking at and down at ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing at ourselves or crying at ourselves . . . And precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings and more weights than human beings, nothing does us as much good as the fool’s cap: we need it against ourselves – we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose that freedom over things that our idea demands of us. It would be a relapse for us, with our irritable honesty, to get completely caught up in morality and, for the sake of the overly severe demands that we there make on ourselves, to become virtuous monsters and scarecrows. We also have to be able to stand above morality and not just to stand with the anxious stiffness of someone who is afraid of slipping and falling at any moment, but also to float and play above it! How then could we possibly do without art, without the fool?59 58 59

Nietzsche, GS, Book Two, §100, p. 97. Nietzsche, GS, Book Two, §107, pp. 104–5 (translation modified).

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Here Nietzsche clearly lowers some of his earlier hopes for art by suggesting that the “aesthetic phenomenon” will make life bearable for us rather than justifying it. He also suggests one addition to such earlier ideas as Du Bos’s “artificial emotion,” Mendelssohn’s idea of distance, and Kames’s “ideal presence”: we do not just need a degree of distance from the objects of drama or other depiction in order to be able to enjoy rather than be pained by emotional response to them; rather, we need a certain degree of distance on ourselves in order not to take ourselves too seriously, more specifically in order not to take the constraints of conventional morality to which it is so easy for us all to subscribe, and thereby have the freedom to create, presumably not merely new works of art (that would make the means into the end), but new, more fulfilling ways of life. This can also be seen as a subtle response to Schopenhauer: the point of aesthetic experience is not simply to free ourselves from our individuality, but rather to free ourselves from the constraints that we ourselves accept that block our creativity. Nietzsche also distances himself from Kant’s aesthetics in his next and last major work, The Genealogy of Morality, when he accuses Kant’s aesthetics of being an aesthetics entirely for spectators “instead of viewing the aesthetic through the experiences of the artist (the creator),” that is, of treating aesthetic experience as a contemplative, passive experience rather than a creative one – and he there charges Schopenhauer as still being, in spite of standing “much closer to the arts than Kant,” unable to “break free of the spell of Kant’s definition.”60 In spite of this hint at a renewed interest in the idea of play as the key to aesthetic experience and its larger significance in our lives, as an indication of the possibility of creating our own lives as artists would create their works of art, Nietzsche does not further develop the concept of play. Instead, in the Genealogy of Morality, he uses the opportunity to take another swipe at the metaphysical pretensions of artists in general and of Wagner in particular: Let us put aside artists for the time being: their position in the world and against the world is far from sufficiently independent for their changing evaluations as such to merit our attention! Down the ages, they have been the valets of a morality or philosophy or religion: quite apart from the fact that they were, unfortunately, often the all-too-glib courtiers of their hangers-on and patrons and sycophants . . . At the very least, they always need a defender, a supporter, an already established authority . . . So, for example, Richard Wagner took the philosopher Schopenhauer as his front man, his defender.61 60 61

Nietzsche, GM III, §6, p. 74. Nietzsche, GM III, §5, p. 72.

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Having backed off from his original metaphysical interpretation of art in Human, All Too Human and having suggested the possibility in The Gay Science that creative play in art might be a model for human creativity in general, in his final works Nietzsche remained torn between the idea that art can be a genuine form of free play, as he suggests in his appreciation of Carmen in “The Case of Wagner,” and that art cannot escape the domination of metaphysics, as he holds in The Genealogy of Morals. For the most part, then, Nietzsche continued the cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience that dominated the nineteenth century, although after his earliest work he rejected the value of the metaphysical cognition to which, in his view, art pretends. A renewed and fuller analysis of aesthetic experience as a form of play, as well as a renewed and developed appreciation of the value of such a form of experience, would largely have to wait for others. In the following chapters, we will see that there were some among Nietzsche’s contemporaries who did do more with the idea of play, for example Wilhelm Dilthey among the Neo-Kantians and Herbert Spencer and Karl Groos among more naturalistic philosophers. Before we turn to these philosophers and their contexts, however, we will take a brief look at another heir to Schopenhauer and a close contemporary of Nietzsche, Eduard von Hartmann.

5. Von Hartmann Von Hartmann (1842–1906) came from a Prussian military family, but his own career in the officer corps was cut short at the age of twenty-three by injury. He then turned to philosophy, earning a Ph.D. at Rostock at twenty-five, and at age twenty-seven he published The Philosophy of the Unconscious, which quickly became a best seller.62 This work was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer but also by Schelling, and postulated an unconscious will as the underlying, absolute reality beneath appearances; von Hartmann differed from Schopenhauer, however, in arguing that the collective exercise of human reason rather than individual asceticism was the only path toward salvation – not that human reason could mediate the suffering brought on by the will, but that it could reveal the ultimate insignificance of it and thus release the human species from its so to speak second-order concern over its suffering. The details of 62

Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewußten: Versuch einer Weltanschauung (Berlin, C. Duncker, 1869); Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. William Chatterton Coupland, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1884).

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this now largely forgotten book, however, need not detain us, as von Hartmann wrote numerous other works, some of which are still of considerable interest independently of his cosmic pessimism. These include a Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness: Prolegomena to Any Future Ethics (1879), in which von Hartmann argues that morality must be based on feeling, not reason (that Kant is a target of the work is of course indicated by the echo of Kant’s own Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics in von Hartmann’s subtitle), yet not, as in Schopenhauer, on the single feeling of compassion, but on a range of feelings and drives including feelings for piety, truthfulness, love, and duty as well as for sympathy,63 and a two-part work in aesthetics, a history of German Aesthetics since Kant and a systematic Philosophy of the Beautiful, both originally published in 1887.64 Von Hartmann’s aesthetic theory hovers between the metaphysical aesthetics of German idealism and the reemerging aesthetics of feeling of the late nineteenth century, but in both moods remains well within the tradition of the aesthetics of truth rather than the aesthetics of play. Von Hartmann begins his theory of beauty in a Kantian mood, starting from Kant’s initial analysis of our pleasure in beauty as an immediate pleasure in the representation of objects rather than pleasure in the use of actual objects or, for that matter, pleasure in actual empirical cognition of the external world obtained through the representation of objects. “The aesthetic attitude [Verhalten] toward subjective appearance is distinguished primarily and specifically from the theoretical and practical attitudes towards the same thing by the fact that it entirely abstracts from the transsubjective reality that causally grounds the subjective appearance, and satisfies itself with the appearance as such, as long as it is beautiful.”65 Going beyond Kant, however, von Hartmann adds that aesthetic Schein or appearances produces Scheingefühle, or apparent feelings and emotions, which must be merely apparent or “aesthetically-ideal” in order to satisfy Kant’s premise that “all enjoyment of the beautiful must be really disinterested satisfaction.”66 Von Hartmann does not seem troubled by the question of why we should take pleasure in merely apparent feelings, for he does not consider these apparent feelings to be causes of 63

64

65 66

Selected chapters of this work have been reprinted as Eduard von Hartmann, Die Gefühlsmoral, ed. Jean-Claude Wolf (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2006). Eduard von Hartmann, Die deutsche Aesthetik seit Kant: Erster historisch-kritischer Theil der Aesthetik (Leipzig: Wilhelm Friedrich, n.d.), and Die Philosophie des Schönen: Zweiter systematischer Theil der Aesthetik, Ausgewählte Werke, second edition, vol. IV (Leipzig: Hermann Haacke, n.d.). Von Hartmann, Philosophie des Schönen, p. 12. Von Hartmann, Philosophie des Schönen, p. 41.

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aesthetic pleasure; rather, their chief effect is to concentrate our attention on the properties of the appearance or Schein of the aesthetic object itself, and it is the latter that is the source of our pleasure in beauty. “The aesthetic appearance that has been enriched and fulfilled with the reflection of the aesthetic apparent feelings is thus the seat or the carrier of beauty; it is that which is enjoyed as beautiful by the aesthetic subject who is apprehending it.” The feeling of pleasure in the beautiful object thus enriched is itself real, von Hartmann emphasizes, not apparent: “This aesthetic enjoyment is evidently a real feeling of pleasure, no ideal apparent feeling like those that are called forth by the aesthetic appearance as it is first given through perception of the product of fantasy.”67 It seems to be just an empirical fact that we are pleased by the contemplation of the appearances of objects enriched by the appearances of the feelings that such objects would induce in us if they were real. Von Hartmann makes no mention of the play of our cognitive or imaginative powers with such appearances, so it seems as if our pleasure in them is cognitive: we are just pleased to know how things look and feel. This, as we will see in the next chapter, was to become a widespread view among the aestheticians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of whom attempted to subsume the aesthetics of feeling into the aesthetics of truth while ignoring the aesthetics of play altogether. However, von Hartmann does not leave matters there; he subsequently says that this first level of his account of our pleasure in the beautiful is “merely empirical,” and has not yet “concerned itself with the causal explanation” of beauty.68 Here, in a section of his chapter on “The Place of the Beautiful in the World-Whole” entitled “The significance and the value of the beautiful for the conscious spirit” is where, as his titles suggests, he turns back toward the metaphysical aesthetics of German idealism. He first claims, using language adopted from Schopenhauer, that if we confine ourselves to truths about “the real world of individuation,” then there will seem to be no connection between beauty and truth at all, indeed, beauty will seem to be just “an hors d’oeuvre ” before the main course of truth, a mere “calculation of the playing fantasy”69 – here is a rare place where he speaks of play, but he speaks of it in what is evidently a derogatory way. Rather, he next argues, the real ground of our pleasure in beauty is that beauty reveals to us in the microcosm of a single 67 68 69

Von Hartmann, Philosophie des Schönen, pp. 64–5. Von Hartmann, Philosophie des Schönen, p. 486. Von Hartmann, Philosophie des Schönen, p. 436.

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appearance the truth of our connection to the macrocosm, even if only evanescently: As an objective-real individual of appearance the subject is really separated from the absolute spirit, and it feels itself as an individual self-consciousness existentially divorced from that, although it remains immanent to it as the unconscious ground of being. But in its surrender to the beautiful the subject feels the annulment of this divorce, and feels itself phenomenally restored to unity with the absolute spirit through the aesthetic appearance of the idea, even if this restitutio in integrum is merely a psychological illusion, which will disappear again with the end of the aesthetic act. All objective real appearances present themselves to the subject as something alien, first and foremost as something hostile . . . Only the pure appearance of the beautiful is an object with which, when the transcendental relation to a transcendental reality falls away, all alienness, potential enmity, and real opposition against the subject is also removed, and it is thereby made possible for the subject to forget its opposition to the object and by means of the aesthetic apparent feelings and the real aesthetic pleasure to be drawn entirely to and into it.70

Here von Hartmann draws on Schelling in conceiving of aesthetic experience as a moment in which the subject pleasurably realizes its identity rather than difference with the object rather than on Schopenhauer, who held that in aesthetic experience the subject simply forgets its own identity and is thus freed from the pain of the ever immanent frustration of its will, although he had earlier, at the merely empirical stage of his account, agreed with Schopenhauer that one loses one’s sense of one’s own identity in aesthetic experience.71 But he also agrees with Schopenhauer here that the pleasure in the metaphysical recognition of the identity of self and object in aesthetic experience is evanescent, lasting only as long as the aesthetic experience itself lasts, and in this he differs from the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, who had not suggested that the aesthetic justification afforded by our insight into the Dionysian beneath the Apollonian is necessarily fleeting. Neither for von Hartmann nor for Schopenhauer is aesthetic experience a permanent solution to the problem of human existence. Von Hartmann’s metaphysical aesthetics thus looks back to the idealism of a half-century before, and was not the aspect of his work that was to be developed or at least echoed in the four following decades. His language in the last paragraphs cited anticipates the existential aesthetics 70 71

Von Hartmann, Philosophie des Schönen, pp. 487–8. Von Hartmann, Philosophie des Schönen, pp. 33–5.

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propounded by Martin Heidegger a half-century later, however. So, as we turn to the aesthetics of feeling developed by both Neo-Kantians and others from the time of von Hartmann until the 1920s, we should keep in mind that the aesthetics of truth still present in his work by no means died out with it, but would return with a vengeance.

9 Neo-Kantian Aesthetics

Neo-Kantianism “officially” began with the command, or plea, “Back to Kant!” issued by the twenty-five-year-old Otto Liebmann, subsequently professor of philosophy at Strassburg and Jena, in 1865. But what this call meant is far from simple.1 The import of the plea must be understood in its historical context, where the authority of Kant was to be used to criticize both the speculative, “absolute” idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel that had immediately followed Kant as well as the attempt to ground philosophy on empirical psychology by Gustav Theodor Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, and others that had been a previous response to post-Kantian idealism.2 However, while it might have been expected that a Neo-Kantian movement in aesthetics would develop Kant’s synthesis of the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of 1

2

There is little literature on Neo-Kantianism, and what there is has even less to say about aesthetics in Neo-Kantianism. For a work on the development of Neo-Kantianism but only up to 1881, see Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufsteig des Neukantianismus: Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986) (the English translation, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism, by R.J. Hollingdale [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], cannot be recommended because, remarkably, it omitted all the endnotes of the original); Thomas E. Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860–1914 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), covers a longer period, but is restricted to the topics indicated by its subtitle; Christopher Adair-Toteff, “Neo-Kantianism: The German Idealism Movement,” in Thomas Baldwin, editor, The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 27–42, provides a brief orientation; and Rudolf A. Makkreel and Sebastian Luft, “Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians: The Dispute over the Status of the Human and Cultural Sciences,” in Dean Moyar, editor, The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 554–97, focuses on the differences between Dilthey and the other Neo-Kantians. See Andrea Poma, The Critical Philosophy of Hermann Cohen, trans. John Denton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 1–4.

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play and perhaps find a way to add recognition of the emotional impact of art and nature on to Kant’s own theory of aesthetic ideas, that is not what initially happened in Neo-Kantianism. Instead, certainly the first great Neo-Kantian, Hermann Cohen, the leader of the Marburg school, retained the outlines of Kant’s analysis of judgments of taste but dropped his explanation of the pleasure that underlies such judgments as the product of the free play of imagination and understanding; he then recognized the importance of emotions in aesthetic experience, but framed that recognition within an essentially cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience, finding the essence of aesthetic experience to be cognition of the nature of human feelings through art. He thus rejected the speculative metaphysics of Hegelian aesthetics, but retained a cognitivist approach by making human emotions themselves the object of aesthetic cognition. Jonas Cohn, a figure not from the first but from the second generation of the other main school of NeoKantianism, the Heidelberg or Southwest school founded by Wilhelm Windelband, made the communication of emotion central to his in this regard deeply un-Kantian aesthetic theory, and in this way came closer to recognizing the experience rather than merely the cognition of emotions as an essential part of aesthetic experience. Following our discussion of Cohn, we will consider another figure associated with the Southwest school of Neo-Kantianism, Hugo Münsterberg, who developed his own aesthetics on the basis of a Kantian idea not used by the others, namely the idea of apperception. However, among NeoKantians it was only the more independent and eclectic Berlin philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, influenced as much by Schleiermacher as by Kant, who would find room for the idea of free play in his version of a Neo-Kantian aesthetics. In the tradition of Karl Philipp Moritz, the founder of the journal for “experiential psychology,” Dilthey would wrap his aesthetics – or more precisely, his poetics, since he focused his attention on literary art – in the mantle of “experience” (Erlebnis), but he was at pains to distinguish his approach from that of the experimental psychologists of the time who applied their methods to the case of aesthetic preferences, namely Fechner and Helmholtz. So we will begin this chapter with a glance at an example of this approach, namely the aesthetics of Fechner. In the following chapter, we examine the broader movement toward psychological aesthetics that took place outside of the framework of NeoKantianism. There we will see how Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s idea of empathy interacted with a revival of the concept of play.

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1. Fechner Thus we begin with a glance at the transitional figure of Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87), who would become a target for Wilhelm Dilthey. Fechner was appointed professor of physics at Leipzig at the age of thirtythree, although ironically had to give up that position five years later because of eye problems; after a period of recuperation, he resumed a life of lecturing and writing. He is best remembered for his research into “psychophysics,” or the physics of perception, summed up in his Elements of Psychophysics (1860). From early in his career, he also wrote speculative works about the mind and its place in nature, including The Little Book on Life after Death (1836), Nanna, or the Soul of Plants (1848), and Zend-Avesta, or on the Things in Heaven and Beyond (1851). In aesthetics, he took over the title used earlier by Jean Paul and published a Preschool for Aesthetics (Vorschule der Ästhetik) in 1876. In this work, he criticized the aesthetics “from above” of the German idealists, which subsumes the “domain of experience” under “ideal frames” characterized by conceptions of the “absolute” and “divine creativity,” and insisted that aesthetics must begin “from below,” with an empirical investigation of the “laws” of pleasure and displeasure and through that of the “objective essence of beauty,” although, in line with his speculative as well as empirical bent, he did not reject speculative aesthetics out of hand but rather expressed the expectation that ultimately – not in his “preschool” – they can be brought together, aesthetics “from above” describing the goals that can be fulfilled by aesthetics “from below.”3 But he also criticized the work of the eighteenth-century British aestheticians – he mentions especially Hutcheson, Hogarth, and Burke – whom one might have thought he would have claimed as forerunners, as too “particular” and “unorganized” to carry much weight.4 However, although Fechner made genuine advances in psychological technique, developing methods for testing preferences by having subjects compare samples rather than just asking them about their response, there is nothing in the content of his empirical aesthetics that was not already known to the eighteenth century. He promulgated two introductory principles – one that our perception of potentially beautiful properties must rise to a certain “threshold” before we will take pleasure in them and the other that different aesthetic properties may “help” or 3

4

Gustav Theodor Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetik, second edition, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1925; reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1978), vol. I, pp. v, 1–2. Fechner, Vorschule, vol. I, pp. 2–3.

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“intensify” each other, or that the sum of an aesthetic effect of a whole is greater than the sum of the effects its parts would have if experienced separately.5 He promoted three “primary” principles – that beautiful objects please in virtue of the “unity of the manifold” of our perception of them, the “truth” or freedom from contradiction of our perception, and the “clarity” of our perception.6 And he held one final principle, the “principle of association,” according to which a large part of the pleasurable effect of an aesthetic object depends on its associations, the recollections it causes, and the like.7 He uses the example of a table for one illustration of the effect of associations: we do not just perceive a table as a rectangular surface a few feet above the floor, rather we cannot but perceive it as a gathering place, a place where we have enjoyed meals or work, or not, as the case may be: “we see it not just with a sensible but with a spiritual [geistigen] eye.”8 Our associations with the object do not present themselves to us discretely, though, but coalesce together with the more formal properties of the object picked out by the previous three principles to form a single, conscious impression of the object, pleasing or not as the case may be. Fechner goes on to enumerate a variety of types of association that may contribute to the aesthetic effect of the perception of an object: associations of color, of space and/or time, of situation, and more,9 but, he argues, it is “the human being as the center of associations” that is the largest factor in our pleasure or displeasure in an object: whatever is the “natural expression of human mood, passion, intellectual and moral quality” is foremost among our associations with an object. For example, the overturning of a tree by wind or racing clouds are interpreted in human terms, and “many natural sounds owe their impression entirely to such associations.”10 Poetry works primarily with associations,11 and “fantasy” – Fechner does not use the term “imagination” – works with associations but does not create new ones: “the circle of associative moments is the room for play [Spielraum] within which only it can move.”12 Fechner’s conception of room for play here is passive rather than active, confining rather than liberating; he nowhere uses

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Fechner, Vorschule, vol. I, pp. 46, 49, 51. Fechner, Vorschule, vol. I, pp. 53, 80, 82. Fechner, Vorschule, vol. I, p. 86. Fechner, Vorschule, vol. I, p. 93. Fechner, Vorschule, vol. I, pp. 96–100. Fechner, Vorschule, vol. I, p. 108. Fechner, Vorschule, vol. I, p. 109. Fechner, Vorschule, vol. I, p. 112.

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the term “play” as part of a positive account of the source of our pleasure in aesthetic experience. But Fechner’s conception of association does recognize the emotional dimension of aesthetic experience. Fechner claims that his principles have been confirmed by his empirical investigations with human subjects, but there is nothing original about them. No one in the eighteenth century formulated his preliminary principles of “threshhold” and “intensification,” but neither would any eighteenth-century aesthetician have objected to them. The principles of unity, truth, and clarity were well known to both British and German aestheticians in the eighteenth century, although grounded in tradition and introspection rather than in any formal method of interrogating subjects in a laboratory setting. Fechner claimed no special originality for his principle of association, acknowledging that it had been anticipated by Kames and Lotze13 but surprisingly not mentioning Archibald Alison, who clearly had already argued precisely that our emotional responses to human qualities are the primary source of our associations with aesthetic objects in general – Alison, who did not know the German philosophy of his own century, seems to have been repaid by being ignored in Germany in the next century. Fechner blames Kant’s preference for “free” over “adherent” beauty for discrediting emotional associations in aesthetic experience in German thought, and claims that Schelling and Hegel were completely ignorant of it. This is only partially fair to all three. Kant did not say that the experience of free beauty is more important than that of adherent beauty, only that it is “purer,” and in particular in his explicit theory of fine art, which Fechner does not consider, he made moral associations central to the experience of artistic beauty, indeed to the experience of all beauty, through his theory of “aesthetic ideas.” To be sure, he did reject “charm” and “emotion” as core elements of the experience of beauty in the “Analytic of the Beautiful,”14 and thus suppressed the undeniable fact that the moral ideas that are conveyed through “aesthetic ideas” are obviously associated with powerful emotions. And it would seem fairer to say that Schelling and Hegel give little weight to the ordinary emotional associations of things in their own accounts of the experience of beauty than to assert that they denied it altogether; at least Schelling’s image of aesthetic experience is fraught with the emotional associations we are supposed to have toward the metaphysical character of human existence. 13 14

Fechner, Vorschule, vol. I, p. 86. Kant, CPJ, §13.

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Fechner’s claim to originality is thus belied by the previous history of aesthetics, and his empirical methods seem only to confirm what had been described by many authors a century before. Fechner’s principle of association could have opened the door to a greater recognition of the importance of emotions as part of aesthetic experience than had been allowed by Kant or German Idealism, but that was not the immediate response to his work. While Fechner stressed the pleasure or displeasure that we take in an object because of its emotional associations, he did not argue that aesthetic experience is at its core nothing less than the cognition of emotions themselves. But Neo-Kantian aesthetics would continue to be dominated by the aesthetics of truth, although the aesthetics of truth turned inward: by most authors, aesthetic experience and art would not be seen as vehicles for metaphysical insight, but as vehicles for insight into the nature of human emotions. Fechner put human emotions back onto the table of aesthetic experience, but he did not anticipate the particular role they would play in the aesthetic schools that would follow his own “preschool.”

2. Cohen The approach to aesthetic experience as a medium for the cognition of human emotions begins with the Neo-Kantian movement in Germany. In the spirit of Kant, the Neo-Kantians attempted to develop accounts of the fundamental, a priori principles of the main forms of human thought that did not assert that these principles give us insight into some transhuman reality and yet did not reduce them to empirically discoverable principles of human cognitive and conative psychology. But the NeoKantians did not feel compelled to stick closely to the letter of the philosophy of the historical Kant (although it was due to the impetus of the Neo-Kantian movement that the foundations of modern Kant scholarship were laid, including the commencement of the critical edition of Kant, the Akademie edition,15 under the leadership of some of the NeoKantians, such as Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Windelband, whose own uses of Kant certainly departed considerably from the letter of Kant’s philosophy), and they often developed approaches and arguments that differed considerably from Kant’s own. 15

Kant’s gesammlte Schriften, edited by the Royal Prussian (later German, now BerlinBrandenburg) Academy of Sciences (Berlin: Georg Reimer, later Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1900 – ), 29 volumes (volume 26 currently incomplete, and others currently under revision).

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This was certainly the case in aesthetics. Perhaps surprisingly, given the interest of all of the main schools of Neo-Kantianism in developing a general philosophy of human culture, few of the leading figures in the movement devoted much of their efforts to aesthetics, although aesthetics was a central field in German philosophy throughout the nineteenth century. But the leader of the “Marburg” school of Neo-Kantianism, Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) did, devoting one of his three books on Kant’s philosophy to Kants Begründung der Aesthetik16 (“Kant’s founding of aesthetics”) and one of the three multi-volumed books of his own philosophical system to an Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls17 (“aesthetics of pure feeling”). And while neither of the leaders of the “Baden,” “Heidelberg,” or “Southwestern” school of Neo-Kantianism, Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, devoted either an historical or a systematic book to aesthetics, one of the significant figures of the second generation of Southwestern Neo-Kantianism, Jonas Cohn (1869–1947), published an Allgemeine Ästhetik (“general aesthetics”) in 1901 that purported to approach the subject on Kantian lines and that may be regarded as the main treatise on aesthetics from this school,18 while Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916), as much a psychologist as a philosopher, also published works on aesthetics both before and after his permanent move to the United States in 1897. Cohen, Cohn, and Münsterberg all made independent use of certain key, but different, elements of Kant’s aesthetics at crucial points in their own work. But they arrived at views that are very different from Kant’s own, although similar in their most basic ideas not only to each other but also to other leading approaches to aesthetics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that were developed independently of Kantian premises. The common approach to aesthetics developed by Cohen, Cohn, and Münsterberg in spite of differences between their schools of Neo-Kantianism and their particular starting points in Kant can certainly be considered as an alternative to the speculative, metaphysical aesthetics of Schelling and Hegel on the one hand19 and to the psychological aesthetics of Fechner and Helmholtz on the other, but their approach reflects the general tendency of aesthetics in their own times as much as Kant’s own intentions. This is by no means to 16

17 18 19

Hermann Cohen, Kants Begründung der Aesthetik (Berlin: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1889). Hermann Cohen, Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls, 2 vols. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1912). Jonas Cohn, Allgemeine Ästhetik (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1901). On the speculative or metaphysical turn of aesthetics after Kant, see Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, chs. 2–3.

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deny the interest or importance of their approach; on the contrary, their work, along with the related and now better-known work of such slightly later figures as Edward Bullough and R.G. Collingwood, may constitute an enduring contribution to the field of aesthetics. But that approach should definitely be considered a supplement to the enduringly important ideas of Kant, not an interpretation of them. We begin our discussion of Neo-Kantian aesthetics with Hermann Cohen, in particular with his commentary on Kants Begründung der Aesthetik rather than on his subsequent, more systematic Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls, as the earlier work lays down the central themes of the latter while also revealing how Cohen managed to transform Kant’s original theory to his own purposes.20 Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) was the most significant Jewish philosopher in Germany since Moses Mendelssohn, and the first to hold a prominent university professorship. He studied at the gymnasium in Dessau, Mendelssohn’s home town, at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, and at the German universities of Breslau, Berlin, and Halle. In 1873 he became a Privatdozent at Marburg, the Hessian university that had welcomed Christian Wolff after his banishment from Halle a century and a half earlier, but that had been in philosophical decline since Wolff’s triumphant return to Halle in 1740; Cohen became professor in 1875, and initiated Marburg’s second golden age in philosophy, with Paul Natorp and then Ernst Cassirer among his foremost students. In addition to his Kant commentaries and his own systematic works, Cohen wrote on Jewish philosophy throughout his career; his culminating work in this area, completed during his retirement in Berlin and posthumously published in 1919, was Religion der Venunft aus der Quellen des Judentums (“Religion of reason from the sources of Judaism”),21 a lengthy riposte to Kant’s argument in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 20

21

The only extended discussion of Cohen’s aesthetics I have been able to find is in Poma, Critical Philosophy, pp. 131–47. Poma’s discussion is useful, but it does not emphasize how fundamentally different both Cohen’s method and his substantive results in aesthetics are from Kant’s, as I will do in what follows. Poma also devotes two essays to particular topics in aesthetics in his collection Yearning for Form and Other Essays on Hermann Cohen’s Thought (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), “Cohen and Mozart: Considerations on Drama, the Beautiful and Humaneness in Cohen’s Aesthetics,” pp. 87–110, and “The Portrait in Hermann Cohen’s Aesthetics,” pp. 145–68. A recent edition is Hermann Cohen, Religion der Vernunft aus der Quellen des Judentums: Eine jüdische Religionsphilosophie, with an introduction by Ulrich Oelschläger (Wiesbaden: Marx Verlag, 2008); an English translation is Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan, introduction by Leo Strauss (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972).

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itself directed at least in part to Mendelssohn, that Christianity is a better expression of the religion of pure reason than Judaism. The connections to both Mendelssohn and Kant are acknowledged in Cohen’s final work, though as the title suggests he is far more interested in demonstrating the presence of a religion of reason in traditional Jewish sources such as the Talmud than in his eighteenth-century predecessors. Kants Begründung der Aesthetik was published in 1889, eighteen years after Cohen’s initial statement of his approach to Kant’s transcendental epistemology and philosophy of science in Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1871) and seventeen years after his interpretation of Kant’s practical philosophy in Kants Begründung der Ethik (1872) (work on his detailed commentary of the Critique of Pure Reason and on the theory of infinitesimals intervened). It is an ambitious work. It begins with a review of the history of aesthetics, in which Cohen, revealing the nationalism of the German Gründerzeit, argues that the discipline of aesthetics could have originated only in Germany, with its recognition of the depths of the human spirit, and that, although important contributions to the discipline were made by Mendelssohn and Winckelmann, who emphasized the centrality of the activity of the idealization of nature in art, aesthetics as a part of philosophy was established only by Kant, because he was the first to include aesthetics in a systematic philosophy – something else only a German could have done. Next, Cohen reviews the central themes of Kant’s philosophy of nature and morality, and makes some general claims about the relations of aesthetics to nature and morality, preparing the way for his claim that although “the beautiful originates as a special interest of the soul, as a special activation of the powers of the soul” – that is what Winckelmann discovered with his conception of the “ideal of the beautiful” – at the same time “science and morality are the matter for art, which this to be sure has to cultivate independently and transform into new creations.”22 After this “Systematic Introduction” Cohen expounds his aesthetics and derives it from Kant’s in three lengthy chapters on “The Lawfulness of Aesthetic Consciousness,” “The Content of Aesthetic Consciousness,” and “The Arts as the Modes of the Generation of Aesthetic Content.” He concludes with a chapter on “The Friends and Opponents of the Critical Aesthetics,” in which he reviews the history of aesthetics, again exclusively German aesthetics, since Kant, and argues that his approach is the only right one.

22

Cohen, Begründung, pp. 92–3.

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Two points about Cohen’s systematic assumptions will be important for what follows. First, following Kant’s claim that “Our cognitive faculty as a whole has two domains, that of the concept of nature and that of the concept of freedom,”23 and that the fundamental principle of judgment, although it is distinct from the principles of nature and freedom, will still have to apply to the objects of nature and freedom, that is, natural and human products, Cohen also argues that there are only two primary domains of objects, the objects of natural science and of morality, and that the objects of aesthetics, namely works of art – he already departs from Kant, and in fact follows the Hegelian tradition, in deemphasizing the importance of natural beauty – will somehow have to supervene on the objects of science and morality. Science and morality, in turn, he argues, here inspired by Kant (and many years before G.E.M. Anscombe introduced this idea into Anglo-American philosophy),24 differ in their “direction of consciousness.” On the one hand, although our experience of nature is a conceptualized product “generated” by our own activity, it nevertheless begins with sensations that we are given, and so the direction of our consciousness in the case of nature is toward a “reality that is independent from the conditions of consciousness”:25 in other words, we try to fit our representation of nature to data that are given to us rather than trying to fit the data to a preconceived notion of nature. The “direction of consciousness” in the “generation of the moral,” however, is the opposite: “here there is not a thoroughly subsisting reality which is merely to be copied; the generation is not intended reconstructively, but is aimed at the future of a reality.”26 In other words, in morality the point is not to form our concepts to fit nature, but to transform nature to realize our moral goals. But these two opposed directions of fit seem at least prima facie exhaustive, and it is not immediately obvious what third direction of consciousness could be the goal of aesthetic experience and of the production of art. Explaining that is one task for Cohen’s aesthetics. The second general point about Cohen’s approach to philosophy in general is that it is ultimately based on the model of Kant’s “analytical” style of argument in the Prolegomena to any future Metaphysics and the “fact of reason” argument in the Critique of Practical Reason rather than on what we might consider to be the synthetic proof-strategies of the first 23 24 25 26

Kant, CPJ, Introduction, section II, 5:174. G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), p. 56. Cohen, Begründung, p. 97. Cohen, Begründung, p. 98.

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Critique, the third section of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, or the deduction of aesthetic judgments in the third Critique. That is, Cohen does not regard it as the task of philosophy to prove the very possibility of natural science, morality, or art; rather, starting from the “fact” of natural science, morality, or of the existence of art, philosophy’s task is to elucidate the a priori principles or “lawfulness” of the relevant domain. In Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, Cohen argues that Kant begins from the validity of Newtonian physics and infers the a priori forms of space and time and the a priori categories of the understanding as the conditions of the possibility of that science, and in Kants Begründung der Ethik he advocates the second Critique’s strategy of inferring freedom from the fact of our consciousness of our obligation under the moral law; indeed, in his later Ethik des reinen Willens he argues that ethics begins from actual systems of laws and elucidates their underlying a priori principle. He then claims that he will follow this methodology in aesthetics as well, and that it is “The productions of the arts that are the Factum to which, in analogy with the fact of the sciences and the ‘fact as it were’ of the moral law the foundation of the beautiful has to conform itself.”27 We might think that since Kant clearly organized the “Analytic of the Beautiful” and the “Deduction of judgments of taste” around the task of proving synthetically that such judgments are possible at all, and for the third Critique wrote no Prolegomena in which he clearly used the analytic rather than the synthetic method, Cohen’s use of his own method in the case of aesthetics is a clear departure from Kant’s method in aesthetics. Substantively, Cohen’s use of his preferred method in aesthetics, namely an appeal to “fact,” opens up the possibility that his results will be influenced as much if not more by his own experience or contemporary views about the arts than by any identifiably Kantian premises, and this could well explain why his views end up seeming more like other contemporary aesthetic theories than like Kant’s own theory. Let us now turn from these general premises to the central ideas of Cohen’s aesthetics. The first and foremost of his theses is that the aim of art is the expression of the feelings associated with our representations of nature and our own volitions and actions – that is, science and morality – that are not captured by the concepts of those two domains, and that the pleasure of beauty is the pleasure of enjoying those feelings. He gives an argument of his own for this view and then claims that Kant was conveying the very same view with his conception of the free play of 27

Cohen, Begründung, p. 305.

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our cognitive powers. He begins his own argument by reiterating that if knowledge of reality on the one hand and the determination of the will to change reality on the other exhaust the directions of consciousness, if “all psychological elements” are exhausted by “concepts on the one side and representations of the will on the other,” then it is not clear that “art could be” or have “a special content” of its own.28 But it does: “The new mode of consciousness is called feeling.” By calling feeling “new,” Cohen means not just that it is being newly introduced into his analysis at this point, but also that the recognition of feeling as the subject matter of art was a theoretical innovation, one that he places just before Kant, observing that Johann Georg Sulzer did not yet devote an article to it in his otherwise exhaustive Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste of 1771–74 although Moses Mendelssohn had made it central to his aesthetics beginning in the 1750s and Johann Nicolaus Tetens had also emphasized it in his Philosophische Versuchen of 1776.29 Kant had been influenced by both of these authors, and had begun his own “Analytic of the Beautiful” with the statement that “the feeling of pleasure or displeasure” is the one aspect of our consciousness of objects that cannot be included in cognition of them.30 Cohen does not immediately appeal to this Kantian premise, however, because his thesis is that we have a multitude of feelings associated with the representation of objects or with the determination of the will that are not captured by our cognitive or practical concepts, that these are the subject matter of art, and that these are not identical with or reducible to some singular feelings of pleasure and displeasure but rather that pleasure or displeasure supervenes on the experience of these multiform feelings. Thus he begins his argument by saying that “If one is to determine feeling, its significance for the connections of consciousness-processes, as well as the kind and degree of consciousness which it may exhibit, then one must abstract from the quale of being-conscious [Bewusstheit] that is designated as pleasure and displeasure.”31 Rather, Cohen argues, we must begin from the idea that we have an initial level of consciousness that we are conscious, being-conscious that we are conscious (“Dass Bewusststein überhaupt von Statten geht . . . das ist Bewusstheit ”),32 and that “feeling” is, in the first place, this consciousness of being conscious, and, 28 29 30 31 32

Cohen, Begründung, p. 151. Cohen, Begründung, pp. 151–2. Kant, CPJ, §1, 5:204. Cohen, Begründung, p. 153. Cohen, Begründung, pp. 153–4.

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second, everything about this consciousness that will not be captured by our subsequent conceptualization of our consciousness, whether that take the form of a conceptualized representation of an object or of a determination of the will. Thus he writes: Now if one properly abstracts from pleasure and displeasure, then feeling in general remains as the universal and fundamental kind of consciousness, as the expression of the fact that we have consciousness, without the specification, however, of to what content this consciousness determines itself. This meaning of feeling [Gefühls] I call to feel [Fühlen] in order to indicate that this first manifestation of consciousness consists in a kind of becoming conscious [Bewusstwerdens] that is preserved in the more developed levels of feeling.33

By the last comment Cohen suggests the two-leveled view I have imputed to him, that is, that we have a layer of feeling associated with all consciousness of objects that precedes and is not exhausted by our conceptualization of that consciousness, and that our aesthetic pleasure or displeasure supervenes on that level of consciousness (as contrasted to prudential or moral pleasure in a state of affairs, which supervenes only on a conceptualization of an object and/or a determination of the will). More precisely, Cohen continues, consciousness of objects consists of “sensations” (Empfindungen) that are organized by concepts, but the primordial level of consciousness or “feeling” precedes both, so there are feelings associated with sensations and feelings associated with concepts that are preserved in, yet not exhausted by, both of the latter. So “the feeling of sensation is the primordial process of becoming conscious that preserves itself” in subsequent consciousness, and likewise there are feelings associated with conceptualized “representations” that “form the substratum of abstract and intellectual processes of consciousness” but are not included in the conceptualized representations that result from those processes. He then maintains that the “unique direction” of “aesthetic consciousness” is precisely its direction at these primordial feelings of becoming-conscious that precede determinate sensation and conceptualization of objects and determinations of the will and are not taken up into them. This solves the problem of the “direction of consciousness” for aesthetic experience and the content of art: we could not introduce an entirely new domain of actual objects or intended states of affairs to play this role, because the distinction of objects into real objects of knowledge and intended objects of the will was exhaustive; but there is 33

Cohen, Begründung, pp. 154–5.

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a whole range of primordial feelings associated with our consciousness of those two kinds of objects, and that range of feelings, itself never fully exhausted by our two exhaustive forms of conceptualization, is the subject matter of art and aesthetic experience. Or, as Cohen puts it much later in the work: No single object, even were it the highest, counts as the content that is to be determined [in aesthetic experience and art], but consciousness itself grasped in the totality of its directions, and this totality organized as proportion; this interweaving of all objects in a mere relationship is the aesthetic content. And this interweaving of objects itself forms the new object: feeling as feeling, and not as an annex of sensation or representation.34

From this general model of the contents of aesthetic experience, one of Cohen’s more particular theses follows pretty directly: since art deals with the feelings that underlie our other, more specific forms of consciousness, and the latter are exhausted by the scientific knowledge of nature on the one hand and the moral representation of a better world on the other, the subject matter of art must be either science or morality, or more precisely the objects of science and of morality, nature on the one hand and human actions and intentions on the other. Thus far, however, nothing positive has been said about the pleasure (or displeasure) of aesthetic experience. Cohen charges that it was a mistake on Kant’s part to reduce all the feelings that are the content of the aesthetic to a single feeling of pleasure (or displeasure), but he certainly concedes that aesthetics must explain the pleasure of its domain of experience. His initial suggestion seems to be that pleasure and displeasure are one of the dimensions of primordial consciousness, and that art has a special charge somehow to capture this dimension of consciousness in its productions, so that the pleasure and displeasure captured by art are then communicated to us as the audience for art. He says, “In fact aesthetic consciousness comes down to this: that the specific moments of pleasure and displeasure press themselves upon us and yet do not become dissolved, but rather intensify and heighten themselves. Joy and pain should move the human heart when it becomes aware of the art-feeling. And through the qualia of anxiety and empathy blessed peace should spread itself over the mind.”35 But this does not explain why art should focus on only those dimensions of primordial consciousness, and it presupposes a theory of empathy that is not worked out or defended. In any 34 35

Cohen, Begründung, pp. 399–400. Cohen, Begründung, pp. 161–2.

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case, Cohen’s more considered view seems to be that pleasure in particular (not displeasure) supervenes on the expression of the whole range of primordial feelings in art because aesthetic experience is not directed at the objective content of experience but at the “motility [Regsamkeit] of consciousness itself”; aesthetic feeling is “the feeling of animation and of the disposition of consciousness to activity in general.”36 Here is where Cohen attaches his analysis to his interpretation of Kant: he presents his own theory as an interpretation of Kant’s theory that the pleasure of aesthetic experience arises from the free play of our cognitive powers. He interprets Kant’s claim that the free play takes place between the “powers of representation” rather than among “representations” themselves37 to be based on Kant’s recognition that aesthetic experience concerns “domains of consciousness [Bewusstseinsgebiete] rather than individual images of consciousness [Bewusstseinsgebilde],”38 that is, the primordial level of consciousness rather than the conceptualized representations of actual or possible objects of consciousness that constitute the subject matter of science and morality. However, he also says that Kant’s image of the play of the mental powers is a “seductively imagistic [bildlicher] expression,”39 and its seductiveness seems to consist in its abstractness leading Kant to focus on pleasure as the unique product of the free play of the faculties and to suppress what he should have recognized, namely Cohen’s own view that what animates the mind to its free play is its awareness of the whole range of preconceptual and never fully conceptualized feelings that constitute the primordial level of consciousness. Now Cohen is certainly right to turn to Kant for the idea that the free play of the mind with any content whatsoever is potentially pleasurable, just because it is an exercise of one of our most distinctive capabilities and as a crucial part of what it is for a human to be alive can lead to a heightened feeling of life. And he is right to associate this with the Leibnizian tradition in German philosophy,40 for the thought can already be found in Sulzer, although it is unfortunate that in his German nationalism Cohen overlooks the presence of this thought in Scottish aesthetics in the mid-eighteenth century, especially in Alexander Gerard, who seems to have been more influential for Kant than Sulzer. But in any 36 37 38 39 40

Cohen, Begründung, pp. 175–6. Cohen, Begründung, p. 170. Cohen, Begründung, p. 172. Cohen, Begründung, p. 173. Cohen, Begründung, p. 172.

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case, Cohen seems to have no justification at all for his interpretation of Kant’s conception of free play as expressing a contrast between a play of representational powers and a play of particular representations, and for using this interpretation to ground his own view that the content of aesthetic experience is all that aspect of primordial consciousness that is not otherwise captured by the determinate concepts of science and morality. As Kant makes clear in the very first section of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” already cited, he himself does not recognize any ineluctably subjective content of consciousness other than the feeling of pleasure and displeasure itself. Kant simply did not recognize the existence of other aspects of primordial consciousness that cannot be captured by our theoretical and practical concepts but that might somehow be captured in art. Indeed, Kant thought that the paradigmatic content of art is ideas of pure reason, paradigmatically moral ideas, which need to be intimated by the wealth of imagery in a successful work of art because they outrun or can never be fully captured by ordinary experience, but not because they in any way precede ordinary experience. Kant has his reason for preferring to call the central thoughts of morality “ideas” rather than “concepts,” but certainly with respect to Cohen’s own distinction between “primordial being-conscious” and worked-up, conceptualized “representation,” they fall on the latter rather than the former side. So Kant’s own theory of art is very different from Cohen’s. Cohen can successfully appeal to Kant for his theory of aesthetic pleasure as resulting from the “lawful” but nevertheless “free” play of our cognitive powers, but he cannot appeal to Kant for his theory of aesthetic contents. That seems to be his own invention, reflecting his own experience and perhaps artistic tendencies of his own time, or at least post-Kantian times. Again, that is not to say his theory is a mistake: it can be considered as part of the same emphasis on feelings or the subjective dimension of experience in general as the special subject of art that we will find in such representative writers of the next half-century as Bullough and Collingwood, to be discussed in the next volume. That tendency can be considered to be an enduring contribution to aesthetics. But it is not Kant’s contribution. A few further points will confirm that Cohen’s approach leads to results rather different from Kant’s. First, as mentioned earlier, Cohen’s conception of the direction of philosophical argument is the opposite of Kant’s preference for the synthetic over the analytic method of argument in all cases except the “fact of reason” argument for freedom in the second Critique : while Kant’s general conception of philosophy is that it needs

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to provide a transcendental deduction of the fundamental principles that license the practices of natural science, aesthetic judgment, and, at least in the Groundwork, moral judgment as well, Cohen’s method is to start from the undisputed actuality of a domain of facts and then merely to elucidate rather than prove the principles of their possibility. I have already suggested that Cohen’s specification of the content of aesthetic experience and the arts is certainly not deduced from Kant’s theory, but may better represent his own experience of the arts. In this context, it is interesting to remember a passage cited earlier, in which Cohen states that the productions of the arts are “the fact” for aesthetics that is analogous to “the fact of the sciences and the ‘as it were fact’ of the moral law,” and in which he also says that “The arts are the factual lever of the beautiful, so that the transcendental foundation of aesthetics has not overstepped its boundaries in seeking what is characteristic in the arts.”41 Here Cohen makes clear that an analysis of what the arts as we actually find them are concerned with is the starting point for aesthetic theory, but that this in his view does not compromise the claim of aesthetics to be called transcendental, any more than the fact that his philosophy of science begins from the actual accomplishments of science compromises its claim to be called transcendental. Cohen’s methodology is also evident in his appeal to the “fact of genius.” Cohen certainly accepts from Kant the claim that judgments of taste claim universal validity, although they do this without the “pretense to laws” and a priori “grounds of proof.”42 He also recognizes that Kant attempted to derive the justification of the universal validity of judgments of taste from the commonality of human cognitive powers, but he dismisses this deduction as psychological rather than transcendental. Instead, for him the basis for the assertion of the “lawfulness of aesthetic consciousness” is the existence of genius, the sheer fact that there are artists who are able to capture the emotional dimensions of human experience in a way that all find valid. He states plainly: The transcendental method stands on the status of its conditions as cultural facts to be examined, on the “fact of experience,” the “as it were fact,” the “analogue of a fact” of the moral law, and so also on the works of the art of genius: in order to communicate in its objective effect the conditions of the feeling corresponding to the cognitive faculty and practical reason.43

41 42 43

Cohen, Begründung, p. 305. Cohen, Begründung, pp. 186, 188. Cohen, Begründung, p. 190.

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In other words, the problem of the possibility of intersubjectively valid judgments of taste is solved by the actuality of universally recognized works of artistic genius, which express the universally valid emotional concomitants of the conceptualized representations of nature and of morality. Again, this seems to be very different from Kant’s approach to the problem of universal validity, because Kant introduces his conception of genius as an ability to create universally accessible works of art only after he has, at least to his own satisfaction, deduced the possibility of universally valid judgments of taste from the commonality of human cognitive powers, and thus, since part of what characterizes genius is that its products are exemplary but not determined by a rule, proven the very possibility of genius. A further point at which Cohen seems to draw more on the actual experience of the arts than on any transcendental argument is his claim that the arts concern not merely the feelings associated with our conceptions of nature or of morality – we saw how his argument for that went, and how it might be considered a priori although not Kantian – but the feelings associated with the unification of art and nature. Cohen argues that art always idealizes – this is the insight that he traces back to Winckelmann – but that in particular it idealizes nature by representing it as more moral than it normally seems to be and it idealizes morality by representing it as more natural, or more fully realized in nature, than it normally seems to be. The “higher task” of art is to be the vehicle for the “idealization” of nature into an “image of morality. Only insofar as art presents the natural object as an image of morality is it capable of transforming both nature and morality into “art-feeling.” He continues: And the opposite holds as well: Only insofar as art is capable of presenting the object of morality as an object of nature can it first transform the object of morality into an object of art. Art demands both, holding both together, combining both. A natural object that is not displaced into the relations of morality so that the sympathy of minds that breathe as a final end does not become effective, such a natural object can never become an object of art, no matter how precise the drawing nor how lively the colors. Nature must pass through morality if it is to be able to become art.44

This might be taken to be inspired by Kant’s claim that we have an intellectual interest in the beauty of nature insofar as it gives us a hint that our moral purposes can be realized in nature,45 but it goes beyond this 44 45

Cohen, Begründung, pp. 230–1. Kant, CPJ, §42.

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claim that we can see a parallel between natural beauty and moral success as well as beyond Kant’s claim that all art must ultimately concern ideas of reason, maintaining instead that all art ultimately directly concerns the realization of morality in nature, or the possibility of a higher degree of that realization than we ordinarily experience. Kant did not maintain that all art concerns the possibility of the realization of aesthetic ideas in nature. Here again Cohen seems to be drawing on a supposed fact about the arts rather than any a priori argument to make his claim (although we might observe that Kant’s own claim that all art concerns aesthetic ideas is also not obviously grounded on any a priori argument). Here we may further note that while there might initially seem to be a tension between Cohen’s claim that all philosophy begins from facts but that art idealizes rather than presenting nature or human efforts to be moral to us as they actually are, there is not: it is just a fact about art as a third form of culture besides natural science and morality that it does this. Of course, it could also be objected that Cohen owes us an explanation of the connection between the idealizing function of art and its function of expressing our primordial feelings underlying our representations of both nature and morality, and it is not immediately obvious what this explanation is. Perhaps his idea is that among our primordial feelings is a never fully expressed yearning that nature and morality fully coincide, and that we express this feeling through art. This would at least be consistent with another feature of Cohen’s aesthetics (and of his philosophy as a whole), namely his remarkable reinterpretation of Kant’s idea of the thing in itself, or in the case of aesthetics of the “supersensible substratum” of both humanity and nature. The role of the “supersensible substratum” in Kant’s resolution of the “antinomy of taste” is problematic, because Kant seems to have solved the problem of reconciling the non-rule-governedness of judgments of taste with their claim to universal validity through the essentially epistemological concept of the free play of shared cognitive powers, and it is not at all clear why he should suddenly resort to the metaphysical conception of a supersensible substratum or common noumenal character of all mankind to explain the possibility of agreement in taste, or to a common supersensible substratum of both mankind and nature to explain the natural existence of things we find beautiful.46 Cohen characteristically avoids this problem 46

I have argued that this move is problematic in Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; expanded edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 10. Kant’s introduction of the supersensible into the resolution of the antinomy of judgments of taste has been defended by Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of

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by insisting that Kant’s conception of the thing in itself and in the case of aesthetics of the supersensible substratum is not a metaphysical conception at all, but something more like a practical conception of an infinite task the realization of which we can approach only asymptotically: the idea of the thing in itself in epistemology is the ideal of a complete knowledge of nature that we can never fully attain,47 the idea of the thing in itself in morality is the ideal of a moral world or realm of ends that we can never fully realize, and the idea of the supersensible substratum in aesthetics is perhaps the ideal of a realization of our primordial desire for a unification of the natural and the moral that can never be fully realized in reality nor fully expressed in art. Cohen writes: And since every idea manages a particular purposiveness, so every kind of purposiveness is a particular kind of thing in itself. The thing in itself, however, always signifies a task, through which reason bounds the understanding, which without reason would regard itself as limited in its task. Aesthetic purposiveness also presents such a task as the aesthetic idea, as a “supersensible ground,” as a thing in itself of consciousness. And hereby we come to the genuine and highest fulfillment of the problem of the end which aesthetic lawfulness sets and solves.48

That Cohen refers to a “thing in itself of consciousness” shows how far his view has departed from Kant’s, for this idea would seem to be selfcontradictory for Kant. Cohen is here obviously also completely reinterpreting Kant’s notion of an “aesthetic idea,” or using Kant’s term for a very different purpose. His idea that art gives expression to our conception of an infinite task of reconciling nature and morality seems to be based entirely on his own interpretation of our primordial feelings and of the task of art. Cohen’s interpretation of the task of art may be determined not just by his general reinterpretation of Kant’s concept of the thing in itself but

47

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Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 11, and Jennifer K. Dobe, “Kant’s Common Sense and the Strategy for a Deduction,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (2008): 47–60. Cohen’s conception of the thing in itself is thus analogous to his contemporary Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1839–1914) conception of the “real” as the object represented in “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate,” in his famous paper “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1877), in The Essential Peirce, edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 124–41, at p. 139, with the difference that Peirce seems to conceive of the real as something that could actually be known in the fullness of time, while for Cohen our knowledge could only approach it asymptotically. Cohen, Begründung, p. 208.

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also by his experience of a kind of art that Kant did not live to experience. At least this suggestion gives me an excuse to quote the concluding peroration of Cohen’s book, which is too indicative of the character of the man and his times to omit: Bach and Beethoven are German artists. The one stems from Luther, who understood how to touch the aesthetic consciousness of his people in word and song. Like Schiller, Bach fulfills German internalization . . . Beethoven, however, follows the path of Goethe. Everything Faustian is only the outline of life. What should be brought to expression is not the drama, not the epic, not the opera and not the oratorium, in general nothing that is stuck onto the thoughts of men, their clever knowledge and the superstitious belief. Their passion alone and in this passion their joys, that is the divine spark49 by which Beethoven becomes Prometheus. He makes feeling as such the object of his creativity. And thus he invents feelings that in such determinacy and with such power had tempted no composer before him. He articulates the mind that lives in the current of feelings with a firmness and gives this human mind full of variation an endurance of feelings that no previous musical artwork was able to accomplish in such intensity. . . . Is it an accident that the Germans completed the foundation of aesthetics?50

Cohen’s view of the infinite task of art in expressing human emotions and the possibility of the complete interpenetration of nature and morality is obviously based on an experience of art that Kant never had, and at least in the case of late Beethoven could not have had, more than on a reconstruction of Kant’s own theory of art. Again, this is hardly to criticize Cohen’s theory of art, only his pretense to be interpreting Kant’s theory of art. As we have now seen, for all his allegiance to Kant, Cohen’s aesthetics departs from Kant’s in radical ways. It employs an analytical rather than synthetic method. It constructs a far more definite connection between art and morality than Kant was willing to accept. But for our purposes, what is most important is that while emphasizing that feelings are the content of art in a way that Kant certainly did not, Cohen transforms Kant’s theory of free play with our cognitive powers into a theory of cognition of the most subjective aspects of experience, and thus transforms what might have been a recognition that the experience of emotions is central to aesthetic experience into a theory of the cognition of emotions through art that essentially rejects the theory of free play. Let us

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Götterfunke, a word Cohen is lifting from the text of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” that Kant used in the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony. Cohen, Begründung, pp. 432–3.

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now turn the purple prose with which Cohen completed his characteristic work of the late nineteenth century to a work from the first year of the twentieth century that differs completely in its philosophical style and method but reaches conclusions that are in some ways similar to Cohen’s but in some ways different. This is the Allgemeine Ästhetik of Jonas Cohn. The crucial difference between Cohn and Cohen (apart from an “e”) is that the former comes closer than the latter to straightforwardly acknowledging the actual experience of the emotional impact of art, and does not reduce the emotions to the subject matter of art as a form of cognition.

3. Cohn Jonas Cohn (1869–1947) was a follower of the Southwest school of Neo-Kantianism led by Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert rather than a leader of his own school, but since neither Windelband nor Rickert wrote extensively on aesthetics, we must turn to Cohn’s Allgemeine Ästhetik of 1901 for an example of the Southwest school’s approach to aesthetics. This book grew out of Cohn’s work for his habilitation under Windelband, after earlier studies that included philosophy and experimental psychology but culminated in a doctorate in botany. In the same year in which he published the work, Cohn was appointed as associate professor in philosophy and pedagogy in Freiburg im Breisgau, where he became full professor in the Institute of Psychology in 1919. He held that position until he was forcibly “retired” after the advent of the Nazis in 1933, but he managed to emigrate to Britain in 1939 and to complete his career at the University of Birmingham. His relocation to Britain seems fitting, because after the overheated rhetoric of Cohen’s book, Cohn’s work reads like a work of more recent analytical philosophy – although naturally Schiller and Goethe loom larger in Cohn’s stock of examples than they would in any British or American work in analytical aesthetics. Rather than beginning from the alleged “facts” of natural science, social mores and law, and art, as did the Marburg Neo-Kantians, the Southwest Neo-Kantians began with conceptions of the “domains of value” and their formal criteria, and then turned to experience to determine what phenomena satisfy the criteria of the various domains of value. This approach is evident in Cohn’s aesthetics. He begins by defining the domain of aesthetics as that of the beautiful broadly rather than narrowly understood, so that the beautiful in the everyday sense is only

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one species of the beautiful in the philosophical sense and the sublime, the tragic, and the comic are other species. He then turns to Kant for guidance in determining the formal criteria of the domain of aesthetic value rather than for the substance of his aesthetic theory; indeed, he explicitly rejects Kant’s conception of the free play of the cognitive powers as a positive characterization of our experience of the beautiful and self-consciously arrives at a different substantive aesthetic theory using Kant’s formal criteria for aesthetic value. He believes that Kant was correct to begin from an analysis of aesthetic judgment, and so himself starts with an analysis of judgments of the beautiful in the broad sense as a form of value judgments. According to Cohn, every value judgment has three aspects or “determinations,” namely something valued, the value that is attributed to that subject, and a particular kind of validity that is claimed for that value.51 He then argues that in the case of aesthetic judgment what is valued is the “intuition” or “immediate experience” afforded by an object rather than the class to which it belongs or the motivation or outcome it may have (in the case in which the object is an action);52 the aesthetic judgment, in other words, is not a cognitive or a practical judgment. Second, the value that is attributed to an intuition in aesthetic judgment is “purely intensive” (rein intensiv);53 this is Cohn’s way of saying that it is intrinsic or non-instrumental, or in Kant’s terminology disinterested. Cohn immediately considers the objection that the values of the true and the good are also intrinsic rather than instrumental, but responds that while that is to a certain extent true, those values are “transgredient” rather than “immanent”:54 a truth in science or ordinary cognitive discourse always both points to some fact outside of itself (to which it corresponds, or which makes it true) and is also linked in all kinds of ways to innumerable other truths, so that it can only be evaluated as part of a larger theory; and the morally good will always seeks a goal beyond itself, even though of course it is still good if it does not actually achieve that goal; but a beautiful object, specifically a beautiful work of art, though it is of course the product of a goal-directed activity, is nevertheless complete in itself and can be valued for what it is by itself. In Cohn’s words, “In the completed work of art what counts is no longer what is willed [das Wollen] but what has been achieved [das Erreichte].”55 51 52 53 54 55

Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 17. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 18. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 23. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 27. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 30.

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Cohn sums up his reconstruction of Kant’s conception of disinterestedness by observing that Kant’s connection of it with the free play of the faculties is instructive in a negative sense, for the immanence of aesthetic value requires that it be appreciated free from constraint by other values, but cannot provide a positive characterization of aesthetic value: “From the consideration of all possible [kinds of] play the characteristic peculiarities of the aesthetic will never be derived.”56 So, unlike Cohen, Cohn does not attempt to re-interpret Kant’s concept of the free play of the faculties for his own powers, but simply accepts Kant’s formal analysis of aesthetic judgment while rejecting Kant’s substantive theory of aesthetic experience and thus of the grounds of that judgment. Finally, in his interpretation of Kant’s conception of the universal subjective validity and exemplary necessity of aesthetic judgments, Cohn argues that the kind of validity characteristic of aesthetic judgments is the “character of a demand” (Forderungscharakter), or an imperatival character:57 “The beautiful, the great work of art presents itself to me with the demand to be appreciated,”58 and likewise of course an object that has properly presented itself to me in this way will similarly present itself to anyone else. Cohn recognizes that Kant did and that others may expect a justification of the Forderungscharakter of the aesthetic judgment, but he rejects Kant’s deduction of the aesthetic judgment’s claim to universal subjective validity by grounding it on a free play of the same powers that are involved in ordinary cognition precisely because this leads to a restriction of “pure beauty to the formal, ornamental domain,” which is a product more of “the effort to derive the demand-character of aesthetic value from that of logical value, the effort to conduct a gap-free proof of its demand-character”59 than of anything intrinsic to aesthetic judgment itself. In other words, Cohn claims that Kant’s conception of the free play of the faculties as the core of aesthetic experience and the ground for aesthetic judgment is a product of his effort to force his analysis of the aesthetic onto the Procrustean bed of transcendental deduction rather than of an open-minded encounter with aesthetic experience itself. In Cohn’s own view, for a justification of the demand-character of aesthetic judgments we must merely turn to the history of art as the “battleground of aesthetic values” from which “great works of art” emerge

56 57 58 59

Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 31. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 37. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 38. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 43.

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victorious, that is, self-evidently justify their demand to be appreciated.60 In other words, the justification of the demand-character of aesthetic judgment lies not in a transcendental deduction but in the test of time that is passed by great works of art. Here Cohn’s method coincides with Cohen’s, although Cohn does not use the Marburg expression of “facts” nor appeal explicitly to the “fact” of genius in addition to that of the existence of great works of art. (We might also say that Cohn ultimately prefers Hume’s empiricist solution to the problem of taste to Kant’s more a priori solution.) Cohn’s substantive account of the object of aesthetic value also coincides with Cohen’s, although his methodology is clearer than Cohen’s argument about the primordial layer of consciousness. Cohn argues simply that once we have defined the formal criteria of aesthetic value, then we should turn to experience to find out what best satisfies them, specifically to discover what kind of intuition immediately presents itself to us as intrinsically valuable and demanding our appreciation. The answer to this question, which “cannot be won through a logical deduction” but “must first be given hypothetically and then justified” by experience, is that “intuition can maintain the value of a demand insofar as it is grasped as the expression of an inner life.” He writes: What this means, and how much intuition itself is thereby altered for us, can readily be seen when one compares . . . the swing of the pendulum in a clock and the wave of a human hand. It is also readily comprehensible that an intuition has a higher, indeed a fundamentally different value for us, when it is regarded as “expression.” For us human beings the inner life of another is in general accessible only insofar as we grasp intuited movements or other sensibly perceivable processes as expression and with their assistance sympathetically experience [miterleben] what is expressed. The only possibility for us to escape from the narrowness of our own individuality, or expanding our personality beyond its limits, lies in this sympathetic life [Mitleben].61

Cohn argues that the feeling of identification with another, in which “his suffering becomes our suffering, his pleasure our pleasure, his want our want,” is the most intense kind of feeling that we can have, and thus that the experience of “complete inhabitation of the life [Hineinleben]” of another satisfies the criterion that aesthetic value be “purely intensive.”62 Here a subtle but important difference between Cohn and Cohen 60 61 62

Cohn, Ästhetik, pp. 44–5. Cohn, Ästhetik, pp. 48–9. Cohen, Ästhetik, pp. 65–6.

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emerges: by adapting the terminology of the empathy theorists whom we will discuss in the next chapter, Cohn signals that the actual experience of emotions and not just cognition of them is an essential aspect of aesthetic experience. Building on his recognition that emotions are communicated and thus shared through art, Cohn has not only replaced Kant’s free play of the faculties with our appreciation of the expression of the inner life of other living beings as the basis of aesthetic value, but also assumed a very different relation between the aesthetic and the moral than Kant did. For Kant, as we saw in Volume 1, the experience of the beautiful and the sublime may prepare us for morality in certain ways, the beautiful may be a symbol of the morally good, and we may take an “empirical interest” in the fact that our pleasure in beautiful objects is shared, that is, take an additional enjoyment from the fact that we enjoy the same things as others.63 But for Kant all of these are consequences of our basic enjoyment of the beautiful because of the free play of our cognitive powers that it stimulates, whereas for Cohn our essentially moral desire to empathize with others is the basis for our appreciation of the beautiful, and our enjoyment of occasions for successful communication of feelings with or at least from others is constitutive of the pleasure of the beautiful. Kant himself used the fact that all art expresses aesthetic ideas to find the axes for his classification of the arts, but he did not use the premise that art expresses and communicates the inner life of others to ground his underlying explanation of our pleasure in art. For Kant, this would have made emotion, namely Rührung, being touched, an essential aspect of aesthetic experience, which he wanted to avoid. But Cohn makes no effort to avoid this conclusion. To be sure, given his initial acceptance of the traditional as well as Kantian tripartion of the domains of values into the true, the good, and the beautiful, Cohn does not want simply to collapse the beautiful into the moral, so he identifies what is unique to the aesthetic by arguing that in the case of the beautiful we experience the expression of an inner life “in a determinate form [Gestaltung] corresponding to our capacity for apprehension,” and thus that “in the aesthetically complete form and expression constitute [bilden] a necessary unity.”64 Here again Cohn does not appeal to Kant’s own division of expression into content and form 63

64

See Kant, CPJ, §41, and my article “Pleasure and Society in Kant’s Theory of Taste,” in Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, editors, Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 21–54. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 48.

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under the rubrics of articulation, gesticulation, and modulation, but defines form or Gestaltung in his own, abstract way. He does not identify it with any particular aspect of perception or of the objects of perception, as Kant did when he separated gesticulation and modulation from articulation or when he identified the aesthetically significant form of a painting with its drawing rather than its color.65 Rather, Cohn identifies form with whatever allows “what is essential in the expression” of the inner life of another “to come forth clearly” out of the background of the noise of various kinds against which our experience always takes place.66 Much of the content of Cohn’s work is then concerned with the description of the ways in which the different media of the arts allow the expression of inner life to become clear as well as with the differences in the kinds of inner life or feelings that the different varieties of beauty – the beautiful narrowly understood, the sublime, the tragic, and the comic – express through the different media of the arts. After his analysis of the different arts and the different forms of beauty, which of course takes up a good part of his book, Cohn returns to the question of the “significance of the aesthetic domain of values.”67 Here he maintains that “the great domains of value all belong to the collaboration of human beings in a cultural life.”68 The need to be heard and understood by each other is the most fundamental of human needs, and aesthetic value has its foundation in this. Kant had recognized this in a very general way, but had not allowed the communication of emotion to be an essential function of aesthetic experience. Cohn can allow this, because for him what distinguishes the aesthetic from the other domains of values is not the absence of feelings but rather the purity and intensity of the communication of feelings that it allows through its unification of expression and form,69 the way in which it allows us to transcend the boundaries of our individuality and to communicate with others more fully than we can do anywhere else. Departing from Cohen on this point, Cohn argues even more generally that while we can never completely realize our goals in science and ethics, in aesthetic experience we can and do attain the completion that we long for elsewhere. “The aesthetic is completed in present intuition [als Anschauung vorhanden], it attains fulfillment, it is not longing but possession. Thereby it elevates 65 66 67 68 69

Kant, CPJ, §14, 5:225. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 75. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 224. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 228. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 231.

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the human being above the narrowness of his own life.”70 To be sure, Cohn carefully argues that the special intensity of aesthetic experience cannot be confused with an actual cognition of the essence of things or with a guarantee that “the kind of life and harmony that is represented in the beautiful also dominates in the extra-aesthetic world”;71 he rejects any claim that the aesthetic gives us actual knowledge of the Idea or a genuine guarantee of the possibility of the complete realization of the demands and goals of morality. In this way, he maintains his allegiance to Neo-Kantianism and his rejection of absolute idealism, still an issue even at the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Cohn, like Cohen, has departed considerably from Kant. He has accepted the formal framework of Kantian aesthetics, its analysis of the logic of aesthetic judgment, but has largely dismissed Kant’s theory of free play and replaced it with a theory, grounded in experience and therefore inevitably in his own experience of the arts and the experience of the arts in and of his time, in which the aesthetic is more closely linked to the experience of emotions and through that to the moral than Kant was ever prepared to concede. For Cohn, aesthetic experience is essentially a medium not for insight into the external world in general but for experience of the feelings of others, and the value of the aesthetic is ultimately founded in the importance of such experience of the inner life of others for the achievement of a cultural community, thus for the achievement of the essential goal of morality. The rejection of Kant’s theory of aesthetic experience as a form of free play leads both of our proponents of Neo-Kantianism to greater claims for the cognitive and moral significance of the aesthetic than Kant ever countenanced. Once again, we might well think that the Neo-Kantians’ departure from the letter of Kant’s aesthetics and their emphasis on human feelings as the essential subject matter to be clarified and communicated by art is hardly anything to be criticized but is rather an enduring contribution to aesthetics. But we might also think that the modesty of Kant’s claims for the cognitive and moral significance of the aesthetic, which is based on his view that aesthetic experience is in the end a form of play rather than a genuine form of scientific or moral knowledge, remains salubrious, a strong cup of coffee that needs to be drunk after indulging in some of the more intoxicating claims not only of his most immediate critics in the heyday of absolute 70 71

Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 285. Cohn, Ästhetik, p. 252.

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idealism but even of those who claimed, in his name, to be returning to a more sober approach to aesthetics.

4. Münsterberg Before turning to the less orthodox Neo-Kantian Wilhelm Dilthey, we may consider another figure at least initially associated with the Heidelberg school of Neo-Kantianism, who developed an aesthetic theory with a focus on the Kantian conception of disinterestedness on the foundation of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, specifically its central concept of the unity of apperception or self-consciousness. This is Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916), a prolific author whose works ranged from industrial psychology to the earliest book on cinema that is still read, but one of whose central works was a philosophy of values very much in the Southwestern Neo-Kantian tradition, which contains an extended treatment of the value of aesthetic experience. Münsterberg, born in Danzig, received a Ph.D. in psychology in 1885 at Leipzig under Wilhelm Wundt and then completed an M.D. at Heidelberg in 1887. During this time, Kuno Fischer and Wilhelm Windelband, the latter of whom is generally regarded as the founder of the Heidelberg or Southwestern school of Neo-Kantianism, were teaching philosophy at Heidelberg; this school’s emphasis on the concept of value would mark Münsterberg’s eventual philosophy. At the outset of his career, however, Münsterberg’s emphasis was primarily on psychology, and it was in this field that he became a Privatdozent and then an assistant professor in Freiburg in Breisgau, which was to become the second center of Southwestern Neo-Kantianism (and later, through Edmund Husserl and then Martin Heidegger, the home of the competing movement of phenomenology as well). It was as a psychologist that Münsterberg met William James at an international conference in 1891, after which James invited him to run the laboratory in experimental psychology that he had established at Harvard. Münsterberg did this from 1892 until 1895, at which point, in spite of James’s entreaties, he returned to Germany. After two more years, however, he submitted to James’s pleas, and returned to Harvard as a professor in the not yet divided department of philosophy and psychology. He then began publishing extensively in English as well as German and in philosophy as well as psychology, where his books included pathbreaking work in industrial psychology and other areas of applied psychology. He also wrote extensively on American-German relations and on his experience of America as a German immigrant, and when World War I broke

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out he campaigned actively although in vain to keep the United States from entering on the Allied side. Although he had previously been a highly popular teacher at Harvard, this activity made him deeply unpopular, even bringing accusations that he was a German spy, and he died in December 1916, from a cerebral hemorrhage brought on, at least in the opinion of his family, by the public pressure on him. But he had remained intellectually active until this bitter end, having published most of his important books within the preceding decade and his book on cinema just earlier that year. Münsterberg’s central philosophical work was The Eternal Values72 of 1909, the English counterpart to his German Philosophie der Werte: Grundzüge einer Weltanschauung of the previous year.73 This book discusses aesthetic values as one of the four basic kinds of values, the others being logical values, ethical values, and “metaphysical” values, including the religious value of holiness as well as the value of “absoluteness.” Münsterberg frames the problem of values by distinguishing, in NeoKantian fashion, between nature understood purely physically, including the “causal psychology” of human beings, which allows for description and explanation but not valuation,74 and the realm of values, which is founded on will, something that does not enter into the description or explanation of nature.75 However, values cannot be reduced simply to personal preferences – “There exists no bridge from the individual pleasure and displeasure to the absolute value”76 – because those have no intersubjective validity – they give rise to “modern relativism in all its forms”77 – and are also subject entirely to causal explanation. But neither will Münsterberg allow that objective values exist, like Platonic forms, independent of human experience altogether. Instead, absolute values must be connected with the conditions of the possibility of experience of a world that is coherent both theoretically and practically. First Münsterberg describes the connection between absolute value and a theoretically coherent world: [T]he idea of super-reality has been definitely removed from critical philosophy by Kant. The world of experience is the only world to which our 72 73

74 75 76 77

Hugo Münsterberg, The Eternal Values (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909). Hugo Münsterberg, Philosophie der Werte: Grundzüge einer Weltanschauung (Leipzig: Barth, 1908). E.g., Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 17. Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 27. Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 28. Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 34.

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knowledge can have reference, and the reality which we want to grasp in our truth is therefore completely bound up with the conditions of our mental experience. The true world is independent of the single individual as such, and therefore absolute with reference to the individual; but it is a world of which we can have knowledge at all only if its forms are determined by the conditions of consciousness.

Likewise, The absolute values must therefore completely lie in a world whose totality stands under the condition of being a possible object of experience. Even where the conviction transcends the world of experience and seeks an overexperience, such a last reality must still remain dependent upon the conditions of consciousness. The absolute world with its eternal values, if it exists, is thus certainly not something which hangs in its own atmosphere, eternally separated from our consciousness. . . . On the contrary, everything which can be acknowledged as unconditional must be conceived beforehand as belonging to the sphere of possible material of consciousness . . . The absolute values have unexceptional validity because they are valid for every possible subject who shares the world with us, and who relates his thinking and striving to our world. . . . The values stand above the individual. But they would become meaningless if they were conceived as independent of the conditions of consciousness.78

Specifically, values are connected with the conditions of the possibility of consciousness of a coherent and organized world. But, as Münsterberg’s juxtaposition of “thinking and striving” might already suggest, he does not conceive of the idea of experiencing a coherent world as without effect on our affects; on the contrary, he conceives of the experience of a coherent world as the most fundamental goal of the will as well as the intellect, although not the contingent will of the “individual personality” but rather “a pure will which is not touched by personal pleasure and displeasure.”79 We all seek to experience a coherent world, independent of whatever preferences may have been formed by the peculiarities of our particular nature and nurture, and achievement of such coherence in experience brings us a kind of satisfaction that is distinct from the gratification of merely personal preferences. Thus, Münsterberg’s conception of objective, absolute, or “eternal” values has a cognitive dimension on the one side – connection or coherence is the fundamental form of all cognition – but a conative and 78 79

Münsterberg, Eternal Values, pp. 48–9. Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 64.

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affective dimension on the other – such coherence is the most fundamental object of the will, and its realization the most fundamental source of satisfaction: We seek the identity of experience. That is the one fundamental fact which secures for us a world. It is the one act which we cannot give up, and yet which has nothing whatever to do with personal pleasure and pain. We demand that there be a world; that means that our experience be more than just the passing experience, that it assert itself in its identity in new experiences. Here is the one original deed which gives eternal meaning to our reality, and without which our life would be an empty dream, a chaos, a nothing. We will that our experience is a world. . . . the experienced content itself becomes such a world for us by that one fundamental deed of seeking identities.80

Münsterbeg combines the fundamental ideas of Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophies, the idea of the necessary unity of apperception on the one hand and the idea of the pure will on the other, to form his basic idea of eternal values. Logical, aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical values will all be specific ways of satisfying the will in its search for a world. But even though the idea of freedom from personal interest has been a parameter for Münsterberg’s conception of absolute value from the outset and his account of aesthetic value will give particular emphasis to its disinterestedness, what is almost entirely omitted from his synthesis of Kantian theoretical and practical ideas is Kant’s own explanation for distinctively aesthetic value, namely the free play of the imagination. Imagination and its play has no central role in Münsterberg’s account of natural or artistic beauty, although he touches upon the idea of play in passing. Münsterberg erects a complex classification of values on the basic idea of experience of a world as the fundamental object of our common will rather than idiosyncratic wills. There are four main classes of value because there are four main forms of unity that we may find in our experience. If experiences are to assert themselves as a self-dependent world, and are to realize themselves in new and ever new experiences, we must demand a fourfold relation. First, every part must remain identical with itself in the changing events; secondly, the various parts must show in a certain sense identity among themselves, and thus show that they agree with one another and that no one part of the world is entirely isolated; thirdly, that which changes itself in the experience must still present an identity in its change 80

Münsterberg, Eternal Values, pp. 75–6.

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by showing that the change belongs to its own meaning and is only its own realization. . . . But if the world is completely to assert itself, that is, to hold its own identity, these three values must ultimately be identical with one another, one must realize itself in the other. Then only the pure will gains its absolute satisfaction; and then we gain the fourth value of completion.81

Specifically, the logical values or values of science concern the connections among objects of experience over time and space; the aesthetic values concern the internal coherence of the experience of individual objects; ethical values concern the realization of a coherent self and coherent relations with others in a world; and metaphysical values, whether in religious form (the value of “holiness”) or philosophical form (the value of “absoluteness”) concern the recognition of the underlying unity of these various forms of unity. But our concern is Münsterberg’s conception of aesthetic value. Münsterberg presents the experience of beauty, which he recognizes may be provided by works of nature or works of art, as the experience of unity or coherence within an object, but specifically, once again effacing the boundary between the theoretical and the practical, as experience of the unity or coherence of the will within an object, the presentation of a coherent volition within the object that satisfies our own volition for coherence. The “beautiful comes to us in the real experience with the whole richness of its own striving and feeling and willing.”82 There must be natural as well as artistic beauty because we can experience beauty in “naïve life” as well as in “the conscious work of civilization . . . the functions of art,”83 and our experience of the unity of the object’s volition must be metaphorical in the case of natural beauty, the beauty of flowers and landscapes to which we do not ordinarily ascribe any volition at all, while it can at best be indirect in the case of works of art, where we may ascribe volition literally to artists but not to their works, although it is our experience of their works that is crucial for aesthetic value. Nevertheless, Münsterberg insists that “If we really start from experience, we must acknowledge that the beautiful is never given to us as a naturalistic object, but as a free expression of attitudes and will which we as willing personalities can understand by feeling with them.”84 Münsterberg illustrates his claim with examples from both nature and art. First, although

81 82 83 84

Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 78. Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 171. Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 165. Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 171.

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here most authors would have described the experience he adduces as sublime rather than beautiful, In the real experience the beautiful unity exists for us in nature itself or in the work of art, and it is our part to understand and to feel, and not to create it. The lightning flashes, the thunder rolls, the black clouds threaten, the rugged rocks stretch upward in defiant power, the surging sea rages and demands its victim. If we feel with that sympathizing, we do not seek the unity of the excited nature in ourselves, but in this raving of the elements. They are not only filled with the will which we share, but their volitions belong together, support one another, reënforce one another, and point to one another. The rocks and the clouds and the waves all really want the same thing, and we feel excited with their common emotion.

Münsterberg then goes on to the case of art: It is not different when the unity of the work of art speaks to us. The charming little rococo picture gossips of light shepherds’ play. The position of the figures betrays the gallant tone; the features, the eyes, the lips, frivolously say the same; the laughing landscape in the background agrees with the flowers in the meadow, and the slender willow with the fleecy little clouds and the glancing brooklet. Every ribbon in the light gown flutters in tender play. In the soft colors and the mildly curved lines all wills are the same, all wills the one, and their real unity must be felt if we want to understand the picture. The unity of the beautiful is the agreement of its real volitions, which we share only in our feelings.85

We may note in the second passage that a work of art that represents nature can of course display the kind of unity that we find in nature itself as well as that which might be peculiar to art. We may also note that in this passage Münsterberg does mention the play of both people (shepherds) and things (the ribbons of the gown), but as part of the coherent content of the work, what it represents, not as a central part of our experience of the work. On the contrary, our experience in both cases is an experience of the unity of volition, whether in actual nature, represented nature, or the artistic representation of nature – but there is no mention of the volition of the artist. It should also be noted that Münsterberg treats our own satisfying sense of coherence as an empathetic response to or “sharing” of “the agreement of [the] real volitions” of the beautiful work of nature or art, and does not treat the unified volition of the object as a projection of our own feeling onto the object. In this regard his theory is diametrically opposed to the theory of empathy of the two Vischers and Theodor Lipps, which interprets empathy as a 85

Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 173.

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form of projection rather than reception,86 and which we will consider in the next chapter. Münsterberg insists that “We know now that æsthetic values can be given in the world of things only when the things have their own will. . . . An æsthetic value is given to us only when a manifoldness of volitions approaches us, and when those volitions point to one another and agree with one another . . . only a nature which wills can come under the æsthetic point of view.”87 At this point it becomes clear that both Schopenhauer as well as Kant have influenced Münsterberg. His ascription of will to nature of course smacks of Schopenhauer rather than Kant, and when his discussion turns to disinterestedness it also reveals the same ambivalence that Schopenhauer’s did. On the one hand, Münsterberg argues that we must approach beautiful objects in a disinterested frame of mind, free from our personal and practical concerns, if we are to experience their beauty: It always remains essential that we can understand this phase of the outer world when our practical desire which serves our personal interests is little concerned. The purple sunset may transmit its own excitement to our soul, but when the sun troubles us with its burning rays at noon-time, we try to protect ourselves from them, and this effort inhibits every sympathizing feeling with the own will of the sun which expresses itself in its fiery glow.88

On the other hand, particularly in the case of art, Münsterberg suggests that the experience of beauty turns us away from our usual concern with our personal practical needs rather than presupposing that we have already turned away from that concern. Thus art leads to a “suppression of all felt relations,” and in that “lies the true unreality of the life which art offers to us”: “The unreal is that which offers itself completely in its presentation; it is that which is a whole, which does not point to anything outside of itself”89 and thereby turns our attention away from anything outside of itself, such as our ordinary practical concerns. Münsterberg sounds just like Schopenhauer, whose theory of sympathy as the basis of ethics he has earlier explicitly acknowledged,90 when he writes that “That which offers itself as unreal excludes every expectation of practical effects. Hence the effect on ourselves and our own surroundings 86

87 88 89 90

See Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst, 2 vols. (Hamburg and Leipzig: Voss, 1903–1906). Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 177. Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 175. Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 210. Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 190.

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is excluded, and that annihilates by principle our interest in entering with an own action and in taking attitudes. There is no point of contact between the work of art and our practical personality.”91 Of course, there is no actual contradiction in the idea that we may need to approach art (or natural beauty) with a certain degree of disinterestedness but that the experience of beauty thereby made possible can then intensify our absorption in the object and our disinterestedness or lack of concern with reality. Münsterberg divides aesthetic values into the values of harmony, love, and happiness, and correlates these categories with a distinction among the “outer world” of objects, the “fellow-world” of other people, and the “inner world” of one’s own feelings. He then correlates the main branches of art with these three domains and therefore with these three values: The self-agreement of the world in our life-experience gave us the value of harmony for the outer world, of love for the fellow-world, of happiness for the inner world. If art is called systematically to bring the self-agreement of the world to its expression in the history of civilization, fine art [that is, visual art] is fulfilling this task for the outer world, literature for the fellowworld, and music for the inner world.92

Münsterberg’s theory of music as forming “our own inner world to a unified tissue of volitions,” in which “the tones lead us back to ourselves” and “Everything remains related to the striving and counter-striving of the feeling and willing of the self and returns to it in the unity of the I”93 is also clearly influenced by Schopenhauer’s analysis of music as the representation of the will itself rather than of any of the externalizations of the will in the characteristic or Platonic forms of objects. But instead of following the further details of Münsterberg’s classification of the arts, we can conclude this discussion of his work with a look at his pioneering book on film, The Silent Photoplay in 1916, or as it was later renamed, The Film: A Psychological Study.94 After a brief history tracing the origin of cinema in various devices for creating the illusion of motion from series of drawn pictures in the earlier part of the nineteenth century through Eadweard Muybridge’s 91 92 93 94

Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 213. Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 204. Münsterberg, Eternal Values, p. 253. Hugo Münsterberg, The Silent Photoplay in 1916 (New York: Appleton, 1916); retitled The Film: A Psychological Study, with a new foreword by Richard Griffith (New York: Dover Publications, 1970).

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stop-motion photography later in the century and then the rapid growth of the popularity of silent films in the two decades following the introduction of Edison’s “kinetoscope” in 1895, Münsterberg gives a detailed description of the roles of depth and movement, attention, memory and imagination, and emotions in our experience of the images of the film. Central to Münsterberg’s analysis is our own projection of movement onto a sequence of images, each of which is itself static. Here, in contrast to his account of aesthetic experience in The Eternal Values a half-dozen years earlier, Münsterberg emphasizes the role of the imagination in the transformation of experience; for example, “The objective world is molded by the interests of the mind. Events which are far distant from one another so that we could not be physically present at all of them at the same time are fusing in our field of vision, just as they are brought together in our own consciousness.”95 But, consistently with his earlier work, Münsterberg stresses our sense of the unreality of the images before us, so that our experience of film is described as a complex experience involving a sense of both reality and unreality, and an oscillation between them: “Even in the most objective factor of the mind, the perception, we find this peculiar oscillation. We perceive the movement; and yet we perceive it as something which has not its independent character as an outer world process, because our mind has built it up from single pictures rapidly following one another. We perceive things in their plastic depth; and yet again the depth is not that of the outer world. We are aware of its unreality and of the pictorial flatness of the impressions.”96 Because of the importance of a sense of unreality as part of our experience of cinema, Münsterberg rejects any interpretation of it as a mere imitation of ordinary life and, further, as an imitation of traditional theater: “moving pictures . . . are not and ought never to be imitations of the theater.”97 This is the basis for an argument that live theater and film are two very different arts, which is important for later film studies; but what is important for our purposes is that it is also the basis for Münsterberg’s argument that, in spite of its basis in photography, which we often take to be a transparent reproduction of the actual world, film, like other arts, achieves “unreality” in the specific sense of detachment from our ordinary practical concern with reality, and that our pleasure in it arises from its self-contained completeness rather than from its reference to 95

96 97

Münsterberg, The Film, p. 46. The italics in this and following quotations are Münsterberg’s, the emphasis setting them off as among the author’s central theses. Münsterberg, The Film, p. 58. Münsterberg, The Film, p. 60.

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anything beyond itself. Film “becomes art just insofar as it overcomes reality, stops imitating itself and leaves the imitated reality behind it.”98 Thus film, like other arts, “shows us the things and events perfectly complete in themselves, freed from all connections which lead beyond their own limits, that is, in perfect isolation.”99 Münsterberg then draws the same conclusion he had drawn in The Eternal Values, namely that the value in the art of cinema “lies just in the deviation from reality in the service of human desires and ideals . . . the desire and ideal of the artist in every possible art is to give us things which are freed from the connection of the world and which stand before us complete in themselves,”100 and which thereby give us a sympathetic sense of our own self-completeness. The remarkable thing about film in Münsterberg’s analysis is that it does this in spite of the fact that it might initially seem to be a mere copy of reality rather than a projection of “unreality” in his sense; but all of his analysis of the perception of motion in the experience of cinema was aimed at showing precisely that we do not respond to it as a mere imitation of real motion. Of course, since his claim that “every possible art” aims to free us from the connection to the world and give us things that are complete in themselves, other arts must have their ways of doing this too, even if they do not involve the particular oscillation between a sense of reality and a sense of unreality that is characteristic of film. A child of his own moment in history, Münsterberg was convinced that the use of either color or sound in film would interfere with the creation of the sense of unreality in film; it can be debated whether he was right about that. But we will not pursue that debate here; instead, we will now turn to a Neo-Kantian who worked independently of the two main schools of Marburg and Southwestern Neo-Kantianism, and who, unlike any of the figures we have been considering, did make room for the Kantian concept of play in his aesthetic theory, while also emphasizing the place of cognition and emotion in aesthetic experience. This is the Berlin philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, who was thus the only figure in Neo-Kantianism, indeed in late nineteenth-century Germany altogether, to continue the development of a threefold approach to aesthetics that had been started by a few in the eighteenth century, such as Kames, and only by Schleiermacher, the subject of one of Dilthey’s main works, among the German Idealists. 98 99 100

Münsterberg, The Film, p. 62. Münsterberg, The Film, p. 64. Münsterberg, The Film, p. 65.

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5. Dilthey Turning from the orthodox Neo-Kantians of the provincial Marburg and Heidelberg schools to the more cosmopolitan philosophers of Berlin, we find in Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) a similar emphasis that the proper subject matter of art is human feeling, but a comprehensive approach to this thesis that uses what Dilthey finds best in Kant and his predecessors, in his idealist successors, and in the more recent psychological aesthetics of Fechner and others that neither accepts anything from these earlier approaches without independent validation from experience nor rejects any of them completely. Dilthey presented his major statement in aesthetics in the form of a “poetics” or a theory of literature rather than of the arts in general, in this formal regard thus returning to the tradition of Baumgarten, but his position was clearly meant to apply to the arts in general.101 In the central essay on “The Imagination of the Poet,” first published in 1887, Dilthey claims that the content of poetry, and by implication of the other arts, is “lived experience” or Erlebnis, the entire range of human feelings, and not “ideas,” that is, metaphysical truths of the sort imputed to art by the absolute idealists. Thus he writes that This to and fro of life at its fullest, of perception enlivened and saturated by feeling, and of the feeling of life shining forth in the clarity of the image: that is the essential characteristic of the content of all poetry. Such lived experience is fully possessed only when it is brought into an inner relation with other lived experiences and its meaning is grasped thereby. Lived experience can never be reduced to thoughts or ideas.102

101

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The chief work on Dilthey remains Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). The substantial Part Two of this work (pp. 77–202) is devoted to “The Concept of the Imagination” and Dilthey’s aesthetics. See also Frithjof Rodi, Morphologie und Hermeneutik: Zur Methode von Diltheys Ästhetik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969). See also Matthias Jung, Dilthey zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 1996), which discusses “Dilthey’s middle phase: aesthetics, pragmatism, and descriptive psychology” at pp. 87–138. Several other general works on Dilthey are Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), and Hans Peter Rickman, Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of the Human Studies (London: Elek, 1979). HansGeorg Gadamer discusses Dilthey in Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, second, revised edition (London: Continuum, 2004), especially pp. 213–51. Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Imagination of the Poet,” trans. Louis Agosta and Rudolf A. Makkreel, in Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Volume V: Poetry and Experience, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 59. All quotations from Dilthey will be from this volume.

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And then again, Every living work of major scope takes its subject matter from something factual that has been experienced. In the last analysis, it expresses only lived experience, transformed and generalized by the feelings. For this reason, no idea may be sought in literature103 –

a claim that Dilthey makes explicit is addressed against the Hegelian tradition of speculative, metaphysical aesthetics: “Thus the interpretation of literary works as presently dominated by Hegelian aesthetics must be opposed.” Any attempt to give a metaphysical interpretation of Hamlet, for example, can offer only “a paltry description of the incommensurable facts [to] which Shakespeare has given a universally valid meaning in his drama . . . the lived experience of the poet and its unnerving symbols constitute a dramatic core that cannot be expressed in any proposition.”104 But these few quotations suggest how complex Dilthey’s aesthetics actually is. While he rejects the metaphysical interpretations of art in idealist aesthetics as wringing the life out of art in behalf of some abstract propositions (precisely the kind that are better dealt with by philosophy itself), he accepts the idealist thesis that works of art are embedded in the cultures that produced them and cannot be understood entirely apart from such cultures. Yet at the same time, while he rejects the Kantian reduction of the feelings relevant to art to the single feeling of pleasure in favor of his view that the arts concern the entire range of human feelings, from the most painful to the most pleasurable, in all their multiplicity, he also accepts the Kantian demand that aesthetic experience be universally valid, and seeks to explain how human feelings embedded in the context of one culture are nevertheless universal and accessible to other cultures. And while he certainly assigns art the task of bringing us to understanding our feelings, or cognizing them – thus he continues the first passage just quoted by saying that the “lived experience” constituted by the “to and fro of life at its fullest” is fully possessed only when it is brought into an inner relation with other lived experience and its meaning is grasped thereby. Lived experience can never be reduced to thought or ideas. However, it can be related to the totality of human existence through reflection, especially through generalization and the establishment of relationships, and thus it can be understood in its essence, that is, its meaning. All poetry – its elements and their

103 104

Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 137. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” pp. 138–9.

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forms of connection – is composed of lived experience understood in this sense105 –

he 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. (This is also part of what he means by choosing as his term for “experience” Erlebnis rather than the more traditional Erfahrung, which for those brought up on Kant could only mean experience as it is subsumed under concepts rather than as it is grasped more immediately.)106 Thus, unlike the Neo-Kantians previously considered, Dilthey by no means rejects Kant’s theory of aesthetic experience as the free play of our mental powers, but 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 central to our experience of art. Although his rejection of the view that art concerns abstract ideas can be taken as a criticism of Kant’s theory of “aesthetic ideas” as well as of the post-Kantian idealist aesthetics that to some extent took its inspiration from that Kantian conception, Dilthey would nevertheless reconnect the idea of the free play of the imagination with an idea of truthfulness to significant content, although this content becomes the concrete reality of human emotions rather than the abstract ideas of morality. And as Dilthey stresses, our experience of the emotional content of art is lived experience; thus through art we do not just cognize emotions, but feel their impact. Dilthey’s poetics thus represents one of those points in the history of modern aesthetics where the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of play, both understood in the broadest possible sense, were joined to the aesthetics of emotional impact to create a comprehensive account of aesthetic experience – although confining himself to the case of poetry as he does, Dilthey does not generalize his position to all the arts, let alone to the aesthetic experience of nature. Like so many other German philosophers of his day, Dilthey was originally sent to university to study for the ministry, but studied classical philology and philosophy along with theology and in spite of familial resistance pursued an academic career in philosophy. Yet although his 105 106

Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 59. On the contrast between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, see Makkreel, Dilthey, pp. 8–9 and 387–8.

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own work became fully secular, with religion being treated only as one form of the cultural self-expression of mankind among others, his early study of theology produced lasting effects: one of Dilthey’s lifelong projects was The Life of Schleiermacher, one volume of which was published during his lifetime (1870) and the other of which, as was true of much of his work, only posthumously; Dilthey also published a work specifically on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics in 1860.107 Another of Dilthey’s biographical works was The History of the Young Hegel (1905), focusing on Hegel’s most theological period. Dilthey’s work on Schleiermacher and Hegel was facilitated by his appointment at their University of Berlin in 1883, following appointments at Basel, Kiel, and Breslau. He was already fifty years old when appointed at Berlin, but taught and wrote copiously for twenty-five years before retiring from that position. In addition to his biographical works and many works on the history of philosophy and of ideas in Germany, especially since the Renaissance, Dilthey wrote a series of systematic works on the foundations of the Geisteswissenschaften, the “human sciences” or better, as Rudolf Makkreel translates the term, the “human studies,” including what we now distinguish as humanities and social sciences. He is sometimes described as attempting to add a fourth critique to Kant’s three, namely a “critique of historical reason,” although that focus misrepresents Dilthey’s view that all of the “human sciences,” and not just art, are concerned with the expression of the full range of human experience, not just abstract thought. Chief among these works are the Introduction to the Human Sciences of 1883, published the year Dilthey started teaching in Berlin; the Ideas for a Descriptive and an Analytical Psychology (1894); the Origins of Hermeneutics (1900); and the Construction of the Historical World in the Human Sciences published in 1910, one year before Dilthey’s death.108 But we are concerned with Dilthey’s approach to aesthetics, or his “poetics.” This was presented not only in the 1887 essay on “The Imagination of the Poet: Elements for a Poetics,” originally published in a Festschrift for the great historian of classical philosophy Eduard Zeller (although its only concession to Zeller’s interests is an opening discussion in which 107

108

See Dilthey, Selected Works, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, vol. IV (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 33–227. See Dilthey, Selected Works, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985–2010): Vol. I, Introduction to the Human Sciences (1989); Vol. II, Understanding the Human World (2010); Vol. III, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (2002); and Vol. IV, Hermeneutics and the Study of History (1996).

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it praises Aristotle’s Poetics as deriving sound principles for a dramaturgy of the imitation of human action but criticizes Aristotle for failing to recognize that art should really concern the inner life of human beings),109 but also in a series of essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Lessing, and Novalis that he began early in his career and which, when finally published in a volume edited by his students in 1906, proved to be his most popular work.110 Here we will focus on “The Imagination of the Poet.” Following in the tradition of Baumgarten with his characterization of the felix aestheticus and the aesthetics of genius in Kant and others, Dilthey organizes this work around the characteristic and techniques of the poet: its two main sections concern the “Description of the Poet’s Constitution” with “An Attempt to Explain Poetic Creativity Psychologically” (Section Two) and “A Theory of Poetic Technique to be Derived from these Psychological Foundations” (Section Four). But Dilthey argues throughout that the aim of the poet is to make it possible for the audience to experience what the poet experiences, the full range of human feelings in all their play and in all their significance, so he draws no hard line between the aesthetics of creation and the aesthetics of reception, and his analysis of the conditions for poetic creation is also explicitly intended as an analysis of aesthetic experience. Thus, Dilthey begins his description of poetic creativity with the claim that the difference between what it takes to create art and what it takes to experience art is only a matter of degree, not of kind, and that successful art brings the experience of the audience close to the intensity of the experience of the artist: The nexus of events provided by our experiences of life need only undergo a transformation in order to become an aesthetic plot. There is no special morality of the theater, there are no resolutions which satisfy us in a novel but not in life itself. That is precisely what is powerfully gripping about a work of literature – that it originates in a psyche similar to ours, only greater and more vigorous. It expands our heart beyond its actual confines without displacing us into the thin, rarefied atmosphere of a world unfamiliar to us. The activities of the [artist’s] imagination . . . should foster and strengthen whatever is best in the reader or listener, teach him to understand better his own emotions, to look for hidden life in the monotonous stretches of his own path, to tend his modest garden, as it were, and then also to be equal to whatever extraordinary things occur there.111

109 110

111

Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” pp. 37–9. Makkreel and Rodi’s Selected Works, Volume V includes the essays on Goethe (pp. 235– 302) and Hölderlin (pp. 303–83). Dilthey, “The Imagination of the Poet,” p. 57.

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Art has its origins in the human drives to experience, to understand experience, and to express and communicate experience: “it emerges in the life of the human mind, which expresses its content in gestures and sound, transposes the power of its impulses to a beloved form or to nature, and enjoys the intensification of its experience in images of the conditions that produced it.” The urge to experience and the urge to communicate are inseparable, so the artist’s experience would be incomplete without its communication to an audience, and the audience’s reception of the communication is also a recreation of the experience that is communicated to them: “One and the same human nature generates both artistic creation and taste that re-experiences feelings.” To be sure, Dilthey continues, “this process works more powerfully in the creator than in the spectator,” and it is more active and voluntary in the creator, who is “guided by the will,” that is, whose intentions determine the nature of the work more than the audience’s intentions do (although of course the audience must voluntarily decide to go to the theater or read the book), “but its constituents are predominantly the same.”112 Thus the analysis of the elements of poetic creativity will also be the analysis of the elements of aesthetic experience, and in practice Dilthey constantly switches back and forth between a poetics of artistic creation and an aesthetics of artistic experience. But what is most important here is that for Dilthey the urge to understand human emotions cannot be separated from the urge to feel and communicate them; thus he links the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of emotional impact. The two main parts of Dilthey’s work are the analysis of the elements of poetic creativity and of the general rules of poetic technique. He makes it clear in both parts that he is attempting to do justice to the eighteenth-century and especially Kantian concern for the possibility of universal validity in judgments of taste. Thus he writes that “The task of a poetics which derives from [the] living relationship to the artistic pursuit itself is to determine whether it can attain universally valid laws that are useful as rules of creativity and as norms for criticism,”113 and that “The central question of all poetics – that concerning the universal validity or historical variability of the judgment of taste, of the concept of beauty, of technique and its rules – must be answered if poetics is to be of use to the creative poet, to guide the public’s judgment, or to furnish a firm foundation for aesthetic criticism and philology.”114 These remarks make 112 113 114

Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 121. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 34. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 54.

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clear Dilthey’s conviction that the theories of aesthetic creation and of aesthetic experience are at bottom one and the same. Their larger context also makes clear his complex view of the relationship of the universal validity of aesthetic creations and experiences to history on the one hand and psychology on the other. Thus, following the latter remark, he continues that universal laws of taste cannot be found by a purely historical method, for “every empirical, comparative method can only derive a rule from the historical past, whose validity is thus historically restricted. It cannot make any binding claims or judgments about what is new and belongs to the future. Such a rule applies only retrospectively, and contains no law for the future.” Instead, “the law of beauty and the rules of poetry can be derived only from human nature . . . poetics must seek this firm basis in the life of the psyche.”115 By the last, he means that aesthetics must be founded in a descriptive psychology, a characterization of the most general cognitive, conative, and emotional tendencies of human nature. But at the same time, he argues at length that the experimental psychological aesthetics popularized especially, as we saw, by Fechner, can only capture particular, subordinate elements of aesthetic experiences – preferences for one sort of shape over another – and that while such results are valid in the laboratory, where the subject responds to isolated forms or features, real aesthetic experiences are not aggregates of such preferences but unified responses to complex works, and the complexity of such works and the unity of our responses to them cannot be captured by experimental psychology but only by his own, more complex descriptive psychology. (As we also saw, this simplifies Fechner’s actual analysis of aesthetic experience.) But Dilthey also argues – and this is his solution to the question “How is the technique of a particular period and particular nature related to . . . universal rules? How do we overcome the difficulty, which all the human sciences must face, of deriving universally valid principles from inner experiences, which are personally limited, composite, and yet incapable of analysis?”116 – that the fundamental commonality of the human psyche must manifest itself differently in different historical and cultural epochs, yet at the same time that commonality of the human psyche must also make it possible for humans from one historical and cultural epoch to understand those of another, at least if adequate information about their whole culture and way of life is available. This is so because 115 116

Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 54. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 34.

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of course it is part of his theory that a work of art does not capture and express a universally valid human feeling in isolation, but only in a complex cultural nexus, so naturally that experience can be recaptured in some other time and place only if adequate information about that entire nexus is available. (Here Dilthey shows the influence of Herder as well as Schleiermacher.) From all of this, Dilthey concludes that it is possible to infer general principles of aesthetic creation and reception, general guidelines for poetic techinque and critical evaluation, but not formulae that can be mechanically or algorithmically followed: Thus, the works of the poet also possess universal validity and necessity. But here these features do not signify what they do in the propositions of science. “Universal validity” signifies that every heart with feelings can re-create and appreciate the work in question. That which is selected from our life and taken together as being necessary for the nexus of life as such, we call “essential.” “Necessity” signifies that the nexus existing in a work of literature is as compelling for the spectator as for the creative artist. When these requirements are satisfied, then the real manifests the essential.117

This interpretation of the universal validity and necessity of aesthetic experience is of course completely consistent with Kant’s thesis that judgments of taste speak with a “universal voice” and achieve “exemplary” necessity but that they are “not determinable by grounds of proof at all” and thus can never be “forced” on anyone.118 The “rules” that Dilthey offers are, to use several of his own terms, “norms” or “guidelines” that can inspire artistic creation and reception, not algorithms that can mechanically determine such production and response. In this regard, Dilthey’s aesthetics is genuinely Kantian (and for that matter, Humean as well). The non-determinate character of Dilthey’s “rules” is also implied by the fact that, unlike those of the Marburg and Heidelberg Neo-Kantians, Dilthey’s account of aesthetic experience makes room for play with the inner life as well as experience and cognition of it, and ultimately insists upon an intimate and inseparable connection between play and these other two dimensions of aesthetic experience. This becomes clear in his analysis of artistic creativity as well as in his exposition of the general principles of artistic technique. The first main part of Dilthey’s poetics consists of the “Description of the Poet’s Constitution.”119 Here, 117 118 119

Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 116. Kant, CPJ, §8, 5:216; §18, 5:237; §33, 5:284. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” section 4, ch. 1, pp. 56–68.

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drawing on the tradition of the analysis of the felix aestheticus and genius, he enumerates the special qualities of the creative poet: “intensity and precision of his perceptual images,” “the clarity of delineation, strength of sensation, and energy of projection peculiar to his memory images and their formations,” “the power with which he recreates psychic states, both states experienced in himself and those observed in others,” “a capacity to truly enliven images, and the attendant satisfaction from perception . . . saturated by images,” and, finally, “the poet stands apart in that his images and their connections unfold freely beyond the bounds of reality.”120 This list intertwines heightened powers of perception and cognition with powers of imagination and invention, powers for the experience and apprehension of the real character of human perceptions and the feelings associated with them and powers for the creation of complexes of perceptions and feelings going beyond anything actually experienced. This duality in Dilthey’s conception of poetic power is manifested throughout his work with an emphasis on the truthfulness of the poet’s perception and expression of feeling on the one hand and on the freedom of the poet’s inventions from the constraints of ordinary reality on the other – truth and play in the realm of feelings – but ultimately resolved with the suggestion that none of these – truth, feeling, and play – can exist without the other. Dilthey’s next chapter, “An Attempt to Explain Poetic Creativity Psychologically,”121 attempts to give a “scientific” foundation to the previous analysis. Here Dilthey situates “The Place of Artistic Creativity in the Nexus of Psychic Life” in general.122 The first point that he emphasizes here is the element of play in poetic creation and therefore experience: 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,”123 and the “formative processes of the artistic imagination are produced by the play of feelings.”124 This emphasis on play with both feelings and “logical thoughts” characterizes the first four stages of Dilthey’s analysis of a series of “spheres of feeling,”125 culminating in a sphere of feelings 120 121 122 123 124 125

Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” pp. 61–6. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” pp. 68–107. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 73. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 74. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 77. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 79.

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comprising “the great variety of feelings that spring from the cognitive connection of our representations and which are aroused by the mere forms of our representational and thought processes, without regard to the relationship of their content to our being.”126 Here Dilthey’s description is Kantian, emphasizing the freedom of the imagination to play with the materials of cognition without the constraints of the ordinary rules and purposes of cognition: “In summary, we find an artwork pleasing because the forms of the representational and thinking processes which occasion its apprehension by the recipient” – note how he has glided from analyzing the character of aesthetic production to analyzing that of aesthetic experience – “are accompanied by pleasure, still quite apart from the relation of the content to our concrete impulses.”127 Although Dilthey immediately follows this claim about aesthetic experience with the remark that it was anticipated by “Leibniz’s idea that plurality must emerge from unity and reemerge in unity” and claims that “this principle was made the basis for art and poetry especially” at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, it also recapitulates Kant’s claim that the detachment of our experience and judgment from the ordinary interests of cognition and practice leaves room for the free play of the imagination within the most general conditions of cognition. But then Dilthey goes on to describe a fifth sphere of feeling that “results from the particular material impulses which pervade the whole of life and whose entire content is possessed in a reflexive awareness obtained through feelings.” The feelings he has in mind here are those associated with “the drives for nourishment, for self-preservation or the will-to-live, for procreation, and love of offspring,” as well as “a second group of feelings in which we experience the pain and pleasure of others as our own,” in which we “appropriate another’s life in our own ego, as it were, through sympathy, pity, or love.” He then maintains that “the elementary material of poetry” is to be found in this final, twofold sphere of feelings, and thus that the “more firmly motif and plot are rooted in life, the more powerfully do they move our senses. The great elemental drives of human existence, the passions that derive from them and the fate of these passions in the world, these constitute the authentic basis of all poetic ability” (here Dilthey has switched from the analysis of aesthetic experience back to that of aesthetic creation).128 This sphere of 126 127 128

Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 81. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 82. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 83.

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feelings leads Dilthey to formulate a “principle of truthfulness in the sense of the powerful reality of a person and of the elementary drives in him” that holds for all of the arts. This principle of truthfulness holds even or especially for the arts that are not overtly representational, “For where no external truth, in the sense of a depiction of reality, is aimed at, as in architecture and music, there the forms are rooted in the inner power of a substantial human being, rather than in the mere imitation of the life of others or even the forms created by them.”129 In this analysis of the spheres of feelings as the proper subject matter of art and aesthetic experience, Dilthey has clearly rejected the metaphysical aesthetics of absolute idealism in favor of a conception of art focused on the expression of human emotions. He has gone beyond Cohen in recognizing that we must feel as well as cognize such emotions, beyond Cohn in reviving Kant’s notion of play, and beyond Münsterberg in that regard as well. But, although he has clearly recognized the importance of a free play with such emotions and the perceptions and thoughts that arouse them as an essential component of aesthetic experience, it may still look as if he has subordinated the importance of this free play to his principle of truthfulness, the principle that art accurately capture and express the kinds of emotions that we really do have in life. As Dilthey continues, however, the opposite seems to be the case: the principle of truthfulness becomes subordinated to the principle of play, or at least to a version of what Cohen had recognized as the principle of idealization in art: the most intense emotions and the most intense “feeling of life” itself can only be evoked by works of poetic imagination that start with the situations of real life and the emotions associated with them but then free themselves from the bonds of the ordinary. Thus under the rubric of “Laws governing the free transformation of representations beyond the bounds of reality under the influence of the life of the feelings,” he writes that “the powerful effect of art and literature does not depend solely on our enjoyment of those constituents of consciousness that already possess an aesthetic effect in the course of our life; it also depends on images that are formed to evoke a still purer kind of aesthetic pleasure.”130 Several pages later he writes: The poet is aware of the nexus of reality and he distinguishes his images from it. He differentiates reality from the realm of beauty and illusion. However much these images approximate the character of reality, they 129 130

Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 84. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 93.

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nevertheless remain separated from it by a fine line. During his creative work, the poet lives in a dream world where these images receive the mark of reality. But they do not receive this through the obscure natural power of hallucinations, but rather through the freedom of a creative capacity in possession of itself. . . . The typical and the ideal in poetry transcend experience so that it can be felt and understood more profoundly than in the most faithful copies of reality.131

But what is really happening here is that the aesthetic of truth, the aesthetics of emotional impact, and the aesthetics of play are all being joined, because it is only through the free play of the imagination unconstrained by the confines of ordinary life that the emotions of real life can be evoked in their purest form and thus be most fully understood. At bottom, this is Dilthey’s conclusion, although he still sometimes emphasizes one element more than the other even though in successful art none can exist without the others. Thus he follows the paragraph just quoted, which comes in the conclusion of his analysis of poetic creativity (and thus aesthetic experience), with the remark that “This kind of belief in images of things that are unreal, and the illusion that results, can best be compared with what takes place in children at play. Literature is akin to play, as Schiller has demonstrated. In play, the energy of the child’s psychic life becomes active and free,” and in “later stages of life the distinguishing trait of play is that its activities stand in no causal relation to the purposive nexus of this life.” But at the outset of his analysis of poetic “technique,” the second main part of his poetics,132 he again suggests that the free play of the imagination is the necessary condition for the expression of the most intense forms of imagination on the part of the artist and the communication of that to the audience rather than the aim of art on its own. Thus he makes a series of statements which we may regard as revealing the core of his position. First he states that “poetic creativity . . . initially has its standard and distinguishing characteristic in the fact that the nexus of images produced satisfies the creator himself. At the same time, however, the satisfaction of the reader or listener becomes the goal of the poet and the standard of his achievement.” This leads Dilthey to one of his highlighted “principles,” which certainly does not have the form of a rule that can be mechanically followed but instead states a goal of art in the most general terms:

131 132

Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 101. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” section 4, chapter 2, pp. 127–60.

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The poet’s technique is a transformation of the content of lived experience into an illusory whole existing merely in the reader’s or listener’s representations. The sensuous energy of this structure of images has a powerful feeling-content, is significant for thought, and produces a lasting satisfaction with the aid of other lesser means.

This is followed by the remark that “It is constitutive of the artist’s character that his work does not intrude into the purposive system of real life and is not limited by it.” Disinterestedness and the freedom of the imagination that it permits become the enabling condition for the artist’s and the audience’s experience and enjoyment of human feelings and emotions in their purest form: Disinterestedness, together with the deep reflection stemming from it, for which everything becomes lived experience, and which hovers over its objects with a calm and contemplative eye, forms a more ideal reality that evokes belief and simultaneously satisfies both the heart and the head: these are the characteristics of the poet.133

On the next page, Dilthey reiterates that “Art is play,” that “The entire effect which it would like to produce consists of a present and lasting satisfaction” rather than any satisfaction of “direct interests,” but then again suggests that free play is the necessary condition of the experience of emotion in all of its intensity: Such a satisfaction, however, is bound to the illusion which makes imitation a lived experience of reality. The basis of all genuine art is the agreement of the product of the imagination with the laws and value-determinations of reality contained in the acquired nexus of psychic life, the probability and plausibility stemming from them, and the sensory impact of the work. Modern technique, which consistently and capably strives to establish this foundation, is completely justified in its opposition to so-called poetry of ideas or illustrations of thoughts. Without this foundation, how would we be moved to experience the destinies of others as our own and what is invented as real? Today’s poets forget all too often that their object must really move the heart and that its theoretical relations must be meaningful.134

Dilthey follows these claims with an appeal to Schiller and Goethe for corroboration; the invocation of these heroes of German culture indicates that we have reached the bedrock of his thought, just as it did even in such a sober analyst as Jonas Cohn. While very much a piece of its own time, for example in its invocation of the authority of experimental psychology (while rejecting Fechner’s 133 134

Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 129. Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” p. 130.

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specific version of it), Dilthey’s aesthetics is also a work of synthesis that is as comprehensive as only a few of the most important aesthetic theories of the preceding two centuries. Like the more orthodox Neo-Kantians, Dilthey rejected the metaphysical aesthetics of German Idealism, according to which art expresses the progress of the “spirit,” in favor of the view that art expresses our own thoroughly human emotions. But unlike the other Neo-Kantians, he emphasized the relation between art and its historical context, characteristic of an idealist like Hegel although also of a more naturalistic philosopher like Herder. Also unlike orthodox Neo-Kantians such as Cohen and Cohn, although in this regard similar to the younger Münsterberg, Dilthey was hospitable to the psychological aesthetics of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, although he integrated the piecemeal results of the experimental aesthetics of Fechner and others into his own unifying “descriptive” psychology of aesthetic creation and reception. Like Cohn, he accepted Kant’s analysis of the universal but “exemplary” rather than “logical” validity of aesthetic experience and judgments of taste, but, in this unlike any of the other Neo-Kantians, he recognized the importance of the free play of the imagination as a source of aesthetic pleasure in its own right but also as the necessary condition for the intensified experience of emotions and of the “feeling of life” itself. Both the free play of the imagination and the “feeling of life” are unmistakably Kantian ideas, but Dilthey linked the two ideas in a new way by arguing that the free play of the imagination produces a heightened feeling of life through producing a heightened experience of particular human emotions, which Kant had attempted to keep out of the proper subject matter and experience of art, in favor of the more intellectual “aesthetic ideas” that prepared the way for the metaphysical excesses of the aesthetics of German idealism. And in his revision of Kantian aesthetics, Dilthey also recaptured one of the deepest ideas of pre-Kantian aesthetics, notably Mendelssohn’s idea, in turn developed from Du Bos, that it is precisely our recognition of the artificiality of what is presented on stage or in another artistic form that frees us to experience the emotions that it arouses most intensely, that artificiality is not an obstacle to emotionally intense aesthetic experience but an enabling condition for it. Both drawing on key moments in eighteenthcentury aesthetics and adding ideas of his own, Dilthey re-established connections among the aesthetics of truth, the aesthetics of feeling, and the aesthetics of play that a few of the greatest aestheticians of the previous century had established but that many of the aestheticians of his own century had rejected. We will shortly see that only a few aestheticians of

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the twentieth century also attempted to connect all three approaches to aesthetics. But first we will conclude the present volume by reviewing some of the German and German-inspired aesthetic theories of the late nineteenth century that were also inspired by contemporary psychology but remained outside the framework of Neo-Kantianism. We will see that in these theories too it proved difficult to sustain a synthesis between the aesthetics of play and other approaches to aesthetics.

10 Psychological Aesthetics Play and Empathy

As we saw previously, one thing that unified authors as diverse as Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and many of their followers was the rejection of the concept of aesthetic experience as a form of play that had been central to the aesthetics of Gerard, Kant, and Schiller in the eighteenth century, and that had then been revived by only a few writers in the nineteenth century, such as Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and perhaps Nietzsche, although only toward the end of his career. As we will see, an attack upon the notion of aesthetic experience as play would again become prominent in many quarters at the beginning of the twentieth century, notably in the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce, himself influenced by Kant in some regards but by Hegel in this regard, and by many influenced by him, especially in Great Britain. Were those philosophers just flogging a horse that had been killed a century earlier? By no means, because there was a revival of enthusiasm for the concept of play as the central concept of aesthetics among several writers in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, as we will see in due course, the character of the renewed attack on the theory of play that would follow its revival would be similar to the original attack of German Idealism against the theory of play in Kant and Schiller: the idea that aesthetic experience involves the pleasurable play of our powers, including our cognitive powers, but not for the sake of cognition or any other determinate goal, would once again be rejected in favor of the theory that aesthetic experience is itself an important form of cognition. But the response to the revived aesthetics of play in the later nineteenth century is more complicated than that suggests, for this time the attack came not only from the side of those who endorsed a primarily cognitivist approach to aesthetics, but also from some who endorsed 378

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the aesthetics of emotional impact, specifically some who developed the concept of “empathy” that had been introduced by Friedrich Theodor Vischer in his attempt to make some room for the emotional impact of both nature and art in an otherwise Hegelian approach to aesthetics. The leaders in the aesthetics of empathy were Vischer’s son Robert and Theodor Lipps, and we shall see that even though the idea of the enjoyment of our own mental activity was central to Lipps’s conception of aesthetic experience, he nevertheless tried to distance his recognition of this aspect of aesthetic pleasure from the traditional conception of play. But then others, notably Karl Groos, tried to synthesize the aesthetics of empathy with the aesthetics of play. But even this still simplifies the somewhat complicated narrative to be presented in this chapter. Thus far, only German characters have been mentioned. And given the title of the present part of this volume, that is what would be expected. However, in this chapter national boundaries are going to have to be breached, because the revival of the theory of aesthetic experience as a form of play that triggered the responses of Lipps and then Groos was in fact the work of an Englishman, namely Herbert Spencer, and then because several of the most interesting writers to be influenced by the empathy theorists were also Anglophone, the American Ethel Puffer, herself a student of Hugo Münsterberg, and the expatriate Englishwoman Vernon Lee. However, what ties these figures together is the influence of psychology in their work. Herbert Spencer’s aesthetic theory was part of his psychology, Lipps and Groos were psychologists as much as philosophers, and Ethel Puffer studied psychology rather than philosophy with Hugo Münsterberg and taught psychology as well. Vernon Lee was neither a philosopher nor a psychologist, indeed she did not have formal academic training at all, but since her works on aesthetics were so heavily influenced by Lipps she clearly belongs with the other figures to be discussed in this chapter rather than among the British aestheticians to be discussed in the next volume. This chapter is thus called “Psychological Aesthetics: Play and Empathy,” rather than, say, “German-influencing, German, and German-influenced non-Neo-Kantian Aesthetics in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” I trust there will be no objection to the simpler title. The point of the chapter is to describe the new version of the aesthetics of play that would be so strongly rejected by many early twentieth-century philosophers, but also to show how some philosophers of the group to be considered here combined the idea of play with the idea of empathy to provide a more comprehensive account of aesthetic experience than

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either approach could provide by itself – although not as comprehensive an approach to aesthetics as Dilthey was developing at the same time.

1. Spencer’s Revival of the Concept of Play The revival of the theory of play was led by the British sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).1 Spencer, the son of a dissenting schoolteacher in Derby, England, did not enjoy a traditional university education like his close contemporary John Ruskin; instead, after receiving an early education by his father and his uncle, a vicar, he worked as a civil engineer during Britain’s early railway boom. But he started writing as a journalist as well, and in 1848 he was taken on as a sub-editor by The Economist, where he would work for five years. During this period he published his first book, Social Statics,2 in which he argued for the “law of equal freedom,” that “every person has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man,”3 and for a minimalist or “nightwatchman” state the function of which should only be to protect the equal spheres of freedom that each person should enjoy.4 This classical statement of nineteenthcentury liberalism brought Spencer renown, and his publisher, John Chapman, introduced him to his salon, where Spencer met luminaries such as the couples John Stuart Mill and Harriet Martineau as well as Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) and George Henry Lewes, and into which circle Spencer himself introduced Thomas Henry Huxley, later “Darwin’s bulldog.” But before the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, Spencer began to work out an evolutionary approach to all questions of philosophy, influenced by the sociology of August Comte, to which he was introduced by Mill’s System of Logic, and the pre-Darwinian thinking of Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin and the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck. Under their influence, as well as that of Schelling, transmitted by Coleridge, Spencer developed a view 1

2

3 4

Monographs on Spencer focusing on his sociology and political philosophy: John David Yeadon Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (London: Heinemann, 1971); Michael W. Taylor, Man versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); and Tim S. Gray, Herbert Spencer’s Political Philosophy: Individualism and Organicism (Hampshire: Avebury, 1996). Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness and the First of them Developed (London: Chapman, 1851). Spencer, Social Statics, p. 103. See Tim S. Gray, “Spencer, Herbert,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998), vol. 9, pp. 87–9, at p. 87.

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of evolution as development toward ever-increasing complexity in which characteristics developed in one generation could be passed on to the next. In spite of the publication of Darwin’s work a few years after his own next book, The Principles of Psychology of 1855, Spencer never gave up his own more teleological conception of evolution, and it remained the basis of the “System of Synthetic Philosophy” that he conceived in 1861 and expounded in a vast corpus of subsequent books. This system would incorporate The Principles of Psychology and include First Principles (1862), Principles of Biology (1864), Principles of Sociology in eight parts (1876–96), and Principles of Ethics in six parts (1879–93).5 It took six years to sell out the initial edition of the Principles of Psychology, but during the 1860s Spencer’s increasing fame made a second edition possible. When this appeared, now in two volumes, in 1870 and 1872, it contained a new final part of “Corollaries,” and Spencer concluded this with a section on “Æsthetic Sentiments.”6 Here is where Spencer revived the theory of play as the basis of aesthetic experience, and his brief treatment, only twenty pages out of the more than twelve hundred of the whole work, would trigger an extensive discussion among aestheticians. The general argument of Spencer’s psychology is that life is “The continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations,”7 and that “mind” or consciousness evolves in increasingly complex organisms as a representation of internal relations that allows organisms to manage their increasingly complex external relations with their environment. Spencer rejects any rigid separation or “impassable chasm” between body and mind,8 or, in his terminology, between physiology and psychology, but does allow that as creatures become increasingly complex they add to their capacities for sensation, perception, reflex, and instinct, which are the foundation for their interaction with their environment, the further capacities of memory, reason, feeling, and will.9 These higher faculties together constitute “intelligence.” The basis for Spencer’s aesthetics is then the assumption that in the highest and most complex creatures, namely humans, these faculties need to be exercised and maintained even when their exercise is not immediately necessary for the survival of the creature, and that the function of play in all its forms – although 5 6

7 8 9

See Gray, “Spencer, Herbert,” p. 88. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Appleton, 1895), vol. II, pp. 627–48. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, vol. I, p. 293. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, vol. I, p. 396. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, vol. I, pp. 444–504.

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not the conscious intention of those who play when they play – is the exercise of these faculties for the sake of their maintenance. The forms of play that ground aesthetic production and experience, the activities of artists and audiences, particularly exercise our capacities for perception and for feeling. Spencer introduces his discussion of the aesthetic sentiments with the remark that Many years ago I met with a quotation from a German author to the effect that the æsthetic sentiments originate from the play-impulse. I do not remember the name of the author; and if any reasons were given for this statement, or any inferences drawn from it, I cannot recall them. But the statement itself has remained with me, as being one which, if not literally true, is yet the adumbration of a truth.10

Spencer’s history as an autodidact and his pose as a systematic philosopher may have led him to suppress his source, but those who subsequently responded to him had no doubt that he was referring to Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education.11 Yet Spencer could just as easily have had Kant in mind; in any case, what he goes on to maintain could certainly be taken as an interpretation of the idea that aesthetic experience is essentially disinterested, and for that reason can only be understood as a form of play. Spencer asserts that “The activities we call play are united with the æsthetic activities, by the trait that neither subserve, in any direct way, the processes conducive to life.” He argues that “the bodily powers, the intellectual faculties, the instincts, appetites, passions and even [the] highest feelings,” everything ranging from the “vital actions” of the “viscera” to the “egoistic” and “altruistic” sentiments which “prompt care of property and liberty” or “regulate conduct toward others” “have maintenance of the organic equilibrium of the individual, or else maintenance of the species, as their immediate or remote ends,” but yet that these same faculties may function in cases in which they do not aim at any proximate ends, although their exercise “may bring the ulterior benefits of increased power in the faculties exercised; and that thus the life as a whole may be afterwards furthered.” Spencer further explains that From the primary action of a faculty there results the immediate normal gratification, plus the maintained or increased ability due to exercise, plus the objective end achieved or requirement fulfilled. But from 10 11

Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §533, vol. II, p. 627. See Karl Groos, The Play of Animals, trans. Elizabeth L. Baldwin, with preface by J. Mark Baldwin (New York: Appleton, 1898), p. 3.

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this secondary action of a faculty exhibited in play or in an æsthetic pursuit, there results only the immediate gratification plus the maintained or increased ability12 –

but not the gratification connected with the achievement of any particular end, the satisfaction of any particular need. Aesthetic experience and aesthetic activity are play without any immediate end, although no doubt as such play – or artistic activity – becomes more complicated, it generates various internal goals within its ultimately goal-less – although ultimately beneficial – activity. What makes play both possible and necessary for higher or more complex creatures is that their “time and strength are not wholly absorbed in providing for immediate needs,”13 or that they have, so to speak, excess capacity, and that their capacities, when dormant or not required for immediate needs, have an “unusual readiness” to discharge themselves anyway, or to produce “a simulation” of their normal activities when circumstances offer the possibility of that “in place of the real activities.” Thus “Play is . . . an artificial exercise of powers which, in default of their natural exercise, become so ready to discharge that they relieve themselves by simulated actions in place of real actions.”14 Spencer illustrates this with the tendency of rats to gnaw anything they can get hold of even when they are not eating (which is not actually an “artificial exercise” of powers, because rats need to do this to keep the constant growth of their teeth in check) and of cats to scratch at chairs even when they are not scratching at prey, but also with the tendency of little girls to simulate adult activities such as tea parties and “The sports of boys, chasing one another, wrestling, making prisoners,” which “obviously gratify in a partial way the predatory instincts”15 that they naturally have and will exercise for specific ends as adults. In such exercises of their capacities, “activity of the intellectual faculties in which they are not used for purposes of guidance in the business of life,” the players will experience a twofold pleasure, “the pleasure of the activity itself” and “the accompanying satisfaction of certain egoistic feelings which find for the moment no other sphere.”16 The additional feelings gratified by an experience of play need not, however, be only egoistic.

12 13 14 15 16

Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §533, vol. II, pp. 527–8. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §534, vol. II, p. 628. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §534, vol. II, p. 630. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §534, vol. II, p. 631. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §534, vol. II, p. 631.

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This theory of the discharge of excess capacity combined with the twofold pleasures of the exercise of the faculties themselves plus the gratification of various feelings, such as the egoistic satisfaction in winning a game (which can generate an internal goal in an externally goal-less activity), provides the foundations for Spencer’s theory of specifically aesthetic play. Spencer holds that the play of any of our capacities of consciousness may be pleasurable, but particularly stresses the capacities for sensation and perception on the one hand and the capacity for feeling or emotion on the other. Thus, he argues that ordinary survival does not require very fine visual or auditory discriminations – the colorblind feel “comparatively small inconvenience,” he blithely observes – so “though the faculty which appreciates colour has a life-serving function, the relation between its activity and its use is not close,” and “the gratification derivable from this activity, carried on for its own sake,” for example making fine discriminations of colors, “becomes conspicuous,” and likewise in the case of sounds. Spencer adds that “the sensations brought by non-useful exercise” do not “necessarily have the æsthetic character,” only that “separableness from life-serving function is one of the conditions to the acquirement” of this character.17 So he will have to spell out some additional condition besides the non-necessary exercise of mental capacities to make their exercise aesthetically pleasurable. But before he does that, he comments on the “other extreme” of the capacities involved in aesthetic experience, the capacity for feeling or sentiment rather than sensation or perception. Here Spencer notes first that self-referential or “egoistic” feelings may be gratified by activities that do not directly contribute to biological survival, for example one might take pride in one’s own capacity for fine sensory discriminations even when that is not directly useful. But more important perhaps is “the conspicuous fact that many æsthetic feelings arise from the contemplation of the attributes and deeds of other persons, real or ideal.” He continues that In these cases, the consciousness is remote from life-serving function, not simply as is the consciousness accompanying play or the enjoyment of a beautiful colour or tone, but also in the further way that the thing contemplated as a source of pleasure, is not a direct action or affection of the self at all, but is a secondary affection produced by contemplation of acts and feelings known as objective, and present to the self only by representation. Here the separateness from life-serving function is extreme; since neither a

17

Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §535, vol. II, p. 633.

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beneficial end, nor an act conducive to that end, nor a sentiment prompting such act, forms an element in the æsthetic feeling.18

Here Spencer seems to be combining two separable ideas: first, that the arousal of sentiment is not functional but a form of play when it is aroused by a representation, even by the representation of another real person instead of a mere image of one, rather than by one’s own condition, and, second, that the arousal of sentiment is aesthetic rather than functional when it does not lead to a specific action. These conditions need to be separated more carefully than Spencer suggests, since there are no doubt many cases in which feeling what another person does or would feel in a certain circumstance is a direct prompt to action (this is the assumption of, for example, Adam Smith’s account of human motivation in A Theory of Moral Sentiments),19 and even some in which arousal of feeling by an image is a direct spur to action (this is the condition of the efficacy of rhetoric). But be this as it may, Spencer’s point is that in the exercise of a variety of our capacities for consciousness ranging from sensation to sentiment without an immediate objective, there is still the possibility for two elements of pleasure, namely the immediate pleasure in the sheer exercise of our faculties and and pleasurable feelings triggered by representations of the exercise of these faculties, whether in ourselves or in others and whether real or fictional. Insofar as pleasures of the second sort depend upon representations of states of affairs, whether veridical or not, this aspect of Spencer’s theory may be considered to contain a cognitive element. Spencer will shortly add a third source of pleasure to aesthetic experience, but before he does that he offers a solution to the problem raised a moment ago, namely that the mere discharge of excess capacity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the satisfaction of aesthetic expectation. What distinguishes the mere discharge of excess cognitive capacity from its aesthetic exercise is the organization of complexity in the successful case. Spencer writes: In the more complex combinations, including many forms presented together, it is relatively difficult to trace out the principle; but I see sundry reasons for suspecting that beautiful arrangements of forms, are those which effectually exercise the largest numbers of the structural elements

18 19

Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §535, vol. II, p. 634. See Adam Smith, A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), edited by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), or by Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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concerned in perception, while over-taxing the fewest of them. Similarly with the complex visual wholes presented by actual objects, or by pictorial representations of objects, with all their lights and shades and colours. The requirements for harmony, subordination, and for proportion – the demand for a variety sufficient to prevent monotony, but not a variety which too much distracts the attention, may be regarded as all implied by the principle that many elements of perceptive faculty must be called into play, while none are over-exerted.20

In keeping with his practice, Spencer does not mention any predecessors for his views, but it is impossible to read this without thinking of Kant’s conception of the free play of the cognitive powers: Spencer’s claim is that aesthetic experience is not simply the experience of the exercise of the powers of consciousness, but the experience of the harmonious play of multiple cognitive capacities, a harmonious play made possible by formal properties – such as “subordination” and “proportion.”21 Turning from sight to sound, Spencer illustrates his point by saying that “greater heterogeneity implies greater variety of excitements in the percipient, and avoidance of that over-excitement of some perceptive agency which uniformity implies,”22 while the pleasurability of the experience also requires the harmony that appropriate relations of subordination and proportion facilitate. Having almost in passing introduced this central theme of traditional aesthetics into his contemporary psychological account, Spencer now adds a third source of aesthetic pleasure, which is also deeply reminiscent of eighteenth-century theories. As Spencer says, “something must be added in elucidation of the third kind of æsthetic pleasure accompanying perceptive activity – that more special kind which results from the special associations formed in experience.”23 By such associations Spencer means the “feelings from time to time received along with perceptions” of objects that may in turn be represented or otherwise invoked in aesthetic activity or appreciation, for example, feelings of happiness associated with the graceful movements of dancers at a ball, which can in turn be invoked by an image of such an event, or with “architectural, plastic, pictorial” “art-products” that have themselves been associated with “occasions of happiness, social or otherwise.” Spencer observes that

20 21

22 23

Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §537, vol. II, pp. 639–40. Spencer’s idea in this passage also points forward to the most Kantian among more recent aestheticians, namely Monroe Beardsley; see Volume III, 3. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §537, vol. II, p. 640. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §537, vol. II, p. 640.

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the dimension of pleasurable association greatly increases the potential for aesthetic pleasure beyond what is offered by the first two dimensions of pleasure, that in the sheer exercise of our capacities and that in the feelings, such as pride, most directly connected with such exercise. Putting the point in a way that reveals that nineteenth-century liberalism is a long way from later conceptions of egalitarianism, Spencer says that association “is a reason why the æsthetic pleasure derived from form, though not great in the uncultured, becomes relatively voluminous in the cultured.”24 But perhaps more important, Spencer suggests that it is at this third level of aesthetic pleasure, the pleasure of associations, that the involvement of our emotional capacities in aesthetic experience becomes most pronounced. “When the emotion suggested” by a musical cadence, for example, “is a joyous one, opportunity is given for pleasurable sympathy; and when a painful emotion is suggested, there comes an opportunity for the pleasurable pain of pity.”25 Here we could say that Spencer departs from the Kantian model of play by including within his own conception of play the exercise of our own emotional capacities when, not needed for immediate practical purposes, they would otherwise lie dormant; and he swiftly addresses the traditional paradox of tragedy by suggesting that the exercise of our emotional capacities is just as enjoyable as the exercise of our cognitive capacities, even when the feelings directly aroused by the content of an artistic representation (through our cognitive capacities, of course) are not immediately pleasant. Situating Spencer’s view even more deeply in the history of aesthetics than he would ever do, we could also contrast his views to Aristotle’s by saying that he does not think that we suffer from an excess of feelings of pity and fear that needs to be purged, but rather that we have an excess capacity for feelings of pity and fear that needs to be exercised. Spencer sums up his account by stating that “the most perfect form of æsthetic excitement is reached when these three orders of sensational, perceptional, and emotional gratification are given, by the fullest actions of the respective faculties, with the least deduction caused by painful excess of action.”26 Thus the most pleasing works of art would be ones that combine “the pleasures derivable from simple sensation, as of sweet odours, beautiful colours, fine tones,” with “those pleasurable feelings that go along with perceptions more or less complex, of forms, of 24 25 26

Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §537, vol. II, p. 641. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §537, vol. II, p. 642. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §539, vol. II, p. 645.

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combined lights and shades, of successive cadences and chords; rising to a greater height where these are joined into elaborate combinations of forms, and . . . structures,” with the even greater opportunities for complexity and especially associations provided when “the presentative elements are incidental and the representative elements essential,” in other words, what can be offered by the content rather than by the matter and form of works of art.27 But he also recognizes that it is very rare for any work of art or body of works to exploit all these potential sources of pleasure to an equal degree: even “many admired works of modern art, . . . good in technique, are low in the emotions they express and arouse, such as the battle-scenes of Vernet and the pieces of Gerôme.”28 But success in exploiting all three dimensions of pleasure in that high form of play which is art is a true measure of artistic success. Spencer sums up his theory of the aesthetic sentiments by reminding us that The æsthetic feelings and sentiments are not, as our words and phrases lead us to suppose, feelings and sentiments that essentially differ in origin and nature from the rest. They are nothing else than particular modes of excitement of the faculties, sensational, perceptional, and emotional – faculties which, otherwise excited, produce those other modes of consciousness constituting our ordinary impressions, ideas, and feelings. The same agencies are in action; and the only difference is in the attitude of consciousness towards its resulting state29 –

the difference, that is, between gratification at the accomplishment or satisfaction of some concrete objective, and pleasure in the mere exercise of our capacities along with that in the feelings and associations that may accompany such exercise. Spencer ends by reminding us of the point with which he began, namely that only highly evolved creatures will be capable of aesthetic experience: “only when there is reached an organization so superior, that the energies have not to be wholly expended in the fulfilment of material requirements from hour to hour” is aesthetic experience possible.30 But since Spencer’s version of evolutionary theory is not just teleological but also profoundly optimistic, he sees no reason to think that aesthetic capacity and correspondingly artistic development has reached a maximum in his own or any past time. On the contrary, his concluding claim is that “the æsthetic activities in general may be 27 28 29 30

Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §539, vol. II, pp. 644–5. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §539, vol. II, p. 646. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §540, vol. II, p. 646. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §540, vol. II, p. 647.

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expected to play an increasing part in human life as evolution advances,” and that particular forms of art will themselves also evolve, thus “they will in a greater degree than now appeal to the higher emotions.”31 Thus Spencer’s revival of the theory of aesthetic experience as play does not just reject German idealism’s rejection of this conception; it specifically rejects Hegel’s famous claim that art for us is a thing of the past. On the contrary, the continuing evolution of humankind that Spencer expects promises the increasing importance of art and aesthetic experience in human life. Spencer’s conception of play as exercise of both our cognitive and our emotional capacities might have been recognized as a way of synthesizing the separate approaches of the aesthetics of truth, the aesthetics of feeling, and the aesthetics of play into a comprehensive theory of aesthetic experience. But many of those who responded to him did not look past his biological account of play as developing abilities needed for survival and then releasing excess capacity in these capacities once developed. This, Spencer’s readers clearly felt, was beneath the dignity expected of a philosophical theory of aesthetic experience. So Spencer’s theory of play would be rejected and its potential for a nonreductive aesthetic theory largely ignored.

2. The Aesthetics of Empathy: Robert Vischer, Lipps, and Volkelt Spencer appealed to psychology to revive the notion of play in his account of the “aesthetic sentiments.” The main school of psychological aesthetics in Germany was not initially concerned to revive the notion of play, but instead developed the recognition of the emotional impact of art in the form of empathy that Friedrich Theodor Vischer had first introduced to break out of the cognitivist confines of Hegelian aesthetics. Without the antipathy toward psychology sometimes characteristic of Neo-Kantianism, especially Marburg Neo-Kantianism, philosophers within this approach had no reason not to recognize the arousal or “experience” (that is, Erlebnis, not Erfahrung) of emotion as an essential aim of aesthetic experience in general and of our experience of the arts in particular. The term “empathy” (Einfühlung), the idea that we immediately experience aesthetic objects, whether human or not, in terms of emotions that we ourselves have in fact projected onto them, is most 31

Spencer, Principles of Psychology, §540, vol. II, p. 647.

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closely associated with the name Theodor Lipps (1851–1914). But it was previously promoted by Robert Vischer (1847–1933), in his 1873 doctoral thesis On the Optical Sense of Form, and after Lipps the position that empathy is indispensable to aesthetic response although not its only aspect was defended against attacks from supposedly more “objectivist” accounts of aesthetic qualities by Johannes Volkelt (1848–1930). We will discuss these three figures in this section, and in the following section will consider a figure who tried to combine the results of the play theorists and the empathy theorists, Karl Groos (1861–1940).32

Vischer Robert Vischer studied in Zürich, Heidelberg, Bonn, and Munich before taking his degree at his father’s university of Tübingen. He completed his habilitation in Munich and then taught art history at Breslau and Aachen, where he became professor of art history and aesthetics. From 1893 until his retirement in 1911 he taught at Göttingen. In addition to editing his father’s works, he published on different periods of art history, including works on Luca Signorelli (1879) and Peter Paul Rubens (1904).33 Vischer developed his account of empathy in his 1873 doctoral dissertation Über das optische Formgefühl (“On the Optical Feeling of Form”).34 But he attributed the idea of empathy to his father, who, in a later “critique” of his earlier system of aesthetics, had maintained “against the Herbartian school” that there can “be no form without content” and then suggested that “forms devoid of emotional content . . . are supplied with emotional content that we – the observers – unwittingly transfer to them.”35 Actually, according to the son, the father had already 32

33

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There is a discussion of the “Theory of Einfühlung” in the Earl of Listowel, A Critical History of Modern Aesthetics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1933), pp. 51–82. Robert Vischer, Lipps, and Volkelt receive some discussion in two works by Christian G. Allesch, Geschichte der psychologischen Ästhetik (Göttingen: Hogrefe, 1987), and Einführung in die psychologische Ästhetik (Vienna: Facultas Verlags- und Buchhandels, 2006). The latter contains an extensive bibliography of work in psychological aesthetics from the period considered here to the present. Lipps is also discussed in Louis Agosta, Empathy in the Context of Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Vischer’s work was discussed by Hermann Glockner, “Robert Vischer und die Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften im letzten Drittel des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Irrationalitätsproblem,” Logos 14 (1925): 297–343, and 15 (1926): 47–102. Robert Vischer, Über das optische Formgefühl (Leipzig: Hermann Credner, 1873); reprinted in Robert Vischer, Drei Schriften zum ästhetischen Formproblem (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1927). Robert Vischer, On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics (Leipzig: Hermann Credner, 1873), translated in Henry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherides Ikonomou, eds.,

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hinted at the new idea in two places in his original multi-volumed treatise on aesthetics, in a section on architecture and a section on natural beauty, where he had argued that “the aesthetic effect of all inorganic phenomena, even the lower organic world of plants and the whole realm of landscape, appears with an intuitive investment on our part, that is, we involuntarily read our emotions into them.”36 The son would develop this idea on the premise that humans have a “pantheistic urge for union with the world, which can by no means be limited to our more easily understood kinship with the human species but must, consciously or unconsciously, be directed toward the universe.”37 In other words, the foundation of empathy is our desire for fellowship with our own kind, which depends upon the possibility of understanding our fellows, but we project this on to the whole world as we experience it, and thus experience the nonhuman world in terms of the same emotions by means of which we understand each other. Theodor Lipps, who adopted the stance of a more sober psychologist than the art historian Vischer, would drop the idea of a “pantheistic urge,” and treat the empathetic projection of our own emotions into other human beings as an essential part of aesthetic experience and not just a basis for it. But before we turn to Lipps, let us continue with Vischer’s development of his father’s idea of the projection of our own emotions into the nonhuman as an essential part of aesthetic experience. Vischer’s idea of empathy is based on two premises. First, he holds that it is possible to distinguish between “ideal associations and a direct merger of the representation with objective form,”38 that is, between the classical association of ideas in which we remain aware of the distinction between a stimulus and an idea to which it leads us, on the one hand, and an experience that seems unitary, with no awareness of distinction between what might be the external stimulus and what might be added by the mind. Vischer argues that much although not all aesthetic experience takes the latter form, an idea that he in turn credits to an 1861 book on The Life of Dreams by Karl Albert Scherner.39 Vischer’s

36 37 38

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Empathy, Form, and Space: A Problem in German Aesthetics 1873–1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Foundation, 1994), pp. 89–123, at p. 89, citing Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Kritische Gänge, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1866). Robert Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, p. 90. Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, p. 109. Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, p. 92. Mallgrave and Ikonomou rendered Vischer’s word Vorstellung as “imagination”; I have used the more customary “representation.” Karl Albert Scherner, Das Leben des Traums (Berlin: Heinrich Schindler, 1861).

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second point is that this second form of experience, the union of subjective response with the perception of “objective form” that he calls Einfühlung or empathy, is based on the projection of our own bodily form or attitude into the perceived form of objects, a projection that, because of the union of our own body and soul, carries with it the projection of our own emotional as well as physical characteristics into the perception of the object. “The body, in responding to certain stimuli” – in dreams, as Scherner had argued, but in aesthetic experience in general, as Vischer is now arguing – “objectifies itself in spatial forms. Thus it unconsciously projects its own bodily form – and with this also the soul – into the form of the object. From this I derived the notion that I call empathy [Einfühlung].”40 This projection, Vischer argues, is based on a feeling of harmony between a perceived object and our own body, “a harmony between the object and the subject, which arises because the object has a harmonious form and a formal effect corresponding to subjective harmony.”41 This harmony is in the first instance a harmony between the object and the organ that perceives it: for example, “the horizontal line is pleasing because our eyes are positioned horizontally.”42 But this feeling of harmony quickly extends itself to the “structure of the whole body,”43 and then along with feeling the harmony or resemblance between an object and our own body, or more precisely with a particular condition or posture of our body, we also feel and project into the object the emotional state that goes along with that bodily condition. Thus, When I observe a stationary object, I can without difficulty place myself within its inner structure, at its center of gravity. I can think my way into it, mediate its size with my own, stretch and expand, bend and confine myself to it. With a small object, partially or totally confined and constructed, I very precisely concentrate my feeling. My feeling will be compressed and modest . . . When, on the contrary, I see a large or partially overproportioned form, I experience a feeling of mental grandeur and breadth, a freedom of the will . . . the compressed or upward striving, the bent or broken impression of an object fills us with a corresponding mental feeling of oppression, depression, or aspiration, a submissive or shattered stated of mind44 – 40 41 42 43 44

Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, p. 92. Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, p. 95. Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, p. 97. Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, p. 97. Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, pp. 104–5.

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and such feelings are projected on to the object in such a way that we do not distinguish between them and the more objective perception of the object, that is, they become part of the unitary experience of the object. With further examples, and perhaps with greater plausibility, Vischer argues that we have this response not just to static forms of objects but also to the perception of motion or the possibility of motion in objects – we feel harmony between the actual or possible motions of objects and those of our own bodies and then project into our experience of the objects the emotions that accompany such motions in our own bodies. Thus “the responsive sensation considers . . . the outline of the form ([e.g.] mountain silhouette) or follows . . . the path of movement ([e.g.] flight of a bird apart from [the form of] the bird itself.” The perception of motion in the object is then accompanied by the emotion that would accompany such motion in our own body: “The apparent movement of form is thus unconsciously accompanied by a concrete emotional element of feeling.” When I, for instance, look at the undulations and curves in a road, my thoughts also trace them – sometimes with dreamy hesitation, sometimes at a bounding speed. I seek and find, ascend triumphantly and fall to destruction, and so on. The direction and tempo of this motion are related to the perceived form and thus emulate human impulses and passions. Thus the responsive sensation intensifies into a responsive feeling [Nachfühling],45

one of the forms of Einfühlung. Vischer further argues that even though the “association of ideas,” which “evokes an other – absent images, thoughts, and vital feelings that have nothing to do with the symbolism of form” immediately before us, where “symbolism of form” is what has been explained by empathy, is “of only minor importance,” nevertheless once the unification of perceived form with emotional response by means of the harmony between object and body has taken place, even the association of ideas is swept up into the sense of unity thereby created. Thus We must bear in mind and never forget that in every image the symbolization of form discussed here always work together, first with each other and second with the association of ideas. They become entwined into an inextricable whole, and only by virtue of this absolute interlacing and togetherness does a true aesthetic appreciation of form arise.46

45 46

Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, pp. 106–7. Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, pp. 108–9.

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In other words, a feeling of complete unity in our experience of what would otherwise be considered physical properties of an object and of our emotional response to it is not just a feature of empathy but is a defining feature of aesthetic experience as such and what makes empathy paradigmatic for aesthetic experience. Although Vischer has not explicitly asserted that aesthetic appreciation is pleasurable, presumably he assumes that it is, and the explanation of its pleasure would be that our pleasure in our own emotions is incorporated into our unitary experience of the object, so that the object itself is indistinguishable from our emotional response to it and our pleasure in the latter becomes part of our pleasure in the former. Thus Vischer’s theory of empathy can be considered a forerunner of the theory developed by George Santayana two decades later that beauty is pleasure “objectified,” although Santayana makes no mention of Vischer or the other empathy theorists.47 Unlike Santayana’s later theory, however, Vischer’s theory is based on the assumption that our primary psychological drive is for union with other human beings – the “natural love for my species is the only thing that makes it possible for me to project myself mentally . . . A pure and complete union between the subjective and objective imagination . . . can take place only when the latter involves another human being”48 – but accompanied with the further assumption that this urge for union with other humans, which in turn depends upon the ability to project our own feelings into others, leads to a less discriminating urge to project our feelings onto nonhuman objects of experience as well. This second assumption is important for Vischer, for he hardly means to argue that aesthetic experience is restricted to our experience of other human beings or images of them, or that our projection of emotion onto nonhuman objects depends upon imagining in some way that they are representations of humans. The feeling of harmony between external objects and our own bodies on which the projection of emotion depends does not involve a stage in which we imagine that the external objects are human. Vischer’s theory of the empathetic projection of emotion as the dominant part if not the whole of aesthetic response also leads to the premise for a theory of artistic production. The basic idea here is that we do not simply feel a harmony between an object and possible motions of our 47

48

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896; New York: Dover Publications, 1955), §11, p. 31. Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, p. 103.

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own, as in the case of the flight of a bird or the undulating road, and then project the appropriate emotions onto such objects; we also have a tendency actually to move our own bodies in response to our imagination of their possible motions, and then to make some sort of physical record of those motions. “To suggest something unfurled or magnificent, for instance, we open our arms wide; to indicate greatness and majesty, we raise them high; to show something contemplated, doubtful, or untrue, we shake our heads and hands.” Thus, our internal emotional states, which are responses to our perceptions of objects and projected into them, also “express themselves externally in analogous movements of our muscles and limbs,” and then “Nothing is more natural, then, than that this hand that traces designs in the air should also seek to set down its images in a more permanent presentation with a solid material.”49 Some people, of course, have a greater drive and a greater gift for the later stages of this process, that is, for expressing their feelings in their bodily movements and finding ways to set those movements down into more permanent presentations. Those are the people who may become artists. But they speak or express for the rest of us, because the emotional responses and projections that they express and record are universal. Thus art “delivers a universally valid product and knows how to translate the indefinability and instability of mental life, as well as the chaotic disorder of nature, into a magnificent objectivity, into a clear reflection of a free humanity.” Vischer concludes that “every work of art reveals itself to us as a person harmoniously feeling himself into a kindred object, or as humanity objectifying itself in harmonious forms.”50 But every work of art potentially reveals itself to every one of us as humanity objectifying itself in harmonious forms, because our underlying perceptual and emotional processes are fundamentally similar. Vischer’s theory of art is thus based on the assumption that we have a natural tendency not only to project our emotions onto objects external to ourselves but also to express our emotions in our own bodies, and then to record such expression in yet other physical media, thus giving rise to the variety of the arts – and even those of us who are not very good at doing the latter, presumably many if not most of us, appreciate the products of others who are gifted at that. This theory of Vischer’s is at least in part a response to the Hegelian idealism of the previous generation of German aestheticians, and should be kept in mind when we come 49 50

Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, p. 115. Vischer, Optical Sense of Form, pp. 116–17.

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to a revival of Hegelian idealism in a subsequent generation, namely the aesthetic idealism of Benedetto Croce, which once again deemphasizes the importance of the bodily and further physical expression of artistic ideas.51 For Vischer, at least, there is a natural continuum between aesthetic experience as a mental response to bodies, the expression of that response in one’s own bodily movement, and recording that response in physical media, and there is no point to introducing any rigid boundaries within this continuum. Vischer’s theory that (visual) art is a record of our feelings and movements in response to the perception of objects rather than of the appearance of the object itself could also be seen as a fundamental attack upon the traditional notion of imitation and as a theoretical basis for the development of modern art, especially abstract expressionism; we will later find an echo of Vischer’s approach, although again probably unwitting, in R.G. Collingwood’s pages on Cézanne.52

Lipps Theodor Lipps was the best-known theorist of empathy. Lipps received his doctorate in Bonn and then followed in the career path of Robert Vischer, teaching first in Breslau and then in Munich, although he arrived there the year after Vischer had left for Göttingen and was the successor to Carl Stumpf in a chair for philosophy, not the successor in Vischer’s chair in art history and aesthetics. Lipps was a prolific author known for work in psychology as well as philosophy. His career began with a dissertation on Herbart’s ontology,53 but among his other early works were The Fundamental Facts of Psychical Life54 (1883) and Psychological Studies55 (1885); his first work exclusively in aesthetics was The Debate about Tragedy56 (1891). In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, he published massive treatises on logic,57 psychology,58 and aesthetics,59 the last of which is organized around the notion of empathy. 51 52

53 54 55 56

57 58 59

See Volume 3, Part Two. See R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. 144–5. Theodor Lipps, Zur Herbart’schen Ontologie (Bonn: n.p., 1874). Theodor Lipps, Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (Bonn: Cohen, 1883). Theodor Lipps, Psychologische Studien (Heidelberg: Weiss, 1885). Theodor Lipps, Der Streit über die Tragödie (Hamburg: Voss, 1891); modern printing (Teddington, Middlesex: Echo Library, 2006) will be cited here. Theodor Lipps, Grundzüge der Logik (Hamburg: Voss, 1893). Theodor Lipps, Leitfaden der Psychologie (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1903). Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik, 2 vols.: Vol. I, Grundlegung der Ästhetik (Hamburg: Voss, 1903), and Vol. II, Die ästhetische Betrachtung und die bildende Kunst (Hamburg: Voss, 1906).

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He remained active until his death in 1914, at only age sixty-three, publishing yet another treatise on empathy as late as 1913.60 Lipps also translated Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature into German (1904–1906),61 a fact that confirms the eighteenth-century sources of much of his thought about aesthetics in spite of his composition of his main work in aesthetics in a contemporary idiom entirely without historical references. Here we shall focus on the idea of empathy as expounded in his main work on aesthetics, though the idea was introduced in earlier works, but shall also turn to his little book on tragedy for a more concrete illustration of his conception of empathy at work. Lipps does not indulge in metaphysical language such as Vischer’s “pantheistic urge,” preferring instead the language of descriptive psychology. “Aesthetics is a psychological discipline,” he says, a “descriptive and explanatory science,” although he also insists that there is no conflict between such a descriptive enterprise and a “normative” one, since from an adequate description of aesthetic phenomena “I can also say without further ado what conditions must be fulfilled and what is to be avoided if the feeling of beauty in question is to be called into being.”62 As this remark makes clear, Lipps regards the discipline of aesthetics as the psychology of beauty, although his conception of the beautiful is quite broad, including under it such categories as the comic and the tragic, which were often distinguished from it; and he regards art as “the intentional production of the beautiful.”63 Beauty itself is defined as “the capacity of an object to produce a particular effect in me,”64 an effect which is none other than pleasure: aesthetic value, Lipps writes, is, like all value, a form of pleasure: “it is, like everything valuable, pleasurable.”65 Of course, not everything that is pleasurable is beautiful or aesthetically valuable; there are different kinds of pleasures, and the beautiful is what reveals itself to be pleasurable in “aesthetic contemplation”: “aesthetic value is the value that reveals itself to us in aesthetic contemplation” (ästhetische Betrachtung).66 Lipps does not define what he means by “aesthetic contemplation” until his second volume, but when he does, he

60 61

62 63 64 65 66

Theodor Lipps, Zur Einfühlung (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1913). David Hume, Traktat über die menschliche Natur, reprint of edition of 1904–1906 with introduction by Reinhard Brandt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1973). Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, pp. 1–2. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 3. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 1. “Er ist, vie alles Wertvolle, lustvoll”; Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 6. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 8.

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explains it as a form of consideration in which we simply do not raise any question about the reality or nonreality of the objects that we experience and the properties in them that we experience with pleasure. An aesthetic experience, for example the experience of aesthetic empathy, is one that simply does not ask about the reality (Wirklichkeit) of its object:67 “Aesthetic contemplation, in short, is that which remains absolutely on this side of the question about reality.”68 Thus far, Lipps remains firmly within the conceptual framework of eighteenth-century aesthetics in spite of the trappings of nineteenthcentury psychology: beauty is the most general aesthetic property, and the beautiful is what causes us a disinterested pleasure where such a pleasure is defined precisely in Kant’s terms as pleasure in the “mere contemplation” of the appearance of an object rather than in any judgment about its existence.69 Lipps also reveals the eighteenth-century and indeed Kantian background of his approach by arguing that we experience beauty in both nature and art, art differing from nature, as has already been stated, only in that it is the intentional production of beauty. Lipps likewise demonstrates the influence of Kant (and Herbart, the subject of his doctoral dissertation) on his thought by beginning his treatise with an account of our pleasure in the aesthetic contemplation of form, an account that is deeply Kantian in spite of his pointed refusal to use the term “play” in his description of the aesthetic experience of form. His account clearly departs from the Kantian approach only when he introduces the idea of empathy into it, for which he borrows not only Vischer’s term Einfühlung and Vischer’s equation of empathy with “symbolization” but also Vischer’s basic conception of empathy as the projection of human emotions into external objects in virtue of harmonies or resemblances between those objects, whether nonhuman or other humans, and ourselves – a process that Lipps calls “personification” or “humanization” (Vermenschlichung). Lipps thus shares with Neo-Kantians like Cohen the strategy of retaining Kant’s analysis of judgments of taste 67 68

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Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. II, p. 35. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. II, p. 36. Lipps’s idea of leaving questions about reality “to one side” cannot fail to remind one of Edmund Husserl’s conception of “bracketing” or “transcendental epoché” as the foundation of the discipline of phenomenology, although Husserl did not emphasize this notion until his Cartesian Meditations of 1909, thus three years after the remark of Lipps just quoted. Further, since Husserl used this notion as the characteristic of the “phenomenological reduction” in general, he could not use it as a criterion of aesthetic experience in particular, and did not develop an aesthetics, although numerous of his followers did. Kant, CPJ, §2, 5:204.

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while dropping Kant’s explanation of aesthetic response as the free play of imagination and understanding, but will substitute the empathetic feeling of emotion rather than the Neo-Kantian idea of the cognition of emotion as his own explanation of aesthetic response. But before we turn to Lipps’s account of empathy, let us take a brief look at his account of our aesthetic response to formal features of objects, insofar as that does not yet involve empathy – for in fact the two aspects of his account are deeply connected. Lipps’s most basic idea is that all pleasure arises from “the activations [Betätigungen] of the soul that . . . find in the soul conditions conducive to their completion,”70 or find in the impressions given to the mind conditions that facilitate its activities. His “general proposition” is that “A ground for pleasure is given to the degree that psychic processes – or complexes thereof – thus sensations, perceptions, representations, thoughts, and connections among them, are ‘natural’ for the soul.”71 This might have seemed a natural place for Lipps to have appealed to the Kantian idea of free play, but Lipps introduces a different Kantian idea here, saying that what pleases us is what can readily be taken up into our “apperception,” or representation of the unity of our own impressions and thoughts, and thus that what pleases us aesthetically is what can readily be taken up into our apperception in aesthetic contemplation. Apperception consists in taking up a particular experience into the unity of our experience: It consists in grasping, comprehending, attending to sensation, perception, representation, in noticing it or its object, in directing attention to it. This noticing, comprehending, attending, this inner grasping, and the specific allowing a process or experience [Erlebnisses] to become effective in the connection of psychical life [psychischen Lebenszusammenhang] is what I call “apperception”. . . . Accordingly we must make the previously stated rule more precise: Pleasure arises to the degree that a psychical process finds favorable conditions for its apperception in the soul, or to the degree that it is harmonious with the psychically given conditions of apperception.72

The first aspects of beauty are thus those that facilitate the apperception of the object that presents them, or facilitates taking our perception of such features of appearance into the unity of our apperception. Lipps then describes such traditional criteria of beauty as proportion, unity amidst variety, equilibrium, and what he names “monarchical subordination,”73 70 71 72 73

Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 9. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 10. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 11. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, pp. 74–90.

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the presence in our experience of an object as a central feature that seems to organize and dominate without eliminating or suppressing the others, as features of objects that facilitate our integration of our experience of them into the unity of our apperception. For example, “Regularity is a harmony among parts, elements, features of a whole,” and “such harmony facilitates the apprehension of the whole” and by means of that facilitates the unity of the soul itself. “On this depends the pleasure.”74 However, Lipps also describes our enjoyment of realizing the unity of apperception in our experience of an object as an enjoyment of our own mental activity in experiencing the object. Thus he writes that The fundamental condition of pleasure in the objective [im Gegenständlichen] for us was unity. This was first determined as inner harmony . . . Corresponding to this is also the unitariness of acting [Einstimmigkeit des Tuns] in itself, and the harmonization [Zusammenfassung] of inner activity in points of unity, the contradiction-free subordination of all acting under determinate, unified goals.

He then goes on to describe this mental state in terms of a feeling of the freedom of inner action: Or, to bring together what has here been said: All feeling of self-value is pleasure in the power, the wealth or breadth, and the inner freedom of my acting. Here inner freedom means nothing other than that unitariness and unity of my acting in itself. The acting, of which I here speak, is of many kinds. It may be my intellectual acting. . . . Another kind of my acting is my acting directed at practical goals. . . . Finally my acting is perhaps also merely the acting that consists in the grasping and holding of an object, the in itself harmonious, thus internally free turning to something perceived or represented and the free turning away from it, the active going hither and yon, taking together and taking apart, penetrating, the internal appropriation and domination.

A beautiful object is one that allows me this unhindered and free mental activity; an object pleases me in aesthetic contemplation when it allows such “free grasping and holding”; “it is also something beautiful on account of the capacity for enjoyment that consists in such power and freedom of grasping and giving” myself to the object.75 In all of this, it certainly sounds as if Lipps is offering his own interpretation of Kant’s central notion of the free play of the imagination and understanding. However, Lipps refuses to call the mental state of 74 75

Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, pp. 18–19. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, pp. 98–9.

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response to a beautiful object “a free play of fantasy” because “it occurs . . . with psychological necessity,”76 that is, it does not seem like an optional and additional response to the perception of a beautiful object, but rather like part and parcel of our original experience of the object. Whether that aspect of the experience of beauty, previously emphasized by Vischer, is an adequate ground for refusing to call the psychological state that Lipps has described a state of free play might well be contested. After all, Kant too had noticed that we tend to think of beauty as if it were really a property of the object rather than a separable feature of our response to it, although his explanation of why we do this lay in our assumption of the intersubjective validity of our judgments of beauty rather than in descriptive psychology.77 Be that as it may, the basis of Lipps’s conception of empathy lies in his view that we enjoy our own mental activity, now coupled with the view that we project an idea of mental activity onto whatever stimulates our own mental activity in aesthetic contemplation and then project as well onto such an object the emotional accompaniment of our own mental activity. The key move here is that the possibility of unhindered mental activity that we enjoy in our experience of a beautiful object is projected into the object as “liveliness and the possibility of life” (Lebendigkeit und Lebensmöglichkeit), so that the subjective character of our experience of the object is fused into our conception of the object itself – for the purposes of aesthetic contemplation, of course. Thus Lipps now states that “All enjoyment of beauty is an impression of the liveliness and possibility of life lying in the object; and all ugliness is in its ultimate essence the negation of life, lack of life, restriction, crippling, destruction, etc.”78 Of course, the most obvious object for such an experience is nothing other than our fellow humans, whom we can experience as themselves enjoying and promoting a free and harmonious mental life or as negating such a life, and this might seem to stand in the way of a generalization of empathy to all forms of beauty, including the beauty of inanimate nature, animate but nonhuman nature, and even human artifacts. But Lipps points out that even our experience of human beauty is not an immediate response to the human body as such – “The external appearance of the human being offers nothing that considered in itself could appear beautiful and indeed as the most beautiful”79 – and infers from 76 77 78 79

Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 165. See Kant, CPJ, §6, 5:211. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 102. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 103.

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this that our experience of the beauty of other humans must be empathetic, a projection onto their bodies of the feelings and emotions that we would associate with the postures and motions we observe in them if we were undergoing or undertaking those ourselves. We associate bodily symmetry, for example, with the possibility of successful physical activity or “life-activity” (Lebensbetätigung),80 and that in turn with our own experience of mental harmony and its pleasure, which we then project onto the body. Lipps argues that “We experience [erleben] that this value is not attached to something sensuous, but to something human, to a life that lies behind [the sensuous] and expresses itself therein. I said about the form of the female body: When we have an impression of its beauty, we so to speak see through the form to a life; and we know that we do this.”81 But my understanding of the inner life has to come from my own case – “This inner is always me” – and has to be projected by me onto the other. Thus, “The consciousness of aesthetic value is always consciousness of a depth, in the object and in me, which I experience as a value, i.e., enjoy in myself,”82 and this has to be projected into my experience of the other. My experience of the other – that is, my Erlebnis – is, phenomenologically, a unity, so I experience the depth of life in the other as being as much of a property of her as her bodily form, but it is nevertheless projected from my experience of my own mental life. And once we have realized that even in the case of the beauty of another human being we have projected our own feeling of life into our experience of her, then of course the way is open for the thought that we perform this kind of projection in our experience of nonhuman and artistic beauty as well. This is exactly what Lipps argues next. Using a favorite term of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, he begins with the case of other animals, and argues that our aesthetic experience of them involves the projection of human emotions on to them: We consider animals as ensouled. Nobody can doubt that we know of a life of the soul in animals only because we ground the expressions of life in animals on a psychic life similar to our own, an I. This is in its origin my own. Insofar as I do not merely add this psychic life to the external appearance of the animal or think it in addition thereto, but internally experience it, the external appearance of the animal becomes aesthetically comprehensible to me and thereby wins aesthetic significance.83 80 81 82 83

Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 105. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 157. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 159. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 160.

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Immediately preceding this argument Lipps had equated the empathetic injection of feeling into what we experience as beautiful as symbolism – “Everything beautiful is the ‘symbol’ of such a personal life and self-expression [Sichauslebens]”84 – so this account of our aesthetic experience of animals is also an account of how they become symbols of human feelings for us. Immediately following his argument about animals, Lipps applies the same analysis to the case of non-animate nature: here too we experience appearances in nature as if they were bodily states or actions of human beings and then project onto them the feelings that we associate therewith. He begins his lengthy description of this sort of empathy with the case of sounds (again revealing his indebtedness to the older Vischer): In nature we encounter sounds everywhere. We hear the trees moan and groan, the storm howl, the leaves whisper, the stream murmur. . . . These sounds are not identical to our sounds of affect, but are comparable. . . . And to the degree that this is the case, they also seem to originate from a drive to make themselves audible, and to carry in themselves a corresponding affective moment. . . . And this is: making audible something internal, something human, something personal in general. Thus the sounds that we encounter in nature animate nature, humanize it, make of it an analogue of our own personality.85

Here Lipps equates empathy with the personification or humanization (Vermenschlichung) of the objects of aesthetic experience. But although Lipps has displayed the eighteenth-century roots of his thought as well as his debts to Friedrich Theodor as well as Robert Vischer with the attention that he gives to the aesthetics of nature, he is sufficiently a child of the nineteenth-century to devote the bulk of his theory – the whole of the second volume of his Aesthetics – to the experience of art. Now of course it is no surprise that we should experience works of art as expressions of human emotion, since they are products of human activity and thus (often) expressions of the actual emotions of actual artists – even if we have to project our own emotions onto those artists in order to understand theirs, since after all we do not experience the emotions of each other directly. But the point that Lipps wants to make is that we experience expressed emotions as if they were part of works of art themselves, not merely part of the causal chain that has produced works of art. We do this in spite of our recognition that the work 84 85

Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 159. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. I, pp. 161–2.

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of art before us is just a block of inanimate stone, in the case of a sculpture, or even in the case of a performance art, such as theater, human actors who are not identical with the characters they are portraying – thus the work of art, or the characters portrayed in it, is always “ideal” rather than actual, and yet we experience it as if it were human, as if it had an emotional life of its own. So we experience the work of art not just as a human product but as if it were itself human; in a poem or a play or a sculpture we encounter a human personality that can only be a product of our own personification or humanization of what is actually before us. The experience of art is “in the final analysis always the experience of a human being. But this is the experience of myself. Thus I feel myself as a human being in the form that presents itself to me.”86 Using a term that Edward Bullough would make famous a decade later,87 Lipps says that we are always aware of “distance” between ourselves and the work of art, or its “objecthood” (Gegenständlichkeit),88 but that we at the same time experience it as having an emotional life that is grounded in our own. “We demand that in every case a human being comes before us in the work of art,” one whose experience we can “co-experience” (Miterleben),89 which of course we can do because its experience is in fact our own, projected into it by means of empathy. Lipps spends most of the second large volume of his Aesthetics working out this idea in detail, and even then discusses only the “spatial” arts, the visual arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, and ornament. There is no space here to follow him through these details. We will conclude our discussion of Lipps with the following point only. Recall that at the outset of his theory Lipps had grounded aesthetic experience in the pleasure that we take in the unhindered activity of our own minds stimulated by an object, the activity that sounded so much like the Kantian free play of our cognitive powers but from which Lipps withheld that designation. This means that the mental life that we project onto other objects by means of empathy must ultimately be a positive form of life, something pleasurable rather than not. It is certainly easier for Lipps to maintain this position throughout a discussion of visual art rather than 86 87

88 89

Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. II, p. 49. See Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Æsthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology V (1912): 87–118, reprinted in Bullough, Æsthetics: Lectures and Essays, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. 91–130. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. II, p. 51. Lipps, Ästhetik, vol. II, pp. 53–4.

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other art forms, for example tragic drama, where the inner life that is represented on stage and to which we respond with the empathetic projection of our own emotions seems anything but pleasurable or affirmative – this is of course the traditional paradox of tragedy. In spite of not explicitly addressing the case of tragedy in his systematic work on aesthetics, as we noted one of Lipps’s earlier publications was a small book on The Debate about Tragedy. Although Lipps does not yet explicitly deploy the concept of empathy in this work and thus does not directly address the question of how our empathetic response to art is supposed to be consonant with the underlying assumption that aesthetic response is supposed to be pleasurable, his main point in this work nevertheless shows how he could resolve this question. For what he argues is that tragedy pleases us not because it offers us an image of “poetic justice”90 or “moral world-order”91 in which characters receive the fate they deserve – from an array of ancient and modern examples, he argues that the main characters in the most effective tragedies usually receive a fate far worse than they deserve – but because it offers us the experience of compassion (Mitleid) with the powers and efforts of the characters to resist the inexorable forces of fate. Thus what we respond to in Antigone is not the unfairness of Creon’s refusal to let Antigone give her brother a proper burial but “the force and powerful measure of moral passion in Antigone,” and even in the case of Shakespeare’s Richard III what we respond to is not his spite but rather the “extraordinary force of human willing” that is therein expressed.92 More generally, Lipps states that No suffering, whatever it may be called, can please through its mere existence. The ground of enjoyment can by no means consist in something merely negative, it also cannot consist in inner negation. Rather what constitutes here as everywhere else the enjoyment in suffering is that in the suffering something positively valuable in the personality comes to light. This positively valuable is here the voice of conscience and truth.93

Such a generalization about tragedy is no doubt debatable: one could argue that it is Oedipus’s drive for truth that brings about his own destruction, and that this drive is therefore something to which we should respond negatively, although it might also be argued that it is his belated drive for truth in spite of his earlier casualness about it (when 90 91 92 93

Lipps, Der Streit über die Tragödie, pp. 11–16, 23–5. Lipps, Der Streit über die Tragödie, pp. 17–22. Lipps, Der Streit über die Tragödie, p. 30. Lipps, Der Streit über die Tragödie, p. 38.

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he killed the old man on the road without worrying much about who he might really be) that ultimately draws our admiration. But however that debate might ultimately be decided, Lipps’s own commitment to ensuring that empathy is always a positive experience should be evident in this approach to tragedy. Lipps’s account of empathy was widely received, but also criticized. Before we proceed to one of the most important of these criticisms, let us take a look at the defense of empathy theory offered by Johannes Volkelt.

Volkelt Johannes Volkelt received his doctorate in Jena in 1876, became a professor there in 1879, and then taught in Basel and Würzburg before becoming professor in Leipzig, where he taught until 1921. He published numerous works in epistemology as well as aesthetics, and also published individual works on Kant, Schopenhauer, Jean Paul, and even on Franz Grillparzer as Poet of the Tragic. One of his mid-career works was, as in the case of Lipps, a theory of tragedy.94 His main work in aesthetics was a three-volume System of Aesthetics, first published from 1905 to 1912 and then substantially revised for a second edition published from 1925 to 1927.95 In the first edition of this work, Volkelt explicitly presented himself as a synthesizer in the history of aesthetics, methodologically and substantively: he said that his aesthetics “proceeds in the manner of experiential psychology” but “at the same time acknowledges significant and illuminating truth in the older German aesthetics”;96 that the aesthetic is “closely connected with the sensory side of the human being, even with the so-called lower sensations,” but at the same time he remains firm that “the aesthetic, with all of its connections with the sensory ground of our nature, in every case nevertheless first comes to be within the highest, most spiritual [vergeistigtesten] circles of activity of the life of our soul”;97 and finally that on his understanding “aesthetics has to make clear the connection of the beautiful and of art with the other 94 95

96 97

Johannes Volkelt, Ästhetik des Tragischen (Munich: Oskar Beck, 1897). Johannes Volkelt, System der Ästhetik: Vol. I, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, second, “strongly altered” edition (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1927); Vol. II, Die Ästhetische Grundgestalten, and Vol. III, Kunstphilosophie und Metaphysik der Ästhetik, second edition (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1925). Volkelt, System, vol. I, pp. v–vi. Volkelt, System, vol. I, p. vi.

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great goods of humankind, with the other activities of culture,” and that “one makes idol worship out of art if one rips it out of its connection with the goods, the values of culture in general and will not accept that the standards of other cultural values must be acknowledged by art.”98 In the second edition, however, twenty years later, Volkelt was more concerned to separate the psychological description of aesthetic experience from “value-theoretic considerations.”99 In spite of these large claims, for Volkelt the “Psychological Foundation of Aesthetics” was and remained the “Psychology of Empathy,”100 and our concern here will only be his attempt to defend this concept from contemporary objections. Volkelt devoted himself to this task in a work of 1920, thus shortly before his revision of his System, titled The Aesthetic Consciousness.101 Volkelt saw the aesthetics of empathy attacked as a “subjectivist” approach by “objectivist” approaches of two kinds, on the one hand, what we might call purely philosophical approaches, namely the phenomenological approach of Edmund Husserl and his followers and the “transcendental method” of the Neo-Kantians, and, on the other, the substantive approach of aesthetic formalists such as Konrad Fiedler (1841–95) and his followers,102 like that of Herbart before them.103 The latter, according to Volkelt, tried to reduce the objects of aesthetic experience to pure “spatial form, relations of colors, connections of tones, forms of words,”104 and so on, but were such “enemies of feeling” that they “paid no attention to what an emptying and flattening of aesthetic experiences [Erlebnisse] they would introduce through the exclusion of feelings” literally “melted into” (eingschmolzenen) the objects of our actual aesthetic experience:105 to insist that we actually experience pure spatial or temporal forms or even colors or tones without any emotional value (or other meaning) is simply to deny the nature of our actual experience. That objects present themselves to us as sublime, magnificent, 98

Volkelt, System, vol. I, p. vii. Volkelt, System, vol. I, p. x. 100 Volkelt, System, vol. I, p. xi. 101 Johannes Volkelt, Das ästhetische Bewusstsein: Prinzipienfragen der Ästhetik (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1920). 102 See Konrad Fiedler, Schriften über Kunst, ed. Hermann Konnerth (Munich: R. Piper, 1913). For literature, see Podro, The Manifold in Perception, Chapter VIII, and Stefan Majetschak, editor, Auge und Hand: Konrad Fiedlers Kunsttheorie im Kontext (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1997). 103 Volkelt, Ästhetische Bewusstsein, p. 18. 104 Volkelt, Ästhetische Bewusstsein, p. 9. 105 Volkelt, Ästhetische Bewusstsein, p. 11. 99

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worthy, or pathetic is just as much as part of our experience as that they present themselves to us as shaped and colored, and thus “The aesthetics of empathy,” in Volkelt’s view, “is at the same time an aesthetics of objectivity.”106 Volkelt was equally unimpressed with the philosophical objections to the aesthetics of empathy as “subjectivist.” In his view, Husserl’s method of “essence-intuiting, eidetic, intuitive grasping”107 is subject matter-neutral, and can be used to describe our experience of objects as emotionally meaningful as much as it can be used to describe any other form of perception or conceptualization of objects; Husserl’s method tells us how to describe our experience of an object but not what kinds of properties we can actually experience objects to have. As for the transcendental method of a Neo-Kantian such as Cohen or for that matter of Kant himself, Volkelt the epistemologist agrees that it can describe the “immanent lawfulness of the thought” of objects as such,108 but again maintains that this only determines the logical form of our experience of objects, not the substance of such experience. It remains to experience to tell us what the contents rather than the form of our experience of objects is, and in Volkelt’s view what experience tells us, as Lipps before him had shown, is that we experience objects as laden with emotions. Thus he defends Lipps’s aesthetics of empathy as well as his own in his System of Aesthetics as the substantive result of descriptive psychology, incompatible with the formalist aesthetics of the Herbartian tradition although compatible with either Husserlian phenomenology or Kantian transcendental principles of experience. He remains confident of his treatment of “empathy as a process widespread in human mental life, which is found by no means only in aesthetic contexts,” all the more so because “his own method of work in aesthetics, for all its close connection to psychology, is predominantly determined by art” itself, “ruled by the effort to order and determine the impressions and experiences that have been imparted to me in uninterrupted traffic with art.”109 Not in his account of the foundations of aesthetics in Volume I of his System, nor in his catalogue of particular forms of empathy in Volume II, nor in his account of artistic creativity or of the relations between aesthetic and other values in Volume III does the idea of aesthetic experience as either a form of cognition or a form of play appear, so from our

106 107 108 109

Volkelt, Ästhetische Bewusstsein, p. 15. Volkelt, Ästhetische Bewusstsein, p. 17. Volkelt, Ästhetische Bewusstsein, p. 34. Volkelt, Ästhetische Bewusstsein, p. 43.

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point of view Volkelt’s aesthetics reduces aesthetic experience to the element of emotional in spite of the generous comments of its preface. One German aesthetician who attempted to revive the concept of play while acknowledging the importance of empathy, however, was Karl Groos.

3. Groos: The Play of Animal and Man A critique of the particulars of Herbert Spencer’s version of the aesthetics of play that nevertheless accepted the importance of play while also trying to find room for empathy within aesthetic experience was offered by Karl Groos (1861–1946), professor of philosophy at Giessen in Hesse, later at Basel, and finally at Tübingen, the university of Friedrich Theodor and Robert Vischer. Groos studied at Heidelberg, one of the seats of Southwest Neo-Kantianism, and his earliest publication was a work on the philosophy of Schelling.110 That was quickly followed by an introduction to aesthetics,111 and then for a decade Groos focused on the concept of play and its pedagogical importance. This work culminated in a book on The Mental Life of Children112 that achieved great popularity in Germany, going through at least six editions. In his later career, Groos published numerous works on more standard topics in academic philosophy. But his wider reputation was based on his work on play, particularly a pair of books that were quickly translated into English, and indeed in the United States published by Spencer’s publisher, namely The Play of Animals (1896) and The Play of Man (1899).113 In these works Groos adopted Spencer’s psychological approach to play and his foundation of aesthetics upon this concept, but objected to the idea that either play or developed aesthetic activity is simply the discharge of excess capacity with no direct advantage for the individual or species who plays. Born two years after the publication of The Origin of Species and convinced that every important characteristic of a creature must have an evolutionary advantage, Groos argued that higher animals and especially humans have a fundamental impulse or instinct to play and that this has the direct advantage of preparing them to use their capacities in ways that are certainly functional. At the same time, Groos, far more learned 110 111 112 113

Karl Groos, Die reine Vernunftwissenschaft (Heidelberg: Georg Weiß, 1889). Karl Groos, Einleitung in die Ästhetik (Giessen: Ricker, 1892). Karl Groos, Das Seelenleben des Kindes (Berlin: Reuter und Richard, 1904). Karl Groos, The Play of Animals, trans. Elizabeth L. Baldwin, with Preface by J. Mark Baldwin (New York: Appleton, 1898), and The Play of Man, trans. Elizabeth L. Baldwin, with Preface by J. Mark Baldwin (New York: Appleton, 1901).

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in the history of philosophy than Spencer, accepted the idea of the disinterestedness of aesthetic experience, and following Schiller and Kant as well celebrated aesthetic experience as an experience of freedom. How he reconciled the functionality of play with the aesthetics of freedom will be a central question in what follows. The fundamental idea of Groos’s approach to the concept of play is clearly asserted in the preface to The Play of Animals: “The play of youth depends on the fact that certain instincts, especially useful in preserving the species, appear before the animal seriously needs them. They are, in contrast with later serious exercise (Ausübung), a preparation (Vorübung) and practice (Einübung) for the special instincts. . . . The animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play.”114 That is, Groos supposes, higher animals will need for their survival physical and intellectual capacities of a kind that cannot be fully developed at birth but are only latent then, but their species must have evolved an instinct to develop these capacities by appropriate play as well as the parenting instincts that will allow and nurture such play in the developing young. In the first chapter of the book, Groos makes it clear immediately that his theory is directed against the “surplus energy principle” of Spencer, and defends the honor of Schiller while so doing: he emphasizes “Schiller’s priority” in the theory of play but also insists that for Schiller the surplus energy principle “holds but a subordinate place” rather than being the whole explanation of the importance of play.115 Instead of interpreting the play of the young, in both higher animals and humans, as mere discharge of surplus energy that may accidentally take the form of the imitation of adult activities, such as tea parties and war, Groos holds that The “experimenting” of little children and young animals, their movement, hunting, and fighting games, which are the most important elementary forms of play, are not imitative repetitions, but rather preparatory efforts. They come before any serious activity, and evidently aim at preparing the young creature for it and making him familiar with it.116

Fledglings flapping their wings while still in the nest, infants crowing and babbling, and boys romping – “all these do not imitate serious action, whose organ has been dormant for an interval ‘longer than ordinary,’ but rather, impelled by irresistible impulse, they make their first 114 115 116

Groos, Play of Animals, p. xx. Groos, Play of Animals, p. 1. Groos, Play of Animals, p. 7.

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preparations for such activities in this way.”117 Along with rejecting the idea that play is primarily an expenditure of surplus energy that just happens to take the form of imitation of adult activities, Groos also rejects the idea that play is primarily recreational or restorative. He does not deny that children or even adults can seek “recreation ‘in a little game’ after the burden and the heat of the day,” but he denies that “the necessity for recreation originates play.”118 What originates play is the need for the young creature to develop the complex abilities that it will need in its later life. Of course, both those latent capacities and the instinct to play in order to develop them must be inherited: “The activity of all living beings is in the highest degree influenced by hereditary instincts.”119 After devoting many pages to describing the varieties of play among animals, Groos turns to “The Psychology of Animal Play,” but under this rubric in fact turns to the psychology of human play. Here he makes a reference to his Basel predecessor Nietzsche, noting that his conception of a “struggle for power” is a better description of the psychology of much play than Darwin’s “struggle for survival,” which as he notes is usually “no struggle at all” at the level of individuals; by this means he introduces the point that young creatures, including children, first struggle to attain mastery over their own bodies “by means of experimental and movement plays,” which then lead to “playful chase and mock combats,” and to further forms of play, involving “building, nursing, and curiosity,” in which “the impulses of ownership and subjugation manifest themselves in various ways.”120 Through these forms of play, children develop the physical and social skills they will need in adult life. In this context Groos returns to the attack upon Spencer, criticizing the characterization of play as “aimless activity” and emphasizing that setting and trying to achieve goals is essential to the functional character of much play.121 But given the high degree of functionality that Groos has ascribed to the play of human children as well as to animals, how can he build upon the concept of play a conception of art that accepts the disinterestedness of aesthetic experience from the tradition of Kant and Schiller that he has taken as the origin of the theory of play? The answer to this question is that 117 118 119 120 121

Groos, Play of Animals, p. 8. Groos, Play of Animals, p. 17. Groos, Play of Animals, p. 13. Groos, Play of Animals, pp. 290–1. Groos, Play of Animals, p. 291. Here Groos cites the French philosopher and aesthetician Paul Souriau.

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Here we must suppose a progressive development from mere satisfaction of instinctive impulse (where the act is performed neither for its own sake nor for the sake of an external aim, but simply in obedience to hereditary propensity) through what is subjectively considered akin to work, up to make-believe activity with an external aim as its second stage. Finally, as the outward aim gives way before the pleasure-giving quality of the act itself, the transition to art takes place. At this point the outward aim has but a very slight significance, though never vanishing entirely; for it can not be denied that in artistic execution it regains very considerable importance in an altered form.122

The suggestion is that play that is at first entirely instinctive can next be undertaken with a conscious recognition of its ulterior benefit, in which case it has some of the characteristics of work, but can finally be undertaken for sheer pleasure regardless of the benefits it may also be recognized to have. At this point Groos must be accepting from Spencer the idea that there is pleasure in the sheer exercise of our capacities, which do have excess capacity, and that we can find ways in which to exercise them that will please us long after their role as preparation for the serious business of adult life has been discharged. “So we find in this pleasure in the possession of power the psychological foundation for all play which has higher intellectual accompaniments”123 and the foundations for the activities of producing and experiencing art in particular – although, as Groos suggested in the previous quotation, the production of art will ordinarily involve elements of acquired skill and effort that seem more like work than like play, and, we might add, sometimes even the appreciation of art can also involve work, such as learning classical languages, as Kant had long before pointed out. In the concluding pages of The Play of Animals, Groos develops this premise into the foundations for a theory of art by identifying the form of play that leads to art as pretending, or “conscious self-illusion,” and the pleasure characteristic of art and its experience as “pleasure in making believe.” He writes that The origin of artistic fantasy or playful illusion is thus anchored in the firm ground of organic evolution. Play is needed for the higher development of intelligence; at first merely objective, it becomes, by means of this development, subjective as well, for the fact that the animal, though recognising that his action is only a pretence, repeats it, raises it to the sphere of conscious self-illusion, pleasure in making believe – that is, to the threshold of artistic production. 122 123

Groos, Play of Animals, pp. 292–3. Groos, Play of Animals, pp. 295–6.

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Groos continues that this brings us “only to the threshold of art,” however, for to the production of true art there also “belongs the aim of affecting others by the pretence, and pure play has none of this aim. Only love play shows something of it, and in this respect it is nearest to art.”124 Here Groos says that the production of art also requires the desire to share the pleasure of making believe, and identifies the desire to share pleasure as the essence of love. So art emerges only when the individual and the species see past a purely egoistical pleasure in play and are ready to share that pleasure. Of course, since sharing is necessary to the individual survival of human beings as well as the propagation of more of the kind, Groos could easily argue, although he does not do so here, that this condition of the emergence of art is also a hereditary instinct, thus that the emergence of art is due to the conjunction of two instincts – the play-instinct and the instinct for love. This does not exactly replicate Schiller’s view that the drive for play and art emerges out of the drive for matter and the drive for form, but has something of the same structure. In any case, Groos explicitly associates his theory of artistic play as “selfconscious illusion” or “making believe” with Schiller’s idea of “æsthetic appearance (Schein) which we distinguish from reality,” which we like “because it is show, and not because we mistake it for anything else.”125 Groos then identifies two key facts about “conscious self-illusion” as the key to aesthetic experience. First, developing a view that he had already suggested in his 1892 introduction to aesthetics but that he also finds in his contemporaries the aesthetician Max Dessoir (1867–1947), who published a work called The Double Self in 1890,126 and the art-historian Konrad Lange (1855–1921), professor of art history at Tübingen, and thus later Groos’s colleague, as well as director of the Württemberg state art museum in Stuttgart, who introduced the idea into his book Conscious Self-Deception as the Kernel of Aesthetic Enjoyment in 1895,127 Groos argues that in aesthetic experience – presumably here meaning either the experience of production or reception – the subject is always conscious of both the fantasy and reality and the difference between them. “Even the 124 125

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Groos, Play of Animals, pp. 302–3. Groos, Play of Animals, p. 303, citing Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, Letter XXVI. Max Dessoir, Das Doppel-Ich (Leipzig: Günther, 1890). Dessoir’s main work was Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (1906), translated as Aesthetics and Theory of Art by Stephen A. Emery (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970). Konrad Lange, Das bewusste Selbsttäuschung als Kern des ästhetischen Genusses (Leipzig: Veit & Co., 1895). Lange would later develop the theory of illusion into a full-blown theory

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child [who] is wholly absorbed in his play . . . has the knowledge that it is only a pretence, after all,” he states,128 and all the more so the adult, whose grip on the difference between reality and illusion is at least as strong as that of the child if not stronger, has the difference in mind while nevertheless being absorbed in the creation or enjoyment of a work of art. Indeed, Groos follows Lange in locating the source of our pleasure in aesthetic experience precisely in playing in the gap between illusion and reality while being aware of the distinction between them. Lange, he says, “speaks of the ‘oscillation between appearance and reality,’ and regards it as the very essence of æsthetic enjoyment.” Lange goes still further, Groos quotes: Artistic enjoyment thus appears as a variable floating condition, a free and conscious movement between appearance and reality, between the serious and the playful . . . The subject knows quite well, on the one hand, that the ideas and feeling occupying him are only make-believe, yet, on the other hand, he continues to act as if they were serious and real. It is this continued play of emotion, this alternation of appearance and reality, or reason and emotion, if you like, that constitutes the essence of aesthetic enjoyment.129

It may be noted that here Groos and Lange introduce the experience of emotion into the theory of play, not, as Spencer did, by holding simply that our capacity for emotion is one of the capacities that is discharged in play, but by suggesting that we experience a complex play of emotions as we swing back and forth between the emotions appropriate to the contents of our illusion or make-believe and the emotions appropriate to our real circumstances. Thus this version of the theory of play finds a central role for the experience of emotions in response to art, which Kant had gone to such efforts to exclude from his own theory of play. Groos does not expand upon this suggestion, although presumably the point could be developed into the assertion that our experience of make-believe allows us to experience emotions missing from our real life, at least in present circumstances, while our continuing awareness of the difference between reality and illusion tempers those emotions. Instead of further developing this point, Groos makes a second main point about aesthetic experience as self-conscious illusion, namely that

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of the arts in Das Wesen der Kunst, 2 vols. (Berlin: G. Grote, 1901), second edition in one volume (Berlin: G. Grote, 1907). Groos, Play of Animals, p. 304. Here Groos also cites Eduard van Hartmann, Ästhetik, vol. II, p. 59. Groos, Play of Animals, p. 310, quoting Lange, Die bewusste Selbsttäuschung, p. 22.

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it is a “feeling of freedom,” a feeling of freedom from the constraints of ordinary life.130 This point too Groos traces back to Schiller, indeed to as early an essay as “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution” of 1784, written well before Schiller felt the influence of Kant. “Schiller is perfectly right,” Groos says, “in designating the feeling of freedom as the highest and most important factor in the satisfaction derived from play.”131 “It may safely be said that we never feel so free as when we are playing,” Groos continues, although he would prefer not to ground this point on “transcendental considerations” but on the fact that “free activity, regarded from a psychological standpoint, depends on our ability to do just what we wish to do.”132 The key idea is then that in our adult life creating and experiencing art is pretty much the only place we can do just what we wish to do. “Where can the feeling of freedom be purer or more intense than in conscious self-illusion in the realm of play? In real life we are always in servitude to objects and under the double weight of past and future.”133 But at the same time, we must preserve consciousness of the illusory character of make-believe if we are not to be swept away by it, and lose our freedom of thought and feeling in that way, different from but just as much a form of unfreedom as the constraints of everyday life. This is the conclusion of The Play of Animals. We might expect to find much more about art and aesthetic experience in The Play of Man, since the creation and the enjoyment of art seems to be a specifically human possibility. In fact, while The Play of Man offers detailed descriptions of “Playful Experimentation” and “The Playful Exercise of Impulses of the Second or Socionomic Order,” picking up on the suggestion that in play we develop mastery of both our own bodies and our social feelings that we noted earlier, it offers only a brief further discussion of the “æsthetic standpoint.” What this adds to the conclusion of The Play of Animals is chiefly a criticism of the theory of “empathy” of Theodor Lipps from the point of view of the theory of play. Groos does not deny the importance of empathy in aesthetic experience. He is clearly sympathetic to the “conviction . . . among German students of æsthetics,” by whom he has in mind in addition to Lipps also Volkelt, “that one of the weightiest problems of their science is offered by that familiar process by which we put ourselves into the object observed, and thus attain a sort of inward 130 131 132 133

Groos, Play of Animals, p. 319. Groos, Play of Animals, p. 320. Groos, Play of Animals, p. 321. Groos, Play of Animals, p. 322.

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sympathy with it.”134 Groos gives a precise description of “this very complicated process”: 1a. The mind conceives of the experience of the other individual as if it were its own. 1b. We live through the psychic states which a lifeless object would experience if it possessed a mental life like our own. 2a. We inwardly participate in the movements of an external object. 2b. We also conceive of the motions which a body at rest might make if the powers which we attribute to it were actual . . . 3. We transfer the temper, which is the result of our own inward sympathy, to the object and speak of the solemnity of the sublime, the gaiety of beauty, etc.135

Groos’s objection is only to the supposition that empathy so described includes “the whole field” of aesthetic experience; what the theory of empathy fails to see, in his view, is that empathy is only one element in the play that we may enjoy with an aesthetic object. He illustrates his point by taking as an example “the latest utterance of Lipps on the impression produced by a Doric column.” This example comes not from Lipps’s systematic Aesthetics, which had not yet been published, but from his 1897 book Spatial Aesthetics and geometrical-optical Illusions.136 Groos quotes Lipps as saying that “I sympathize with the column’s manner of holding itself and attribute to it qualities of life because I recognize in it proportions and other relations agreeable to me. Thus all enjoyment of form, and indeed all æsthetic enjoyment whatsoever, resolves itself into an agreeable feeling of sympathy.”137 Groos does not object to Lipps’s hasty generalization that all aesthetic experience involves the kind of empathy we are supposed to find in our experience of the column, although he might well have done so; rather, he objects that Lipps’s description of empathy is incomplete, because it does not explain how our sympathetic projection of feeling onto the column is “part of a general psychological fact,” how it fits into our apperception as a whole while still being “differentiated as a particular satisfaction from general apperception.” He himself asserts that this can be done only by means of the idea of play, arguing that empathy becomes aesthetic “only when the hearer enjoys the emotional effect of the phenomenon as such, rendered possible by the process of fusion; when he has an independent, self-centered pleasure in this result – that is to say, when he plays.”138 “It 134 135 136 137 138

Groos, The Play of Man, p. 322. Groos, The Play of Man, p. 323. Theodor Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrische-optische Täuschungen (Leipzig: Barth, 1897). Groos, The Play of Man, p. 324, quoting Lipps, Raumästhetik, p. 5. Groos, The Play of Man, pp. 325–6.

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is self-evident,” he continues, “that we can not think of [the column’s] upward spring without calling in our earlier experiences, but it seems to me to be just as apparent that in æsthetic perception the impression is intentionally lingered over only for the sake of its pleasure-giving qualities, i.e., playfully.”139 Thus Groos makes room for the emotional impact of art by allowing that empathy can be part of play, but also argues that aesthetic empathy can be understood only as part of play as he has analyzed it. Whether it will be “self-evident” that empathy can be incorporated into yet differentiated within the unity of apperception of human mental life in general only as part of play will depend upon whether the reader has by this point accepted Groos’s theory of play. But even if Groos’s entire theory has not been accepted, his criticism might be taken to make the point (in anticipation) that in spite of the emphasis that he gives to the concept of apperception, Lipps does not in fact fully explain how his theory of empathy fits into this larger aspect of human mental life. Lipps does of course try to explain what differentiates aesthetic empathy from other sorts of empathy through his concept of aesthetic contemplation, but then it could be argued that this too needs a more explicit integration into Lipps’s theory of apperception than he actually gives it. Groos thus attempted to unify the approaches to aesthetics that emphasized the importance of play with aesthetic form and the emotional impact of art, although he had nothing to say about aesthetic experience as a form of knowledge. He thus developed a more comprehensive approach to aesthetic experience than Lipps or Volkelt did, but not as comprehensive an approach as Dilthey had suggested in his poetics, which seems to have been ignored by all these authors. In spite of their limitations, however, both the more restrictive empathy theory of Lipps and the more inclusive theory of Groos had considerable influence. We will now consider several examples of their influence outside of Germany. Although both of the authors now to be considered published their relevant works after the turn of the twentieth century, they were so influenced by the late-nineteenth-century theories we have just been discussing that we will consider them here before concluding the present volume and turning to the aesthetics of the twentieth century proper.

139

Groos, The Play of Man, p. 326.

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4. Psychological Aesthetics in the United States: Puffer A significant author of psychological aesthetics in the United States was the now little remembered Ethel Dench Puffer, later Ethel Puffer Howes (1872–1950), whose promising career as a psychologist was cut off by prejudice against women in academia in the early twentieth century, but who enjoyed a second career as a leading feminist writer and researcher. Puffer was one of four sisters from Framingham, Massachusetts, all of whom graduated from Smith College – Ethel at the age of 19, in 1891. In 1895 she traveled to Berlin to pursue advanced studies in psychology, but as a woman met with considerable resistance. She was treated better in Freiburg, where she spent 1896–97 working under Hugo Münsterberg. When he was called to Harvard, she came back with him, and completed work for a doctorate in 1898. But Harvard refused, again on account of her gender, to grant her a degree, which after a three-year delay was granted instead by Radcliffe College, not yet part of Harvard, in 1901. In that year Puffer published the first chapter of her dissertation, “Criticism and Æsthetics,” in the Atlantic Monthly,140 and the whole work was published in 1905 as The Psychology of Beauty.141 Puffer taught at Wellesley College until she married Benjamin Howes, a civil engineer, in 1908, which ended her appointment at Wellesley and blocked her from other appointments, such as at Barnard, the women’s college of Columbia University. In spite of this, she stayed abreast of the field of aesthetics, publishing detailed reviews of new works by leading German, British, French, American, and Italian aestheticians in 1913 and 1914.142 She had two children in 1915 and 1917, well into her forties, and at that time became Executive Secretary of the National College Equal Suffrage League. In the 1920s, she published prominent articles, again in the Atlantic, on the difficulties put in the way of professional women. From 1925 to 1931, she headed an Institute for the Coordination of Women’s Interest back at Smith with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, but when that grant ended Smith did not continue support. She subsequently moved to Washington with her husband, who became chief of the U.S. Housing Authority and Public Housing Administration, and devoted herself to civic activities but did not publish further. 140 141 142

Ethel D. Puffer, “Criticism and Æsthetics,” Atlantic Monthly 87 (June, 1901): 839–48. Ethel D. Puffer, The Psychology of Beauty (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905). Ethel Puffer Howes, “Æsthetics,” Psychological Bulletin 10 (1913): 196–201 and 11 (1914): 256–62.

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In The Psychology of Beauty, Puffer argued that it is the role of philosophy to define beauty or “lay down what Beauty has to do,” but of psychology to determine how beauty is actually experienced or to “deal with the various means through which this end is to be reached.”143 More fully, The aim of æsthetics being . . . the determination of the Nature of Beauty and the explanation of our feelings about it, it is evident at this point that the Nature of Beauty must be determined by philosophy; but the general definition having been fixed, the meaning of the work of art having been made clear, the only possible explanation of our feelings about it – the æsthetic experience, in other words – must be gained from psychology. . . . How the beautiful object brings about the æsthetic experience, the boundaries of which are already known, is clearly a matter for psychology.

Puffer’s work accordingly comprises both an analytical stratum, in which the definition of beauty is presented, and an empirical level, in which the experience of beauty is described. (Her conception of the relation between philosophical analysis and psychological description thus anticipates that suggested by Volkelt’s response to phenomenology and transcendental philosophy.) She does not consider any other aesthetic category than beauty, although since her book concludes with her explanation of tragic emotions, it is clear that she meant the concept and experience of beauty to be understood broadly. In view of this structure, one would expect Puffer to begin by defining beauty and then turning to her psychological account of the experience of it. In fact, she proceeds in the opposite order, first giving her basic description of the experience of beauty and only then showing how it fits into and completes traditional philosophical conceptions, before illustrating her results with discussions of the beauty of fine art, music, literature, and drama. Her account of the experience of beauty is not basically dissimilar to those we have found in Robert Vischer and Lipps, of the latter of whom at least she was well aware, emphasizing the effect of the perception of the work of art on our own emotions, but she does not follow them in arguing that we project our own emotion back onto the object, in other words she does not adopt their conception of empathy. She is also aware of the work of Groos, but does not include an element of play in her own account of aesthetic experience. Puffer begins her chapter on “Criticism and Æsthetics” with a critique of the evolutionary theory of art of Ferdinand Brunetière (1849–1906),

143

Puffer, Psychology of Beauty, pp. 37–8.

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professor of French language and literature at the École Normale Supérieure and editor of the Revue des deux mondes, whose L’Evolution de genres dans l’histoire de la littérature 144 offered a pseudo-Darwinian account of the evolution of artistic genres and styles. Puffer argued that an evolutionary approach could explain the development of various stylistic characteristics of art but could never explain what makes them beautiful. Thus, it could explain the emergence of the “Greek temple [as] a product of Greek religion applied to geographical conditions” or various features of early Italian art as due to its ecclesiastical origins, but can never explain “how and why just those proportions” of Greek architecture “were chosen which make the joy and despair of all beholders” or “all that makes a Giotto greater than a Pictor Ignotus.”145 What actually makes an object beautiful, Puffer holds, can only be explained in psychological terms. The explanation lies in the effect of a work on one’s own bodily condition and through that on one’s emotional state and general sense of well-being. Thus, When I feel the rhythm of poetry, or of perfect prose, . . . every sensation of sound sends through me a diffusive wave of nervous energy. I am the rhythm because I imitate it in myself. I march to noble music in all my veins, even though I may be sitting decorously by my own hearthstone; and when I sweep with my eyes the outlines of a great picture, the curve of a Greek vase, the arches of cathedral, every line is lived over again in my own frame. And when rhythm and melody and forms and colors give me pleasure, it is because the imitating impulses and movements that have arisen in me are such as suit, help, heighten my physical organization in general and particular. . . . The basis, in short, of any æsthetic experience – [of ] poetry, music, painting, and the rest is beautiful through its harmony with the conditions offered by our senses, primarily of sight and hearing, and through the harmony of the suggestions and impulses it arouses with the whole organism.146

Puffer emphasizes, as Vischer had thirty years earlier, that harmony between aspects of objects and the conditions of our perception of them diffuses a feeling of well-being throughout our bodies and psyches, but does not argue, as both Vischer and Lipps had, that we then in turn project our own emotional state back on to the object. Instead, she takes up another question, namely “What of the special emotions – the gayety or 144

145

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Ferdinand Brunetière, L’Evolution de genres dans l’histoire de la littérature (Paris: Hatchette, 1892). Puffer, Psychology of Art, p. 10. “Pictor Ignotus” is a poem by Robert Browning, describing an imaginary monastic painter. Puffer, Psychology of Art, pp. 12–13.

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triumph, the sadness or peace or agitation – that hang about the work of art, and make, for many, the greater part of their delight in it?”147 Explaining how objects stimulate specific emotions rather than the general emotion of pleasure or a feeling of well-being would be a necessary condition for explaining how we project specific emotional content back on to them, but Puffer is not interested in taking that further step. Instead, with a tacit appeal to the theory of emotion of William James – she uses his famous example of “fear at the sight of a bear” without mentioning his name148 – she argues that specific emotions consist in specific “bodily changes,” for example physical feelings of “preparation for flight” or, on the perception of a glass of wine, or image of one, “organic states which are felt emotionally as cheerfulness.” Her thesis is that different bodily states have different “emotional tones,” “And so if the music of a Strauss waltz makes us gay, and Händel’s Largo serious, it is not because we are reminded of the ballroom or of the cathedral, but because the physical response to the stimulus of the music is itself the basis of the emotion.” Or, “What makes the sense of peace in the atmosphere of the Low Countries?” or paintings of those landscapes? “Only the tendency, on following those level lines of landscape, to assume ourselves the horizontal, and the restfulness which belongs to that posture.”149 Here Puffer rejects the associationism of a century earlier as well as Eduard Hanslick’s criticism that music cannot have specific emotional meaning because it can only make us feel its own properties, such as a fast or slow beat;150 her position is that all sorts of physical properties of objects (such as landscapes or musical performances) or their representations (landscape paintings) have specific physical effects on us that are in turn characteristic of specific emotions, which we then experience without attributing to the objects. This is a physical and emotional process, not an intellectual one – Puffer rejects a cognitivist approach to art: If the crimson of a picture by Böcklin, or the golden glow of a Giorgione, or the fantastic gleam of a Rembrandt speaks to me like a human voice, it is not because it expresses to me an idea, but because it impresses that sensibility which is deeper than ideas, – the region of emotional response to 147 148

149 150

Puffer, Psychology of Art, p. 14. See William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), introduction by George A. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), Chapter XXV, pp. 1058–97, at p. 1065. Puffer, Psychology of Art, pp. 14–15. See Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill Company, 1957), pp. 24–5.

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color and to light. . . . It is the way in which the form in its exquisite fitness to our senses, and the emotion belonging to that particular form as organic reverberation therefrom, in its exquisite fitness to thought, create in us a delight quite unaccounted for by the ideas which they express. This is the essence of beauty, – the possession of a quality which excites the human organism to functioning harmoniously with its own nature.151

Here Puffer focuses on the emotional dimension of aesthetic experience, but leaves room for a larger sense of harmony as well. Puffer returns to the general emotional tone of aesthetic experience rather than to specific emotions in relating her psychological explanation of aesthetic experience to the philosophical definition of beauty, the project of her second chapter, on “The Nature of Beauty.” She begins with the premise that “Beauty is an excellence, a standard, a value . . . because it fulfills an end, because it is good for something in the world.”152 It thus appears that she must be about to reject the traditional definition of aesthetic experience as disinterested and of the beautiful as completely different from the good as well as from the true. But in fact she endorses Hegel’s statement that “It was Kant . . . who spoke the first rational word concerning Beauty.”153 She can do this because she holds that the “two important factors . . . of Kant’s æsthetics are its reconciliation of sense and reason in beauty, and its reference of the ‘purposiveness’ of beauty to the cognitive faculty,”154 though not for the purpose of determinate cognition. She argues that Schiller and Schelling basically have the same idea as Kant, namely that the experience of beauty is “the objective possibility for the bridge between sense and reason, . . . the vindication of the possible unity of the real and the ideal, or nature and self,”155 all of which point to her own idea that aesthetic experience constitutes a “reconciliation” “because I am for the moment complete, at the highest point of energy and unity.” “The subject should not be a mirror of perfection but a state of perfection,” she adds.156 All of the idealist theories, except for Hegel’s, which is too intellectualist for Puffer’s taste, point to the idea of the experience of beauty as an experience of “unity and self-completeness” in the one who has the experience rather than the object. We saw indeed that this remained an aspect of aesthetic theory in Germany as late as Robert Vischer, and it could even be argued 151 152 153 154 155 156

Puffer, Psychology of Art, p. 15. Puffer, Psychology of Art, p. 36. Puffer, Psychology of Art, p. 39. Puffer, Psychology of Art, p. 41. Puffer, Psychology of Art, p. 43. Puffer, Psychology of Art, p. 47.

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that it is what lies behind Lipps’s theory of apperception. Once again, Puffer could have argued that the subject goes on to project that experience of unity on to the object and that this is what is called its beauty, but she does not take that further step of the empathy theorists. Nor, although the experience she describes must clearly involve a sense of harmony among the different mental powers of the subject, does she describe it as any form of free play. For Puffer, this is as far as philosophy can take the explanation of beauty. She states: Our philosophical definition of Beauty has thus taken final shape. The beautiful object possesses those qualities which bring the personality into a state of unity and self-completeness. . . . Beauty is to bring unity and selfcompleteness into the personality. By what means? What causes can bring about this effect? When we enter the realm of causes and effects, however, we have already left the ground of philosophy, and it is fitting that the concepts which we have to use should be adopted to the empirical point of view. The personality, as dealt with in psychology, is but the psychophysical organism; and we need to know only how to translate unity and self-completeness into psychological terms.157

And that Puffer has already done, by explaining how the experience of the physical features of works of art or natural beauties – shape, rhythm, and so on – produce complementary states in our own bodies that in turn induce a general feeling of well-being. Eighteenth-century empiricists would not have drawn the rigid distinction between philosophical analysis and psychological explanation that Puffer does, although Kant already pointed in that direction.158 Puffer does not contrast her view to that of the earlier empiricists, however, but concludes her chapter on “The Nature of Beauty” with some brief comparisons between her view and that of her contemporaries. According to her, “Lipps defines the æsthetic experience as a ‘thrill of sympathetic feeling,’” which is too narrow an account of the range of emotions beauty can produce, and Groos defines it as “sympathetic imitation,” which she thinks leaves out the element of “repose” that is crucial to her own account of the experience of beauty as an experience of

157 158

Puffer, Psychology of Art, p. 49. This distinction has been a cornerstone of my own interpretation of Kant’s aesthetics; see Kant and the Claims of Taste, second edition, pp. 106–18. I made my distinction there between the analysis of the logic of aesthetic judgments and the explanation of aesthetic response that allows it to satisfy before I discovered Puffer’s work.

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“unity and self-completeness” and thereby relates it to the idealist tradition.159 Santayana’s account of “Beauty as objectified pleasure” (which will be discussed in the next volume) she finds “neither a determination of objective beauty nor a sufficient description of the psychological state,”160 that is, specific enough as a description neither of the properties of objects that cause aesthetic experience nor of the response to those properties. The contemporary who holds a view closest to her own is Jean-Marie Guyau (1854–88), author of Problèmes de l’Esthétique Contemporaine161 as well as many other works during his short life, who wrote that “The beautiful is a perception of an action which stimulates life within us under its three forms simultaneously (i.e., sensibility, intelligence, and will), and produces pleasure by the swift consciousness of this general stimulation.”162 This passage comes closer to any of Puffer’s own remarks to recognizing the involvement of all our mental capacities in aesthetic experience, though it too does not describe their relation as one of play. The remainder of Puffer’s book applies her theory to the fine or visual arts, music, literature, and drama. In her account of literature she expands upon her idea of the experience of beauty as one that gives us a sense of “unity and self-completeness”: The perfect moment across the dialect of life, the moment of perfect life, must be in truth that in which we touch the confines of our being, look upon our world, all in all, as revealed in some great moment, and see that it is good – that we grasp it, possess it, that it is akin to us, that it is identical with our deepest wills. The work that grasps the conditions of our being gives ourselves back to us completed. . . . The development, the rise, complication, expectation, gratification, the suspense, climax, and drop of the great novel, corresponds to the natural functioning of our mental processes.163

The remark that the work “gives ourselves back” might sound like a tacit adoption of the idea of empathy, but for the fact that Puffer is discussing the art of the novel, an art form that explicitly describes human conduct and feelings and so of course can describe states that mirror those of the reader – it was not the novel that called forth the theory of empathy, but

159 160 161 162

163

Puffer, Psychology of Art, p. 53. Puffer, Psychology of Art, p. 54. Jean-Marie Guyau, Problèmes de l’Esthétique Contemporaine (Paris: F. Alcan, 1884). Puffer, Psychology of Beauty, p. 54, quoting from p. 77 of a 1902 edition of Guyau’s work. Puffer, Psychology of Art, p. 223.

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rather the puzzle of describing works of non-descriptive art in terms of human emotions that did so. Puffer writes that “In the end it might be said that literature gives us a moment of perfection, and is thus possessed of beauty, when it reveals ourselves to ourselves in a better world of experience.”164 But she then says that “because it is most often in the tragedies that the conditions of our being are laid bare, and the strings which reverberate to the emotions most easily played upon, it is likely that the greatest books of all will be the tragedies themselves.”165 Yet tragedies notoriously do not present to us a “better world of experience,” and, perhaps with the exception of Oedipus at Colonus, they do not represent characters experiencing unity and self-completeness. So how does she fit the case of tragedy into her theory? She argues against the famous interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of katharsis as the medicinal “purgation” of emotion offered by Jakob Bernays,166 and develops her own view in two steps. First, she points out that “A necessary step to the explanation of our pleasure in supposedly painful emotions is to make clear how we can feel any emotion at all in watching what we know to be unreal,”167 and resolves this problem by appeal to the Jamesian theory of emotions as an essentially physiological response to perception that does not fully, or at least immediately, involve the cognitive faculties and thus our discrimination between fact and fiction.168 Having by this means established that drama can arouse emotions at all, she then turns to the paradox of our pleasure in supposedly painful emotions. Here what she argues is that tragedy is always a depiction of conflict or antagonism, and that it is only through the experience of conflict that the experience of resolution can in turn be enjoyed. The “tragic . . . is in the collision itself; it is the profound and, to our vision, the irreconcilable antagonism of different elements in life,” she writes, and that would seem to leave us in tension; but she goes on that “In life we accept it because we must; we transcend it because, as moral beings, we may.”169 In other words, it is not the characters within the tragedy that experience the resolution of their conflicts; it is we, the audience, who realize the possibility of resolution. This solution to the 164 165 166

167 168 169

Puffer, Psychology of Beauty, p. 224. Puffer, Psychology of Beauty, p. 225. Puffer, Psychology of Beauty, pp. 231–9; see Jakob Bernays, Zwei Abhandlungen über die Aristotelischen Theorie des Dramas (Berlin: Hertz, 1880), originally 1857. Puffer, Psychology of Beauty, p. 239. Puffer, Psychology of Beauty, p. 240. Puffer, Psychology of Beauty, p. 256.

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paradox of tragedy is impressive. But it might also seem to go beyond the physiological foundation of Puffer’s psychology of beauty; to experience the resolution of tragedy in this way seems to call upon our knowledge of our own moral potential and what morality requires. Perhaps here the limits of an approach to the emotional response to art without admission of the intellectual dimension of aesthetic experience are revealed.

5. Psychological Aesthetics in Britain: Lee The chief proponent of psychological aesthetics in Britain was Vernon Lee, the pseudonym of Violet Paget (1856–1935), who interpreted beauty on the basis of a theory of empathy developed on the basis of the work of Lipps, Groos, and her own lover Clementina AnstrutherThomson, but who also argued that beauty was only one objective among many aims of art, even if it is the sine qua non of art. Lee can therefore be regarded as developing within the framework of fin-de-siècle psychological aesthetics a complex account of aesthetic experience that recognizes its cognitive and emotional dimensions while emphasizing beauty of form. But she interpreted the explanation of the beauty of form in terms of empathy as an alternative to its explanation by the concept of play, thus in contrast to the explanation of empathy offered by Karl Groos, whom she nevertheless admired and regarded as a good friend. Lee was born to expatriate British parents in France, and spent much of her life in Italy; a childhood friend among expatriate circles was John Singer Sargent, who would later paint her portrait, now in the Tate Gallery. Later in life, she would number both Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde as friends and influences. She received little formal education, but was a precocious child and voracious reader who would go on to publish more than forty books, including stories and novels of the supernatural, historical novels, works of history and art history, books on music, travel, and gardening, and in mid-life the two volumes that establish her place in the history of aesthetics, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Æsthetics in 1912,170 a volume of essays organized around the central essay on “Beauty and Ugliness” originally published

170

Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psyschological Æsthetics (London: The Bodley Head, 1912). Anstruther-Thomson contributed the introspective reports on aesthetic experience in the original essay “Beauty and Ugliness.”

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with Anstruther-Thomson in 1897, and The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics in 1913.171 In both works, Lee distinguishes between aesthetics and the philosophy of art, arguing that aesthetics properly concerns only the nature of beauty and our response to it, or even more precisely that the “central problem of æsthetics” is that of explaining “the intrinsic satisfactoriness of visible form as such, and the pleasure (or displeasure) which its contemplation can awaken,”172 while art can have multiple aims although beauty is always one of them and its achievement of beauty is always a necessary condition for our satisfaction with its other accomplishments. Lee makes this point in both books. She begins the first essay in Beauty and Ugliness, on “Anthropomorphic Æsthetics,” by arguing that the word “aesthetics” should be understood as “the adjective referring to beauty” rather than to art in order to avoid “self-contradictions” (a linguistic recommendation recently accepted by many outside of professional philosophy, no doubt without knowledge of its source), for art aims at many things besides beauty and these other aims can at least potentially conflict with the achievement of beauty: No one, for instance, can deny that the drama, the novel, poetry in general, are of the nature of art. But no one can deny that in all of them, besides appeals to our desire for beauty, there are appeals to quite different demands of the human soul, such as the demand for logical activity, for moral satisfaction, and for all manner of emotional stimulation, from the grossest to the most exalted; let alone the demand for self-expression, for construction, and for skilful handicraft. All these demands, involved in every form of art, are of course demands for pleasure, but some of them are consistent with the production and perception not of beauty but of ugliness.173

While insisting upon the plurality of aims of art and thus of aspects of our response to it, however, Lee does not draw the inference that art may actually ignore the demand for beauty, let alone aim at ugliness rather than beauty; her view is rather that we are under an “imperative” for beauty and that all the other aims of beauty must be subordinated to the demand for beauty. Thus her position is not the same as that of Arthur Danto a century later, who argued that a specific work or style of art might aim for beauty, but that aiming for beauty is not necessary to art 171

172 173

Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913). Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 81. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 3–4.

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in general.174 Lee rather holds that “the definition of the word ‘æsthetic’ provides a clue to the whole question, ‘What is art, and what has the beautiful to do with art?,’” For we shall find that it is the demand for beauty which qualifies all the other demands which may seek satisfaction through art, and thereby unites together, by a common factor of variation, all the heterogeneous instincts and activities which go to make up the various branches of art.175

Unlike Bosanquet two decades earlier, or Croce a decade earlier (to whom she does not refer in spite of her lifelong residence in Italy), Lee does not argue that beauty is successful expression, or success in any of the other aims of art, e.g., moral satisfaction or emotional stimulation, but rather that it is an independent goal but one that constrains the ways in which the other goals of art may be achieved. Thus she concludes, Art, therefore, is the manifestation of any group of faculties, the expression of any instincts, the answer to any needs, which is to any extent qualified, that is to say, restrained, added to, altered, or deflected, in obedience to a desire totally separate from any of these, possessing its own reasons, its own standards and its own imperative, which desire is the æsthetic desire. And the quality answering to this æsthetic desire is what we call Beauty; the quality which it avoids or diminishes is Ugliness.176

Whatever else it does, and it may do much else, art must achieve beauty and avoid ugliness. Of course this leaves open the question of what beauty and our response to it are, and that is the “central problem” of aesthetics to which Lee devotes most of her work. She argues that beauty lies in shape, understood broadly to include audible as well as visible shape, and that our response to it, “shape preference,” is based on empathy, understood in terms drawn from Lipps and Groos. But before we turn to her account of empathy with shape, we may observe that she repeats her argument that art has multiple aims that are however subordinated to the aesthetic aim or imperative in her introductory work on The Beautiful. Here she posits it as “historically probable that the habit of avoiding ugliness and seeking beauty of shape may have been originally established by utilitarian attention to the non-imitative . . . shapes of weaving, pottery, and implementmaking” and then “transferred from these crafts to the shapes intended 174

175 176

Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, Paul Carus Lectures 21 (LaSalle: Open Court Publishing Co., 2003), e.g., pp. 101–2. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 5. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 9.

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to represent or imitate natural objects.” Yet, she continues, “the distinction between Beautiful and Ugly does not belong either solely or necessarily to what we call Art,” thus “the satisfaction of the shape-perceptive or æsthetic preferences must not be confused with any of the many and various other aims and activities to which art is due and by which it is carried on.”177 Thus art does not originate in the desire to experience beauty; art may originate in the attempt to fulfill practical needs for implements or in other needs such as the need for self-expression or moral instruction. But once the possibility of beauty has been discovered, it seems, in at least some circumstances these other aims will be subordinated to the aim at beauty, thus although “art has invariably started from some desire other than that of affording satisfactory shape-contemplation,” it nevertheless submits itself to the “æsthetic imperative”: All art, therefore, except that of children, savages, ignoramuses and extreme innovators, invariably avoids ugly shapes and seeks for beautiful ones; but art does this while pursuing all manner of different aims. These non-æsthetic aims of art may be roughly divided into (A) the making of useful objects ranging from clothes to weapons and from a pitcher to a temple; (B) the registering or transmitting of facts and their visualising, as in portraits, historical pictures or literature, and book illustration; and (C) the awakening, intensifying or maintaining of definite emotional states, as especially by music and literature, but also by painting and architecture when employed as “aids to devotion.” And these large classes may again be divided and connected . . . into utilitarian, social, ritual, sentimental, scientific and other aims, some of them not countenanced or not avowed by contemporary morality.178

The last remark implies that for Lee art is subject to the “aesthetic imperative” regardless of its other aims but not to the categorical imperative or at least to any particular current understanding of the demands of morality. Thus, though Lee does not think that art aims at beauty alone, but that it might in addition have a wide range of utilitarian, cognitive, and emotional goals, she does think that it may be free of the constraints of at least current, conventional morality. At this point Lee’s approach to art might thus be thought to converge with the conception of the autonomy of art or “art for art’s sake” associated with such of her contemporaries and indeed acquaintances as Oscar Wilde. The phrase “satisfactory shape-contemplation” in the last series of quotations may suggest a Kantian conception of beauty, and indeed Lee does claim in the first chapter of The Beautiful that the “kind of satisfaction 177 178

Lee, The Beautiful, pp. 98–9. Lee, The Beautiful, pp. 99–100.

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connected with the word Beautiful is always of the Contemplative order ” and illustrates this claim in the second chapter with a parable distinguishing a wayfarer who simply enjoys “contemplative satisfaction” of the view of a city such as Rome or Edinburgh from a hilltop from a practically minded one who immediately begins to think of the profit that might be derived from a tram or funicular to make the view more accessible and a “man of science” who immediately starts to think about the geological processes that produced the vista; indeed, Lee here goes so far as to distinguish the purely contemplative satisfaction in the vista from any desire to paint it or describe it in a work of literature.179 However, Lee does not follow Kant in explaining our pleasure in contemplation of beauty as pleasure in the free play of our perceptive and cognitive faculties. Instead, she explicitly rejects this theory, which she associates primarily with Friedrich Schiller and Herbert Spencer rather than with Kant, as confusing a necessary condition for both the production and reception of art, namely the kind of leisure that allows us to play, with the aim of aesthetic experience. In The Beautiful she states that “although leisure and freedom from cares are necessary for both play and for æsthetic appreciation, the latter differs essentially from the former by its contemplative nature.”180 She argues this point at greater length in “Anthropomorphic Æsthetics.” Here she presents the theory “according to which art is differentiated from other employments of human activity by being a kind of play,” “first broached by Schiller . . . and revived by Mr. Herbert Spencer,” as an alternative to her theory that “the demand for beauty qualifies all the other demands which may seek satisfaction through art” rather than as an explanation of it.181 She allows that the play theory correctly connects the arts “by the common characteristic of disinterested contemplation,” although she implies, as her own theory of the multiple aims of art requires her to, that the play theory is mistaken to assume that the arts always “serve no practical aim and constitute a kind of holiday in life.” But more importantly, she objects that the play theory, whether in the form of Spencer’s theory that art simply vents stored up and otherwise unused energy or in that of Groos’s “play-instinct,” which “has merely returned to Schiller’s 179

180 181

Lee, The Beautiful, pp. 8–13. Because of her separation of the concepts of the aesthetic or beautiful and the concept of art, however, Lee does not infer from this, as Croce and later Collingwood would do, that the act of aesthetic contemplation exhausts the production of a work of art and thus that physical production such as painting is not actually part of the work of art. See Volume 3, Part Two. Lee, The Beautiful, p. 7. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 5.

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theory that the pleasurableness of art is due to the characteristic of all other kinds of play, namely, the sense of freedom or of holiday,” “is surely an inversion of the true order of facts,” namely that “We do not take pleasure in playing because playing makes us feel free; but, on the contrary, we get greater and more unmixed pleasure while playing, because we are free to leave off and alter – in fact, to do what we cannot do while working, accommodate our activity to our pleasure.”182 Lee’s view is that the freedom, not in the abstract but in the specific sense of freedom from constraint by the demands of work, is simply a necessary condition for aesthetic experience and artistic experience, not their aim and the explanation of our pleasure in them. As she says, if a freedom from practical considerations is undoubtedly implied in . . . making . . . necessary things beautiful, that freedom is not the aim of this artistic process, but its necessary condition, since we do not act freely in order to take pleasure in freedom, but please ourselves because we happen to be free to do so.183

The connection between play and beauty is only that the same kind of freedom, that is to say, leisure, that is a necessary condition for our being free to play is also a necessary condition for our being free to create art and to enjoy it. Of course, given Lee’s view of the multiple aims of art, which can include many practical aims, this freedom or leisure cannot be understood as the complete absence of all practical concerns or all concerns other than the concern with beauty itself. The freedom that is a necessary condition for artistic production and aesthetic experience must instead consist in the fact that the practical or other aims of art do not exhaust our relation to the work of art and preclude contemplative satisfaction with it. But now the question of what does explain contemplative satisfaction becomes all the more pressing, so we must turn to Lee’s positive account of beauty. Here is where she invokes the theory of empathy as developed by Lipps and refined by Groos, although she states that her original 1897 article on “Beauty and Ugliness,” coauthored with Anstruther-Thomson, was written before she had discovered their work. Lee understands empathy as the projection of our own feeling of life on to objects, “the interpretation of form according to the facts of our own inner experience, the attribution to form of modes of being, moving, and feeling similar to our own.” It might seem as if such projection could be either 182 183

Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 6–7. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 8.

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pleasant or unpleasant, depending on what feelings we project on to objects, and thus as if objects might be made either beautiful or ugly depending on the feelings that we project on to them. Thus, “this projection of our own life into what we see is pleasant or unpleasant because it facilitates or hampers our own vitality,”184 and, Lee infers, it is only “when this attribution of our modes of life to visible shapes” and the “revival of past experience” that is also projected on to objects “is such as to be favourable to our existence and in so far pleasurable” that “we welcome the form thus animated by ourselves as ‘beautiful.’”185 However, Lee’s deeper view appears to be that all activity is fundamentally pleasurable, and thus that all projection of our own feelings of activity – life in the broadest sense – onto objects is pleasurable and makes objects beautiful. Thus she endorses a passage from Rudolph Lotze’s Microcosmos, which she, apparently unfamiliar with the Vischers, regards as the “first statement” of the theory of empathy, in which Lotze writes that Our fancy meets with no visible shape so refractory that the former cannot transport us into it and make us share its life. Nor is this possibility of entering into vital modes of what is foreign to us limited to creatures whose kind and ways approximate to ours; to the bird, for instance, who sings joyously in his flight. . . . We project ourselves not merely into the forms of the tree, identifying our life with that of the slender shoots which swell and stretch forth . . . We extend equally to lifeless things those feelings which lend them meaning.186

She likewise cites Theodor Lipps’s example of our empathetic experience of the Doric column (which had also been cited by Groos), summing up his description of our experience of such a nonhuman object (although a human-made artifact) by saying that we attribute to its “lines and surfaces, to the spatial forms, those dynamic experiences which we should have were we to put our bodies into similar conditions.” She then makes it clear that we attribute to such an object a wide range of emotions connected to a wide range of human activities, and implies that we enjoy all of them as part of human life and thus find objects beautiful insofar as we project on to them all of these emotions: Moreover, just as sympathy with the grief of our neighbors implies in ourselves knowledge of the conflicting states – hope, resignation, pain, and

184 185 186

Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 17. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 21. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 17–18, quoting from Lotze, Mikrokosmos, Book V, Chapter 2, no edition given.

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the efforts against pain – which constitute similar grief in our own experience; so this æsthetic attribution of our own dynamic modes to visible forms implies the realisation in our consciousness of the various conflicting strains and pressures, of the resistance and yielding which constitute any given dynamic volition experiences of our own. When we attribute to the Doric column a condition akin to our own in keeping erect and defying the force of gravitation, there is the revival in our mind of a little drama we have experienced many millions of times, and which has become registered in our memory, even like that less common drama of hope, disappointment, and anguish which has been revived in the case of our neighbor’s grief and attributed to him.187

What is crucial is not that the individual feelings that we project on to objects (or even on to other people) be kinds of feeling that taken in isolation would be pleasurable rather than painful, but rather that objects stimulate in us a drama or “dynamic” of feelings that we then project back onto them, a drama that is enjoyable, as a mirror of life itself, even if every moment of it is not. Indeed, it could be argued that a drama necessarily includes some unpleasant moments, just as life necessarily includes obstacles that must be overcome, just as even in standing erect we must overcome the resistance of gravity. What we enjoy in the experience of objects is the experience of life itself in all its complexity and activity, and it is the projection of that back onto objects, not the projection onto them of individually pleasant feelings, that leads us to call them beautiful. In fact, in spite of her rejection of the account of aesthetic experience as play in the forms it had taken on in Spencer and before him Schiller, Lee comes close to connecting empathy and play: “we feel activity and life, because our own activity, our own life, have been brought into play.”188 It might be objected that this is just a verbal similarity between Lee’s description of empathy and the theory of play, but the idea that play is enjoyable because it is activity and that activity is the essence of life itself goes back to the roots of the theory of aesthetic experience as play in Gerard and Kant. In her account of empathy, Lee has built upon Lipps, but she takes from Groos, even though he is a play theorist rather than an empathy theorist, the point that the perception of objects produces in us bodily or “motor” responses, not just purely mental responses, and that we project those too onto the objects that stimulate them. Thus she writes that “our motor activities rehearse the tensions, pressures, thrusts, resistances, 187 188

Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 20–1. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 22.

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efforts, the volition, in fact, the life, with its accompanying emotions, which we project into the form and attribute to it.”189 This leads to a spirited but friendly polemic – Lee had by this time become personally acquainted with both Lipps and Groos – in which she charges that in order to avoid recognition of the bodily aspect of empathy Lipps had moved toward a “metaphysical” conception of the ego that experiences and projects. “One might almost believe that it is the dislike of admitting the participation of the body in the phenomenon of æsthetic Empathy which has impelled Lipps to make æsthetics more and more abstract, a priori, and metaphysical.”190 Lee deplores this tendency in Lipps, and thereby re-introduces into aesthetic theory an emphasis on the bodily dimension of aesthetic experience the likes of which had not been seen since Mendelssohn, except to the extent that Lee’s own approach was anticipated by Groos. One might suggest that it is only with this emphasis that the century-long grip of idealism on aesthetic theory began to be loosened, although as we shall subsequently see the dominant influence of Croce on British aesthetics in the early decades of the twentieth century meant that this battle would continue to be fought for decades to come, and it is perhaps only in the psychoanalytically inflected work of Richard Wollheim three-quarters of a century later that the approach of Lee finally triumphs. Although Lee’s introductory book on The Beautiful begins with the Kantian emphasis on contemplation that has already been mentioned, it quickly introduces the theory of “Empathetic Interpretation” as its explanation of the experience of beauty,191 and sums up the previous analysis of empathy “as the merging of the activities of the subject in the object.”192 Empathy is the projection of imagined and physically felt activity into the forms of objects, although that is still contemplative because it is not identical to nor immediately leads to practical activities such as constructing funiculars: “I have already given the Reader an example of such Empathy when I described the landscape seen by the man on the hill as consisting of a skyline ‘dropping down merely to rush up again in rapid concave curves’; to which I might have added” – in a way that goes all the way back to Robert Vischer’s 1873 dissertation – “that there was also a plain which extended, a valley which wound along, paths which climbed

189 190 191 192

Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 28–9. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 60. Lee, The Beautiful, p. 55. Lee, The Beautiful, p. 58; emphasis in the original.

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and roads which followed the undulations of the land”193 – in all of this we are projecting our own activities and the emotions connected with them onto something that is actually inert, in this case a landscape that is partially natural and partially man-made. We do the same with works of art, which are completely man-made though not themselves human beings with their own emotions. But while in The Beautiful Lee expands on how “lines” and “shapes” stimulate our empathy, she also adds a second dimension to her account of aesthetic experience, arguing that “life has little leisure for contemplation; it demands recognition, inference and readiness for active adaptation,” and thus “forces us to deal with shapes mainly inasmuch as they indicate the actual or possible experience of other groups of qualities which may help or hurt us,” thus “Life hurries us into recognizing Things.”194 She then characterizes aesthetic experience, using the example of the experience of “Art of the visualrepresentative group,” as “the interplay of the desire to be told (or tell) facts about things with the desire to contemplate shapes, and to contemplate them (otherwise we should not contemplate!) with sensuous, intellectual and empathic satisfaction.”195 Here Lee complicates her previous already complex analysis of aesthetic experience: while she had previously held that the shapes of visible objects, or the analogues of shapes in other art forms, may stimulate a variety of responses, including cognitive and moral as well as emotional responses, although the empathetic response to beauty must always be among them and indeed prima inter pares, she now argues that our response to a work of art or other aesthetic object is always a mixture of our already complex responses to its shape or other kind of form as well as our cognitive and practical responses to its actual existence and the implications of the latter, the advantages and threats that the object may really present to us. In other words, contemplative, aesthetic experience does not occur independently of our cognitive and practical response to objects – as Kant might have been thought to argue, at least in his initial exposition of aesthetic judgment – but as part of our overall response to objects. Indeed, she argues that “interference of the Thought about Things with the Contemplation of Shapes is essential to the rythm [sic] of our mental life, and therefore a chief factor in all artistic production and appreciation.”196 However, she also insists that “art is conditioned by the desire for beauty while pursuing entirely different 193 194 195 196

Lee, The Beautiful, pp. 59–60. Lee, The Beautiful, p. 84. Lee, The Beautiful, pp. 100–1. Lee, The Beautiful, p. 105.

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aims, and executing any one of a variety of wholly independent nonaesthetic tasks”;197 in other words, no matter how complex our experience of an aesthetic object is, no matter what a mixture of empathetic, intellectual, and moral responses, satisfaction of our desire for beauty is always a necessary condition for art. Lee thus concludes the psychological movement in late nineteenthand early-twentieth century aesthetics by complicating it. The movement began with Spencer introducing a simple physiological conception of play into his principles of psychology. Though that theory was refined by Groos, it was largely replaced by the theory of empathy developed by Vischer and Lipps and defended by Volkelt in Germany, then brought to the United States, although without the idea of projection, by Ethel Puffer. Lee combined the approaches of Lipps and Groos to develop her own account of empathy as projection of the full range of human emotions on to the shapes or other forms of objects, but also recognized cognitive and practical dimensions both within the aesthetic aspects of experience as well as the vital interplay between aesthetic and non-aesthetic dimensions of experience in the experience of aesthetic objects. She thus provided a model of the complexity of aesthetic experience that avoided the reductionism that had dominated the nineteenth century, whether in the cognitivist form of idealist aesthetics or the formalist approach of the early members of the “art for art’s sake movement,” although not perhaps the subtler theories of her own models Pater and Wilde. But as our study of twentieth-century aesthetics shall now show, the struggle between reductionist approaches to aesthetics and more complex approaches like Lee’s was by no means over. Particularly in Germany, where we shall now continue, the reductionist cognitivism of German Idealism was about to enjoy a new lease on life, and just as there had been a left and right wing in the original response to Hegel, so cognitivist aesthetics in twentieth-century Germany can also be divided into left- and right-wing forms. In Britain, to which we will subsequently turn, both the native aesthetics of the Bloomsbury school and the imported theory of Benedetto Croce can be seen as reductive theories, one lending academic dress to the original inspiration of the “art for art’s sake movement” and the other developing a kind of cognitivism from a strange mixture of Hegel and Kant. There would be an immediate and forceful rejection of the immaterialism of Croce’s aesthetics, but not until much 197

Lee, The Beautiful, p. 110.

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later in the twentieth century would the phenomena of play and of emotional impact be given their full due in British aesthetics. If, next, we regard twentieth-century American aesthetics – really American aesthetics altogether – as beginning with Santayana’s Sense of Beauty of 1896, we shall see that here aesthetics begins with a comprehensive rather than reductive approach, and that many American aestheticians in the first half of the century did a better job than their counterparts elsewhere in keeping that synthetic spirit alive. But then, as we shall see, a new form of reductionism entered into both British and American aesthetics with the impact of Wittgenstein in the 1950s, and there was again a struggle to restore a sense of the complexity of aesthetic experience. Volume 3 will be completed with a description of some of the most recent phases of that struggle.

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Index

absolute in Jean Paul’s account of genius, 60 in Schelling’s The Philosophy of Art, 50–1 absolute (objective) idealism, 21–2. See also Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Josef von absolute Idea, Friedrich Vischer’s account of, 161–4 absolute spirit, Hegel’s account of classical art, 133–6 continuing significance of, 143 genius, 141–2 history of art, 128–31 overview, 126–8 rejection of natural beauty, 140 romantic art, 135–8 sublime, 141 symbolic art, 131–3 absolute values, Münsterberg’s account of, 354–60 abstraction, in Pater’s account, 254 The Aesthetic Consciousness (Volkelt), 407–9 aesthetic contemplation, Lipps’s account of, 397–8 aesthetic idea Kant’s account of, 14–15 Schleiermacher’s version of, 148–9 æsthetic imperative, Lee’s account of, 429

aesthetic Socratism, Nietzsche’s account of, 313 aesthetic values, Münsterberg’s account of, 357–60 aestheticism. See “art for art’s sake” movement; Pater, Walter; Wilde, Oscar Aesthetics (Lipps), 397–404 Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Hegel), 123–4 Aesthetics of the Ugly (Rosenkranz), 173–8 Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (Aesthetics or the Science of the Beautiful), Friedrich Vischer absolute Idea, 161–4 beauty, 165–6 emotional impact of aesthetic experience, 166–7 overview, 160–1 rehabilitation of Kant in, 164–5 agreeable, Lotze’s account of, 182 Alison, Archibald, 329 Allgemeine Ästhetik (Cohn), 345–6 American aesthetics. See also specific philosophers by name in nineteenth century, 3–4 psychological aesthetics, 418–26 twentieth-century, 437 analytic method, in Cohen’s account, 334–5 animals, projection of emotions on, 402–3 457

458

Index

anthropomorphism, in Hegel’s history of art, 133–6 Apollonian art, Nietzsche’s account of, 305, 309–11, 312–14 apperception, in Lipps’s account, 399–400 architecture Hegel’s account of symbolic art, 131–2 Ruskin’s account of relation, 213–15 Ruskin’s account of truthfulness in, 218–24 Schopenhauer’s account of, 116 Aristotle, in Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” 262–3 Arnold, Matthew, 225–8 art. See also “art for art’s sake” movement; greatness in art, Ruskin’s sources of; history of art, Hegel’s account of; specific arts by name in Bosanquet’s History of Æsthetic, 272–5 Cohen’s account of feelings in, 335–9 Cohen’s account of higher task of, 342–5 Coleridge’s account of, 66, 69–71 Dilthey’s account of, 367–8, 370–7 Emerson’s account of, 96–9 Friedrich Vischer’s account of, 165–72 Groos’s account of, 411–15 Hegel’s cognitivist view of, 119–22, 127–8 Jean Paul’s account of, 58–62 Kant’s account of, 13–17 Lee’s account of, 427–9, 430–1 Lipps’s account of projection of emotions on, 403–4 Lotze’s account of, 184–5 Mill’s account of poetry, 84–91 in Münsterberg’s account, 357, 358–9, 360, 362 Nietzsche’s account of, 300–1, 309–14, 316–20 Pater’s account of free play, 251–4

Pater’s account of integrative character of, 246–51 Pater’s account of morality, 255–6 Puffer’s account of, 424–6 Robert Vischer’s account of, 394–6 Rosenkranz’s account of ugliness in, 174–8 Ruskin’s account of truthfulness in, 216–18 Schelling’s The Philosophy of Art, 50–4 Schelling’s system of transcendental idealism, 41–50 Schlegel’s account of truth as aim of, 28–34 Schlegel’s “Letters on Christian Art,” 37–8 Schlegel’s “On the Study of Greek Poetry,” 28–34 Schleiermacher’s account of, 144, 146–52 Schopenhauer’s account of, 112–19, 308–9 Solger’s account of, 153, 154–8 Spencer’s account of, 387–9 Tolstoy’s What is Art?, 291–6 Wilde’s basic account of, 258–9 in Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” 261–8 in Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying,” 258–9 in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, 268–9 “Art” (Emerson), 97–9 “art for art’s sake” movement (aestheticism), 7. See also Pater, Walter; Wilde, Oscar Baudelaire, 241–4 Cousin, 230–4 Gautier, 234–6 Lee’s approach as similar to, 429 overview, 227–8, 229–30 Poe, 236–42 Tolstoy’s attack upon, 290–6 artificiality, in Dilthey’s account, 376 artistic beauty Emerson’s account of, 96–7 Hegel’s account of, 140

Index in Münsterberg’s account, 357, 358–9 Schelling’s account of natural beauty versus, 49 associations Fechner’s principle of, 328–30 in Robert Vischer’s account, 391, 393–4 Ruskin’s account of, 212–15 in Spencer’s account, 386–7 associative imagination, Ruskin’s account of, 209–10 Athäneum fragments (Schlegel), 33–7 audience in Dilthey’s account, 367–8 in Kant’s account, 16 in Mill’s account, 87–8 in Nietzsche’s account, 311–12 in Schleiermacher’s account, 146–7 in Schopenhauer’s account, 114–15 Tolstoy’s account of art as communication of feeling, 292–6 in Wordsworth’s account of poetry, 76–8 autonomy of aesthetic experience. See “art for art’s sake” movement “Baden” school of Neo-Kantianism. See Neo-Kantianism; specific philosophers by name Baudelaire, Charles, 241–4 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb in Solger’s account, 155 in Tolstoy’s account, 291 The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Lee), 428–30, 434–6 “The Beautiful and Art” (Das Schöne und die Kunst), Friedrich Vischer, 167–72 beauty Baudelaire’s account of, 242–4 Bosanquet’s basic account of, 272–5 Bosanquet’s discussion of Goethe, 281–2 Bosanquet’s discussion of Hegel, 282–4

459 Bosanquet’s discussion of Kant, 276–9 Bosanquet’s discussion of Ruskin, 285–6 Bosanquet’s discussion of Schelling, 282 Bosanquet’s discussion of Schiller, 280 Bosanquet’s discussion of Winckelmann, 275–6 Cohen’s account of pleasure of, 335–9 Cohn’s account of, 350–1 Coleridge’s account of, 65–6 Cousin’s account of, 231–4 Emerson’s account of, 95–7, 101–2 Friedrich Vischer’s account of, 162–4, 165–6, 167, 170–2 Gautier’s account of, 236 Hegel’s rejection of natural, 139–40 Kant’s account of, 14–15, 16–17 Lee’s account of, 427–33 Lipps’s account of, 397–8, 399–400 Lotze’s account of, 181–4 Mill’s account of, 88–9 Münsterberg’s account of, 357–60 Pater’s argument against general rules for, 248–9 Poe’s account of, 238, 240–1 Puffer’s account of, 419–26 Ruskin’s account of, 192, 203–12, 216–17 Schelling’s account of, 47–9, 51–2 Schlegel’s account of limits of, 25–8 Schlegel’s account of objectivity of, 28–34 in Schlegel’s account of romantic poetry, 37 Schopenhauer’s account of, 115–16 Solger’s account of, 156–7 in Tolstoy’s account, 291, 293 von Hartmann’s account of, 321–3 in Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” 261–8 in Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying,” 259–60 in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, 268–9

460

Index

Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Æsthetics (Lee), 427–8, 430–4 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 345 being, Hölderlin’s account of, 20–1 Beiser, Frederick, 125 Bell, Clive, 4 Biographia Literaria (Coleridge) art, 69–71 central idea of, 65–9 discussion of Wordsworth in, 72–4 genius, 69–71 overview, 64 The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), 300–1, 306–14 Bizet, Georges, 315 Bloomsbury aesthetics, 4, 7 bodily dimension of aesthetic experience Lee’s account of, 433–4 Puffer’s account of, 421 Robert Vischer’s account of, 394–6 Bosanquet, Bernard, 3–4, 8, 269 on Goethe, 281–2 on Hegel, 282–4 on Kant, 276–9 overview, 270–5, 289–90 on Ruskin, 284–6 on Schelling, 282 on Schiller, 279–81 Three Lectures on Aesthetic, 286–9 on Winckelmann, 275–6 British aesthetics. See also specific philosophers by name in eighteenth century, 1 in nineteenth century, 2–4, 187–9 psychological aesthetics, 426–36 twentieth-century, 436–7 British Romantics. See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Mill, 84–91 Shelley, 79–83 Wordsworth, 75–8 capacities, discharge of excess Groos’s disagreement with, 410–11 Spencer’s account of, 383–4, 385–6 Carmen (Bizet), 315

“The Case of Wagner” (Nietzsche), 315–16 categorical imperative, in Nietzsche’s account, 308 celebration, in Schleiermacher’s account of art, 151–2 characteristic Bosanquet’s account of, 272–3 Bosanquet’s discussion of Goethe’s concept, 281–2 Christian religiosity in Hegel’s account of romantic art, 136–7 in Schlegel’s aesthetics, 37–8 cinema, Münsterberg’s account of, 360–2 classical art, Hegel’s account of, 130, 133–6. See also Greek art cognition, in Kant’s account of free play, 11–13 cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience Arnold’s account, 226–8 Bosanquet’s account, 286, 289–90 Cohen’s account, 345–6 Cohn’s account, 352 Coleridge’s account, 66 Cousin’s account, 231 Dilthey’s account, 364–5, 368, 370–7 Emerson’s account, 96, 97–101, 102, 103–4 in German Idealism, 106 Hegel’s account, 119–22, 127–8, 140 Hölderlin’s account, 23 Jean Paul’s account, 60 in Kant’s account, 16–17 Lee’s account, 435–6 Lotze’s account, 181–2 metaphysical version of, 13, 15–16, 23 Münsterberg’s account, 355–6 Neo-Kantianism, 330 in nineteenth century, 4–8 Puffer’s rejection of, 421–2 by Romantic writers, 57

Index Rosenkranz’s account, 172–3, 175–6 Ruskin’s account, 191–3, 225 Schelling’s account, 43, 47, 49–50, 51–2, 53–4 Schleiermacher’s account, 144, 147–9, 150, 152 Schopenhauer’s account, 106–7, 112–15, 118–19 Shelley’s account, 79, 80–2 Solger’s account, 155, 157 Spencer’s account, 385, 389 von Hartmann’s account, 322–4 Wordsworth’s account, 75, 78 cognizing functions, in Schleiermacher’s account, 147–9 Cohen, Hermann, 326, 331 background of, 332–3 feelings in art, 335–9 free play theory, 339–40 genius, 341–2 higher task of art, 342–5 versus other Neo-Kantians, 331–2 overview, 333–5, 345–6 philosophy, 334–5, 340–1 coherence, in Münsterberg’s account, 354–6, 357–9 Cohn, Jonas, 326, 331–2, 346–53 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor art, 69–71 background of, 63–4 central idea in aesthetics of, 65–9 discussion of Wordsworth by, 72–4 genius, 71–2 influence on Mill, 84 comedy Hegel’s account of, 137 Rosenkranz’s account of, 173–4 communication of cognition by geniuses, Schopenhauer’s account of, 114–15 in Dilthey’s account, 368 of feeling, Tolstoy’s account of art as, 292–6 in Schleiermacher’s account, 148–9 complexity, organization of in Spencer’s account, 385–6

461

concept, in Hegel’s account, 126–7 concreteness, in Pater’s account, 247–8, 254 The Conduct of Life (Emerson), 101–2 conscious, in Coleridge’s account of genius, 72 conscious intelligence, Coleridge’s account of, 66–8 conscious self-illusion, in Groos’s account of art, 412–15 conscious thought, in Schelling’s account, 41–50 consciousness, Cohen’s account of, 334, 335–9 contemplation, Lipps’s account of aesthetic, 397–8 contemplative imagination, Ruskin’s account of, 211–12 content in Hegel’s history of art, 129–31 Pater’s account of effacement of distinction between form and, 249–50 contingency, in Friedrich Vischer’s absolute Idea, 162 Cousin, Victor, 230–4 creation, in Bosanquet’s account, 288–9 creativity Dilthey’s account of, 367–8, 370–3 Emerson’s account of, 97 “The Critic as Artist” (Wilde), 261–8 criticism Gautier’s attack on, 236 in Pater’s account, 247–9 Croce, Benedetto, 4 Culture and Anarchy (Arnold), 225–6 Danto, Arthur C., 143 Das Schöne und die Kunst (“The Beautiful and Art”), Friedrich Vischer, 167–72 The Debate about Tragedy (Lipps), 405–6 “The Decay of Lying” (Wilde), 258, 259–61 deceitfulness, in Ruskin’s account of architecture, 220–2

462

Index

decoration, in Ruskin’s account of architecture, 222–4 deduction of judgments of taste, 12 “Defence of Poetry” (Shelley), 79–83 demand-character of aesthetic judgments, Cohn’s account of, 348–9 detachment, in Emerson’s account of art, 98 “Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” (Kant), 12–13 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 7–8, 299, 326 background of, 365–6 overview, 362–5, 366–8 synthesis of aesthetic theories by, 370–7 universal validity of judgment of taste, 368–70 “Dionysiac World View” (Nietzsche), 304–6 Dionysian art, Nietzsche’s account of, 304, 309–14 direction of consciousness, in Cohen’s account, 334, 337–8 discharge of excess capacity Groos’s disagreement with, 410–11 Spencer’s account of, 383–4, 385–6 disinterestedness Cohn’s account of, 347–8 in Dilthey’s account, 375 in Emerson’s account of art, 98 in Friedrich Vischer’s account, 169–70, 171–2 in Kant’s account of taste, 11 in Münsterberg’s account, 359–60 in Schopenhauer’s account, 308–9 displeasure, Cohen’s account of, 335–9 dissolution of art, Hegel’s account of, 135–6 distance, in Nietzsche’s account, 319 divine. See also God in Hegel’s account of classical art, 133–6 in Jean Paul’s account, 58–9, 60 in Solger’s account, 154–5, 156–8

drama Friedrich Vischer’s account of, 166–7 Hegel’s account of, 138 Du vrai, du beau, et du bien (The True, the Beautiful, and the Good), Cousin, 230–4 early German Romanticism. See also Schlegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, 19–23 overview, 18–19, 24–5 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 306–7 education, Hegel’s views on art in, 121–2 Egyptian art, Hegel’s account of, 132 eloquence, versus poetry, Mill’s account of, 87–8 embodied feeling, object of aesthetic attitude as, 286–8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo art, 96–9 background of, 91–3 beauty, 95–7, 101–2 imagination, 102–5 poetry, 99–101 Transcendentalism, 92, 93–5 emotion, Spencer’s account of capacity for, 384–5, 388 emotional impact of aesthetic experience Bosanquet’s account, 286, 289–90 Cohn’s account, 349–50, 351–2 Dilthey’s account, 364–5, 368, 370–7 in Emerson’s account, 103 empathy school, 389–90 Fechner’s account, 329–30 Friedrich Vischer’s account, 160, 166–72 Groos’s combination of play and empathy, 409–17 Hegel’s rejection of, 120–2 Lee’s account, 431–5 Lipps’s account, 396–406 Mill’s account, 85–91 Münsterberg’s account, 355–6

Index in nineteenth century, 4–8 Puffer’s account, 420–6 and revival of free play theory, 378–80 Robert Vischer’s account, 390–6 Romantic writers, 57 Schleiermacher’s account, 144, 146–50, 152 Schopenhauer’s account, 107 Shelley’s account, 79, 81–3 Spencer’s account, 387–8, 389 Tolstoy’s account, 295–6 Volkelt’s account, 406–9 in Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” 261, 263–7 Wordsworth’s account, 75–8 empathy in Cohn’s account, 349–50 Friedrich Vischer’s account of, 170–1 Groos’s combination of play and, 409–17 Lee’s account of, 431–5 Lipps’s account of, 396–406 in Münsterberg’s account of beauty, 358–9 overview, 3, 6, 389–90 and revival of free play theory, 378–80 Robert Vischer’s account of, 390–6 Volkelt’s account of, 406–9 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Hegel), 120 end of art, Hegel’s account of, 135–6 Friedrich Vischer’s account of Kant’s concept of, 164 endless striving, in Schopenhauer’s account of will, 111 ensoulment, Friedrich Vischer’s account of, 170–1 esemplastic imagination, Coleridge’s account of, 65–6, 68, 69, 73–4 Essays: First Series (Emerson), 94, 97–9 Essays: Second Series (Emerson), 99–101

463

The Eternal Values (Münsterberg), 354–60 ethics, affinity with nature as expressed in, 95 Euripides, Nietzsche’s account of, 312–13 evolution Puffer’s criticism of theories of beauty based on, 419–20 Spencer’s conception of, 380–1, 388–9 excellence, in Emerson’s account of beauty, 101 excess capacity, discharge of Groos’s disagreement with, 410–11 Spencer’s account of, 383–4, 385–6 experience in Dilthey’s account, 363–5, 368 in Ruskin’s account of truth, 198–203 expression in Bosanquet’s account, 275–6, 288 in Cohn’s account, 350–1 fancy. See also imagination Coleridge’s account of, 68–9 Emerson’s account of, 104–5 Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 327–30 feeling. See also emotional impact of aesthetic experience in art, Cohen’s account of, 335–9 Dilthey’s account of spheres of, 371–3 embodied, Bosanquet’s idea of object of aesthetic attitude as, 286–8 of life, in Dilthey’s account, 376 Spencer’s account of capacity for, 384–5, 388 Tolstoy’s account of art as communication of, 292–6 in von Hartmann’s account of beauty, 321–2 festival, in Schleiermacher’s account of art, 151–2

464

Index

The Film: A Psychological Study (Münsterberg), 360–2 fine art, Kant’s account of, 13–17 finite, in Jean Paul’s account of modern art, 61–2 form in Bosanquet’s account, 286–8 in Cohn’s account, 350–1 in Friedrich Vischer’s account, 168–9 in Hegel’s history of art, 129–31 human, in Emerson’s account of beauty, 101 Pater’s account of effacement of distinction between content and, 249–50 formative arts, Schelling’s account of, 52 formlessness, in Rosenkranz’s account of ugliness in art, 176 fragmentary conception of aesthetic cognition, 25–6, 33–7 free play theory Arnold’s account, 226 Bosanquet’s account, 273, 286, 289–90 Cohen’s account, 339–40 Cohn’s account, 347–8 Coleridge’s dismissal of, 65–6 Dilthey’s account, 364–5, 370–7 Emerson’s account, 100–1, 105 Fechner’s account, 328–9 Friedrich Vischer’s account, 161, 164–5 Groos’s combination of empathy and, 409–17 Hegel’s rejection of, 120 in Kant’s account of taste, 11–13 Kant’s theory of genius, 14, 15, 16–17 Lee’s objections to, 430–1, 433 Lipps’s avoidance of, 400–1 Lotze’s account, 179, 181–4, 185 Münsterberg’s account, 356 Nietzsche’s account, 301, 304–6, 317–19 in nineteenth century, 4–8 Pater’s account, 246, 251–4

revival of in late nineteenth century, 378–80 in Schlegel’s account of beauty, 26–8 Schleiermacher’s account, 144, 149–51, 152 Schopenhauer’s account, 107, 114–15 in Solger’s account, 155 Spencer’s revival of, 380–9 free will, Schelling’s account of, 54–6 freedom in Cohen’s account, 334 in Groos’s account, 414–15 Mill’s account of, 90 in Rosenkranz’s account, 172–3, 174–5, 177–8 in Ruskin’s account, 224–5 in Schelling’s account of will, 54–6 in Schleiermacher’s account of art, 150–1 French aesthetics, 3 frustration, in Schopenhauer’s account of will, 111 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (Arnold), 226 Gautier, Théophile, 234–6 The Gay Science (Nietzsche), 317–19 The Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche), 319–20 generic vital beauty, Ruskin’s account of, 209 genius Cohen’s account of, 341–2 Coleridge’s account of, 71–2, 73–4 in Emerson’s account of art, 100 Hegel’s account of, 141–2 Jean Paul’s account of, 59–60 Kant’s account of, 13–17 in Schelling’s account, 45–6 Schleiermacher’s account of, 151 Schopenhauer’s account of, 113–15 German aesthetics. See also specific philosophers by name empathy school, 389–90 in nineteenth century, 187–8, 299

Index periodization, challenge of, 1–3 twentieth-century, 436 German Idealism, 2, 106. See also NeoKantianism; specific philosophers by name German Romanticism. See also Schlegel, Friedrich early, 18–19, 24–5 Hölderlin, 19–23 Jean Paul, 58–62 overview, 6 God in Cousin’s account, 231, 233–4 in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 205–6, 208 in Schelling’s account of will, 54–5 in Schelling’s The Philosophy of Art, 50–1 in Solger’s account, 154–5, 156–8 gods, anthropomorphic representation of, 133–6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 281–2 good, in Lotze’s account, 183–4 Gothic architecture, Ruskin’s account of, 223–4 grace, in Emerson’s account of beauty, 102 great art, Ruskin’s account of truthfulness in, 216–18 greatness in art, Ruskin’s sources of beauty, 203–12 imitation, 196–8 overview, 195 power, 195–6 relation, 212–15 truth, 198–203 Greek art Hegel’s account of, 134 Jean Paul’s account of, 61–2 Nietzsche’s account of tragedy, 306–14 Schlegel’s “On the Study of Greek Poetry,” 28–34 in Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” 262–3 Groos, Karl, 409–17 Guyau, Jean-Marie, 424

465

hand-work, in Ruskin’s account of architecture, 222–4 harmony Hölderlin’s account of poetry, 22–3 in Lipps’s account, 399–400 in Poe’s account, 241 purposive, in Lotze’s account, 181–2 in Robert Vischer’s account, 392–3 in Schlegel’s account of Greek poetry, 29–34 Hegel (Beiser), 125 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich background of, 122–4 Bosanquet’s discussion of, 282–4 classical art, 133–6 cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience, 5–6, 119–22 Friedrich Vischer’s independence from, 160–3 genius, 141–2 history of art by, 128–31, 139 influence of Kant’s ideas on, 17 influence of on German aesthetics, 153 influence of on others, 6–7 natural beauty, rejection of, 139–40 opinion of Solger, 154–5 overview, 106, 142–3 philosophical system of, 125–8 romantic art, 135–8 sublime, 140–1 symbolic art, 131–3 Hegelian aesthetics. See also Bosanquet, Bernard; Vischer, Friedrich Theodor Lotze, 179–85 overview, 153, 158 Rosenkranz, 172–8 “Heidelberg” school of NeoKantianism. See Neo-Kantianism; specific philosophers by name high art, Ruskin’s account of truthfulness in, 216–18 higher task of art, Cohen’s account of, 342–5

466

Index

historical truth, Ruskin’s account of, 212–15 A History of Æsthetic (Bosanquet) Goethe, 281–2 Hegel, 282–4 Kant, 276–9 overview, 272–5 Ruskin, 284–6 Schelling, 282 Schiller, 279–81 Winckelmann, 275–6 history of art, Hegel’s account of classical art, 130, 133–6 overview, 128–31, 139 romantic art, 130–1, 135–8 symbolic art, 130, 131–3, 141 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 19–23 holy style in art, Schleiermacher’s account of, 151–2 Hotho, Heinrich Gustav, 123–4 Howes, Ethel Puffer (Ethel Dench Puffer), 418–26 Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Nietzsche), 303, 316–17 human form in Emerson’s account of beauty, 101 in Hegel’s account of classical art, 133–6 human vital beauty, Ruskin’s account of, 209 humanization, Lipps’s account of, 402–4 humor, Jean Paul’s account of, 62 Husserl, Edmund, 398 Idea, absolute, Friedrich Vischer’s account of, 161–4 ideal Hegel’s contrast between idea and, 129–31 in Schelling’s account of art, 52–3 ideal beauty Bosanquet’s discussion of Kant’s concept of, 277–8 Cousin’s account of, 233–4 idealism. See also Neo-Kantianism; specific philosophers by name

absolute, 21–2 German, 2 of Hegel, 125–6 overview, 106 Schelling’s system of transcendental, 41–50 idealization in art in Cohen’s account, 342–5 in Dilthey’s account, 373–4 ideas in Hegel’s account, 126–7 Hegel’s contrast between ideal and, 129–31 Platonic, Schopenhauer’s account of, 112–18 “Ideas” (Schlegel), 36–7 identity of thought, in Schelling’s system of transcendental idealism, 45–6 identity philosophy, Schelling’s, 42, 50–1 imagination in Bosanquet’s account, 288–9 Coleridge’s account of, 65–6, 68–9, 73–4 Cousin’s account of, 232 Emerson’s account of, 102–5 in Jean Paul’s account of genius, 60 in Kant’s account of free play, 11–13 in Pater’s account, 254–5 in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 209–12 Shelley’s account of, 79–80, 82 in Tolstoy’s account, 293–4 Wilde’s account of, 260–1 “The Imagination of the Poet: Elements for a Poetics” (Dilthey) overview, 363–5, 366–8 synthesis of aesthetic theories in, 370–7 universal validity of judgment of taste, 368–70 imaginative reason, in Pater’s account, 254–5

Index imitation of Greek art, Schlegel’s account of, 32–3 of nature, Coleridge’s account of, 70–1 Ruskin’s account of, 196–8, 199–200 in Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying,” 259–60 impression, Ruskin’s truth of, 198–203 incorrectness, in Rosenkranz’s account of ugliness in art, 176–7 independence of aesthetic experience. See “art for art’s sake” movement individuality Jean Paul’s account of genius, 59–60 Mill’s account of, 90 in Pater’s account, 247–8 in Tolstoy’s account, 295 in Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” 265–6 infection model of art, Tolstoy’s, 292–6 infinite, in Jean Paul’s account of modern art, 61–2 infinite task of art, Cohen’s account of, 342–5 infinity in Jean Paul’s account of genius, 60 in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 207 in Schelling’s system of transcendental idealism, 47–8 insight, genius as capacity for metaphysical, 71–2 integrative character of aesthetic experience, Pater’s account of, 246–51 intellect in Emerson’s account of beauty, 96 in Poe’s account of poetry, 239–40 in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 203–4 intellectual beauty, Cousin’s account of, 233–4 intellectual interest, in Lotze’s account, 179, 183

467

intellectual intuition, Hölderlin’s account of, 20–2 intelligence, Coleridge’s account of, 66–8 intensification principle, Fechner’s, 327–8 intention, in Schelling’s system of transcendental idealism, 44–6 intoxication, in Nietzsche’s account, 304–6 intuition in Cohn’s account, 349 in Hegel’s account, 126–7 intellectual, Hölderlin’s account of, 20–2 iron, in Ruskin’s account of architecture, 221 irony of art, Solger’s account of, 157–8 Italian aesthetics, 4 Jean Paul ( Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), 58–62 judgment Cohn’s account of aesthetic, 347–9 Hölderlin’s account of, 20–1 “Judgment and Being” (Hölderlin), 20–1 judgments of taste Bosanquet’s discussion of Kant, 276–7 Cohen’s account of, 341–2 Dilthey’s account of, 368–70 Kant’s account of, 11–13 Kant, Immanuel, 50 Bosanquet’s discussion of, 276–9 central themes of aesthetics of, 11–17 Cohen’s departure from methods of, 334–5, 340–1 Cohen’s interpretation of free play theory of, 339–40 Cohen’s reinterpretation of supersensible substratum, 343–4 Cohn’s reconstruction of ideas of, 347–8, 350–1

468

Index

Kant, Immanuel (cont.) emotional impact of aesthetic experience, 329 Friedrich Vischer’s rehabilitation of, 161, 164–5, 168–9 Hegel’s transformation of account of, 126–7 Hölderlin’s anti-Kantian viewpoint, 21 influence of on Lipps, 398–9 Lotze’s discussion of, 182–4 natural beauty, 139 Neo-Kantianism, 325–6, 352–3 reviving influence of in nineteenth century, 299 Schlegel, influence of on, 25–8 Schopenhauer’s transformation of account of, 107, 110–11, 114–15, 118–19 in Solger’s account, 155 sublime, 140–1 synthesis of aesthetic theories by, 4–5, 16–17 Kants Begründung der Aesthetik (“Kant’s founding of aesthetics”), Cohen, 332 feelings in art, 335–9 free play theory, 339–40 genius, 341–2 higher task of art, 342–5 overview, 333–5, 345–6 philosophy, 334–5, 340–1 knowledge Coleridge’s account of, 66–8 of self, in Schopenhauer’s account, 109–10 lamps of architecture, Ruskin’s account of, 218–23 landscape painting, Lotze’s account of, 184–5 Lange, Konrad, 413–14 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 426–36 “Letter to B—” (Poe), 237 Letters and Social Aims (Emerson), 102–5

“Letters on Christian Art” (Schlegel), 37–8 liberation, in Emerson’s account of art, 100–1. See also freedom life, feeling of in Dilthey’s account, 376 “The Limits of the Beautiful” (Schlegel), 25–8 Lipps, Theodor, 396–406, 416–17, 433–4 literature Friedrich Vischer’s account of, 166–7 Puffer’s account of, 424–6 lived experience, in Dilthey’s account, 363–5, 368 Loos, Adolf, 222–3 Lotze, Hermann Rudolf, 179–85 love of beauty, Ruskin’s account of, 216–17 Poe’s account of, 240–1 lying in art, Wilde’s account of, 259–61 lyric poetry, Friedrich Vischer’s account of, 166 Lyrical Ballads, Preface to (Wordsworth), 75–8 Mademoiselle du Maupin (Gautier), 234–6 making believe, in Groos’s account of art, 412–15 man, Ruskin’s account of vital beauty in, 209 “Marburg” school of Neo-Kantianism. See Cohen, Hermann; NeoKantianism matter, in Hegel’s account, 125–6 mental activity, in Lipps’s account of empathy, 400–2 metals, in Ruskin’s account of architecture, 221 metaphysical (moral) truth in Nietzsche’s account, 300–1 in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 203–12

Index metaphysical insight, genius as capacity for, 71–2 metaphysical version of cognitivist aesthetics Hölderlin’s account of, 23 Kant’s theory of genius, 15–16 overview, 13 metaphysics Dilthey’s rejection of aesthetics based on, 364 of Hegel, 125–8 in Nietzsche’s account, 306–14, 316–17, 319–20 in von Hartmann’s account, 322–3 metempsychosis, 72 Mill, John Stuart, 84–91 Millán-Zaibert, Elizabeth, 33 mind, in Emerson’s Transcendentalism, 94–5 moderation, in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 207–8 modern art, Jean Paul’s account of, 61–2 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 191–3 beauty, 203–12 imagination, 209–12 imitation, 196–8 power, 195–6 relation, 212–13 sources of greatness in art, 195 truth, 198–203 truthfulness, 215–18 monadology, in Schlegel’s account of romantic poetry, 35–6 moral (metaphysical) truth in Nietzsche’s account, 300–1 in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 203–12 moral beauty, Cousin’s account of, 233–4 moral sense, in Poe’s account of poetry, 239–40 morality in Bosanquet’s account, 274–5, 278–9 in Cohen’s account, 334, 342–5

469

in Cohn’s account, 350 in Emerson’s account of beauty, 101–2 in Friedrich Vischer’s account, 163–4 Kant’s theory of genius, 15–16 in Lotze’s account, 183–4 in Pater’s account, 255–6 in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 204–9 in Shelley’s account, 81–2 in Tolstoy’s account, 292–3 in Wilde’s works, 264, 267–9 morally good, beauty as symbol of, 17 Morris, William, 224 motion, in Robert Vischer’s account, 393, 394–6 Münsterberg, Hugo, 331–2 background of, 353–4 The Eternal Values, 354–60 The Silent Photoplay in 1916, 360–2 music Hegel’s account of, 137–8 in Münsterberg’s account, 360 Nietzsche’s account of, 313–14, 315–16 Pater’s account of, 249–50 Schopenhauer’s account of, 117–18 natural beauty Emerson’s account of, 95–6 Hegel’s rejection of, 139–40 Schelling’s account of, 49 nature Bosanquet’s discussion of Hegel, 282–4 Bosanquet’s discussion of Ruskin, 285–6 in Cohen’s account, 334, 342–5 Coleridge’s account of, 66–8, 69–71 in Emerson’s account, 93–9, 103 Jean Paul’s account of, 58–9 Lipps’s account of projection of emotions on, 403 in Münsterberg’s account, 357–9 Rosenkranz’s account of ugliness in, 174

470

Index

nature (cont.) in Ruskin’s account of truth, 199–200, 202 Schelling’s philosophy of, 41–2 in Schelling’s The Philosophy of Art, 50–1 Schelling’s system of transcendental idealism, 43–5 truthfulness to organic whole of, 29–34 in Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying,” 259–61 Nature (Emerson), 93–4, 95–7 necessity of aesthetic experience, Dilthey’s account of, 370 in Friedrich Vischer’s account of absolute Idea, 162 negative pleasure in Ruskin’s account of imitation, 197–8 in Schelling’s account, 46 in Schopenhauer’s account, 111–13 Neo-Classicism, Hegel’s rejection of, 142 Neo-Kantianism. See also specific philosophers by name departures from Kant within, 352–3 overview, 3, 6–7, 299, 325–6 plurality of approaches in, 330–2 Neo-Platonism, Schlegel’s, 25–7 Nietzsche, Elizabeth, 303 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7 after The Birth of Tragedy, 315–20 The Birth of Tragedy, 306–14 “Dionysiac World View,” 304–6 influence of Emerson on, 92–3 overview, 300–4 nineteenth century aesthetics. See also specific aesthetic theories or movements; specific philosophers by name major themes covered in, 4–8 overview, 436–7 periodization, challenge of, 1–4 revival of free play theory in, 378–80

non-human world, projection of emotions on, 391–3, 402–4 non-rational will Schelling’s account of, 54–6 Schopenhauer’s account of, 109–11 noumenal, in Schopenhauer’s account, 308 noumenal basis for taste, 12–13 obedience, Ruskin’s lamp of, 219 object, Coleridge’s account of, 66–8 objectification of non-rational will, Schopenhauer’s account of, 112–18 objective (absolute) idealism, 21–2. See also Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Josef von objective form, in Robert Vischer’s account, 391–4 objective values, Münsterberg’s account of, 354–60 objectivity of beauty, Schlegel’s account of, 28–34 Nietzsche’s account of, 310–11 in Schelling’s system of transcendental idealism, 42–3 “On German Architecture” (Goethe), 281–2 On Liberty (Mill), 90 “On Poesy or Art” (Coleridge), 69–71 “On the Conditions of Beauty in Art” (Lotze), 181–2 “On the Study of Greek Poetry” (Schlegel), 28–34 opera, Nietzsche’s historiography of, 313–14 oratory versus poetry, Mill’s account of, 87–8 organic whole of nature, truthfulness to, 29–34 organization of complexity, in Spencer’s account, 385–6 organizing functions, in Schleiermacher’s account, 147–9 ornament, in Ruskin’s account of architecture, 222–4 “The Over-Soul” (Emerson), 94

Index Paget, Violet (Vernon Lee), 426–36 painting Hegel’s account of, 137 Lotze’s account of, 184–5 Ruskin’s account of truth in, 198–203 paradox of tragedy Lipps’s account of, 404–6 Nietzsche’s account of, 311–12 Puffer’s account of, 425–6 Schopenhauer’s account of, 116–18 Shelley’s account of, 82–3 particulars, focus on in art, 31–2 passion, Poe’s account of, 238 Pater, Walter, 229–30 free play theory, 251–4 integrative character of aesthetic experience, 246–51 morality, 255–6 overview, 244–6, 256–7 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 344 penetrative imagination, Ruskin’s account of, 210–11 perception in Schopenhauer’s account, 111–12 in Spencer’s account, 384, 385–6 periodization, challenge of, 1–4 personality, in Friedrich Vischer’s absolute Idea, 163 personification, Lipps’s account of, 402–4 phenomenal, in Schopenhauer’s account, 308 phenomenological truth, in Ruskin’s account, 198–203 Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness: Prolegomena to Any Future Ethics (von Hartmann), 321 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (Schelling), 54–6 philosophical system of Hegel, 125–8 philosophy Cohen’s account of, 334–5, 340–1 Coleridge’s account of, 70

471

Hegel’s account of, 127–8, 129, 143 of nature, Schelling’s, 41–2 Schelling’s transcendental, 42–3 Schlegel’s assimilation of poetry to, 36–7 of Solger, 154–5 The Philosophy of Art (Schelling), 40, 50–4 “The Philosophy of Composition” (Poe), 237–8 Philosophy of the Beautiful (von Hartmann), 321–3 The Philosophy of the Unconscious (von Hartmann), 320–1 physical beauty, Cousin’s account of, 233–4 physical process, Puffer’s account of aesthetics as, 421 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), 268–9 plastic quality of Greek poetry, Jean Paul’s account of, 61 Plato and Platonism (Pater), 246 Platonic ideas, Schopenhauer’s account of, 112–18 play. See also free play theory in Bosanquet’s discussion of Schiller, 280–1 interpretation of Schlegel centered on, 28 The Play of Animals (Groos), 409–15 The Play of Man (Groos), 409–10, 415–17 pleasure in Bosanquet’s account, 288–9 Cohen’s account of, 335–9 in Emerson’s account of imagination, 104 in Groos’s account, 412–13, 414 in Lipps’s account, 397–8, 399–401, 404–6 in Nietzsche’s account of tragedy, 311, 312 in Poe’s account of poetry, 237–8 in Robert Vischer’s account, 394

472

Index

pleasure (cont.) in Ruskin’s account of imitation, 197–8 Schelling’s account of negative, 46 in Schlegel’s account of beauty, 27 Schopenhauer’s account of negative, 111–13 Schopenhauer’s account of positive, 115–16 in Shelley’s account, 82–3 in Spencer’s account, 383–8 in Tolstoy’s account, 291–2 in von Hartmann’s account of beauty, 321–3 in Wordsworth’s account of poetry, 77–8 Poe, Edgar Allan, 236–42 poesy (verbal arts), Hegel’s account of, 138 “The Poet” (Emerson), 99–101 “The Poetic Principle” (Poe), 238–41 Poetics (Aristotle), 262–3 poetics, of Dilthey overview, 363–5, 366–8 synthesis of aesthetic theories in, 370–7 universal validity of judgment of taste, 368–70 poetry Arnold’s account of, 227 Baudelaire’s account of, 242 Emerson’s account of, 99–101, 102–5 Hölderlin’s account of, 22–3 Jean Paul’s account of Greek, 61–2 Mill’s account of, 84–91 in Pater’s account, 256 Poe’s account of, 237–41 Schlegel’s account of romantic, 33–7 Schlegel’s “On the Study of Greek Poetry,” 28–34 Schopenhauer’s account of, 116–17 Shelley’s account of, 79–83 Wordsworth’s account of emotional impact of, 75–8

“Poetry and Imagination” (Emerson), 102–5 Poma, Andrea, 332 positive pleasure, in Schopenhauer’s account, 115–16 post-Hegelian generation. See also Vischer, Friedrich Theodor Lotze, 179–85 overview, 153, 158 Rosenkranz, 172–8 power, Ruskin’s account of, 195–6 practical responses, in Lee’s account, 435–6 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), 75–8 Preface to The Renaissance (Pater), 247–8 preparatory efforts, Groos’s idea of play as, 410–11 Preparatory School for Aesthetics (Vorschule der Ästhetik), Jean Paul, 58–62 Preschool for Aesthetics (Vorschule der Ästhetik), Fechner, 327–30 pretending, in Groos’s account of art, 412–15 primary imagination, Coleridge’s account of, 65–6, 68, 69, 73–4 primordial feelings in art, Cohen’s account of, 335–9 primordial unity of being, Hölderlin’s account of, 20–3 The Principles of Psychology (Spencer), 381–9 “The Procedure of the Poetic Spirit” (Hölderlin), 22–3 production, artistic, Solger’s account of, 157 production aesthetics, Schleiermacher’s account of, 146–7, 148–9 projection of emotions Lee’s account of, 431–5 Lipps’s account of, 401–5 Robert Vischer’s account of, 391–3, 394–5

Index Proust, Marcel, 193 psychological aesthetics Dilthey, 369–70, 371–3 Fechner, 327–30 Groos, 409–17 Lee, 426–36 Lipps, 396–406 overview, 378–80, 436–7 Puffer, 418–26 Robert Vischer, 390–6 Spencer, 380–9 Volkelt, 406–9 The Psychology of Beauty (Puffer), 419–26 Puffer, Ethel Dench (Ethel Puffer Howes), 418–26 purity, in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 207 purposive harmony, in Lotze’s account, 181–2 purposiveness, in Schelling’s system of transcendental idealism, 44–6 “The Rationale of Verse” (Poe), 238 rationality, in Schopenhauer’s account, 109–11 real, in Schelling’s account of art, 52–3 reality in Dilthey’s account, 373–4 fragmentary character of, 25–6, 33–7 in Groos’s account of art, 413–14 in Lipps’s account, 397–8 in Münsterberg’s account, 359–60, 361–2 reason, in Cousin’s account of beauty, 231–2 reception aesthetics, Schleiermacher’s account of, 146–7, 148–9 reconstitution of original unity, Hölderlin’s account of, 20–3 reductionism, 436–7 relation, Ruskin’s account of, 212–15 relative vital beauty, Ruskin’s account of, 209 relief, in Schopenhauer’s account, 111–13

473

religion in Hegel’s account, 127–8, 129, 136–7 in Schlegel’s aesthetics, 37–8 in Schleiermacher’s account of art, 151–2 in Solger’s account, 154–5, 156–8 in Tolstoy’s account, 292–3 Religion der Venunft aus der Quellen des Judentums (“Religion of reason from the sources of Judaism”), Cohen, 332–3 Rembrandt van Rijn, 217–18 The Renaissance (Pater) free play theory, 251–4 integrative character of aesthetic experience, 245–6, 247–51 morality, 255–6 repose, in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 207 representation in Dilthey’s account, 371–3 in Hegel’s account, 126–7 in Spencer’s account, 384–5 Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich (Jean Paul), 58–62 romantic art, Hegel’s account of, 130–1, 135–8 romantic poetry, Schlegel’s account of, 33–7 Romanticism. See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Schlegel, Friedrich after Schelling, 57 early, 18–19, 24–5 Hegel’s rejection of, 142 Hölderlin, 19–23 Jean Paul, 58–62 Mill, 84–91 overview, 6 periodization, challenge of, 2 Shelley, 79–83 Wordsworth, 75–8 Rosenkranz, Karl, 172–8 rules for beauty, Pater’s argument against, 248–9

474

Index

Ruskin, John, 3, 188 architecture, truthfulness in, 218–24 background of, 193–5 beauty, 203–12 Bosanquet’s discussion of, 284–6 great or high art, truthfulness in, 216–18 imagination, 209–12 imitation, 196–8 overview, 191–3, 225 power, 195–6 relation, 212–15 sources of greatness in art, 195 truth, 198–203 truthfulness, overview of, 215–16 Santayana, George, 3–4, 189 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Josef von, 6, 115, 329 background of, 38–41 Bosanquet’s discussion of, 282 cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience, 5 Hegel’s account versus that of, 125 influence of Kant’s ideas on, 17 influence on Coleridge, 64, 66–7 The Philosophy of Art, 50–4 in Solger’s account, 155 System of Transcendental Idealism, 41–50 will, 54–6 Schiller, Friedrich, 279–81 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 24 Schlegel, Friedrich, 6 Athäneum fragments, 33–7 background of, 24–5 fragmentary conception of aesthetic cognition, 33–7 influence of Kant on, 25–8 “Letters on Christian Art,” 37–8 “The Limits of the Beautiful,” 25–8 “On the Study of Greek Poetry,” 28–34 religious tone of aesthetics of, 37–8 truth as aim of art, 28–34

Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 6, 144–52 “The School of Giorgione” (Pater), 248–50, 252–3 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 54, 105 background of, 106–8 classification of arts by, 116–18 cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience, 5 genius, 113–15 Hegel’s views on art versus, 121 influence of Kant’s ideas on, 17 influence of on others, 7, 299 influence on Nietzsche, 307–12 negative pleasure, 111–13 Nietzsche’s repudiation of, 316–17 non-rational will, 109–11 overview, 106 positive pleasure, 115–16 science, in Cohen’s account, 334 sculpture, Hegel’s account of classical, 133–6 secondary Imagination, Coleridge’s account of, 68, 69 self-completeness, in Puffer’s account, 422–3 self-consciousness Coleridge’s account of, 67–8 in Schelling’s account, 43 self-directed pleasure, in Ruskin’s account of imitation, 197–8 sensation, in Spencer’s account, 384 senses, in Pater’s account of free play, 252 sensible particulars, in Friedrich Vischer’s absolute Idea, 162–3 sensual response to beauty, in Ruskin’s account, 203–4 sentiment, Spencer’s account of capacity for, 384–5, 388. See also emotional impact of aesthetic experience The Seven Lamps of Architecture (Ruskin), 213–15, 218–23 shared feelings, in Wordsworth’s account of poetry, 78 sharing, in Groos’s account of art, 413

Index Shelley, Percey Bysshe, 79–83 signs, in Ruskin’s account, 199–200, 208 The Silent Photoplay in 1916 (Münsterberg), 360–2 sincerity (truthfulness), Ruskin’s account of, 192–3 architecture, 218–24 great or high art, 216–18 overview, 215–16 sincerity, in Tolstoy’s account, 294–5 Social Statics (Spencer), 380 social style in art, Schleiermacher’s account of, 151–2 Socratism, aesthetic, Nietzsche’s account of, 313 Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, 153–8 Sonderegger, Ruth, 28 Sophocles, Schlegel’s characterization of, 30–1 sounds, Lipps’s account of projection of emotions on, 403 “Southwestern” school of NeoKantianism, 346. See also NeoKantianism; specific philosophers by name speculative version of cognitivist aesthetics. See metaphysical version of cognitivist aesthetics Spencer, Herbert, 380–9 spheres of feeling, Dilthey’s account of, 371–3 spirit. See also absolute spirit, Hegel’s account of in Kant’s theory of genius, 14 in Lotze’s account, 183–4 of poetry, Hölderlin’s account of, 22–3 in Rosenkranz’s account of ugliness, 174–5 spiritual beauty, Cousin’s account of, 233–4 The Stones of Venice (Ruskin), 193, 223–4

475

stories versus poems, Shelley’s account of, 80–1 strangeness, in Baudelaire’s account, 243–4 striving, endless, in Schopenhauer’s account, 111 structural honesty, in Ruskin’s account of architecture, 221–2 struggle for power, Groos’s idea of play as, 411 “The Study of Poetry” (Arnold), 227 subject, Coleridge’s account of, 66–8 subjective part of aesthetic pleasure, Schopenhauer’s account of, 115–16 subjectivism, Friedrich Vischer’s account of Kant’s, 164 subjectivity in art, 31–2 in Coleridge’s account of art, 69–70 in Hegel’s account of romantic art, 137–8 Nietzsche’s account of, 310–11 in Pater’s account, 247 sublime in Bosanquet’s account, 273–4 Hegel’s account of, 140–1 Jean Paul’s account of, 58–9 Schelling’s account of, 48–9 Schopenhauer’s account of, 115–16 supernal beauty, Poe’s account of, 240–1 supersensible substratum, Cohen’s account of, 343–4 support modes, in Ruskin’s account of architecture, 221–2 surplus energy principle Groos’s disagreement with, 410–11 Spencer’s account of, 383–4, 385–6 symbolic art, Hegel’s account of, 130, 131–3, 141 symbols, in Ruskin’s account of truth, 199–200 symmetry, in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 207

476

Index

synthesis of aesthetic theories by Bosanquet, 286, 289–90 by Dilthey, 7–8, 364–5, 370–7 by Groos, 409–17 by Kant, 4–5, 16–17 by Lotze, 181–2, 185 in nineteenth century, 4–8 by Schleiermacher, 144, 147–50, 152 by Spencer, 389 by Wordsworth, 78 System of Aesthetics (Volkelt), 406–7 System of Transcendental Idealism (Schelling), 40, 41–50 taste Bosanquet’s discussion of Kant, 276–7 Cohen’s account of, 341–2 Cohn’s account of, 348–9 Dilthey’s account of, 368–70 Emerson’s account of, 98–100 Kant’s account of, 11–13 Poe’s account of, 239–40, 241 teleological view of nature, Schelling’s, 44–5 theoretic faculty, in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 204–9 thought in Coleridge’s account of art, 70–1 in Emerson’s account of beauty, 96 in Hegel’s account, 126–7 in Schelling’s The Philosophy of Art, 50–1 in Schelling’s system of transcendental idealism, 41–50 Three Lectures on Aesthetic (Bosanquet), 286–9 threshold principle, Fechner’s, 327–8 Tolstoy, Leo, 8, 269, 270, 290–6 tragedy Friedrich Vischer’s account of, 166–7 Lipps’s account of, 404–6 in Nietzsche’s account, 305–14 Puffer’s account of, 425–6 romantic, Hegel’s account of, 138

Schopenhauer’s account of, 116–18 Shelley’s account of, 82–3 in Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” 262 tranquil soul, in Bosanquet’s discussion of Winckelmann, 275–6 transcendental foundation of aesthetics, in Cohen’s account, 340–1 transcendental idealism, Schelling’s system of, 41–50 transcendental philosophy, Schelling’s, 42–3 transcendental poetry, Schlegel’s account of, 36 Transcendentalism, of Emerson, 92, 93–5 Tristan and Isolde (Wagner), 314 The True, the Beautiful, and the Good (Du vrai, du beau, et du bien), Cousin, 230–4 truth. See also cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience as aim of art, Schlegel’s account of, 28–34 in Arnold’s account, 227 Coleridge’s account of, 67 Cousin’s account of, 231 historical, Ruskin’s account of, 212–15 metaphysical, in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 203–12 phenomenological, Ruskin’s account of, 198–203 in Poe’s account of poetry, 237, 241 in Ruskin’s account of architecture, 219–22 Ruskin’s basic account of, 191–3, 195 in Shelley’s account, 80–2 in Tolstoy’s account, 295 in von Hartmann’s account, 322–3 in Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” 261–8 truthfulness (sincerity), Ruskin’s account of, 192–3

Index architecture, 218–24 great or high art, 216–18 overview, 215–16 truthfulness, Dilthey’s principle of, 372–4 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 191–2, 200–1, 202–3 twentieth-century aesthetics, 436–7 types, in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 208 typical beauty, Ruskin’s account of, 206–8 ugliness in Bosanquet’s account, 273–5 Rosenkranz’s account of, 173–8 unconscious, in Coleridge’s account of genius, 72 unconscious nature, Coleridge’s account of, 66–8 unconscious thought, in Schelling’s account, 41–50 understanding, in Kant’s account of free play, 11–13 unfreedom, in Rosenkranz’s account of ugliness, 177–8 unification, in Friedrich Vischer’s account, 168 unitary experience of objects, in Robert Vischer’s account, 391–4 unity of being, Hölderlin’s account of, 20–3 in Coleridge’s account of art, 69–71 in Emerson’s Transcendentalism, 93–5 in Lipps’s account, 399–400 in Münsterberg’s account of beauty, 357–9 organic, in Schlegel’s account of Greek poetry, 29–34 in Puffer’s account, 422–3 in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 207 in Schlegel’s account of beauty, 26 in Solger’s account of art, 156–8 universal intelligibility of art, Emerson’s account of, 98–100

477

universal poetry, Schlegel’s account of, 33–7 universal validity of judgment of taste Cohen’s account of, 341–2 Cohn’s account of, 348–9 Dilthey’s account of, 368–70 Kant’s account of, 11–13 universe, Lotze’s account of purposive harmony of, 181–2 unreality, in Münsterberg’s account, 359–60, 361–2 Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche), 302–3 utilitarianism, 83–91 Gautier’s attack on, 235–6 Ruskin’s critique of, 204–6 utility in Ruskin’s account of beauty, 204–6 in Shelley’s account, 83 value-judgments, Cohn’s account of, 347–8 values, Münsterberg’s account of, 354–60 variety in Baudelaire’s account, 243–4 in Mill’s account of individuality, 90 verbal art, Schelling’s account of, 52 verbal arts (poesy), Hegel’s account of, 138 virtue in Emerson’s account of beauty, 96 in Ruskin’s account of vital beauty, 209 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 6 absolute Idea, 161–4 background of, 159–61 beauty, 165–6 emotional impact of art, 166–72 independence from Hegel, 160–3 rehabilitation of Kant by, 161, 164–5, 168–9 Vischer, Robert, 6, 390–6 vital beauty, Ruskin’s account of, 207, 208–9

478 volition, in Schelling’s system of transcendental idealism, 44–6. See also will Volkelt, Johannes, 406–9 voluntarism, 55 von Hartmann, Eduard, 320–4 Vorschule der Ästhetik (Preparatory School for Aesthetics), Jean Paul, 58–62 Vorschule der Ästhetik (Preschool for Aesthetics), Fechner, 327–30 Wagner, Richard, 300–1, 302, 313–14, 315–16 What is Art? (Tolstoy), 290, 291–6 Wilde, Oscar, 229–30 “The Critic as Artist,” 261–8 “The Decay of Lying,” 259–61 overview, 256–9, 269 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 268–9

Index will in Münsterberg’s account, 355–6, 357–9 non-rational, Schopenhauer’s account of, 109–11 Schelling’s concept of, 54–6 in Schopenhauer’s account, 112–18, 308–9 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 253–4, 275–6 Wordsworth, William, 72–3 Coleridge’s discussion of, 72–4 general discussion, 75–8 The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer) classification of arts, 116–18 genius, 113–15 negative pleasure, 111–13 non-rational will, 109–11 positive pleasure, 115–16

A History of Modern Aesthetics Volume 3: The Twentieth Century A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle’s defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato’s famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact – precisely what Plato criticized – and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. The three volumes tell how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by both the best-known and lesser-known aestheticians of modern times, focusing on Britain, France, and Germany in the eighteenth century (Volume 1); Germany and Britain in the nineteenth (Volume 2); and Germany, Britain, and the United States in the twentieth (Volume 3). Paul Guyer is the Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Brown University. He is author of nine books and editor of six collections on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, including four focusing on Kant’s aesthetics. He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and prizes, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize. A History of Modern Aesthetics was facilitated by a Laurance Rockefeller Fellowship at the Princeton University Center for Human Values. Professor Guyer is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been president of both the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and the American Society for Aesthetics.

A History of Modern Aesthetics Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

Paul Guyer Brown University

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107038059 © Paul Guyer 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Guyer, Paul, 1948– A history of modern aesthetics / Paul Guyer. volumes cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-03803-5 (hardback) 1. Aesthetics, Modern – History. I. Title. BH151.G89 2014 111′.850903–dc23 2013050046 978-1-107-03803-5 Volume 1 Hardback 978-1-107-03804-2 Volume 2 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-03805-9 Volume 3 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-64322-2 Three-Volume Hardback Set ISBN ISBN

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Contents

Acknowledgments

page ix

Introduction

1

Part One German Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century 1 German Aesthetics between the Wars: Lukács and Heidegger 1. Lukács 2. Heidegger 2 German Aesthetics after World War II 1. Gadamer 2. Benjamin and Adorno 3. Marcuse 4. Coda: Seel’s Aesthetics of Appearing Part Two Aesthetics in Britain until World War II

7 9 10 25 43 43 65 89 100 105

3 Bloomsbury, Croce, and Bullough 1. Moore, Bell, and Fry 2. Croce 3. Bullough

108 109 128 150

4 First Responses to Croce 1. Carritt 2. Reid 3. Alexander

158 158 171 180

5 Collingwood 1. Collingwood’s Early Aesthetics 2. Collingwood’s Later Aesthetics

189 194 209 v

Contents

vi

Part Three American Aesthetics in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

235

6 Santayana 1. The Sense of Beauty 2. Reason in Art

238 242 258

7 The American Reception of Expression Theory I: Parker to Greene 1. Parker 2. Ducasse 3. Prall 4. Stace 5. Greene

265 266 280 286 295 299

8 Dewey 1. Experience and Nature 2. Art as Experience

309 312 316

9 The American Reception of Expression Theory II: Cassirer and Langer 1. Cassirer 2. Langer

335 335 351

10 After Dewey and Cassirer 1. Gotshalk 2. Isenberg 3. Beardsley 4. Goodman

367 367 381 389 411

Part Four Wittgenstein and After: Anglo-American Aesthetics in the Second Part of the Twentieth Century

429

11 Wittgenstein 1. Wittgenstein and the Tractatus 2. The Philosophical Investigations 3. The Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics

432 432 439 443

12 The First Wave 1. From Passmore to Mandelbaum 2. Danto to Dickie 3. Back to Danto

449 450 464 481

13 The Second Wave 1. Sibley 2. Wollheim

499 499 506

Contents 3. Scruton 4. Cavell

vii 524 532

Epilogue: Truth, Feeling, and Play in Recent Aesthetics 1. Playing with Emotions 2. Art and Morality 3. Aesthetics and Knowledge of Nature 4. Loving Beauty

557 557 573 585 593

Bibliography Index

605 633

Acknowledgments

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, newly translated and edited by Robert Hullot-Kenter. English translation copyright © 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Press. Original, German-language edition copyright © 1970 by Suhrkamp Verlag. Quotations reprinted with the kind permission of the University of Minnesota Press. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, revised edition, copyright © 1981 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Quotations reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Robin G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis: The Map of Knowledge, copyright © 1926 by Oxford University Press. Quotations reprinted with the kind permission of Oxford University Press. Robin G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, copyright © 1938 by Oxford University Press. Quotations reprinted with the kind permission of Oxford University Press. John Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works, Volume 10: 1934. Copyright © 1987, 2008, by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. Quotations reprinted courtesy of Southern Illinois University Press. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, revised edition copyright © 2004 by Continuum, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Quotations reprinted with the kind permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, copyright © 1976 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Quotations reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. ix

x

Acknowledgments

Arnold Isenberg, Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, edited by William Callaghan et al., with an introduction by Mary Mothersill. Copyright © 1973 by the University of Chicago Press. Quotations reprinted with the kind permission of the University of Chicago Press. Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. Copyright ©2007 by Princeton University Press. Quotations reprinted with the kind permission of Princeton University Press. DeWitt Parker, The Analysis of Art. Copyright © 1926 by Yale University Press. Quotations reprinted with the kind permission of Yale University Press and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Introduction

In Volume 1, we saw how two alternatives were developed during the course of the eighteenth century to the traditional approach to aesthetic experience as a form of cognition or insight into truth, what has been called here the aesthetics of truth, namely, the idea that aesthetic experience is a free play of our cognitive or more broadly mental powers, the aesthetics of play, and the recognition of the emotional impact of aesthetic experience, especially the experience of art, the aesthetics of emotional impact. A few thinkers, including Moses Mendelssohn and Johann Georg Sulzer in Germany and Lord Kames in Britain, at least suggested a comprehensive attitude to aesthetic experience synthesizing all three of these, but Immanuel Kant rejected the importance of emotional response in aesthetic experience and in his theory of fine art combined only the traditional aesthetics of truth with the novel aesthetics of play. Among Kant’s immediate contemporaries and successors, a few made gestures toward adding emotional impact into Kant’s mix. But as we saw in Volume 2, the predominant response among Kant’s most prominent successors in the early nineteenth century was not to add emotional impact back into a comprehensive aesthetic theory; rather, they accepted Kant’s exclusion of emotional impact but also rejected his theory of play, thus reverting to an essentially cognitivist approach to aesthetics, although with a decidedly metaphysical twist. This was certainly true in the cases of Friedrich Schelling, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, although their contemporary Friedrich Schleiermacher sketched an aesthetic theory comprehending all three approaches, and some of the figures to whom the influence of Schelling was communicated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, such as William Wordworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Stuart Mill, also sought to recognize the emotional impact as well as 1

2

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 3

cognitive significance of art, particularly poetry, even if they stopped short of recognizing the element of sheer play in aesthetic experience. In the generation that followed Hegel, Friedrich Theodor Vischer especially tried to make room for both the Kantian aspect of play and the non-Kantian aspect of emotion in aesthetic experience, the latter under the term “empathy” that was developed into an approach to aesthetics by his son Robert, Theodor Lipps, and others. Friedrich Nietzsche, after his early work under the influence of Schopenhauer, also sought room for the idea of play, and some of the critics associated with the aestheticist movement, namely, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, suggested comprehensive rather than reductive approaches to aesthetics. Among the Neo-Kantians, Wilhelm Dilthey, a student of Schleiermacher as well as of Kant, recognized the compatibility and equal importance of cognition, imagination, and emotion in his poetics. But as we now turn to the twentieth century, we will see that this comprehensive approach to aesthetics was not immediately pursued. In Germany, very different thinkers such as the Marxists Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno, on the one hand, and the existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, on the other, adopted purely cognitivist approaches to aesthetics, thus reprising the history of German aesthetics a century earlier, although eventually Herbert Marcuse on the Marxist side and Hans-Georg Gadamer on the Heideggerian side tried to make room for free play in their conceptions of aesthetic experience. In Britain, two major influences at the outset of the twentieth century were the cognitivist theory of Benedetto Croce and the formalist theory of the Bloomsbury writer Clive Bell, both reductive theories, and British aestheticians then struggled to broaden those conceptions of aesthetic experience and the aesthetically significant aspects of art. In the United States, twentieth-century aesthetics, indeed aesthetics as a branch of academic philosophy at all, can be regarded as beginning with the 1896 work of George Santayana and reaching a characteristically American form in the pragmatist aesthetics of John Dewey. The examples of Santayana and Dewey encouraged a more comprehensive approach to aesthetics in the United States than elsewhere, as will be seen from our examination of some now-less-well-known aestheticians from the first half of the century who deserve to be remembered, foremost among them DeWitt Parker, T.M. Greene, and D.W. Gotshalk. At midcentury, however, the enormous impact of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the field of aesthetics, resisted at first perhaps only by Monroe Beardsley, steeped as he was in the thought of Kant and Dewey,

Introduction

3

once again produced a narrowing of approach in aesthetics, and only the efforts of some of the most creative philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein, such as Richard Wollheim and Stanley Cavell, suggested ways to restore a broad rather than narrow approach to aesthetics. In an Epilogue, we will consider how the relations among the three main modern approaches to aesthetics have continued to play out among a small sample of recent contributors to the field. As mentioned in the General Introduction to this work, the present volume will, with very few exceptions, omit discussion of French aesthetic theory in the twentieth century. There are multiple reasons for this. For one, the reception of recent French aesthetic theory in the United States and Britain has been far greater in the fields of literary and cultural studies than in academic philosophy, at least in philosophy with an “analytic” orientation, and the present work reflects the latter orientation, indeed could perhaps fairly be said to tell the history of aesthetics insofar as it leads up to philosophical aesthetics as practiced in analytically oriented departments in the United States, Britain, and Germany at the present time. And this fact about the reception of recent French aesthetics is not an accident. Much recent French thought, paradigmatically that of the late Jacques Derrida but of many others as well, has been a “poststructuralist” response to the “structuralism” of the linguist Ferdinand DeSaussure and the anthropologist Claude-Levi Strauss. The structuralists approached various forms of human thought and activity on the model of a language with fixed syntactical and semantical categories (the “structure”), and the poststructuralist response has been to argue, in myriad ways befitting the thesis, that language is not like that, but instead consists of an indeterminate and indeed effectively infinite possibility of internal relations, with meaning always “deferred” from one term to another and never fixed by either a unified subject or a unified world of objects. Common to both structuralism and poststructuralism has been the assumption that the object of investigation – whether language literally, human social relations, or works of art – is always a “text” that stands on its own, either allowing or defeating interpretation. This approach may have its merits, but it is fundamentally different from the underlying assumption of aesthetic theory in Britain, the United States, and Germany throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and certainly in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well, namely, that works of art do not exist on their own, but are products of as well as triggers of human experience of an objective world, an experience of which aesthetic experience may be one distinctive form

4

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 3

but one that still is part of a genuine interaction between real subjects and real objects. For this reason, it seems to me that poststructuralism is difficult to integrate into the history of mainstream modern aesthetics as it has developed from the eighteenth century onward, and I have chosen to tell the latter. A second reason is a matter not merely of space and time but also of justice: To tell the story of French aesthetic theory in the twentieth century not only would have added years to the already lengthy gestation of this work, but would either have required either an additional volume of its own or else the elimination of a great deal of the material included in the present volume. But the latter option would no doubt have meant the elimination of a great deal of my discussion of the now-little-known accomplishments of American and British aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth century, and that is not a price I would have been willing to pay; on the contrary, the retrieval of the work of such figures as Samuel Alexander, DeWitt Parker, T.M. Greene, and many more, and even the rescue of the work of the never completely forgotten R.G. Collingwood from its customary simplification or even caricature, have, as it turned out, become one of the primary ambitions of this volume. Meanwhile, there has been no dearth of expository work on the recent French thinkers whom I will not be discussing.1 For reasons of space, I will also be omitting discussion of the treatment of aesthetics within the phenomenological approach to philosophy initiated by Edmund Husserl, with the notable exception of Martin Heidegger, without whom no history of twentieth-century aesthetics or twentieth-century philosophy more generally could make any pretense to completeness. There are certainly figures within the phenomenological movement who continue to be read and continue to be worthy of being read, and who could be discussed among the heirs to Heidegger, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty; the latter’s several essays on perception in the visual arts, especially his famous essay “Cezanne’s Doubts,” are gems.2 The Polish literary theorist Roman

1

2

See, for example, Clive Cazeaux, ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader, second edition (London: Routledge, 2011); numerous works by Frederic Jameson beginning with The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); numerous works by Jean-Michel Rabaté, e.g., The Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Post-Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), Part III; and Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). This essay and several others are conveniently collected, along with commentaries, in Galen A. Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993).

Introduction

5

Ingarden,3 influenced more by Husserl than by Heidegger, would also be worthy of inclusion, along with other Polish aestheticians such as Stefan Morawski4 and the historian Władysław Tatarkiewicz, author of a threevolume History of Aesthetics 5 that stops at the end of the seventeenth century, just where the present one begins. Much of this work, as Ingarden’s titles in particular suggest, could readily be assimilated to what I have called in this book the cognitivist tradition in modern aesthetics, and the discussion of it would show that the interest of this approach was far from being exhausted in the twentieth century. But as my interest in this volume lies more in describing the way leading aestheticians in the twentieth century attempted to break out from a purely cognitivist approach rather than just adding more detail to it, and as, again, in the course of my work on this volume I arrived at the ambition of conducting an exercise of retrieval on behalf of pre-Wittgensteinian Anglophone aesthetics, I am going to have to exclude discussion of all this material. As is evident, the present volume is large enough already.

3

4

5

See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and the Theory of Literature, trans. George C. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); and Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work, Painting, Architecture, the Film, trans. Raymond Meyer with John T. Goldthwait (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989). Stefan Morawski, Inquiries into the Fundamentals of Aesthetics, foreword by Monroe C. Beardsley (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974). Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, 3 vols. (The Hague: Mouton, 1970–4). This work is more of a sourcebook than a work of interpretation, although it remains of value precisely for that reason. Tatarkiewicz’s more interpretative work is History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics, trans. Christopher Kasparek (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980).

Part One

GERMAN AESTHETICS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

G

erman writers dominated the field of aesthetics in the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries, and their prominence in the preceding narrative, in the last part of Volume 1 and through much of Volume 2, has reflected that fact. German intellectual life, indeed German life in general, was repeatedly disrupted in the twentieth century, by the First World War, by the rise of National Socialism and the Second World War and the enforced emigration or destruction of many professors and writers, largely but not exclusively Jewish, that accompanied those events, and then by the division of the nation and the Cold War that followed; and German philosophy including aesthetics was not excepted from all these upheavals. But in spite of and to some extent because of all these disruptions, as well as because of the tradition of German aesthetics over the preceding two centuries, debate over the nature and value of the arts and of experience of them remained lively throughout the twentieth century. In order to make room for the extensive development of aesthetics in twentieth-century Britain and the United States, our survey of twentieth-century German aesthetics will have to be even more selective than were our surveys of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury German aesthetics. But we will nevertheless consider a number of the most important German (or German-writing) aestheticians of the twentieth century, including Georg Lukács and Martin Heidegger (although not others in Germany, France, or Poland who hewed more closely to the original phenomenology of Heidegger’s teacher Edmund Husserl), whose views were formed in the period between the two world wars, and who may to some extent be taken as representing left- and right-wing thought during those years, and then Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, who although they to some extent carried on the interwar debates, published their most important 7

8

German Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century

works after the Second World War, and, at least in the case of Gadamer and Marcuse, in spite of both having begun as students of Heidegger, introduced a new theme, or reintroduced an old one, into twentiethcentury German aesthetics, namely, the idea of play. We will also briefly consider several more contemporary German figures, including Dieter Henrich, in turn the foremost student of Gadamer.

1 German Aesthetics between the Wars Lukács and Heidegger

It might seem strange to take György Lukács (1885–1971) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) as the main examples of German aesthetics between the two world wars. Not only were there other important philosophers who wrote on aesthetics (such as Ernst Cassirer, whom however we will consider as part of the history of twentieth-century aesthetics in the United States, where at least until recently his influence was much greater than in Germany); not only was Lukács not German at all, but Hungarian (although, like many other urban Hungarian Jews, he was of German descent, and throughout his life wrote his main works in German); above all, they were at opposite ends of the political spectrum, Lukács known as a Marxist for most of his life and even flourishing in the Stalinist Soviet Union while Heidegger was permanently tainted by his affiliation with the Nazis in the 1930s even if he withdrew from any official position other than his professorship after his year as the Nazi-appointed rector of his university in 1933–4 (he retained his membership in the party until the end of the war). But in spite of all their differences, Lukács and Heidegger shared one trait that binds them together and makes them representative of German aesthetics in their time: a focus on art and aesthetic experience as a vehicle of important truth, truth about human society in the case of Lukács and about human being itself, as something even more fundamental than society, in the case of Heidegger. For that reason they will be considered together in this chapter. Ernst Cassirer, who might also be considered a major contributor to aesthetics during the interwar period, had his major influence in the United States after World War II and for that reason will be considered in our discussion of American rather than German aesthetics.

9

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German Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century

1. Lukács The extraordinary devastation of World War I marked a caesura throughout European culture, academic philosophy by no means excluded, but above all in Germany: While some individuals who had made their mark before 1914 made further contributions after 1918 (for example, Volkelt and Groos) and a few who had just begun to work before 1914 reached the height of their powers after 1918, it is natural to divide German intellectual history, including German philosophy, into the period before 1914, still essentially part of the nineteenth century, and the period after 1918, which can itself be divided into the period before the Second World War and the period after. The first of these periods will concern us in this chapter, and the second in the next. One figure who started his career before the war and even continued it during the war but who wrote his most substantial works after the war, indeed for fifty years after the war, was György Lukács. Lukács was born in Hungary and spent some fateful periods of his life there, but he studied and worked in Germany and Austria and then, when as both a Communist and a Jew, he became unwelcome there, he spent the years of the Third Reich in the Soviet Union. But his work in aesthetics, with which he began and ended his career, was not only deeply rooted in the history of German aesthetics but also written largely in German, so it can be discussed as part of the history of German aesthetics. In German Lukács published under the name “Georg” rather than “György,” and so we can henceforth refer to him. Lukács was born in 1885, the son of a Jewish bank director in Budapest (originally named “Löwinger”), who would often support his son financially even after the latter became an active Communist and thus attacked the class that made his own existence possible. After an early attempt at a career as a dramatist, Lukács studied law and economy and received a degree in public administration in 1906. But he would put that expertise to work only briefly in a stint as minister of education in the short-lived Hungarian Republic of 1919; otherwise, he devoted himself to literature and philosophy. He received another degree in 1909 for the first chapters of what would be published as A History of the Development of the Modern Drama in Hungarian in 1911; in that same year Lukács published his first work in German, a collection of essays entitled The Soul and the Forms.1 His Jewish background blocked him from an academic 1

György Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

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appointment in Hungary, however, and he spent much of the time from 1909 to 1916 first in Berlin and then in Heidelberg, where he began work on a systematic treatise in aesthetics (he was found unfit for military service). In 1916 he published material intended as an introduction to a major work on Dostoevsky in the leading German journal in aesthetics; he did not write the work on Dostoevsky, however, and instead republished the introduction in 1920 as The Theory of the Novel. After returning to Budapest at the end of 1916, he lectured on ethics outside the university. In May 1918 he applied for habilitation at Heidelberg but was rejected as a foreign national. At the end of that year, he joined the Hungarian Communist Party and as mentioned played a prominent role in the short-lived Hungarian Communist republic of 1919. After that collapsed, he spent the next ten years in Vienna, during which time he published History and Class-Consciousness (1923), one of the major theoretical works of twentieth-century Communism. In 1930 he emigrated to Moscow, but he returned to Berlin in 1931, only to have to emigrate again in 1933 to Moscow, where he would remain until 1945. During this period he enjoyed a position at the Philosophical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and was also an editor of the journal International Literature. In these years he defended a “Marxist-Leninist” version of realism against avant-garde modern art and published The Historical Novel (1937). In 1941, at the height of the war, he and his family were evacuated to Tashkent. In 1944 he returned to Budapest, where in 1945, at the age of sixty, he was finally appointed professor of aesthetics and philosophy of culture and also participated in Hungarian political life, including its parliament, although after the Hungarian uprising of 1956 he was once again exiled, this time to Romania. He returned to Hungary in 1957 but after that no longer participated directly in government. His major works during the postwar period included The Young Hegel (1948), The Destruction of Reason (1954), a diagnosis of the roots of Fascism in the German Idealist tradition, and finally The Uniqueness of the Aesthetic (Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen) in 1963. Like Baumgarten’s original Aesthetica two hundred years earlier, this stout two-volume work comprised only a third of the system of aesthetics that Lukács originally intended. At the time of his death from cancer in 1971, at the age of eighty-six, he was finishing a work optimistically entitled A Prolegomena to the Ontology of Social Being, which was posthumously published.2 2

Biographical data taken from Rüdiger Dannemann, Georg Lukács zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 1997), pp. 158–65. For Lukács’s life and career, see George Lichtheim, George Lukacs (New York: Viking Press, 1970); Lucien Goldmann, Lukács et

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As this sketch of a complex, uniquely twentieth-century life suggests, Lukács’s intellectual career may be divided into three main periods: his pre-Communist period through 1918; his first Communist, ultimately Soviet period between 1919 and 1941; and his second, Hungarian Communist period from 1945 until his death. The Theory of the Novel may be considered his chief work of the first period – although it was not published in book form until 1920, it was, as was noted, already published in journal form in 1916. As far as aesthetics is concerned, his polemics in behalf of realism may be considered his chief works of the second period. Again as far as aesthetics is concerned, The Uniqueness of the Aesthetic was obviously the chief work of his final period. Although Lukács’s later works are clearly responsive to authors such as Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, and it would certainly be possible to treat him as a recurring figure in a strictly chronological exposition of German aesthetics in the twentieth century, his works of these several periods will be discussed together here in order to bring out the continuities as well as the changes in the work of this first major figure in post–World War I German aesthetics. The Theory of the Novel is a work on literary genres, not a general aesthetic theory, but it is deeply rooted in the German aesthetic tradition and reveals a focus on the cognitive significance of art that would remain constant throughout Lukács’s career, in spite of changes in his political commitments: the idea of art and aesthetic experience as forms of play has no role in Lukács’s thought, and he remains throughout his long career firmly committed to the conception of art as a vehicle for truth. In particular, like much in German aesthetics from Schlegel to Heidegger (Paris: Gonthier, 1973); Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979); Michael Lowy, Georg Lukacs: From Romanticism to Bolshevism, trans. Patrick Chandler (London: New Left Books, 1979); Agnes Heller, Lukacs Revalued (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); and Michael J. Thompson, ed., Georg Lukacs Reconsidered: Essays on Politics, Philosophy, and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010). On Lukács’s aesthetics, see Bela Kiralyfalvi, The Aesthetics of György Lukács (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); J.M. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxisms, and the Dialectics of Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). See also Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, trans. P.S. Falla, new edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), pp. 989–1032. I have discussed Lukács’s debate with Bertold Brecht, upon which I will not touch here, as well as the background for twentieth-century Marxist aesthetics in Lenin and Trotsky, in “Aesthetics between the Wars,” in Thomas Baldwin, ed., Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 721–6, at pp. 722–6.

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Nietzsche, The Theory of the Novel may be regarded as a descendant of Schiller’s influential essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.” In that essay, itself part of the tradition of replies to Winckelmann’s claim that it is only by copying the art of the ancients that modern art can attain beauty, Schiller had argued that modern man and therefore modern art can never simply recapture the unquestioned harmony between man and nature felt by the ancient Greeks, and that modern art must therefore seek other avenues for beauty. Lukács argues that the modern novel from Don Quixote to the end of the nineteenth century is the successor to the ancient epic in its relation to lyric and drama, but that whereas the ancient epic could express a sense of the wholeness of human nature and its place in the totality of nature as if this were simply a matter of empirical fact, for modern man and therefore for the modern novel a sense of wholeness and of being entirely at home in nature could always be only an ideal, tantalizingly glimpsed but never fully realized. In the modern period, literature inevitably reflects philosophy, and “philosophy, as a form of life or as that which determines the form and supplies the content of literary creation, is always a symptom of the rift between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, a sign of the essential difference between the self and the world, the incongruence of soul and deed.”3 The “secret of the Greek world” was “its perfection, which is unthinkable for us. . . . The Greek knew only answers but no questions, only solutions (even if enigmatic ones) but no riddles, only forms but no chaos,”4 whereas moderns, by contrast, know only questions, riddles, and chaos and can only glimpse but not realize their resolution. This is not due to a simple degeneration of the modern mind, to be sure, as if we were just stupider than the Greeks; rather it accompanies the freedom and inventiveness of modernity, but it nevertheless leads to a longing that can never be satisfied: The circle within which the Greeks led their metaphysical life was smaller than ours: that is why we cannot, as part of our life, place ourselves inside it. Or rather, the circle whose closed nature was the essential essence of their life has, for us, been broken; we cannot breathe in a closed world. We have invented the productivity of the spirit: that is why the primeval images have irrevocably lost their objective self-evidence for us, and our thinking follows the endless path of an approximation that is never fully accomplished. We have invented the creation of forms: and that is why everything that falls from our weary hands must always be incomplete. We have found the only 3

4

Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 29. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, pp. 30–1.

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true substance within ourselves: that is why we have to place an unbridgeable chasm between cognition and action, between soul and created structure, between self and world. . . . Our world has become infinitely large and each of its corners is richer in gifts and dangers than the world of the Greeks, but such wealth cancels out the positive meaning – the totality – upon which their life was based.5

Lukács’s remark that “we have found the only true substance within ourselves” indicates that at this point in his career his thought is firmly within the framework of German Idealism, but he is rejecting the Schellingian idea that art can fully resolve the tension between ourselves and nature in favor of the Hegelian view that art cannot fully express the identity of the Spirit, although he is perhaps also rejecting Hegel’s own anti-Schellingian idea that philosophy can do what art cannot, that is, provide us with absolute knowledge of absolute spirit. Nevertheless, art still has to be understood and interpreted as a form of cognition, although always as an incomplete form of cognition, or more accurately as cognition of the essentially incomplete and uncompletable form of modern life. This is what Lukács expresses through his contrast between the ancient epic and the modern novel. Ancient epic enjoys precisely the sense of wholeness as if it were a matter of empirical fact that the modern novel can never recapture. “Great epic,” Lukács writes, “gives form to the extensive totality of life.” He continues: For the epic, the world at any given moment is an ultimate principle: it is empirical at its deepest, most decisive, all-determining transcendental base; it can sometimes accelerate the rhythm of life, can carry something that was hidden or neglected to a utopian end which was always immanent within it, but it can never, while remaining epic, transcend the breadth and depth, the rounded, sensual, richly ordered nature of life as historically given. . . . This indestructible bond with reality as it is . . . is a necessary consequence of the object of the epic being life itself. . . . the character created by the epic is the empirical ‘I’.6

The modern novel, by contrast, can never take an indestructible bond between the individual and reality as an empirical fact, but always only as something to be sought and glimpsed but never fully realized. Thus Lukács writes: The epic gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life. The given structure of the object (i.e., the search, which is only a

5 6

Lukács, Theory of the Novel, p. 34. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, pp. 46–7.

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way of expressing the subject’s recognition that neither objective life nor its relationship to the subject is spontaneously harmonious in itself) supplies an indication of the form-giving intention. All the fissures and rents which are inherent in the historical situation must be drawn into the form-giving process and cannot nor should not be disguised by compositional means. Thus the fundamental form-determining intention of the novel is objectivised as the psychology of the novel’s heroes: they are seekers.7

The heroes of the modern novel must remain seekers because that which they seek, totality or the wholeness of man and nature, which the ancients (supposedly) enjoyed as a matter of course, they can never find. (Nietzsche’s iconoclastic rejection of the harmony of ancient life is nowhere in view in this early work of Lukács.) One might object to this view of the modern hero that it was an ancient, Ulysses, who was the seeker par excellence, but had he considered this objection Lukács would have had to reply that the resolution that Ulysses ultimately found in his return to Ithaca and the waiting Penelope is simply unavailable to the modern hero. Of course, much at the same time as Lukács was writing The Theory of the Novel James Joyce was writing his modern Ulysses in which his wanderer, Leopold Bloom, does return to his Penelope in the person of Molly and finds in her all the transcendence anyone could want – but in his subsequent writings Lukács would always reject Joyce as an “extreme case” of “extreme subjectivism,” of “modern-bourgeois thought” that “dissolves objective reality into a complex of immediate perceptions.”8 These remarks about Joyce were made in 1936, at the height of Lukács’s Communist orthodoxy, and reflect his view of those years that the modernist avant-garde had failed to understand the socioeconomic inadequacies of bourgeois society rather than the metaphysical incompleteness of modern man in which he had earlier believed – but either way Lukács always held that the harmonious experience of totality that is the outcome of the ancient epic could never be recaptured by purely artistic means. The seeker-hero of the modern novel that genuinely understands the philosophical conditions of its own possibility can never have more than a glimpse of the attainment of harmony that the ancient seeker could assume awaited him: The inner form of the novel has been understood as the process of the problematic individual’s journeying towards himself, the road from dull 7 8

Lukács, Theory of the Novel, p. 60. Georg Lukács, “Die Intellektuelle Physiognomie der Künstlerischen Gestalten” (“The Intellectual Physiognomy of Artistic Configurations”), in Probleme des Realismus (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955), pp. 60–102, at p. 81.

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captivity within a merely present reality – a reality that is heterogeneous in itself and meaningless to the individual – towards clear self-recognition. After such self-recognition has been obtained, the ideal thus formed irradiates the individual’s life as its immanent meaning; but the conflict between what is and what should be has not been abolished and cannot be abolished in the sphere wherein these events take place – the life sphere of the novel; only a maximum conciliation – the profound and intensive irradiation of a man by his life’s meaning – is attainable. The immanence of meaning which the form of the novel requires lies in the hero’s finding out through experience that a mere glimpse of meaning is the highest that life has to offer, and that this glimpse is the only thing worth the commitment of an entire life, the only thing by which the struggle will have been justified.9

The last clause of this quotation might seem to be an allusion to Nietzsche’s theory of the aesthetic justification of life in The Birth of Tragedy, but Lukács nowhere mentions Nietzsche in the original text of The Theory of the Novel, and in any case even though Lukács’s modern hero only glimpses that which will make his life worthwhile, what he glimpses seems to be more the possibility of the reconciliation of his individual life with a welcoming nature rather than the transcendence of his individual life in the Schopenhauerian, Dionysian supercession of the principle of individuation. We will not pursue the further details of Lukács’s typology of the modern novel, his division of it into the genres of “abstract idealism,” “the Romanticism of disillusionment,” and the “attempted synthesis” epitomized by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.10 Instead, at this point we will turn to the later periods of Lukács’s work in aesthetics. Common to both his pre–World War II and post–World War II Communist aesthetics is the thought that art itself cannot change the world but can provide knowledge of the real conditions within which the social and economic transformation of bourgeois society must be effected; what differentiates his prewar from his postwar aesthetics of truth is that while in his defense of realism in the 1930s he treated art simply as a means for the cognition of the socioeconomic conditions of the world it reflects – his central term in all his later aesthetics is Wiederspiegelung, “reflection” or literally “mirroring” – in his later magnum opus on The Uniqueness of the Aesthetic it is the interrelation between the objective conditions of the external world and the human feelings that this world evokes that is the essential subject matter of art. Thus the emotions do enter into Lukács’s aesthetics, 9 10

Lukács, Theory of the Novel, p. 80. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, pp. 97–143.

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but ultimately as part of the cognitive content of art rather than as an essential aspect of the response to it. Lukács’s polemical works of the 1930s, however, written in Stalinist Moscow, tacitly recruit the emotional impact of art for political purposes. A characteristic work of this period is the 1934 essay “Art and Objective Truth,” which begins with the section “The Objectivity of Truth in the Epistemology of Marxism-Leninism,” according to which “the correct, comprehensive theory of reflection [Wiederspiegelung] has first arisen in dialectical materialism, in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.”11 After rejecting the alternative, “extreme” theories of reflection offered by “bourgeois aesthetics,” “on the one side remaining glued to immediate reality, on the other side the isolation from material reality of those moments that lead beyond immediacy,”12 Lukács gives his account of the “correct” understanding of artistic reflection: In spite of the fact that “every work of art must offer a nexus [Zusammenhang] that is closed, rounded off and completed in itself, and indeed one whose movement and structure is immediately evident,”13 nevertheless properly conceived works of art offer their audience a truer picture of reality than they could obtain on their own without the benefit of the art: Does not such a determination of the uniqueness of the work of art cancel out its character as a reflection of reality? By no means! The apparent closed-off character of the work of art, its apparent incomparability with reality rests precisely on the foundation of the artistic reflection of reality. For this incomparability is merely an illusion, even if a necessary illusion belonging to the essence of art. The effect of art, the complete engagement of the recipient in the effect of the work of art, his complete entrance into the uniqueness of the “particular world” of the work of art rests precisely on the fact that the work of art by its very nature offers a more true, more complete, more living, more moving reflection of reality than the recipient otherwise possesses, that it therefore leads him on the basis of his own experiences . . . beyond the limits of these experiences in the direction of a concrete insight into reality.14

The accuracy and emotional force of the presentation of the real world in the work of art in turn undermine the idea that works of art can be objective in the sense of being simply impartial, “the dead and false objectivity of an ‘impartial’ copy without a position [Stellungnahme], without a

11 12 13 14

Lukács, “Kunst und Objektive Wahrheit,” in Probleme des Realismus, pp. 5–46, at p. 5. Lukács, “Kunst und Objektive Wahrheit,” p. 11. Lukács, “Kunst und Objektive Wahrheit,” p. 14. Lukács, “Kunst und Objektive Wahrheit,” p. 15.

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direction, without a call to activity.” Rather, “as we already know through Lenin,” in a proper work of art what is conveyed to the audience is “a driving force present in reality itself, that is made conscious through the correct, dialectical reflection of reality” through which the audience “is led into action [Praxis].”15 On the basis of this understanding of the reality-reflecting and action-inducing character of genuine art, Lukács rejects the theory of “l’art pour l’art,” of art for art’s sake, of the “imperialist period” as a “haughty, parasitic separation of art from life, a denial of every objectivity of art, a glorification of the ‘sovereignty’ of the creative individual, a theory of the indifference of content and arbitrariness of form.”16 Here the emotional impact of art is being recognized with a vengeance, but for strictly political purposes. Lukács’s antipathy to the formal experimentation of twentiethcentury avant-garde art would endure throughout his career, but in The Uniqueness of the Aesthetic, the mature work of his post–World War II period, the simplicity of his Soviet-influenced earlier conception of realism and its call to action would be considerably refined, leading to a more sophisticated conception of artistic representation and differentiation between aesthetics and ethics, or between art and the call to action. In the mature work Lukács emphasizes that art represents not just external reality but the place of human feelings in the world in which human beings live; he recognizes that distinctive varieties of aesthetic form are necessary not for their own sake but for capturing and representing the interactions of objectivity and feeling; and he distinguishes more carefully than before between “the aesthetic [as] a distinctive kind of reflection of reality” and “the ethical by contrast [as] a reality itself, the practical realization of the human essence in its interactions with its fellow humans.”17 But this refinement of his view is accompanied with a reversion to an essentially cognitive approach to the place of emotions in art. As we saw in Volume 2, for many the metaphysical cognitivism of the aesthetics of German Idealism was replaced at the end of the nineteenth century by the theory that art is a form of cognition, but the cognition 15 16 17

Lukács, “Kunst und Objektive Wahrheit,” pp. 18–19. Lukács, “Kunst und Objektive Wahrheit,” p. 20. Georg Lukács, Ästhetik: In vier Teilen (Neuwied and Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1972), vol. IV, p. 12. This four-volume paperback edition is a slightly abridged version of the twovolume Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen of 1963 that was prepared by Ferenc Fehér under Lukács’s supervision before the latter’s death in 1971, and is what will be cited here.

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of human emotions. In his first Communist period Lukács had taken the alternative stance, although without much reference to this recent tendency in aesthetic theory, that art represents the external world of human actions and institutions. The centerpiece of his mature theory is a compromise between these two positions, still a thoroughly cognitivist theory of art but one that makes the interaction between human actions and institutions on the one hand and human feelings on the other the characteristic content of art. Lukács begins his theory by arguing that both science and art arise from everyday activities of work and representation, science striving for abstraction and generalization on the one hand and art self-consciously representing the position of human beings within the world through the depiction of individuals on the other hand. Thus he writes that “the deep truth to life [Lebenswahrheit ] of aesthetic reflection rests in the final analysis not on the fact that it always aims at the fate of the human species, but on the fact that it never separates this from the individuals that comprise this” species; “aesthetic reflection always displays humanity in the form of individuals and individual fates.”18 Art is in all its phases a social phenomenon. Its object is the foundation of the social existence of human beings: society in the metabolism [Stoffwechsel] of nature, naturally mediated through relations of production, through the relations of human beings to one another that are conditioned by these relations. Such a socially general object cannot possibly be adequately reflected in the mere particularity of enduring subjects; in order to attain here a level of approximate adequacy the aesthetic subject must form itself here in the moments of a human generalization, of suitability to the species. But as aesthetic it cannot deal with the abstract concept of the species, but with concrete, sensory, individual human beings, in whose character and fate the current characteristics and the currently attained developmental level of the species is contained concretely and sensorily, individually and immanently.19

Lukács’s emphasis on the representation of general human characteristics through the actions and fates of individual human beings in art and his contrast of this to the generalizing character of scientific theory stand firmly within the tradition of Neo-Kantianism, particularly the Southwest Neo-Kantianism of Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich

18 19

Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 155. Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. I, pp. 157–8.

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Rickert,20 and beyond that within the tradition of Baumgarten’s contrast between abstract “logical cognition” and concrete “aesthetic cognition,” although Lukács acknowledges his debt to neither of these predecessors. Lukács’s emphasis on the importance of individuals as composing the species and not just representing the species, as if the latter were ontologically more fundamental than the former, is also reminiscent of a text that he did write about, although critically, during his most orthodox Communist period, namely, Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education, which had presented the emphasis on concrete individuals in the arts as a corrective to the revolutionary tendency to sacrifice living individuals for the sake of the abstraction of the species.21 Although Lukács was to separate aesthetics from ethics and politics more firmly in his mature work than had Schiller, whose point had indeed been to argue that political progress could occur only through aesthetic education, perhaps his emphasis on the importance of the artistic representation of the human species and its condition only through the representation of concrete individuals and their fates was intended to distance himself from the excesses of the Leninist and Stalinist regimes, now over for ten years but hardly forgotten, in which living individuals were time and again sacrificed in the name of general goals such as collectivization, five-year plans, and so on. Be that as it may, the real advance in Lukács’s final aesthetic theory is in his emphasis that it not just individual human beings in their interactions with one another but human feelings in their interaction with external human circumstances that constitute the genuine subject matter of art. What has “central significance” for the “aesthetic reflection of reality” is that “it deals with the conduct, through which the objective reality and the internal world of the human being and its sensible way of appearing are truly mirrored [wahrheitsgetreu gespiegelt] and at the same time – inseparably from the truthfulness of the reflection – made sensible with a maximum of evocative power.”22 Lukács emphasizes that human subjectivity, self-consciousness in all of its dimensions, emotional

20

21

22

See particularly, Heinrich Rickert, Limits of Concept-Formation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences, ed. and trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter VI. For Lukács’s view of Schiller in 1935, see “Zur Ästhetik Schillers,” in Georg Lukács, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Ästhetik (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 1954), pp. 11–96. Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. I, p. 255.

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as well as cognitive, is part of what must be represented in an objective representation of the human condition. Art should not represent human subjectivity alone, but must represent human subjectivity as part of the human condition: The determination of aesthetic subjectivity, above all as it appears in its adequate realization, in the work of art, as the self-consciousness of the human species (as “re-collection” [Er-Innerung] of the path that has been followed in its development and its stages) confirms and concretizes our results thus far concerning its essential character. The extensive analysis of externalization as a necessary stage toward the attainment of true aesthetic subjectivity shows how false those theories are that seek to find the way that leads to this in a mere deepening of subjectivity in itself.23

In this context, Lukács argues that he is improving on Hegel’s aesthetics in two ways: On his account, the subject matter of art is the development of the human species in all the complexity of its biological, ecological, economical, and political relationships, including the contradictions therein that have needed and still need to be overcome, not the development of a metaphysical abstraction such as “Spirit,” and, second, the representation of human feelings about their situation is an essential part of the concrete representation of the human condition.24 Lukács does not entirely surrender his view of the 1930s that the artistic depiction of the human condition will have an effect on human action, but he now plays down the immediacy of this effect by characterizing artistic reflection as “evocative” rather than as leading immediately to “praxis”: As we have repeatedly been able to establish, the essence of aesthetic representation rests precisely on its elevating the sensory, sense-impacting [sinnlich-sinnfällig] unity of the human and its complete, contradiction-full richness to an evocative effect. This qualitative transformation of the immediately bound stuff of life is aimed at so guiding the experience of reception that the human unity of content – be this so full of contradiction as it may – attains an elevated unity through a unifying creation of form [Formbildung]. In the subjective dialectic the Hegelian unity and separation of that which is to be distinguished and that which is not to be distinguished receive an entirely special aspect: the self-consciousness that differentiates itself as contemplation from itself as the whole, undifferentiated complex of human forms of externalization, which cognizes itself and objectifies this self-reflection, is aimed at attaining the highest possible universalization, i.e., lending 23 24

Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. II, p. 133. See Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. II, pp. 129–33.

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the aesthetic formation [Gebilde] the most intensive and enduring effect that is thinkable.25

This can only be achieved by including powerful representations of human feelings, but of human feelings in interaction with external conditions and thus as part of the larger human reality, in works of art. Two points about this position already alluded to should be emphasized. First, Lukács now clearly recognizes that art achieves this goal not just through the inclusion of representations of human emotions but through the use of its various formal devices for the expression of emotions. He maintains that the formal devices of art offer unique possibilities for the “expression and evocation” of feelings, although he continues to insist that “the most virtuoso mastery of forms, the most spirited invention of new possibilities for effects is only a . . . ‘ringing shell’” if it is not deployed in behalf of the “unfolding of concrete humanness”; it is “the artistic revelation of this content that first makes mimesis into the fundamental fact of the aesthetic.”26 Thus Lukács continues to resist formal experimentation for its own sake, or any suggestion that there can be a free play of our mental powers with forms of appearance that is intrinsically satisfying and worth our investment of time and resources independently of its cognitive and ultimately practical benefits. In the history of art, he suggests, purely internal issues of formal innovation may move the dialectic forward for “relatively short stretches,” but in the longer run such movements end “in artistic nothingness,” and the “real fundamental principle” of the dialectic of art history must be “sociallyhistorically determined.”27 But second, in spite of his emphasis on the “social-historical” significance of the “evocative” power of art, Lukács emphasizes that we must always remain aware of the difference between the artistic representation of the conditions of human existence and the ethical transformation of these conditions. Importantly, in his late work Lukács emphasizes that precisely because ethics, unlike art, aims directly at the actual transformation of human reality, but the ideal resolution of the contradictions of human existence can never be immediately and completely realized, we must always remain aware of the “only hypothetical, only postulative” character not of artistic but of moral goals. That “ethical praxis . . . can have only an approximating character is self-evident.”28 25 26 27 28

Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. II, p. 146. Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. II, pp. 154–5. Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. II, p. 161. Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. IV, p. 13.

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Here Lukács was quietly making a plea for the constraint of political action by ethical considerations and particularly by the realization of the ideal character of ethical goals and thus the uncertainties of how best to realize them that was by no means characteristic of orthodox Communist regimes or of his own Communist orthodoxy of his earlier years. An obvious objection to Lukács’s emphasis on the reflection of human reality as the essential content of all art is suggested not by cases of nonrepresentational work within media that can also be used for representation – such cases Lukács can simply dismiss as degenerate – but rather by those artistic media that seem essentially nonrepresentational (or representational only in borderline or degenerate cases), such as instrumental music (where the narrative tone poem seems a borderline and short-lived genre). Lukács recognized the importance of this objection; indeed, while dropping much of the rest of his discussion of particular artistic media from the abridged version of The Uniqueness of the Aesthetic he retained his detailed discussion of music in order to forestall such an objection. His defense of his theory against the objection that might be suggested by the apparently nonrepresentational character of instrumental music has two prongs. On the one hand, he argues that music does present a “world,” although a formal world, or at least aspects of the formal structure of a real world. Appealing to a remark by Marx that “time is the space of human development,” Lukács argues that at least part of the aesthetic effect of music results from exploiting and exploring the temporal character of human existence and consciousness, a necessary structural feature of any representation of a world.29 On the other hand, Lukács appeals to the entire tradition from Aristotle to Schopenhauer in behalf of the “self-evidence, which seems to be in no need of argument, that [music is] a reflection, indeed a reflection of the human inner life,” that is, that music is mimesis of the emotions.30 He appeals to Aristotle’s remark that “rhythms and melodies present themselves as images of the true essence of anger and gentleness as well as of courage and moderation and their counterparts,”31 and to “even such a prominent representative of epistemological subjectivity and philosophical irrationalism as Schopenhauer,” who “founded his otherwise 29 30 31

Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. II, pp. 256–9. Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. III, p. 75. Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. III, p. 77, citing Aristotle’s Politics, VIII.5, 1340a19–21; Benjamin Jowett translated the passage as “supply imitations of anger” rather than “present themselves as images of the true essence of ”; see The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, p. 2126.

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phantasmagorical and metaphysical theory of music on its mimetic character.” Lukács rejects Schopenhauer’s “phantasmagorical and metaphysical” theory that what music represents is the noumenal will that is the arational basis of phenomenal appearance, but he takes this absurd metaphysics to be Schopenhauer’s distorted recognition of the empirically indisputable fact that music does represent human “interiority as such,”32 to be understood in terms of concrete human emotions rather than metaphysical abstractions. Whether this is a plausible defense of the mimetic character of instrumental music, especially of much twentieth-century instrumental music, could obviously be debated. We cannot pursue this debate here; Lukács’s defense of the mimetic character of music has been adduced only to demonstrate the consistency of his cognitive approach to the experience of art in general, and his refusal to be tempted even by such an obvious case as that of instrumental music to allowing any room for the pleasure of the free play of our mental capacities into his theory of the aesthetic, or to transposing emotional impact from the subject matter of art to its effect. In this, as we have seen, he is only following in the tradition established by Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, in spite of his rejection of their versions of idealism in the name of the materialism to which he hitched his wagon for so much of his life. Having chronicled Lukács’s half-century career through the turmoils of twentieth-century Marxism, I will eschew further discussion of Marxist aesthetics, whether more orthodox or less, until I return to the loosely Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt school, Adorno and Marcuse.33 At this point, I will instead turn to another German thinker – German not just in his language but in his birth and every aspect of his being – who utterly rejected play in favor of truth in aesthetic experience, although he held 32 33

Lukács, Ästhetik, vol. IV, p. 78. I discussed the debate between Lukács and the Marxist but less “realist” poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht in “Aesthetics between the Wars: Art and Liberation,” in Thomas Baldwin, editor, The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 721–36, at pp. 722–6. For selections of materials from Marxist aesthetics, see Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, new edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), sections IIA, IIID, IVB–D, and VC, and Ronald Taylor, trans. ed., Aesthetics and Politics, with an afterword by Frederic Jameson (London: NLB, 1977). For discussion, see Armstrong, Radical Aesthetic, chapter 1; Henri Arvon, Marxist Esthetics, trans. Helen Lane, intro. Frederic Jameson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973); Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach, trans. Anna Bostock (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959); and Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).

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a very different conception of truth than Lukács’s social and psychological conception of truth and a conception that Lukács could also reject as “phantasmagorical and metaphysical,” namely, Martin Heidegger.

2. Heidegger No philosopher of the twentieth century was more controversial than Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). For some, he was the most important philosopher of the century, with great influence not only in Germany but also in France, Italy, many quarters in the United States, and elsewhere. For others, he was a philosophical obscurantist and at best a political opportunist, at worst a committed Nazi. Obviously we will not engage the debate about Heidegger’s overall significance as a philosopher here. In this narrative Heidegger figures as another representative of the post-Kantian German tradition in aesthetics who rejects the concept of play and the associated concept of “aesthetic experience” in the strongest possible terms – the latter as part of his general rejection of Neo-Kantianism – and commits himself unreservedly to an aesthetics of truth, based on a distinctive conception of truth. As Heidegger repeatedly asserts in his central text in aesthetics, three lectures on “The Origin of the Work of Art” originally delivered in the mid-1930s during the Nazi regime, but first published only in 1950, “The artwork opens up, in its own way, the being of beings,” and “Art is the setting-itself-[in]to-work of truth.”34 The task for this section will be to figure out what Heidegger’s particular version of the aesthetics of truth is and where it stands in the history of the aesthetics of truth. Heidegger was born in Meßkirch, in the Black Forest region of what is now the state of Baden-Württemberg, about a hundred kilometers from the university town of Freiburg im Breisgau, where he would spend much of his career and life. In 1909, after completing his studies at gymansia in Konstanz and Freiburg, he began a novitiate with the Jesuits but was soon dismissed because of a heart condition that would later keep him out of the German army in World War I. He then enrolled in the university at Freiburg, first studying theology but then switching to philosophy, in which Heinrich Rickert was his main teacher. He earned a doctorate in 1913 with the work “The Doctrine of 34

Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–56, at p. 19. This volume is a translation of Holzwege, the first edition of which was published by Vittorio Klostermann in Frankfurt am Main in 1950.

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the Judgment in Psychologism” and his habilitation only two years later, under Rickert, for the work “The Theory of Categories and Meaning of Duns Scotus.” In 1916, Edmund Husserl succeeded Rickert in Freiburg, and after the war Heidegger became his assistant and began giving his own lectures. In 1923 he was appointed to a professorship extraordinarius in Marburg, and in 1927 to the main chair in philosophy there. In order to qualify for that appointment, he published a book based on his lectures that would become his enduring magnum opus, Being and Time. The book as published was only a third of what Heidegger then intended, but it was destined to remain, like Baumgarten’s Aesthetica or Lukács’s later The Uniqueness of the Aesthetic, an incomplete torso. In 1928, after just one year in this position, Heidegger was called back to Freiburg as Husserl’s successor. In 1929 Heidegger published a monograph, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics; thereafter most of his publications would be short speeches or collections of essays until in 1961 he published a stout two-volume edition of his lectures on Nietzsche originally given during the 1930s. This publication would set the pattern for the massive posthumous edition of Heidegger’s Collected Edition,35 which includes more than forty volumes of his lectures, mostly offering his distinctive interpretations of selected main figures from the history of philosophy. Among the most notorious of Heidegger’s published speeches was the inaugural address he gave on May 27, 1933, after his election as rector of the university in Freiburg on April 21. In between, on May 3, he had become a member of the Nazi Party. He resigned his position as rector after one year, after refusing to remove the deans of the medical and law faculties, but remained in his position as professor throughout the Third Reich and delivered prominent lectures in both Germany and Italy. In 1944, like many other fifty-five-year-old men, he was drafted into the Volkssturm, or defense force, and stationed in Alsace. He returned to Freiburg in 1945, but in 1946 Heidegger, who even though he had given up his position as rector had never withdrawn from the Nazi Party, was forbidden to continue teaching by the Allied occupying authorities (the French in Baden-Württemberg). His right to teach was restored in 1949, but he became emeritus in 1951. However, he continued to lecture in Freiburg for at least two more decades, before dying in 1976 at the age of eighty-seven (thus having

35

Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977–), 102 volumes foreseen.

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long outlived the heart condition that had kept him out of both the Jesuits and World War I).36 It is a matter of continuing debate whether or not Heidegger’s work after the early or mid-1930s represents a fundamental departure from the standpoint of Being and Time, but either way the later work cannot 36

The biographical data are based on Heidegger Lesebuch, ed. Günter Figal (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), pp. 375–82. The literature on Heidegger is of course vast. Some general works on his philosophy are William Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963); Werner Marx, Heidegger and the Tradition, trans. Theodor Kisiel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971); Otto Pöggeler, Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1987); Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Theodor Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John Stanley (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1994); William D. Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Mark A. Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On the issue of Heidegger and Nazism, see Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, trans. Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); Hans D. Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Julian Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Monographs on Heidegger and aesthetics include Otto Pöggeler, Die Frage nach der Kunst: Von Hegel zu Heidegger (Freiburg: Alber, 1984); Joseph J. Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Art Works (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985); Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, Heideggers Philosophie der Kunst, second edition (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994); Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, translated and with an introduction by Jeff Fort (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); and Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Two collections of essays are The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed., Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), chapter 2; Brigitte Scheer, Einführung in die philosophische Ästhetik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), ch. VI; Andrew Bowie, Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), ch. 6 and 7; Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), ch. 5; Ekbert Faas, The Genealogy of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 14–16; and Thomas Wartenberg, “Heidegger,” in Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, second edition (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 147–68.

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be understood apart from the earlier work, so even though aesthetics is not discussed in it at all, we will need to consider Being and Time at least briefly before turning to “The Origin of the Work of Art.” My approach here will be that at least this later work in aesthetics is continuous in spirit with what Heidegger actually accomplished in the earlier work, even if not what he might have intended to accomplish in that work. Heidegger begins Being and Time with the proposal to “raise anew the question of the meaning of Being”37 (Sein) as opposed to the particular kinds of beings (seienden) studied in the various sciences and disciplines, a question that he claims “has today been forgotten,”38 that indeed he would later claim had largely been forgotten since Plato attacked Presocratic philosophy. But he proposes to approach this mysterious question through a preliminary study of the kind of being that raises the question about what being itself is, namely, the human being, or what Heidegger calls Dasein – a term that in ordinary and previous academic German (for example, in Kant) just means “existence” and can be used interchangeably with the latinate “Existenz,” but that Heidegger appropriates to designate human beings because they are the only beings that can have an awareness of their own being and thus appreciate what Heidegger takes to be the literal meaning of Dasein, “being there” (da sein). “Thus to work out the question of Being adequately,” Heidegger says, “we must make an entity – the inquirer – transparent in his own Being.”39 All of what Heidegger actually wrote of Being and Time is then dedicated to his preliminary analysis of Dasein rather than the intended analysis of Sein, and understanding the analysis of Dasein does not depend upon Heidegger’s claim that philosophy since Plato has forgotten the question of Dasein itself. The analysis of Dasein in turn takes the form of a phenomenological analysis of human experience, that is, neither a scientific account of human life and the conditions of its possibility nor an epistemological analysis of human judgments and the conditions of the possibility of their justification but a description of the most fundamental features of human experience as they present themselves to consciousness and form the basis of all other forms of human inquiry. In adopting this phenomenological approach Heidegger was influenced by Husserl, to whom indeed Being and Time was dedicated, although while Husserl’s phenomenology, originally intended as a purely methodological approach without any particular 37

38 39

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 19. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 21. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 27.

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metaphysical commitments, had gradually evolved in the direction of Kantian transcendental idealism, Heidegger used phenomenology as a weapon against his main contemporary target, namely, Neo-Kantianism, arguing that a dispassionate analysis of the phenomenology of human experience reveals that external objects present themselves to us directly without any intermediary such as Humean “impressions,” Kantian “representations,” or the like. Heidegger’s realism was not in fact atypical of the response in the 1920s to the revival of Kantianism in Germany or Hegelianism in Britain and America during the preceding decades, although his route to realism through phenomenology, which had arguably become a form of idealism in the hands of Husserl, was certainly distinctive.40 Indeed, perhaps the most central idea of Being and Time is that truth should not be understood as a correspondence between some form of internal representation and an external reality, a correspondence that always remains mediated and problematic, but rather that truth is in the first instance something provided by objects that reveal or “uncover” themselves to us. According to Heidegger, “Being-true is αληθυειν in the manner of αποϕαινεσθαι – of taking entities out of their hiddenness and letting them be seen in their unhiddenness (their uncoveredness),” and truth in the usual philosophical sense as a property of beliefs or propositions, namely, their correspondence with some reality other than themselves, is entirely dependent on the primordial attitude of letting things as they actually are appear to us: the truth of a “λογος” or proposition is dependent upon “αποϕανσις” or letting things themselves appear to

40

For evidence that the attack upon representationalism was already well established in Anglophone philosophy by the 1880s, see Andrew Seth, Scottish Philosophy: A Comparison of the Scottish and German Answers to Hume, second edition (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1890). While Neo-Kantianism was flourishing in Germany, Seth was arguing that while Kant’s analysis of the logical structure of judgment was superior to that of Thomas Reid, the realism of Reid (and of Hegel, as Seth understood him) was superior to the idealism that Kant took over from Berkeley and Hume. Heidegger’s realist attack upon NeoKantianism was thus part of a larger movement. Among subsequent manifestations of this realist response to idealism, one can think of G.E. Moore’s famous “Refutation of Idealism,” Mind 12 (1903): 433–53, and the “critical realism” of Roy Wood Sellars; see Sellars, Critical Realism: A Study of the Nature and Conditions of Knowledge (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1916). For an interpretation of Heidegger as aiming to refute the idealism of Husserl and before him of the philosophical tradition culminating in Kant, but as also failing to liberate himself from idealism completely, see A.W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 459–92, especially pp. 485–92. In his lucid but concise account, Moore does not explicitly mention the Neo-Kantianism of Heidegger’s first teacher, Rickert, as among his targets.

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us as they really are.41 “The Origin of the Work of Art” is subsequently based on this conception of truth: Its argument is that art is a, if not the primary, vehicle through which the most basic truths about the human condition reveal themselves to us. It might seem as if getting at the truth about anything, whether particular beings or Being itself, should thus be a simple matter of simply leaning back and opening our eyes, or our mind’s eye, and letting things as they really are uncover themselves to us. But it is not so simple, according to Heidegger, for although it is entirely characteristic of human beings to inquire, into particular things but into Being itself as well, it is also a fundamental feature of Dasein that it puts barriers between itself and either beings as they really are or Being itself by readily accepting without independent scrutiny views of things that they have inherited from those around them, who have in turn inherited their views from those around them, and so on; thus letting things as they are simply reveal their true nature is far from easy. Heidegger’s description of the ways in which Dasein is blocked from a clear view of reality, its own reality and the reality of things around it, is thus the first and in many ways most influential part of his phenomenological analysis of Dasein, which was in turn supposed to be the preliminary to a phenomenological analysis of Sein itself. We need not involve ourselves in all of the details of Heidegger’s phenomenology of Dasein in order to understand the argument of “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Heidegger gives a nice summary of the essentials of this phenomenology in the discussion of truth that has just been cited, which in turn appears in the chapter “Care as the Being of Dasein.” He begins this chapter by summing up his previous results in the statement that “Dasein’s ‘average everydayness’ can be defined as ‘Being-in-the-world which is falling and disclosed, thrown and projected, and for which its ownmost potentiality-for-Being is an issue, both in its Being alongside the ‘world’ and in its Being-with Others.”42 He expands on this statement and the concepts it employs subsequently. First, “To Dasein’s state of being, disclosedness in general essentially belongs,” or Dasein’s being “embraces the whole of that structure-of-Being which has become explicit through the phenomenon of care.”43 By “care” Heidegger means the fact that the world of both things and others around us presents itself to us as 41 42 43

Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 262; see also pp. 56–7. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 225. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 264.

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something about which we know at some level that we can either just accept as it is or with respect to which we can exercise freedom of choice, a recognition that can fill us with the anxiety of having to make our own choices and depart from the status quo, on the one hand, a fact on which Heidegger lays great stress,44 but, one should think, with joy at the same possibility of making our own choices and departing from the status quo, on the other hand, a fact that Heidegger does not stress. One point that should be added here is that the things of the world in the first instance characteristically present themselves to us as “equipment” (Zeug) or instruments, that is, as things whose usefulness and design for our various pragmatic purposes are more immediately apparent to us than what they may be in themselves.45 Other people, of course, can also present themselves to us more immediately as instruments for our own purposes, or as ones who would use us as instruments for their purposes, than as what they might be in their own right. Second, Heidegger states, that “To Dasein’s state of Being belongs thrownness; indeed it is constitutive for Dasein’s disclosedness. In thrownness is revealed that in each case Dasein, as my Dasein and this Dasein, is already in a definite world and alongside a definite range of definite entities within-the-world.” Further, to Dasein’s state of Being belongs falling. Proximately and for the most part Dasein is lost in its ‘world’. Its understanding, as a projection upon the possibilities of Being, has diverted itself thither. Its absorption in the ‘they’ signifies that it is dominated by the way things are publicly interpreted. That which has been uncovered and disclosed stands in a mode in which it has been disguised and closed off by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. Being toward entities has not been extinguished, but it has been uprooted. Entities have not been completely hidden; they are precisely the sort of thing that has been uncovered, but at the same time they have been disguised. They show themselves, but in the mode of semblance.46

By the “they” Heidegger means the world of meanings and norms presented to us throughout our lives by other people, which we have a tendency to accept as it is presented to us without questioning it or thinking it through on our own.47 Thus by the two statements together Heidegger means that our surroundings always present themselves to us as a complex 44 45 46 47

Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 227–34. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 96–102. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 264. See Heidegger, Being and Time, Part I, Division I, Ch. IV, “Being-in-the-World as Beingwith and Being-One’s-Self. The ‘They,’” pp. 149–68.

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of things and people whose purposes and norms are already established, and that as human beings we have an inherent tendency to take all this for granted and thus to live a life whose purposes and norms are already defined without any choice on our part: we tend to fall in, we might say, with the social and economic (in the broadest possible sense) world into which we find ourselves thrown. However, Heidegger also holds, “To Dasein’s state of Being belongs projection – disclosive Being towards its potentiality-for-Being. As something that understands, Dasein can understand itself in terms of the ‘world’ and Others or in terms of its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.”48 In other words, it is fundamentally characteristic of human beings that although they always find themselves in a world of already-constituted meanings and norms, they also always have the capacity for self-awareness and for questioning – remember that Dasein was originally introduced into Heidegger’s argument precisely because it is the being that can ask the question of the meaning of Being – and thus the capacity to ask whether they should accept things as the instruments as which they initially present themselves or let other potentialities in those things disclose themselves, whether they should accept other people in the instrumental relations in which they initially present themselves or let the possibilities of other relations with those people disclose themselves. Human beings find themselves thrown into a world and certainly have the tendency simply to fall in with it, but they also have the power to step back from that world and let the possibility of its real nature and the other potentialities inherent in that disclose themselves. People do not have to accept things and people, including themselves, just as they seem to be, but can let the truth – or other truths – about those things uncover or reveal themselves, although that takes action and effort on their part, the action and effort of breaking free from the received way of looking at things. Heidegger often refers to a life in which a person simply falls in with the world in which he finds himself thrown as “inauthentic” and one in which a person does not just understand itself in terms of “the ‘world’ and Others” as they are given but rather grasps “its ownmost potentialityfor-Being,” presumably its ownmost potentiality for being as it would like to be, as “authentic disclosedness.”49 Remarkably, however, Heidegger also says that in order to use “falling” and the other terms that describe our presumably inauthentic existence “we must avoid giving [them] 48 49

Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 264. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 264.

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any . . . negative ‘evaluation.’ To be closed off and covered up belongs to Dasein’s facticity.”50 I have elided the word “ontically” between “any” and “negative ‘evaluation’” because I have not defined it. But while Heidegger uses the word “moral” only half a dozen times in Being and Time, and this is not one of the places he uses it, presumably what he means here is that as a phenomenologist he is refraining from any moral judgment that it is better to live an authentic life than to live an inauthentic one: He is simply dispassionately describing the alternatives that the nature of human life affords us. Just as his emphasis on anxiety at the thought of our freedom but suppression of the possibility of joy at that same freedom suggests ambivalence about the value of living an active and authentic life, so does Heidegger’s neutral stance here between “falling” and “projection” suggest such ambivalence. Heidegger’s ambivalence toward the exercise of personal freedom may well have been connected with his embrace or at least acceptance of Nazism; be that as it may, it certainly seems connected with his remarkable lack of emphasis on the free creativity of the artist and the audience in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” with his utter rejection of art as a form of play in favor of it as a vehicle for the knowledge of truth, but of truth that almost seems to reveal itself through a self-creating work of art rather than being actively sought by free human agents. This is one continuity between Heidegger’s stance in Being and Time and his aesthetics in the mid-1930s and after. Another is that although while in Being and Time Heidegger had apparently engaged in the analysis of Dasein only as a prelude to the unwritten analysis of Sein itself and seems in his subsequent works, including the work in aesthetics, to turn directly to Sein itself, in fact the truth that Heidegger describes as disclosed in and through art in “The Origin of the Work of Art” is the truth about the nature of the human world and its relation to the natural world. Rather than having turned from the nature of human being as a mere prelude to the nature of being itself in his work before 1930 to the nature of being itself in his work after 1930, Heidegger seems rather to have decided after 1930 that the real nature of human being is being itself and thus the ultimate subject for philosophical analysis. At least Heidegger’s work in aesthetics will here be approached on this premise. Before we see what sort of aesthetics the “Origin of the Work of Art” advocates, we may look briefly at a contemporaneous piece, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” to see what sort of aesthetics Heidegger 50

Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 264–5.

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decisively rejects, namely, any form of the aesthetics of play. Heidegger organizes this essay around five quotations from the poet Hölderlin, about whom Heidegger lectured and wrote much during the 1930s and 1940s, rather than the metaphysician and aesthetician Hölderlin upon whom we briefly touched in Volume 2. The first of these quotations was a remark in a letter to his mother in which Hölderlin called poetry “this most innocent of our affairs,” and the last two the conclusion to his poem “Andenken” (which might be translated “In memoriam”), “But that which endures, is founded by the poets,” and lines from another poem, “Full of merit, yet poetically, mankind lives on this earth.”51 In spite of calling poetry innocent, Heidegger claims, Hölderlin cannot have meant that “our existence” (here Heidegger uses Dasein in its ordinary sense) “is really only a harmless game” (Spiel).52 He continues: Poetry looks like a game (ein Spiel) yet it is not. Play (Das Spiel) brings people together, to be sure, but in such a way that each thereby precisely forgets himself. In poetry, by contrast, the human being is recalled to the ground of his existence. He comes therein to rest, to be sure not to the merely apparent rest of inactivity and emptiness of all thought, but to that infinite rest, in which all powers and dispositions are mobile (regsam).53

The last clause of this remark, while obscure, suggests that Heidegger recognizes that some form of activity may be essential to the experience of poetry and thus to aesthetic experience, and thus might seem to imply some acknowledgment on his part of the sheer pleasure of mental activity, one of the central ideas of the aesthetics of play throughout its history. But Heidegger supposes that playing is an obstacle to being open to the truth, and the core of his reflection on Hölderlin is that poetry is a revelation of truth, and that our experience of poetry is marked not so much by our own activity as a temporal experience as by evanescence as a temporal phenomenon, the short-livedness of our awareness of truth in our ordinary lives even when poetry can raise us to this awareness for a moment. The heart of the essay is this comment on the line “But that which endures, is founded by the poets”: With this saying light comes to our question about the essence of poetry. Poetry is founding (Stiftung) through the word and in the word. What is so founded? That which endures. But can that which endures then be 51

52 53

Heidegger, “Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung,” in Heidegger Lesebuch, ed. Figal, pp. 135– 48, at pp. 135, 136, 141, 142. Heidegger, “Hölderlin,” p. 143. Heidegger, “Hölderlin,” p. 145.

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founded? Is it not that which is always already to hand? No! Precisely the enduring must be brought to rest against progress; the simple must be wrung out of confusion, measure must be opposed to the measureless. What the beings [das Seiende] as a whole can bear and rule must come into the open. Being [Das Sein] must be disclosed so that the beings appear. But this enduring is the fleeting. “So everything heavenly is quickly transitory; but not in vain” . . . The poet names the gods and names all things in that which they are. This naming does not consist in something already known merely being supplied with a name, but in the poet speaking the essential word and through this naming first naming the being as what it is. Thus does it become known as something that is [Seiendes].54

A certain effort is here attributed to the poet, to be sure, the effort to wring some sort of truth about the real nature of things and their ground in being out of all “confusion” (Verwirrung), presumably the confusion of everyday life as we find ourselves “thrown” and “fallen” into it along lines already determined by the “they,” presumably already determined for them by an earlier “they,” and so on, ad infinitum. But what the poet achieves by this effort seems strictly to be a piece of knowledge, not an invention that expresses his own freedom of imagination in any way, and what is offered to the presumed audience of the poem – Heidegger makes no mention of an audience at all – is not an occasion for the exercise of its own imagination and a stimulation to any activity of its own, but strictly a bit of insight, an evanescent one at that, to which it is apparently unable to hold on. (Heidegger thus agrees with Schopenhauer on the evanescence of aesthetic experience, although for Schopenhauer what is evanescent is peace while for Heidegger it is knowledge of the truth.) Heidegger’s explicit rejection of any serious role for play in aesthetic creation and experience in the “Hölderlin” essay complements his strictly cognitivist approach to art in the lectures “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Heidegger first gave a single lecture on this topic to the Society for the Discipline of Art in Freiburg in November 1935,55 and then expanded that into three lectures for the Free German Foundation in Frankfurt at the end of 1936; the material thus had some circulation in the 1930s, although it was not actually published until 1950.56 54 55

56

Heidegger, “Hölderlin,” p. 142. This version was published in Heidegger Studies 5 (1989): 5–22 and is reprinted in the Heidegger Lesebuch, ed. Günter Figal (Frankfurt an Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), pp. 149–70. In Holzwege; Holzwege means something like “timber tracks,” the later overgrown paths leading to clearings left in woodlands by earlier cuttings of timber; the English edition, as already noted, is called Off the Beaten Track. The version of “The Origin of the Work of Art” published in Holzwege was previously translated in Albert Hofstadter and Richard

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Heidegger revised the lectures very slightly for an edition in 1960 with a preface by his former student Hans-Georg Gadamer, to whom we will return in the following chapter.57 The present discussion will be based on the three-lecture version of the material. Continuing his tacit campaign against Kant and Neo-Kantianism, Heidegger begins by rejecting the idea that art can be defined through a conception of “aesthetic experience.” (Thus Heidegger’s argument is part of the larger attack on “subjectivist” aesthetics against which Johannes Volkelt was already defending the empathy theorists in 1920.) We should certainly not begin a phenomenological analysis of art by considering works of art as commercial commodities, for example; rather “we are required to take the works as they are encountered by those who experience and enjoy them.” Yet even this much-vaunted “aesthetic experience” cannot evade the thingliness of the artwork. The stone is in the work of architecture, the wooden in the woodcarving, the colored in the painting, the vocal in the linguistic work, the sounding in the work of music. The thingly is so salient in the artwork that we ought rather to say the opposite: the architectural work is in the stone, the woodcarving in the wood, the painting in the color, the linguistic work in the sound, the work of music in the note. . . . What, however, is this obvious thingliness in the artwork?58

Heidegger does not mean, as we shall see, that what art reveals to us is simply the physical nature of its own medium, although some of the leading critical theories of painting popular in the 1950s and 1960s, that is, shortly after the actual publication of Heidegger’s lecture, held precisely this.59 Rather, what the “thingly” in a work of art is will be revealed by an analysis of in what sense the work of art is actually a work. That would suggest that there should be a considerable emphasis on the creative activity at least of the artist if not of the audience in Heidegger’s account. In fact, as the quotation already hints, and as we have already seen in the Hölderlin essay, the creative work of the artist tends to disappear from Heidegger’s account, or to be confined to the activity, such as it might

57

58 59

Kuhns, Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (New York: Modern Library, 1964), a widely circulated volume. Heidegger, Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerks, with an introduction by Hans-Georg Gadamer (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1960). Heidegger, “Origin,” Off the Beaten Track, p. 3. See especially Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), especially “‘American-Type’ Painting” (1955), pp. 208–29; and Michael Fried, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1965), and Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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be, that is necessary to let the truth that is the content of art reveal itself, presumably first to the artist and then through his preservation of that appearance of truth in some publicly accessible medium to an audience that is even more passive than the artist himself. Heidegger begins his analysis by rejecting three candidates for what might be involved in experiencing a work of art as a “thing”: He rejects first the idea that “thing” is just a placeholder for anything to which we might be able to refer or about which we might be able to think at all, because this will bring out nothing about what is distinctive about the thingliness of a work of art;60 he rejects next the idea of a thing as the subject of accidents or bearer of properties, because this also is too general;61 and he rejects finally the idea that a thing is intentionally formed matter, because this does not allow for an adequate distinction between the sort of thing that a work of art is and the sort of thing that a tool or piece of “equipment” designed for a specific practical purpose is. A piece of equipment, to be sure, “displays an affinity with the artwork in that it is something brought forth by the human hand,” but “The artwork, however, through its self-sufficient presence, resembles, rather, the mere thing which has taken shape by itself and is never forced into being.”62 This is Heidegger’s way of paying homage to the traditional view that the value of art is in some sense independent of ordinary pragmatic purposes, but here again, rather than taking the opportunity to say that a work of art is a product of human creativity, but of a special, free, playful sort of creativity that goes beyond ordinary practical purposes, Heidegger instead deemphasizes the role of creativity in the production of art and instead treats the work of art as if it is something that somehow reveals itself to us without much human effort, or in which the human effort is only one of uncovering rather than creating. Be that as it may, however, having first suggested that the thingliness of a work of art cannot be equated with that of a mere piece of equipment because that does not bring out the way in which a work of art is independent, or as Heidegger puts it, self-subsistent or resistant to mere pragmatic purposes, Heidegger turns around and extracts his account of the character of a work of art from an artistic representation of equipment. This is his famous account of Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting of shoes. Heidegger takes the represented shoes to be those of a peasant women, 60 61 62

Heidegger, “Origin,” Off the Beaten Track, pp. 4–5. Heidegger, “Origin,” Off the Beaten Track, pp. 6–7. Heidegger, “Origin,” Off the Beaten Track, p. 10.

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and what he argues is that from his painting the whole way of life and form of being of the peasant woman emerge: From out of the dark opening of the well-worn insides of the shoes the toil of the worker’s tread stares forth. In the crudely solid heaviness of the shoes accumulates the tenacity of the slow trudge through the far-stretching and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lies the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as the evening falls. The shoes vibrate with the silent call of the earth, its silent gift of the ripening grain, its unexplained self-refusal in the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread, wordless joy at having once more withstood want, trembling before the impending birth, and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth and finds protection in the world of the peasant woman.63

The art historian Meyer Schapiro criticized Heidegger’s interpretation of van Gogh’s painting on the ground that the shoes that van Gogh painted were not those of a peasant woman at all, but his own.64 On an ordinary understanding of artistic creation as the transformation of materials given by reality into works of the imagination, such a point would seem to be entirely irrelevant: that a Renaissance painter might have used his mistress, presumably not a virgin, as his model for a painting of the Virgin Mary would not by itself give us any reason to doubt the religious significance of the painting or even the sincerity of the artist in expressing his own religious belief, not just fulfilling a commission. Since Heidegger himself interprets artistic production not as the imaginative transformation of reality but as letting reality uncover itself, his fallacious assumption about the identity of the shoes van Gogh actually painted might be more damaging to his own account. But what is important here is the account of what is revealed by the work of art that Heidegger gives, whether it is justified or not: the interpretation of the essence of the particular character of “thingliness” of the work of art as revealing “earth” and “world.” By these terms Heidegger means that the work of art reveals the truth about the network of human feelings, intentions, and relations in which the purported owner and wearer of the shoes exists – her “world” – and the natural environment from which

63 64

Heidegger, “Origin,” Off the Beaten Path, p. 14. Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object – Note on Heidegger and van Gogh” (1968) and “Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh” (1994), in Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society; Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1994), vol. IV, pp. 135–42, 143–51.

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this network has emerged – “earth.” “The artwork lets us know what the shoes, in truth, are,”65 Heidegger writes, meaning that the depiction of the shoes in turn reveals the kind of human world in which they are embedded and the relation of that world to nature. Heidegger describes what is revealed by the shoes in terms of the account of truth that he had previously given in Being and Time: What is happening here? What is at work in the work? Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, in truth is. This being steps forth into the unconcealment of its being. The unconcealment is what the Greeks called αληθεια. We say “truth” and think little enough in using the word. In the work, when there is a disclosure of the being as what and how it is, there is a happening of truth at work. In the work of art, the truth of the being has set itself to work. . . . In the work, a being, a pair of peasant shoes, comes to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into the constancy of its shining. The essential nature of art would then be this: the setting-itself-to-work of the truth of beings.66

Heidegger’s work in the 1930s and later, especially the lectures on art, is often thought to represent a radical turn in his thought, from a focus on Dasein, or human being, to a direct address of the question of Sein, or being itself, for which in the incompleted project of Being and Time the analysis of Dasein was only supposed to be a prelude. But perhaps Being and Time remained uncompleted because Heidegger discovered that it is the real nature of human being that he meant to be discussing all along; in any case, the truth that “sets itself” into the work of art according to his analysis in 1935–6 is precisely the truth about a particular way of human life and its origins in a particular relation to nature. Heidegger insists that “the workliness of the work, the equipmentality of equipment, and the thingliness of the thing come nearer to us only when we think of the being of beings,”67 but in spite of the suggestion that there is something deeper about the “being of beings” to be revealed by art than the properties of objects as ordinarily understood, his actual description of the truth revealed by van Gogh’s painting makes it clear that it is the truth about a specific form of human being and human existing, not anything more – or less – profound and mysterious than that.

65 66 67

Heidegger, “Origin,” Off the Beaten Track, p. 15. Heidegger, “Origin,” Off the Beaten Track, p. 16. Heidegger, “Origin,” Off the Beaten Track, p. 18.

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The same conclusion may be drawn from Heidegger’s second famous example in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” his discussion of the aesthetic experience – to use the term that he disliked – this time of a work of nonmimetic art, namely, a work of architecture, specifically a Greek temple. Heidegger describes the experience of the temple as revealing both a way of human life and the character of nature itself: A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rocky, fissured valley. The building encloses the figures of a god and within this concealment, allows it to stand forth through the columned hall within the holy precinct. Through the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is, in itself, the extension and delimitation of the precinct as something holy.

However, the truth that is revealed by the temple as a work of art is not really a truth about the god as some form of being that is distinct from human being; rather, what the temple reveals is in the first instance the truth about a human way of life: The temple and its precinct do not, however, float off into the indefinite. It is the temple work that first structures and simultaneously gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire for the human being the shape of its destiny. The all-governing expanse of these open relations is the world of this historical people.68

The work of art may reveal the truth about the being of human beings, the Sein of Dasein, but what in fact that means is just that it reveals what is most essential about a human way of life. The temple also reveals something essential about nature, and specifically about the nature in which these people, the Greeks, lived, but again what it reveals about nature is not some mysterious form of Being that underlies it but rather what is most essential about it as it presents itself to us: The artifact paradoxically induces us to look at nature itself. Thus Heidegger continues: Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws out of the rock the darkness of its unstructured yet unforced support. Standing there, the building holds its place against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm visible in its violence. The gleam and luster of the stone, though apparently there only by the grace of the sun, in fact first bring forth the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of the air. . . . the Greeks called this coming forth and rising up in itself 68

Heidegger, “Origin,” Off the Beaten Path, pp. 20–1.

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and in all things ϕυσις. . . . We call this the earth. . . . Earth is that in which the arising of everything that arises is brought back – as, indeed, the very thing that it is – and sheltered.

Heidegger’s claim that the work in the work of art is setting truth in or into the work comes down to the claim that the work of art reveals to us in a way that nothing else quite does what is most essential about specific ways of human life and the nature (here he has explicitly equated “earth” with physis) in which they arise and perhaps what is essential to human life in general and to the nature in which human life in general takes place. So Heidegger’s account of the significance of our experience of art is strictly cognitivist: Art reveals these truths to us, and even when it depicts equipment it differs from mere equipment because its value lies not in its usefulness for some specific practical purpose but in the fact that it reveals such truth to us. Still, Heidegger’s emphasis on the work of art and his insistence on posing the question of what constitutes the “workliness” of the work might lead one to expect that he would also emphasize the element of human creativity embodied by a work of art, and might have found room for an emphasis on the freedom of imagination and thought expressed by an artist in creating a work and perhaps also experienced by an audience in responding to that work. But Heidegger deemphasizes that entirely; the work of the artist is precisely to let truth uncover or reveal itself and otherwise make himself and his own creativity as invisible as possible, and presumably the role of the audience for art is to do likewise. Thus the second of Heidegger’s lectures, entitled “The Work and Truth” (which contains the example of the Greek temple), which one might expect to emphasize the creativity of artistic work, begins precisely by making the artist disappear: Nothing can be discovered about the thingly aspect of the work until the pure standing-in-itself of the work has clearly shown itself. But is the work in itself ever accessible? In order for this to happen it would be necessary to remove the work from all relation to anything other than itself in order to let it stand on its own and for itself alone. But that is already the innermost intention of the artist. Through him, the work is to be released into its purest standing-in-itself. Precisely in great art (which is all we are concerned with here), the artist remains something inconsequential in comparison with the work – almost like a passageway which, in the creative process, destroys itself for the sake of the coming forth of the work.69 69

Heidegger, “Origin,” Off the Beaten Track, p. 19.

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It is hard to imagine a characterization of artistic creation that could play down the freedom of the artist more: Heidegger writes as if the work of art is not actually the product of human creativity, but rather something already there, just waiting for the veil to be drawn from it so that it can be seen for what it is – even though what it is is the revelation of a human world and a natural world as experienced by human beings. Heidegger ascribes no role whatever to the imaginative activity of the artist, let alone to that of the audience for art. The “work” of the artist becomes a pure act of cognition where cognition itself is understood entirely as a form of reception rather than of creation. It could be argued that the remarkable passivity expressed in Heidegger’s conception of art as an “uncovering” rather than making of truth is characteristic of his conception of human being as a whole, and that this pervasive feature of Heidegger’s philosophy made it easy for him to accommodate himself to the emergence of Nazism. We cannot pursue this speculation here, however. Instead, we will now turn to the work of one of Heidegger’s foremost students, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who took our creation of and relation to art as the example of our creation of and relation to meaningful action and our understanding of it in general, grounding his approach in Heidegger’s phenomenology of Dasein and above all his description of the temporality of our experience, but who also insisted upon the centrality of play to the creation and experience of art and thus to human action more generally. Gadamer continued Heidegger’s attack upon Neo-Kantianism, but as we have already seen, the Neo-Kantians for the most part had also eliminated play from their own conception of aesthetic creation and experience. In changing the terms of Heidegger’s attack upon the Neo-Kantians, Gadamer thus effected one of the major syntheses of the aesthetics of truth with the aesthetics of play in the twentieth century. Gadamer actually wrote much of his magnum opus before the Second World War but did not publish it until afterward. We shall therefore continue our discussion of him in a new chapter.

2 German Aesthetics after World War II

The dominant figures in German aesthetics after World War II were certainly Hans-Georg Gadamer, perhaps the most important student of Heidegger, and Theodor W. Adorno, the leading theorist of the Frankfurt school of “critical theory” after the war. Although Adorno, as both a Jew and a leftist, was forced to flee Germany in the 1930s and spent the war years in the United States, while Gadamer, a non-Jew who tried to remain apolitical and therefore could not get an academic appointment, was nevertheless able to ride out the war within Germany, there is a deep commonality in their thinking in general and in aesthetics in particular: Both take a deeply historical approach to art, seeing all art as expressing its time and therefore offering the possibility of knowledge of it. But Gadamer tries to assimilate that approach – which can be seen as deriving from Heidegger’s phenomenology of Dasein freed from its pretense of introducing an analysis of Sein – with the aesthetics of play that Heidegger had rejected, while Adorno did not, so that task was instead left to his Frankfurt school colleague Herbert Marcuse (also originally a student of Heidegger), who came to America but unlike Adorno stayed there after the war, although he continued to work within the tradition of German aesthetics. So he will be considered here along with Gadamer and Adorno, rather than in the subsequent discussion of American aesthetics. Several other German aestheticians associated with either Gadamer or Adorno as well as several others significant in postwar Germany will also be touched upon, although Gadamer, Adorno, and Marcuse will be the main characters in this chapter.

1. Gadamer Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) was born in Marburg, son of a chemist who was rector of the university, and earned his doctorate 43

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there in 1922 under the Neo-Kantian Paul Natorp, the most important of the first-generation Marburg Neo-Kantians after Hermann Cohen, who had retired (and moved to Berlin) in 1910. Excited by the paper “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle” that Heidegger had submitted in application for a position at Marburg, which Natorp let him see, Gadamer went to Freiburg in the summer of 1923 to study with Heidegger and returned with him to Marburg that fall when Heidegger was indeed awarded the position there. He then worked on his habilitation under Heidegger, completing it with a work on Plato’s Dialectical Ethics in 1931, after Heidegger had returned to Freiburg as Husserl’s successor. Gadamer then began to lecture in Marburg, where he languished as a Privatdozent for eight years, perhaps because he tried to keep his distance from the Nazi Party, before being appointed a professor at Leipzig in 1939. He was able to continue at Leipzig after the war and serve as rector precisely because he had not joined the party, but did not remain there after the establishment of the German Democratic Republic, first moving to Frankfurt am Main and then being appointed the successor to Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg in 1949. He would remain active in Heidelberg, long after he became emeritus, with many visits to the United States as well, until his death at the age of 102.1 Gadamer published the magnum opus on which his reputation rests, Truth and Method, only in 1960, after three decades of work, and the book’s origin in the Neo-Kantian debates of its author’s youth is evident in its references and its thesis;2 apart from numerous works of interpretation, 1

2

General works on Gadamer include Joel Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); Ingrid Scheibler, Gadamer: Between Heidegger and Habermas (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); and Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), which details the history of Gadamer’s careers during the 1930s and 1940s in chapters 10–12, and The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. Kathryn Plant (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). A monograph that places Gadamer’s hermeneutics against the background of Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher is Kristin Gjesdal, Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For collections, see The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Louis E. Hahn, Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 24 (LaSalle: Open Court, 1997); The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); and Günter Figal, Hans Georg-Gadamer: Wahrheit und Methode (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007). Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, second revised edition (London: Continuum, 2004), based on the fourth German edition as published in Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. I (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1985).

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especially on ancient philosophy and on Hegel, Gadamer’s work after Truth and Method consisted of restatements and defenses of his position in that book, the best known of these occurring in debate with the Frankfurt school of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas.3 The title is intended to signal the contrast between the “methods” of natural science and the different approach that is needed to understand the truth of meaningful human activity in art, history, and everyday life. In drawing this contrast, Gadamer is working within the tradition of Neo-Kantianism, although more the Southwest Neo-Kantianism of Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert than his own Marburg Neo-Kantianism, but the conception of meaningful human activity and its comprehension that he develops is based on Heidegger’s analysis of the character of human experience or Dasein. Gadamer calls his approach “hermeneutical,” meaning by this that we do not understand human affairs from a standpoint outside them, as if we were natural scientists studying some nonhuman phenomenon, but rather that we must always interpret human actions that take place within some cultural tradition from a standpoint within our own cultural tradition, whether that is the same as the tradition being interpreted or not; thus understanding the truth about meaningful human actions is not a matter of neutrally accumulating data and forming scientific hypotheses about recurring patterns within them, but rather a matter of becoming self-conscious about the tradition within which one finds oneself – the condition into which one finds oneself “thrown,” as Heidegger said in his dramatic language – and from there learning to appreciate the similarities and differences between one’s own cultural traditions and others. Gadamer offers his most general characterizations of what it is to understand hermeneutically early in Truth and Method, with a nod to Hegel, although he does not intend to appropriate all of Hegel’s metaphysics: Every single individual who raises himself out of his natural being to the spiritual finds in the language, customs, and institutions of his people a pre-given body of material which, as in learning to speak, he has to make his own. Thus every individual is always engaged in the process of Bildung and in getting beyond his naturalness, inasmuch as the world into which he is growing is one that is humanly constituted through language and custom.4 3

4

Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik, with contributions by Karl-Otto Apel, Claus von Bormann, Rüdiger Bubner, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans-Joachim Giegel, and Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971). Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 13.

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From a position that is already within a culture, a human individual has to learn to understand that culture. But not only his own culture; rather, the “general characteristic of Bildung” is “keeping oneself open to what is other – to other, more universal points of view. . . . This universality is by no means a universality of the concept or understanding. . . . The universal viewpoints to which the cultivated (gebildet) man keeps himself open are not a fixed applicable yardstick,” as a scientific concept might be, “but are present to him only as the viewpoints of possible others. Thus the cultivated consciousness has in fact more the character of a sense.”5 Gadamer takes it to be relatively easy for us to appreciate the character of human self-understanding and especially the way in which the comprehension of culture is more like a sense, although one that needs to be developed and refined in a lifelong process of learning than one that is, so to speak, ready to go as soon as it is switched on, in the sphere of art, and thus he used aesthetics as the paradigm for his account of our understanding of human history and of human communication in general. He also turns to aesthetics and specifically to the concept of taste as it had evolved from Balthasar Gracián6 in the seventeenth century to Kant7 in the eighteenth for an image of hermeneutical comprehension as a kind of judgment rather than a kind of sense, but again a kind of judgment that must be refined by practice rather than simply mechanically executed according to determinate rules, judging that “involves not merely applying the universal principle according to which it is judged, but co-determining, supplementing, and correcting that principle.”8 Truth and Method is therefore divided into three parts, the first “The question of truth as it emerges in the experience of art,”9 the second “The extension of the question of truth to understanding in the human sciences,”10 dealing primarily with our understanding of history but also including a section on “legal hermeneutics,” and the last 5 6

7 8 9 10

Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 16–17. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 31–2. Gracián (1601–58) was a Spanish Jesuit who wrote Arte de ingenio (1642), a work on literature and criticism; the Oráculo manual o arte de prudencia, or Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647), a work of aphorisms that was greatly admired by Schopenhauer and through him enjoyed considerable prestige among subsequent German intellectuals; and the Criticón (1651–7), a lengthy philosophical picaresque novel that anticipates eighteenth-century texts such as Voltaire’s Candide (it was translated into English as early as 1681). Gjesdal has emphasized the importance of Gracián in Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism, pp. 16–17 and 103–4. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 33–5. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 35. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 1–171. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 175–382.

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“The ontological shift of hermeneutics guided by language,”11 offering a general theory of language as a medium through which human experience is expressed and communicated. It is only relatively easy for us to understand even the case of aesthetic experience, however, because previous theorizing in aesthetics, especially by the Neo-Kantians, had taken art to be concerned with capturing Erlebnisse, particular experiences isolated from one another, rather than Erfahrung, the ongoing flow of human experience in all of its complexity and interrelationship; it is only when the content and appreciation of art are understood as experience in the fuller sense of Erfahrung that art can become a model for the comprehension of Dasein generally, that is, human experience in its culturally situated, temporally continuous form. Gadamer’s criticism that Neo-Kantian aesthetics portrayed art as concerned with isolated experiences rather than with the complex flow of human experience as an evolving, tradition-laden whole is a plausible criticism of such theories as those of Hermann Cohen and Jonas Cohn that were earlier discussed in Volume 2 of this work, although Gadamer mentions neither of these names in Truth and Method (perhaps omitting the former out of respect for his own Marburg background?). Whether it is plausible as a criticism of Dilthey is another question; the interpretation of Dilthey offered in the present work would suggest that it is not (and that Gadamer has actually reversed the senses of Erlebnis and Erfahrung as Dilthey had used them). Be that as it may, the distinction between the conception of experience as consisting of a series of isolated Erlebnisse that might be studied as if they were natural scientific data to be observed from the outside and the conception of it as consisting of the ongoing flow of Erfahrung that can only be studied and comprehended from a standpoint that must be extended and expanded from within is the foundation of Gadamer’s hermeneutical approach to human understanding in general. Like Heidegger, Gadamer set out from the debate about “subjectivism” and “objectivism” that we have already mentioned in connection with Volkelt. Gadamer refers to the specific theory according to which art captures Erlebnisse rather than Erfahrung as the “subjectivization” of aesthetics and holds Kant responsible for the inception of this diversion of aesthetic theory from its promising start as a model for hermeneutical understanding in general.12 Gadamer has a subtle interpretation of Kant, however, and traces the subjectivization of aesthetics partly to 11 12

Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 385–553. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 36, 37–70.

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Kant’s intentions but partly to the failure to appreciate the complex and progressive structure of Kant’s exposition of his theory of fine art in the third Critique. Kant is held directly responsible for the subjectivization of aesthetics insofar as he “discredit[ed] any kind of theoretical knowledge except that of natural science,” and thereby “compelled the human sciences to rely on the methodology of the natural sciences in conceptualizing themselves,” reducing what later generations would call “the ‘artistic element,’ ‘feeling,’ and ‘empathy’ [to] subsidiary elements.”13 But many subsequent readers of Kant, especially among the Neo-Kantians, also failed to recognize that Kant’s initial example of the free, entirely subjective play of our cognitive faculties with the forms of the “free beauties” of nature, devoid of all cultural and moral content, was only a methodological starting point chosen precisely because its very simplicity allows us to identify play as a necessary condition of aesthetic experience,14 and by no means exhausts Kant’s theory of fine art and our experience of it. For on Gadamer’s interpretation of Kant’s theory, its exposition moves through the moments of “dependent beauty,”15 which places our experience of art within the pragmatic and cultural contexts of Heideggerian “equipmentality,” of the “ideal of beauty,”16 which assigns morally significant content to fine art, and finally of the theory of genius, in which Kant characterizes both the creation and the reception of art as an experience of playing with the truth content of art.17 (Gadamer’s account of Kant’s expanding exposition of his theory of art thus anticipates the one given in this work.) Kant’s theory of genius in particular offers the possibility of understanding a crucial element in the creative production of rules evident both in creator and recipient, namely that there is no other way of grasping the content of a work than through the unique form of the work and in the mystery of its impression, which can never be fully expressed by any language. Hence the concept of genius corresponds to what Kant sees as the crucial thing about aesthetic taste, namely that it facilitates the play of one’s mental powers, increases the vitality that comes from the harmony between imagination and understanding, and invites one to linger before the beautiful. Genius is ultimately a manifestation of this vivifying spirit for, as opposed to the

13 14 15 16 17

Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 36–7. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 39. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 39–41. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 41–3. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 46–52.

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pedant’s rigid adherence to rules, genius exhibits a free sweep of invention and thus the originality that creates new models.18

Kant’s theory of genius could have offered the model for a general theory of hermeneutical understanding of the ongoing process of Bildung, or acculturation, in which individuals always start within a particular cultural position but through the development of self-consciousness about their culture have the potential to develop and innovate within it as well as to come to understand other cultures as well. However, although Kant himself intended not to be “deflected from transcendental inquiry and pushed into the cul-de-sac of a psychology of artistic creation,”19 Gadamer holds that his interpretation of genius as a gift of nature and his thesis that beautiful art must appear to us as if it were nature lead to the supposition that “whether in nature or art beauty has the same a priori principle, which lies entirely within subjectivity,” and thus that “Kant’s transcendental reflection on the a priori of judgment justifies the claim of aesthetic judgment, but basically it does not permit a philosophical aesthetics in the sense of a philosophy of art.”20 This subjectivization and we might say naturalization of the theory of genius, combined with its rejection of the model of culture that had been offered by Hegel but that had been transformed into a “dogmatic schematism” by the “Hegelian school in the mid-nineteenth century” (this seems more than a little unfair to a Hegelian like Friedrich Theodor Vischer), led NeoKantianism to try “to derive all objective validity from transcendental subjectivity,” to declare “the concept of Erlebnis to be the very stuff of consciousness,”21 and thus to reduce the content of art and its experience to the pseudoscientific data of isolated Erlebnisse rather than recognizing that it is the rich, culturally laden, and ever-evolving continuum of Erfahrung, or Heidegger’s Dasein. The Neo-Kantians to whom Gadamer particularly applies this charge are Dilthey22 and his own early teacher in Marburg, Paul Natorp, who did not write on aesthetics but who, expanding on Cohen’s approach to aesthetics, did designate “Bewußtheit, which expresses the immediacy of experience” that Gadamer rejects in favor of its cultural richness and complexity, “as the object of critical psychology, and . . . developed universal subjectivization as the research method of 18 19 20 21 22

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 46. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 46. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 48–9. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 52. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 53–7.

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reconstructive psychology.”23 Gadamer thus rejects what he sees as the subjectivist approach of his first teacher, Natorp, in favor of the objectivist approach of his second, Heidegger. As has already been suggested, Gadamer’s interpretation of Dilthey seems one-sided and appears to omit what has here been described as Dilthey’s attempt to reintroduce a Kantian conception of play into German aesthetic theory at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. But the other Neo-Kantians certainly explicitly rejected Kant’s concept of the play of our cognitive capacities or transformed it beyond recognition (as in the case of Cohen), and his interpretation of Neo-Kantianism as a whole as having failed to appreciate the potential of Kant’s concept – as in his view had Kant himself – leaves Gadamer free to reappropriate this concept for his own purposes. This he does, making the concept of play central to his account of art and our experience of it, and indeed to his account of hermeneutical understanding in general, although in a way that ties it to his conception of hermeneutical truth rather than contrasting it to the latter. Thus Gadamer fully integrates the concept of play into his Heideggerian conception of Dasein, although he never explicitly criticizes Heidegger’s rejection of play from aesthetics as he does Natorp’s subjectivization of consciousness. He praises Heidegger’s critique of Neo-Kantianism without immediately signaling that his own emphasis on play will be a fundamental departure from Heidegger as well: Basically it is to the phenomenological criticism of nineteenth-century psychology and epistemology that we owe our liberation from the concepts that prevented an appropriate understanding of aesthetic being. This critique has shown the erroneousness of all attempts to conceive the mode of being of the aesthetic in terms of the experience of reality, and as a modification of it. All such ideas as imitation, appearance, irreality, illusion, magic, dream, assume that art is related to something different from itself: real being. But the phenomenological return to aesthetic experience (Erfahrung) teaches us that the latter does not think in terms of this relationship but, rather, regards what it experiences as genuine truth.24

But this is only Moses leading the Israelites up to the River Jordan: Focusing exclusively on truth, Heidegger is barred from a complete understanding of aesthetic experience and thus indeed from a complete understanding of our experience of Dasein itself. “The productive thing

23 24

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 59. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 72.

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about Heidegger’s criticism of modern subjectivism is that his temporal interpretation of being has opened up new possibilities,”25 but to exploit those possibilities the concept of play must be reintroduced. This is what Gadamer does in the second chapter of the first part of Truth and Method, “The Ontology of the Work of Art and Its Hermeneutic Significance,” the first section of which is devoted to “Play as the Clue to Ontological Explanation.”26 Gadamer begins his analysis of play with a tacit critique of Heidegger’s rejection of play as, for example, in the essay “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”: For Gadamer, “play itself contains its own, even sacred, seriousness.” Yet, he continues, “in playing, all those purposive relations that determine active and caring existence have not simply disappeared, but are curiously suspended.”27 Thus it is through play that we can first gain the distance on the equipment and more generally the culture with which we are always surrounded and gain the freedom both to understand and to transform it. Gadamer then analyzes the key aspects of play. First, “the player loses himself in play”: Play of any kind has its own logic and rhythm that, without undermining the freedom of the player, lift him from his subjectivity and absorb him into the play or game as something larger. This is true of art too: The work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences it. The “subject” of the experience of art, that which remains and endures, is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work itself. . . . For play has its own essence, independent of the consciousness of those who play. Play – indeed, play proper – also exists when the thematic horizon is not limited by any being-for-itself of subjectivity.28

Gadamer’s claim that play is “independent of the consciousness of those who play” seems to be an overstatement or a misstatement: A game of chess or of football cannot proceed independently of conscious subjects, but rather demands the full attention of its players; but what is true is that such a game cannot proceed successfully as long as the players are preoccupied by their normal concerns; rather they must give their 25 26

27 28

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 86. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 102. Gadamer’s use of the word “clue” here is reminiscent of Kant’s use of the “logical functions of judgment” as the “clue” to the discovery of the “pure concepts” or categories of theoretical thought in the “Metaphysical Deduction” of the Critique of Pure Reason and may be meant to intimate that play as the clue to hermeneutical understanding is as important as logic as the clue to theoretical or natural scientific understanding. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 102. Gadamer, Truth and Being, p. 103.

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full attention to the game and its demands. In this way play can take the subject beyond the ordinary limits of everyday consciousness and by so doing prepare the way for the extension and refinement of that consciousness necessary for the experience of art and for the comprehension of history and of other people and other cultures generally. Gadamer also states this point by saying that a game “masters the players” in the sense of imposing its own tasks: players choose a game, but then the game itself presents those who play it with a “task” of its own, determined by the logic of the game rather than by the ordinary pragmatic concerns of the player. Even in the simplest form of play, a solitary child’s game, “the child gives himself a task in playing with a ball, and such tasks are playful ones because the purpose of the game is not really solving the task, but ordering and shaping the movement of the game itself.”29 By imposing its own tasks on us, once again play lifts us out of the preoccupations of our ordinary subjectivity and connects us to something other than ourselves. Next, Gadamer stresses that play typically defines roles for its players, roles through which the players can in turn present themselves to an audience. He states this point by saying that in play the players represent themselves to themselves in a certain way determined by the game or play but thereby also actually or potentially present themselves to others in that role as well. Thus, “the self-presentation of the game involves the player’s achieving, as it were, his own self-presentation by playing – i.e., presenting something,” either through “meaningful allusion” or because “the game itself consists in representing something (e.g., when children play cars)”; but further, “all presentation is potentially a representation for someone. . . . The closed world of play lets down one of its walls, as it were.”30 More plainly put, perhaps, much playing is role playing, but role playing should not be understood simply as an escape from oneself; rather it should be understood as an expansion of self, or as learning how to comprehend the positions of others as well as oneself. As such, play is both inward- and outward-looking, utterly absorbing but yet at the same time a way of relating to other persons or cultures (whereas Heidegger, it will be recalled, had regarded play simply as an obstacle to opening oneself to truth). In this way play obviously has a hermeneutical structure, or models the process of understanding human beings generally. Another way Gadamer expresses these points is by saying that play 29 30

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 107. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 108.

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is “a process that takes place ‘in between’”31 – in between the player and the role, in between the player and an audience, generally in between self and others. Third, “human play,” and in this regard it “comes to its true consummation in being art,” is “transformation into structure. . . . The play – even the unforeseen elements of improvisation – is in principle repeatable and hence permanent. It has the character of a work, of an ergon and not only of energeia.” “Only through this change,” Gadamer adds, “does the play achieve ideality, so that it can be intended and understood as play.”32 In other words, play not only has a logic that gives rise to certain patterns, but it also results in an awareness of pattern: It is a way in which we form recognizable representations of the structure of experience itself. This is of course not necessary if experience is understood as isolated Erlebniss, but it is necessary if experience is understood, as human Dasein really is, as flowing and ongoing Erfarhrung: We need to have ways to give shape to this, and we do that in play, in art, and in other forms of comprehension that are based on the models of play and art. Gadamer understands this shaping function of play not as transposition into another world, for example, a world of mere fantasy, but as the transformation of the not fully understood world of Erfahrung as we first experience it into a comprehensible world in the first place. Play should not be understood as mere mimicking of a world that is already given, but as the way in which a comprehensible world is created in the first place: Transformation into structure is not simply transposition into another world. Certainly the play takes place in another, closed world. But inasmuch as it is a structure, it is, so to speak, its own measure and measures itself by nothing outside it. Thus the action of a drama . . . exists as something that rests absolutely within itself. It no longer permits of any comparison with reality as the secret measure of all verisimilitude. It is raised above all such comparisons . . . because a superior truth speaks from it.33

Play and by extension art are the transformation of the unshaped into the shaped, the merely felt into the represented, and only by means of that transformation do we get something that deserves to be called “truth” or “world.” “Thus the concept of transformation characterizes the independent and superior being of what we call structure. From this 31 32 33

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 109. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 110. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 111–12.

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viewpoint ‘reality’ is defined as what is untransformed, and art as the raising up (Aufhebung) of this reality into its truth.”34 Further, this transformation of the unshaped into the shaped is the source of the pleasure that we take in play or art: “The joy of recognition is rather the joy of knowing more than is already familiar.”35 In a later essay, “Die Aktualität des Schönen,” translated as “The Relevance of the Beautiful,”36 Gadamer presents a similar threefold analysis of play. Here the three defining features of play are, first, that “play appears as self-movement that does not pursue any particular end or purpose so much as movement as movement . . . living self-representation,” that it is a “non-purposive activity” but yet one that involves our reason and leads us toward “the self-discipline and order that we impose on our movements when playing”;37 second, that play is “a communicative activity . . . that does not really acknowledge the distance separating the one who plays and the one who watches the play,”38 but is instead absorbing and out-reaching or outgoing at the same time; and third, that play always results in form, or in the increase or clarification of form in something that was less or less explicitly formed before the play. In play and in art, there is always some reflective and intellectual accomplishment involved, whether I am concerned with the traditional forms of [play or] art handed down to us or whether I am challenged by modern forms of art [or new forms of play]. The challenge of the word brings the constructive accomplishment of the intellect into play.39

In this work, Gadamer also stresses that in addition to sharing the character of play, art has the characteristics of symbol and of festival. By the first of these, a point he mentions in Truth and Method only in passing and many pages before his analysis of play rather than in immediate succession to it,40 he means that art is not like allegory, where we must 34 35 36

37 38 39 40

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 112. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 113. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Part I, pp. 1–53, originally published as Die Aktualität des Schönen (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1977). Aktualität connotes “timeliness” as opposed to the mere fact of existence; thus in contemporary German aktuell means “current,” as in “current affairs” or “news”; hence the translator’s choice of “relevance” rather than “actuality,” which would not have that connotation. Gadamer, Relevance, p. 23. Gadamer, Relevance, p. 24. Gadamer, Relevance, p. 28. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 62–70.

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understand the intended reference in advance and can basically only admire the cleverness or elegance with which the well-understood relation of reference is invoked in a particular work; rather, in our experience of a work of art, “the particular represents itself as a fragment of being that promises to complete and make whole whatever corresponds to it. . . . The symbol is that other fragment that has always been sought in order to make complete and whole our own fragmentary life.”41 Art does not merely refer from one well-defined sign to an external, already well-defined meaning; rather it presents itself as and makes us feel part of a larger, never fully defined but always increasingly meaningful whole. As Gadamer also says, art is only encountered in a form that resists pure conceptualization. Great art shakes us because we are always unprepared and defenseless when exposed to the overpowering impact of a compelling work. Thus the essence of the symbolic lies precisely in the fact that it is not related to an ultimate meaning that could be recuperated in intellectual terms. The symbol preserves its meaning within itself.42

By the last remarks, Gadamer does not mean that the experience of art is not profoundly intellectual, but that it is not merely conceptual, or merely abstract – that is, that it does not fit into the pattern of natural scientific thought as he understands it – nor does he mean that the meaning of art is hermetic, sealed off from us. Rather, what he means is that we experience a work of art as part of a larger system of meaning that involves the work and ourselves but reaches beyond both. This is, of course, the structure of hermeneutical meaning and the understanding of it in general as well. Finally, in both works Gadamer also stresses that art is like a festival, a recurring celebration that has its own temporal structure that both links us to others43 and precisely by interrupting the ordinary temporal rhythms of our existence allows us to step back and comprehend the temporal structure of our existence. In Truth and Method Gadamer sums up the festive character of art or our experience of it thus: What unfolds before us is so much lifted out of the ongoing course of the ordinary world and so much enclosed in its own autonomous circle of meaning that no one is prompted to seek some other future or reality behind it. The spectator is set at an absolute distance, a distance that 41 42 43

Gadamer, Relevance, p. 32. Gadamer, Relevance, p. 37. Gadamer, Relevance, pp. 39–40.

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precludes practical or goal-oriented participation. But this distance is aesthetic distance in a true sense, for it signifies the distance necessary for seeing, and thus makes possible a genuine and comprehensive participation in what is presented before us. A spectator’s ecstatic self-forgetfulness corresponds to his continuity with himself. Precisely that in which one loses oneself as a spectator demands that one grasp the continuity of meaning. For it is the truth of our own world – the religious and moral world in which we live – that is presented before us and in which we recognize ourselves. Just as the ontological mode of aesthetic being is marked by . . . absolute presence, and just as an artwork is nevertheless self-identical in every moment where it achieves such a presence, so also the absolute moment in which a spectator stands is both one of self-forgetfulness and of mediation with himself.44

Through the characteristics of its experience that art shares with play, with symbol, and with festival, art has the potential to lift each of us out of our everyday prudential concerns and our focus on mere Erlebnisse one after another, into a fuller realm of meaning in which we do not merely lose ourselves but rather better understand our relations to one another, whether near or distant. Thus our experience of art is certainly cognitive, revealing to us the truth about the nature of human existence or Dasein that is so often hidden from us in everyday life, into which it seems as if we are merely thrown or fallen, to return to Heidegger’s terms. Yet one of the chief ways in which art accomplishes this is through the element of play that is first and foremost in it, as long as play is understood not as idle diversion, as Heidegger seems to understand it, but as a fully serious mode of existence in which we get beyond ourselves, present ourselves to others and them to ourselves, and shape our experience into a comprehensible reality and world. Gadamer thus works within the framework established by Heidegger according to which art can make the truth about human being available to us but argues that it does this precisely through features that it has in common with play. In this way, Gadamer reestablishes the synthesis between the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of play that had been Kant’s great accomplishment. But it had been the great limitation of Kant’s account that it kept all “charm and emotion” out of proper aesthetic response, and Gadamer seems to have gone even further than Kant by simply omitting all discussion of the emotional impact of art, instead linking play only with the cognitive import of art. This remains true of his work even though Greek art and thought provide much of his inspiration. 44

Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 124–5.

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In both Truth and Method and “The Relevance of the Beautiful” and other essays published with it, Gadamer seeks to provide confirmation for his approach to aesthetics by showing how it applies to the whole range of the media of art and to a wide range of genres within those media. One might well think that the cognitivist aspect of Gadamer’s conception of art would be most apt for the representative arts such as literature and painting, and indeed his first illustration of his analysis of our experience of art in Truth and Method is the case of tragedy, indeed, going back to his earliest and enduring interest in ancient philosophy, an interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy according to which the “traditional translations” of Aristotle’s terms for the tragic emotions “as ‘pity’ and ‘fear’ gives them a far too subjective tinge,” and the real effect on the audience of tragedy is to return its members to themselves, a form of consciousness that seems more cognitive than emotional.45 In another passage obviously influenced by but more specific than Heidegger’s famous discussion of the Greek temple, Gadamer also attempts to show how his analysis applies to a nonrepresentational art such as architecture, indeed to what might normally be taken to be the least cognitively significant aspect of architecture, namely, ornament. Thus he writes that the “nature of decoration,” just like other forms of art, consists in performing that two-sided mediation: namely to draw the viewer’s attention to itself, to satisfy his taste, and then to redirect it away from itself to the greater whole of the life context which it accompanies. This is true of the whole span of the decorative, from municipal architecture to the individual ornament. A building should certainly be the solution to an artistic problem and thus attract the viewer’s wonder and admiration. At the same time it should fit into a way of life and not be an end in itself. . . . On surveying the full extent of the architect’s decorative tasks, it is clear that architecture explodes that prejudice of the aesthetic consciousness according to which the actual work of art is what is outside all space and all time, the object of an aesthetic experience. One also sees that the usual distinction between a work of art proper and mere decoration demands revision.46

The case of architecture too demonstrates that aesthetic experience is a matter of giving form to Erfahrung rather than merely capturing and accumulating Erlebnisse – and experiencing emotion in response to art would seem to fall on the side of the latter rather than the former. 45 46

Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 125–30, quotation from p. 126. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 151.

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There is no space here to examine Gadamer’s application of his analysis to other nonobvious cases for it, such as the cases of “nonobjective” or abstract art and “absolute” or purely instrumental music.47 Nor is there space here to pursue the most obvious questions to be raised about Gadamer’s reintroduction of the concept of play into a tradition otherwise dominated by the aesthetics of truth, namely, Does it really create space for an adequate conception of the creative exercise of the imaginations of both artists and the audience for art? as well as the question, How is the actual experience of emotion in response to art to be understood on his hermeneutical approach? One might well think that Gadamer’s hermeneutical approach emphasizes the conditions for understanding existing forms of art and existing forms of culture more than it does the possibility of creating genuinely novel works within existing forms or whole new forms of art, but without pressing that point, perhaps we can leave matters here merely by suggesting that later syntheses between the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of play in the twentieth century may make more obvious space for satisfying theories of aesthetic creativity. And, speaking of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, there is obviously no space here to pursue his construction of a detailed hermeneutics of historical and linguistic comprehension on the example of aesthetic comprehension, the project that occupies the latter two-thirds of Truth and Method. Instead, at this point we will take our leave of Gadamer. But before turning to the other mainstream of aesthetics in postwar Germany, the loosely Marxist aesthetics of the Frankfurt school, we will take a moment to say a few words about the aesthetic thought of one of Gadamer’s own most important students, Dieter Henrich (who supplied one of the mottoes for this work).

Henrich Dieter Henrich (1927–) has been best known throughout his career for his work on Kant, Hegel, and the “constellation” of the less well-known idealists of the 1790s from which Hegel’s thought emerged.48 But aesthetics 47 48

But see Gadamer, “Art and Imitation,” in The Relevance of the Beautiful, pp. 92–104. See Dieter Henrich, Konstellationen: Probleme und Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991); The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Richard Velkley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, ed. David S. Pacini, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Grundlegung aus dem Ich: Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus, Tübingen-Jena 1790–1794, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp Verlag,

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has been one of Henrich’s substantive concerns throughout his career. Henrich’s main philosophical ambition has been to provide an account of the conditions of subjectivity, and he sees both the creation and the reception of art as a central means by which people, whether artists or not, come to understand themselves. Thus Henrich’s conception of the function of the creation and the experience of art is primarily cognitive, although he argues that selfhood is not like an object waiting to be discovered, but something that has to be created as one lives one’s life, and thus one’s experience of art, whether as artist or audience, is as much a matter of creating a self as it is of discovering one’s self. Henrich was critical from the outset of his career of Heidegger’s ambition to provide an analysis of Sein and not just Dasein, and his own interest in a theory of subjectivity can be regarded as an analysis of Dasein.49 And although Henrich’s approach to aesthetic experience is deeply hermeneutical, he also criticizes Gadamer for focusing exclusively on the layer of historical and cultural meaning in art, ignoring the more basic sensory responses, rooted in our physical embodiment, that we may even share with higher animals, which Henrich calls the “protoaesthetic.” In this way, Henrich takes aesthetics further back to its Baumgartian roots than Gadamer had, and there may be a trace of the Neo-Kantian aesthetics of Hermann Cohen here as well. Henrich does not seem to make room for an element of play in his account of aesthetic experience, however, although the notion that aesthetic experience is a form of activity is certainly part of his picture. Although one of Henrich’s works translated into English was an essay on Kant’s aesthetics,50 many more of his works in this area concerned the aesthetics of Hegel and Hölderlin,51 thus reflecting the essentially cognitivist approach to aesthetics from which he set out. Like Gadamer, Henrich was born in Marburg. While still in high school, he was able to study privately with Klaus Reich, a noted Kant

49

50

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2004). Henrich’s work on Hölderlin’s role in the origins of German Idealism has been cited in Volume 2. See Dieter Henrich, “Über die Einheit der Subjektivität,” Philosophische Rundschau 3 (1955): 28–69; “On the Unity of Subjectivity,” trans. Guenter Zoeller, in Henrich, The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Richard Velkley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 17–54 Dieter Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). See especially Dieter Henrich, Fixpunkte: Abhandlungen und Essays zur Theorie der Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), Part II, “Überlegungen im Blick auf Hegel.”

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scholar in Marburg (though one who never wrote on Kant’s or any other aesthetics). He then studied in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, where Gadamer was, earning his doctorate with the dissertation “Max Weber’s Theory of the Unity of Science”52 and his habilitation with the work “Self-Consciousness and Morality,” which remained unpublished. His next book was a detailed study of the history of the ontological argument for the existence of God;53 these two works thus established Henrich’s lifelong pattern of alternating between historical and systematic work in philosophy. Apart from three works on public issues – nuclear disarmament and German reunification – in the early 1990s,54 most of Henrich’s work in the remainder of his career was divided between his interests in German Idealism and in subjectivity, but in 2001 he published Versuch über Kunst und Leben (“Essay on Art and Life”), which will concern us here.55 Henrich begins with the thesis that the unity of a life from a subjective point of view is not given but must be created in the face of the multiple and contradictory (or apparently contradictory) data – experiences, perceptions, desires, and so on – that we face: “In truth our life is from the outset and always shot through with conflicts and ambivalences that are not to be resolved by recalling a lost or misplaced original unity. Insofar as our life has unity, it must be achieved.”56 Henrich traces this insight – which essentially rejects the entire line of thought that begins with Hölderlin, much as Henrich has celebrated Hölderlin’s importance for the development of German Idealism – back to the Neo-Kantian Georg Simmel at the beginning of the twentieth century.57 “Postmodernism,” perhaps ultimately the contemporary heir to Schopenhauer, has made an industry out of saying that there are no unifying narratives in human life, but for Henrich that is not an attitude that can be accepted: “We cannot do what for some time the diagnosticians of a ‘condition postmoderne’ have

52

53

54

55

56 57

Dieter Henrich, Die Einheit der Wissenschaftslehre Max Webers (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1952). Dieter Henrich, Der ontologische Gottesbeweis, second edition (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1967; first edition, 1960). Dieter Henrich, Ethik zum nuklearen Frieden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990); Eine Republik Deutschland: Reflexionen auf dem Weg aus der deutschen Teilung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990); and Nach dem Ende der Teilung: Über Identitäten und Intellecktualität in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993). Dieter Henrich, Versuch über Kunst und Leben: Subjektivität – Weltverstehen – Kunst (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2001). Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 22. Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 17.

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recommended, namely register and accept the uncomprehended [unbegriffene] manifold as reality or as the wealth of life, in order to accept and tolerate it without concern or joyfully pick our way through it, probe it, and enjoy it”;58 it is our nature to seek a coherent path through our experience, to be able to tell ourselves (each) a coherent story about our experience. In particular, we must find ways to make sense of the undeniable fact of constant change in our lives while a coherent sense of who we are is nevertheless constructed: For the subject “to complete itself as subjectivity,” “it must enter into a movement that is at the same time the unfolding of a form which determines the way in which the movement is completed but at the same time transforms itself without breaking off the continuity of life in knowledge of itself.”59 Henrich’s use of the term “knowledge” (Wissen) in this statement is a sign that he does not oppose the construction of unity in life to knowledge of unity, but rather equates the two: What it means to know the unity of one’s life is to construct it. This is of course an application of the idealist conception of knowledge going back to Kant rather than to Hölderlin and Hegel to the case of self-knowledge. Art is a means by which we do this, and it is “precisely from the fact that the world does not explain itself for us that we can understand the production of art and the resonance that art has in our life.”60 In other words, the unity amid variety that has so often been thought to be an essential aim of art is not an aim merely of art, but something we aim to achieve in life itself, and making and/or experiencing art is one of the ways we do this. However, Henrich does not leap directly from the variety of our experiences to a unification offered by art. His argument is rather that our first steps toward the unification of our experience into a coherent subjectivity take place in a “protoaesthetic” attitude or “elementary aesthetics,”61 and here is where he explicitly criticizes Gadamer. “The construction of an elementary aesthetics can begin with considerations on the accomplishments of attention,”62 Henrich writes, for the first step toward a “conscious life,” as he also calls a unified subjectivity, is a clear view of the experiences that have to be unified. The elements of attention are in turn “concentration,” the “presupposition for being able to understand the properties and changes as well as the 58 59 60 61 62

Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 23. Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 38. Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 23. Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 64. Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 70.

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proximate grounds” of what Henrich calls the “contents of the world” (Weltgehalte), and the second step is the activity of perceiving the multiple contents of one’s (experienced) world “in an activity of winnowing and filtration [ausschwingenden Durchlaufens],”63 in other words, a process of continuously seeking patterns in the ever-changing flow of experience and retaining but evolving the patterns one finds to accommodate further change. Henrich states that “concentration and following-through [Durchschwingen] in perceiving [Gewahren] are complementary epistemic activities that are equally essential for the construction of a relation to the world” and to a self as both part of and subject for such a world. He further claims that it is from the “counter-play [Wiederspiel] of these two activities in the perceiving relation to a world that the particular manner of perception is introduced from which the facts of elementary aesthetics can be intelligible.”64 This is a rare place in his discourse where any term involving the concept of play is introduced, but the kind of play he has in mind here is a condition for cognition, not something we do with cognition; it is an oscillation (another translation for his term ausschwingen) between elements and patterns that is necessary for any knowledge, whether of world or of oneself in it, but there is no suggestion that this requires imagination or invention in the sense prominent in aesthetics since the time of the debate between Gottsched and Bodmer and Breitinger, that is, the invention of possibilities and idealizations that are in some sense alternative to reality as it is given; for Henrich, these conditions of attention are the conditions for constructing a knowledge of reality itself. However, although the concept of play is not further developed in Henrich’s account, there is a transition from the “protoaesthetic” to the genuinely aesthetic, the world of art, which turns on the “enrichment and modification” of the constituent activities of attention, when concentration “becomes self-sufficient because it is not in the service of any interest in further investigation,” as is, for example, “familiar from concentrated listening to music.”65 Here the idea seems to be that the activities of concentrating on individual moments of experiencing and finding evolving patterns in them that is ordinarily undertaken for the sake of constructing a coherent experience of world and self in it can become the objects of attention for their own sake, or of reflection, and 63 64 65

Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, pp. 70–1. Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 71. Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 73.

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then we have the origins of art. When we reflect on our own activities of concentrating and seeking patterns we can also have the experience of “lingering in the contemplation of a world content,” or “aesthetic contemplation.”66 “Aesthetic experience is connected with the consciousness of heightened activity,”67 because our activities of concentrating and finding patterns have been doubled as we focus on both the contents of our experiencing and the activity of experiencing. We reach the stage of art when we seek and find means or media by which “to make present [vergegenwärtigt] to ourselves the processes of the conscious life in a real completion [Vollzug]”68 that will allow us both to achieve some “distance” from our experience itself and to communicate both the experience and our reflective attitude or distance toward it to others. The “production of art that has begun from the proto-aesthetic situation has however deepened it, and this moreover in relation to making present the dynamics of the conscious life and the projection of worlds of integration that arise from it.”69 Henrich also states that “the practice of art allows forms [Gestaltungen] to come forth that stand on their own insofar as they are justified in their existence without regard to any further purpose only from the relation to the one who created them.”70 In this way works of art are “signs of success” in the reflective activity of finding coherence. At this point, we have to ask what is the relation between making sense of our experience as such and making art. Henrich has described the activities of concentration and filtration as preconditions for achieving subjectivity and for making art but has not explicitly said that taking the further step from these activities into making art is itself a further precondition for achieving subjectivity. Thus it might seem as if achieving subjectivity and making art are two alternative developments of the protoaesthetic activities, more like two effects of a common cause than linked in a direct relation to each other. Henrich’s answer to this question is not completely clear but seems to be that the reflective and concentrated patterning that goes on in making art and experiencing it as art offers us forms of coherence that we can carry back into the rest of our lives, not as necessary conditions for the unification of the rest of our lives but nevertheless as available and exemplary models for that. Thus he says that “artworks bring life in relation to itself. . . . They draw 66 67 68 69 70

Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 75. Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 76. Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 132. Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 133. Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 143.

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it into contemplation, lift it above its involvements in the diffuse world of the every-day and expose a way of being moved to it from which it can understand that this is its own and is always also completing itself beneath all these involvements. . . . For the dynamic of the development of forms is now experienced in one’s own life.”71 Art shows both that we can make sense, that is, find form and coherence, in our lives, and particular ways in which we might do this, though it does not limit us to these particular ways. But this solution raises a second question. In the passage used as one of my mottoes at the beginning of these volumes and in a further statement in the present context that “an absolutely universal theory in a single mold, such as Hegel assumed, cannot result” from his own approach, Henrich claims to be adopting a pluralistic rather than monistic approach to aesthetics. Yet it is not obviously pluralistic in the way in which we have in this work found some theories, such as those of Kames, Schleiermacher, or Dilthey, to be pluralistic, namely, giving equal weight to knowledge, play, and emotional impact as aspects of aesthetic experience; we have found no overt mention of the emotional impact of art in Henrich’s account, and we found the term “play” only as part of a compound word that described a precondition of cognition rather than an exercise of imagination that supervenes on imagination. Henrich’s idea seems rather to be that pluralism is inherent to cognition itself, because there is not a single way of making sense of our experience as subjects, even though making sense of that experience remains our overriding task. The experience of art offers us a variety of ways in which to introduce unity into our experience, but the overriding task of aesthetic experience remains that of achieving that unity, which is the same as coming to know ourselves as subjects. Henrich’s pluralism is thus not that art has a plurality of goals besides self-knowledge but rather that self-knowledge can be achieved in a plurality of ways. This conclusion also provides a key to Henrich’s critique of his teacher Gadamer. Henrich states that “according to Gadamer aesthetic consciousness is itself an historical fact and really only a temporally-conditioned construct.” Still in Gadamer’s view, “a theory of art that starts from aesthetic consciousness mistakes the genuine reality of artworks, namely that they are always embedded in an historically conditioned process of understanding . . . like a conversation.” Henrich says that these claims are not as such erroneous, but that they are too limited to do justice to 71

Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, pp. 170–1.

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all of art theory, “the consequence of a monistic approach that attributes universality to the hermeneutical perspective.”72 The problem is that Gadamer’s hermeneutical conception of works of art as always expressing the self-conceptions of artists and their cultures that then have to be understood by others leaves out the protoaesthetic, the level at which we find focus and pattern in our perception of the world, and then express that in art. Henrich concedes that “art is not to be grasped through the elementary aesthetic concepts alone” anymore than it is to be understood at the more conceptual level at which Gadamer’s hermeneutical level understands art, but that “this is no reason to declare it indifferent or obsolete in art theory.”73 In other words, we can understand art in cognitive terms, but must understand cognition itself in pluralistic rather than monistic terms, as something that transpires at a variety of levels as well as in a variety of ways. Henrich’s response to the cognitivism in Gadamer’s aesthetics is a more pluralistic cognitivism. Yet we also saw that Gadamer’s aesthetics was not purely cognitivist, and attempted to make room for the element of play as essential to aesthetic experience and the production of art. There is no emphasis on play or on imagination as invention in Henrich’s aesthetics. This suggests how difficult it has been to break the grasp of cognitivism in modern German aesthetics. As we now turn back to the main competitor to Gadamer in post–World War II German aesthetics, namely, Theodor Adorno, we will see how strong the grip of cognitivism was on him too. We shall see that it was only another member of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, though first another student of Heidegger, namely, Herbert Marcuse, who introduced the idea of play into the Marxist scene from which these authors emerged, although perhaps the fact that Marcuse did most of his work in the inherently more pluralistic air of the United States facilitated that development.

2. Benjamin and Adorno So we can now turn to the leading figures of Marxist aesthetics after the Second World War, Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. In the relation between these two figures we will find a similar pattern to the relationship we found between Heidegger and Gadamer, that is, first an uncompromising commitment to an aesthetics of truth and then 72 73

Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 81. Henrich, Versuch über Leben und Kunst, p. 82.

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a reintroduction of an aesthetics of play into a framework that at first seems to leave no room for it. The reader might expect to find in conjunction with the discussion of Adorno and Marcuse some attention to their Frankfurt school colleague Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), who, although he did not survive the war, has been a major figure in the postwar intellectual scene in both Europe and America. Although Benjamin’s original training was in philosophy, however, his work was primarily criticism and translation, and his influence has been greatest in literary theory rather than academic philosophy. So we will discuss him only briefly before turning to Adorno.

Benjamin Watter Benjamin (1892–1940) was from a prosperous Berlin Jewish family and studied philosophy at Berlin, Freiburg (with the NeoKantian Heinrich Rickert, also the teacher of the three years older Heidegger, although there is no record of any meeting between the two students), and Munich, where his friends included Rainer Maria Rilke and Gershom Scholem, before earning his doctorate at Bern, where he met Ernst Bloch,74 also to become a well-known Marxist-influenced philosopher, with the dissertation The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism in 1919.75 In 1923 he became associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung, or Institute for Social Research, the institutional origin of the Frankfurt school of “critical theory,” and became acquainted with both Lukács and Adorno.76 During this period he successfully published translations of Baudelaire and several volumes of Proust’s Recherche de le temps perdu, but in 1925 the work he submitted to the university at Frankfurt for a habilitation, The Origins of German Tragic Drama,77 was rejected and his hopes for an academic career deflated. His family’s 74

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The chief works of Bloch (1885–1977) were The Spirit of Utopia (1918), trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), and The Principle of Hope (1954–8), trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986). His works in aesthetics include Ästhetik des Vor-Scheins, ed. by Gert Ueding (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), and Essays on the Philosophy of Music, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973). See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research 1923–1950 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972).

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wealth destroyed in the German economic crisis of the 1920s, after this time Benjamin lived from journalism and grants, with increasing difficulty especially after the Nazi takeover in 1933. He fled to Paris and then in 1940, with a visa sponsored by Max Horkheimer, tried to travel through Spain to Portugal to embark for the United States. But Spain’s dictator Franco cancelled all exit visas, and to avoid being returned to France and the Nazis Benjamin committed suicide in September 1940. The work on nineteenth-century Paris that had occupied him through much of the 1930s, the Passagenwerk, or “Arcades Project,” was published posthumously.78 In his dissertation The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, Benjamin followed his subjects, primarily Friedrich Schlegel but also Fichte, in conceiving of art and our response to it in cognitive terms. He followed them in particular in conceiving of both art and our response to it as forms of “reflection,” in particular reflection “at the second level, in the thinking of thinking at the first level,” where “thinking at the second level has originated from thinking at the first level by itself and self-actively as its self-knowledge.”79 Ordinary thought, in other words, is an attempt at self-knowledge, and art is a self-conscious attempt at selfknowledge. The Romantics, unlike Fichte, in Benjamin’s view, at least early on, thought that such second-order reflection or thinking, and thus art, could “penetrate into the absolute” or attain completeness;80 Benjamin did not, and that is what made him such an attractive thinker for so many later. The nature of art can also be expressed by saying that 78

79 80

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Two early collections of Benjamin’s work in English translation were Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), and Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). A larger selection of his works is Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003). Several relevant works on Benjamin include Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Birgit Recki, Aura und Autonomie: Zur Subjektivität der Kunst bei Walter Benjamin und Theodor W. Adorno (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1988); Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); Lutz Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); and Andrew Benjamin, ed., Walter Benjamin and Art (London: Continuum, 2005). See also Bowie, Romanticism to Critical Theory, chapter 8. Benjamin, Begriff der Kunstkritik, p. 23. Benjamin, Begriff der Kunstkritik, p. 29.

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it “is a determination of the medium of reflection, probably the most fruitful that it has received,” while in turn “art criticism is the cognition of the object in this medium of reflection,”81 or cognition of a form of cognition. Thus Benjamin’s early aesthetics, at least to the extent that it may be gleaned from this early dissertation, is thoroughly cognitivist. Benjamin’s most famous theoretical piece, the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production” (or “of its technological reproducibility”), of which he produced several versions in the middle 1930s, with a version first published in French in 1936,82 would seem to contradict the purely cognitivist approach to art and our experience of it that Benjamin took in his dissertation by means of its concept of “aura,” an emotional nimbus that surrounds a work of art rather than a conceptual or historical meaning that can be stated in propositional or other determinate form. Aura is defined as a “quality of presence,” including our sense of the “authenticity” of a thing, “all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it” (the work of art itself) “has experienced.”83 (Benjamin’s concept of aura thus seems similar to Ruskin’s idea of the “lamp of memory” in his Seven Lamps of Architecture, although Ruskin is not mentioned in this essay or anywhere else in Benjamin’s Selected Writings.) But the argument of the essay is not a celebration of aura, but rather that mechanical reproduction allows aura to “wither” and thus allows the modern audience to approach its art, above all the cinema, without a sense of awe that would stand in the way of their learning what modern art has to say about their world. The “social significance” of contemporary mass art, Benjamin writes, “is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspects, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage,” but this is not a bad thing; rather it is the “most positive form” of the social significance of modern art.84 Benjamin adds that “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.”85 He further says that “when the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, 81 82

83

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Benjamin, Begriff der Kunstkritik, p. 57. This is the version translated in Arendt’s edition of Illuminations; a “second version” is translated under the title “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, pp. 101–33. The well-known version from Illuminations will be cited here. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, pp. 219–53, at p. 223. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” Illuminations, p. 223. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” Illuminations, p. 226.

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the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever,”86 but the emphasis in that sentence would appear to be on “semblance”: That is, the independence of art from the rest of life, what was celebrated by the slogan “art for art’s sake,” was never more than a delusion, and stripping art of its aura as the ready accessibility facilitated by mechanical representation does allows the modern audience to use art, without delusion, as an instrument for understanding their society. “Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing”;87 that is, the audience can subject reality to its own scrutiny through art freed from its cultic aura. Benjamin does not deny that there is any emotional aspect to the experience of art without aura, but the emotional aspect is subordinated to the cognitive potential of art: Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin film. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance.88

Benjamin’s idea seems to be that mechanical reproduction or mass media can make everyone an expert, and that this will inevitably lead to a clear view of their society, which will in turn be a force for social progress. Benjamin’s essay concludes with the warning that mass art can also lead to laziness or absentmindedness; thus the final lines of the essay are “The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”89 Mechanical reproduction strips art of its aura; it can be an instrument for constraining the masses but also runs the risk of inducing inattention or lassitude, which can be equally constraining. Even with this caveat, Benjamin’s essay might seem remarkably optimistic for something written in the 1930s, when German and Italian 86 87 88

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Benjamin, “Work of Art,” Illuminations, p. 228. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” Illuminations, pp. 230–1. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” Illuminations, p. 236. Presumably Benjamin did not own a beach towel with the image of a Picasso painting, like one we have in my household; he did not see that the possibility of mechanical reproduction does not always have to lead to new forms of art, rather that the very same art once made for a cultural elite can be made accessible – and stripped of its aura? – by mass reproduction. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” Illuminations, pp. 242–3.

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Fascism as well as Soviet Communism were perfecting the techniques of co-opting their subjects through artful propaganda that was designed precisely to appeal to the masses rather than to the elite. We will subsequently see that in Britain at the same time R.G. Collingwood was worrying precisely about the use of art for propaganda. Benjamin was not in fact blind to the possibility of such an exploitation of art and ends the essay with an epilogue on Fascism. He astutely says that “fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate,” and that it “sees its salvation in giving the masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves,” or even worse to delude them into thinking they have a chance to express themselves through their appreciation of art that really does the bidding of their masters. Indeed, Benjamin now goes so far as to assert that “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war,”90 an idea that is plausible only if “rendering politics aesthetic” means hiding the true intentions of masters behind an aura intentionally created by exploiting the resources of art. Benjamin thus swings from an optimistic view of the power of mass art to allow its audience to subordinate their emotions to genuine expertise to a pessimistic view that it will be used to deny its audience of knowledge of their real situation. Writing in desperate straits in the middle of the 1930s, Benjamin was not surprisingly flung between pillar and post. But either way, he hardly looks at emotions as equal partners in the experience of art: Either they are subordinated to genuine knowledge, or they are manipulated by pseudoexpertise. Benjamin’s younger colleague at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Theodor Adorno, was able to get to the United States and ride out the war years in safety, returning to Germany only in 1949, when the “all clear” had been sounded by the end of the war and even the beginning of Germany’s economic reconstruction and postwar boom. But Adorno too took an essentially cognitivist view of art. A more systematic philosopher than Benjamin, he was not torn between inconsistent views of the cognitive potential of art, but rather consistently saw art as internally inconsistent: It always offers us a promise of happiness but at the same time knowledge of the impossibility of happiness, thus only a promise of happiness. We come to know through art, but what we come to know is not very encouraging.

90

Benjamin, “Work of Art,” Illuminations, p. 243.

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Adorno Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–69) was as passionately committed to the idea of art as a vehicle for truth and as contemptuous of the value or even the very possibility of a free play of our mental powers as was Heidegger, but he had a very different conception of the fundamental truth about reality that art must reflect and about the way in which art does it than did Heidegger. For Adorno, the form of a work of art reflects the contradictory character of the world as it exists while its content suggests the possibility of an alternative to the world that actually exists – “Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity” – and by suggesting the possibility of an alternative to the world as it actually exists, they also offer a promise of the happiness that is not to be found in the world as it currently is – “Thus, however tragic they appear, artworks tend a priori to affirmation.”91 The happiness that works of art promise is not that of pleasure in the contemplation of the works themselves – that traditional view Adorno decisively rejects in favor of the view that artworks are to be understood as vehicles of cognition, and the pleasure they promise is that in knowledge of the possibility of a better world: “The concept of aesthetic pleasure as constitutive of art is to be superseded. . . . What the work demands from its beholder is knowledge, and indeed, knowledge that does justice to it: The work wants its truth and untruth to be grasped.”92 But the possibility of a better world that art holds out is just that, a tantalizing possibility that it can give us no reason to believe will ever actually be realized and that we have no other reason to believe will ever actually be realized. The very attempt of art to escape from the empirical world constituted as it is at any time only links art inescapably to that world: “By virtue of its rejection of the empirical world – a rejection that inheres in art’s concept and is thus no mere escape, but a law immanent to it – art sanctions the primacy of reality . . . art’s inescapable affirmative essence has become insufferable. Art must turn against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself right into its innermost fiber.”93 And thus Adorno transmutes Stendahl’s famous statement that “art is a promise of happiness” or even “only a 91

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Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 1. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 15. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 2.

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promise of happiness,” that is, a promise of the possibility of happiness but one that has no guarantee of its fulfillment, into the claim that “art is the ever broken promise of happiness,”94 a promise that we know cannot be fulfilled. “Aesthetic experience is that of something that spirit may find neither in the world nor in itself; it is possibility promised by its impossibility.”95 The truth that art delivers is that of the impossibility of the happiness that it says is possible. Adorno’s aesthetic theory expresses a pessimism that makes that of Schopenhauer seem halfhearted: For Schopenhauer, art offered only momentary respite from pessimism, but asceticism could offer enduring relief from it, while for Adorno art promises a better world with one hand but proves the impossibility of such a world with the other. That Adorno could start from a conception of art as a vehicle for truth as dominating as Heidegger’s but develop that into a pessimism not to be found in Heidegger may be at least in part explained by their radically different experiences of the 1930s and 1940s. Heidegger, as we saw, accepted the rectorship of his university with the approval of the Nazis, and when he found the political demands of that position of prominence distasteful (because he was asked to fire some deans) his success as a teacher and public lecturer was nevertheless hardly diminished; even his brief exclusion from the university during the period of de-Nazification hardly interfered with his success. Adorno’s career was very different. The son of a Jewish wine wholesaler and an opera singer in cosmopolitan Frankfurt, he was born into a world of wealth and culture unlike Heidegger’s rural Black Forest – but into a world that was doomed. From early in life, he was devoted to both music – originally named Wiesengrund-Adorno after both his father and mother, he changed his father’s name to his middle name and his mother’s name to his surname, symbolizing his passion for music – and philosophy; he started reading The Critique of Pure Reason with the somewhat older Siegfried Kracauer, later well known as a film theorist,96 when he was fifteen. In his teenage years, he attended both conservatory and gymnasium in Frankfurt, and

94 95 96

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 136. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 135–6. See Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), new edition, with an introduction by Miriam Bratu Hansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), revised and expanded edition, ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

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while studying philosophy, sociology, psychology, and music theory at the university in Frankfurt he also worked as a music critic. After earning his doctorate in philosophy in 1924 with a thesis on Husserl, he went to Vienna to study composition with Alban Berg; during his two years in Vienna, he also became acquainted with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton von Webern as well as with György Lukács, again reflecting his dual interests in music and philosophy – although while Schoenberg would become one of the artistic heroes of his later writing, Lukács would become a chief target, a rival sibling within the family of Marxist aesthetics. Adorno continued his dual career until 1931, editing a Viennese music journal, on the one hand, and working on his habilitation under Paul Tillich in Frankfurt, on the other. He completed his habilitation in 1931 with the book Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic,97 but his academic career as a lecturer was quickly cut short by the ascendency of the Nazis. In 1934 he was able to obtain a position as an “advanced student” at Merton College, Oxford, although he continued to spend time in Frankfurt in association with the Institute for Social Research led by his friend Max Horkheimer. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States, first to New York, where the Institute for Social Research had been taken under the wing of the New School, which sheltered many emigré European intellectuals, and then, in 1941, to Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, Adorno worked with Horkheimer on The Dialectic of Enlightenment,98 first published in Amsterdam in 1947; on his own books Philosophy of Modern Music,99 a first exposition of themes of his aesthetics in the form of a contrast between Schoenberg and Stravinsky (published in 1948) and Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life100 (published in 1951); on the collective volume The Authoritarian Personality101 (1950); and he also advised the novelist Thomas Mann on music theory for Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told

97

98

99

100

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Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Max Horkeimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (London: Continuum, 2004). Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974; new edition London: Verso, 2005). Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, et al., The Authoritarian Personality, American Jewish Committee. Social Studies Series, Publication No. 3 (New York: Harper, 1950).

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by a Friend (1947). In spite of this intense productivity, however, Adorno was never comfortable in the United States and returned to Germany as soon as possible. He resumed teaching philosophy at Frankfurt in 1949 and subsequently became director of the reestablished Institute for Social Research there in 1950, associate professor for social philosophy in 1953 (after one more stay in Los Angeles), and in 1956 full professor for sociology and philosophy, the position that he held until his sudden death in 1969. During these years in Germany, Adorno published profusely on philosophy, music, literature, and sociology – his collected published works alone run to twenty volumes, with many more volumes of lectures and other unpublished materials as well. Among these many works, his main work on theoretical philosophy, Negative Dialectics, was published in 1966, but the other work to which he devoted much of his last decade, the Aesthetic Theory, was unfinished at his death and first published posthumously in 1970.102 Its central themes and theses, however, are already visible in Adorno’s works of the 1940s, such as Philosophy of Modern Music and Minima Moralia, and the work is indelibly marked by his experience of the tragic decades on the 1930s and 1940s (even though, as this account suggests, Adorno came through them personally quite well).103 102

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Adorno lectured on aesthetics six times during his postwar years at Frankfurt, and the later versions of the course were preserved on tape recordings. One version of those lectures has now appeared, Ästhetik (1958/59), ed. Eberhard Ortland as Nachgelassene Schriften, Abteilung IV, Band 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009). The language of these classroom lectures is much more accessible than the tortured prose of the posthumous Aesthetic Theory, but it is the latter work that has been well known for the last forty years, and that will be discussed here. For biographies, see Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Polity Press, 2005); and Detlev Clausen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). For some general works on Adorno’s philosophy, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977); Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectical (London: Verso, 1990); Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Hauke Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999); J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Yvonne Sherrat, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Espen Hammer, Adorno and the Political (London: Routledge, 2006). Monographs on Adorno’s aesthetics include Günter Figal, Theodor W. Adorno: Das Naturschöne als spekulative Gedankenfigur (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1977); Joseph Früchtl, Mimesis: Konstellation eines Zentralbegriffs bei Adorno (Würzburg: Könisghausen

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In a passage in Minima Moralia that was written in the autumn of 1944, when the Allied defeat of the Axis was by no means complete but was nevertheless well on the way (the brutal German onslaught against Russia having been stopped at Stalingrad by November 1942 and the AngloAmerican landing at Normandy and breakout having been completed by the end of the summer of 1944), yet that he apparently saw fit to publish unchanged in 1947, Adorno wrote: The idea that after this war life will continue “normally” or even that culture might be “rebuilt” – as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation – is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself. What more is this culture waiting for? And even if countless people still have time to wait, is it conceivable that what happened in Europe will have no consequences, that the quantity of victims will not be transformed into a new quality of society at large, barbarism? As long as blow is followed by counter-blow, catastrophe is perpetuated. One need only think of revenge for the murdered. If as many of the others are killed, horror will be institutionalized, . . . If, however, the dead are not avenged and mercy is exercised, Fascism will despite everything get away with its victory scot-free, and, having once been shown so easy, will be continued elsewhere. The logic of history is as destructive as the people that it brings to prominence: wherever its momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity. Normality is death.104

Of course nothing could resurrect the millions of Jews (and Poles and Russians and many more) who had been murdered by the fall of 1944, or the millions more who would be murdered before the fall of Germany in May 1945; and, as Adorno feared, in various quarters of Europe bloody reprisals would continue past that date, in some places (such as Greece)

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& Neumann, 1986); Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Shierry Webber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997); Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998); Martin Seel, Adornos Philosophie der Kontemplation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004); and the collection edited by Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997). See also Recki, Aura und Autonomie; Bernstein, The Fate of Art, ch. 4–5; Bowie, Romanticism to Critical Theory, ch. 9; Scheer, Einführung in die Ästhetik, chapter VII; J.M. Bernstein, “‘The Dead Speaking of Stones and Stars’: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 139–64; and Hans Feger, Poetische Vernunft: Moral und Ästhetik im Deutschen Idealismus (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2007), pp. 589–93. Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 55–6.

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well past that date.105 Indeed, Adorno’s prediction that fascism would “be continued elsewhere” came true for half of Europe for almost another half-century. But in spite of having spent the war years in the United States, where apart from the deeply regrettable lapse of the internment of Japanese-Americans, the war against fascism was conducted with remarkably democratic means, Adorno seems to have been simply unable to predict that for the other half of Europe, a combination of moderate revenge (the Nuremburg trials) with a remarkably generous program of rebuilding (the Marshall Plan) would prevent the supposedly inexorable “logic of history” from replacing fascism with more fascism, and indeed allow his own country to make as thorough a transformation from dictatorship to democracy as the world has ever seen. Perhaps the pessimism that pervades Adorno’s whole philosophical work is as much a mark of the man as of his times. Be its origins what they may, pessimism pervades Adorno’s aesthetics and its background assumptions. Two assumptions that underlie Adorno’s aesthetics are that, although art is aimed at knowledge, absolute or complete knowledge is impossible because anything like Hegelian absolute reality that has resolved all contradictions is impossible (a position already taken in Benjamin’s dissertation on Romanticism), and that individuality, for the development of which art should be a paradigmatic means, is, if not completely impossible, close to impossible, because of the pervasive commodification of artistic media by the “culture industry,” the paradigmatic industry of late capitalism that sees art as an opportunity not for the development of individuality but for mass marketing and profits (an attitude toward mass art unequivocally more pessimistic than Benjamin’s ambivalence on this score). A passage from Minima Moralia expresses Adorno’s view that knowledge must always be fragmentary and incomplete because reality, the object of knowledge, is itself incomplete and contradictory. Under the simple title “Gaps,” Adorno writes: The injunction to practise intellectual honesty usually amounts to sabotage of thought. The writer is urged to show explicitly all the steps that have led him to his conclusion, so enabling every reader to follow the process through and, where possible – in the academic industry – to duplicate it. This demand not only invokes the liberal fiction of the universal communicability of each and every thought and so inhibits their objectively appropriate expression, but is also wrong in itself as a principle of representation. . . . Rather, knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short 105

See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005).

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through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience. Of this the Cartesian rule that we must address ourselves only to objects, “to gain clear and indubitable knowledge of which our minds seem sufficient,” with all the order and disposition to which the rule refers, gives as false a picture as the opposed but deeply related doctrine of the intuition of essences. If the latter denies logic its rights . . . the former takes logic in its immediacy, in relation to each single intellectual act, and not as mediated by the whole flow of conscious life in the knowing subject. But in this lies also an admission of profound inadequacy. For . . . thought which, for the sake of the relation to the object, forgoes the full transparency of its logical genesis, will always incur a certain guilt. It breaks the promise presupposed by the very form of judgment. This inadequacy resembles that of life, which describes a wavering, deviating line, disappointing by comparison with its premises, and yet which only in this actual course, always less than it should be, is able, under given conditions of existence, to represent an unregimented one.106

At first it might seem as if Adorno is simply advocating an honest empiricism over self-deluding rationalism: Pay careful attention to all the unruly details of experience rather than forcing them into the Procrustean framework of an artificial simplification. But Adorno’s position is not as simple or as cheerful as that; rather, what he is arguing is that it is the very nature of judgment or cognition to seek clarity and coherence, and that it is the very nature of life to resist it, thus that life must always disappoint the search for knowledge. And if this is so, then insofar as art too strives for knowledge it is also doomed to frustration: It must strive to know clearly and coherently that which cannot be known clearly and coherently. This is the epistemological premise for Adorno’s cognitivist but pessimistic conception of art. The socioeconomic basis for Adorno’s conception that art is always a broken promise of happiness lies in his conception of the “culture industry.” This concept too is already present in Adorno’s writings of the 1940s. Writing before the spread of television, Adorno means by the “culture industry” primarily the film and music industries, purveying their wares through cinemas, recordings, and radio broadcasts, and no doubt the publicists of these industries, so-called critics writing in newspapers and magazines. His thesis is that these industries have largely expropriated the media of genuine artistic expression for capitalist purposes and that if it is not entirely impossible, then it is certainly very difficult for artists who would be autonomous to regain the use of their 106

Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 80–1.

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own media for the sake of knowledge rather than profit. In Philosophy of Modern Music, Adorno writes that “since the culture industry has educated its victims to avoid straining themselves during the free time allotted to them for intellectual consumption, they cling just that much more to the external framework of a work of art which conceals its essence. . . . Kitsch – with its dictate of profit over culture – has long since conquered the social sphere.”107 Art, or artists, may struggle against the domination of the culture industry, but with little prospect of success either in creating genuinely independent works or in finding an audience for them: The all-powerful culture industry appropriates the enlightening principle and, in its relationship with human beings, defaces it for the benefit of prevailing obscurity. Art vehemently opposes this tendency; it offers an eversharper contrast to such false clarity. The configurations of that deposed obscurity are held up in opposition to the prevailing neon-light style of the times. Art is able to aid enlightenment only by relating the clarity of the world consciously to its own darkness. Only in a society which had achieved satisfaction would the death of art be possible. Its demise today, which appears immanent, would only signify the triumphs of base existence over the penetrating eye of consciousness which would presume to assert itself against it.108

This passage contains layers of polemic. It is part of Adorno’s lifelong polemic with Hegel, which is also prominent in Aesthetic Theory: Hegel was right to treat art as a form of cognition, of course, but wrong to think that its demise was imminent because it would be superseded by philosophical knowledge of the absolute: There can be no such knowledge because there is no absolute, and art is better positioned than philosophy itself to convey that fact. But yet art is nevertheless threatened with demise by the culture industry, which has expropriated its own media, and which in particular has in the clarity of its own images – think of Hollywood movies of the 1930s – stolen the means of enlightenment from genuine, nonkitsch art, which is thereby forced to be obscure even when its aim is enlightenment. The culture industry puts real art into a very difficult position, to say the least. As already suggested, Adorno’s attack on the culture industry can also be read as a riposte to (the optimistic side of ) Benjamin’s essay on art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Adorno extends this argument in Minima Moralia. In an extended passage captioned “Wolf as Grandmother,” alluding to the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, he argues that the archetypical products of the culture 107 108

Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 10. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 15.

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industry, popular films, are as full of “lying stereotypes” as fairy tales, the paradigmatic products of folk art. He states that “the strongest argument in the arsenal of apologists for the cinema is the crudest, its mass-consumption. They declare it, this drastic medium of the culture industry, popular art,” but try to hide the fact that “the film is not a mass art, but merely manipulated to deceive the masses.”109 This is endemic to the culture industry, not accidental: “Bad films cannot be put down to incompetence; the most gifted are broken by the business setup . . . by the total structure, which first reduces the individual subjects to mere moments, in order then to unite them, impotent and discrete, in the collective.”110 But the way in which mass art undermines the autonomy of its audience cannot even be blamed on the misused autonomy of its producers; it seems to be the product of economic forces beyond any individual control. The film, which today attaches itself inescapably to men as if it were a part of them, is at the same time remotest of all from their human destiny, . . . That the people who make films are in no way schemers is no counterargument. The objective spirit asserts itself in experiential rules, appraisals of the situation, technical criteria, economically invariable calculations, the whole specific weight of the industrial apparatus, without any special censorship being needed, and even if the masses were asked they would reflect back the ubiquity of the system. The producers no more function as subjects than do their workers and consumers, but merely as components in a self-regulating machinery. The Hegelian-sounding precept, however, that mass-art should reflect the real taste of the masses, and not that of carping intellectuals, is usurpation. The film’s opposition, as an all-encompassing ideology, to the objective interests of mankind, its interlacement with the status quo of profit-motivation, bad conscience and deceit can be conclusively demonstrated.111

The goal of art should be to enlighten people and allow them to function as genuine subjects, autonomous agents of their own destiny – this would be the ultimate response to Plato’s original challenge. But the economic forces of late capitalism seem superhuman, able to overcome the will of even the most dedicated artist, or at the very least to reduce almost any attempt to attain enlightenment through art to kitsch and to force the very few artists who can resist these forces into the creation of obscure rather than clear works and thereby virtually to guarantee their own obscurity. 109 110 111

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 203. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 204. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 205.

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It is against the background of these epistemological and socioeconomic assumptions, reached in the 1940s but unchanged into the 1960s, that Adorno worked on his Aesthetic Theory. Let us now turn to that work. Adorno begins with the remark that “the concept of art is located in a historically changing constellation of elements; it refuses definition.”112 If this were intended as an inference, it would be a non sequitur, a confusion between a definition and its extension: The definition of war as the extension of politics by other means is not falsified by the fact that the political issues as well as the means of each war are different, and art could likewise be defined precisely as the historically changing means by which that which cannot at any given time otherwise be known or expressed is known or expressed, as that which at any given time causes a free play of its audience’s mental powers even if it might not for another audience at another time, and so on. But the remark should probably be taken as Adorno’s own definition of art, and as the core of his polemic with Hegel within the framework of the aesthetics of truth.113 He says on the next page that the Hegelian vision of the possible death of art accords with the fact that art is a product of history. That Hegel considered art transitory while all the same chalking it up to absolute spirit stands in harmony with the double character of his system, yet it prompts a thought that would never have occurred to him: that the substance of art, according to him its absoluteness, is not identical with art’s life and death. Rather, art’s substance could be its transitoriness.114

According to Hegel, art for us is necessarily a thing of the past because it is the sensuous representation of the idea of the absolute, but the powers of sensuous representation are inherently limited and ultimately incapable of adequately representing the absolute, which can only be grasped 112 113

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Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 2. Adorno’s underlying commitment to the aesthetics of truth as his heritage from Hegel is made very clear in the opening lectures of Ästhetik (1958/59), where he states, “I must attempt, to make this clear at the outset, to orient the considerations on aesthetics that here ensue toward this thought of an aesthetic object, on the thought therefore that the essence of beauty [indeed] of all aesthetic categories . . . disclose . . . objectivity and are not mere effects on us as subjects” (p. 13) and “the relation to art is not so much a Sunday pleasure but something very serious and obligatory or, as Hegel said, art is an appearance and indeed a progressive appearance of the truth” (p. 21). Adorno’s replacement of Hegel’s thesis that the limited truth-presenting capacity of art is to be superseded by the philosophy of absolute knowing with his own view that art ultimately displays the impossibility of knowledge and beyond that of happiness is not yet on display in these opening comments in the lectures. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 3.

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by philosophy instead. For Adorno, art’s substance not only could but must be its transitoriness not just because the power of sensuous representation is limited, although there is something inherently contradictory for him in art’s attempt to represent anything other than itself at all, but also because there is no absolute, nothing that could ever be grasped in final form whether by art or for that matter by philosophy – remember that Adorno’s chief work in theoretical philosophy itself was called Negative Dialectics, a dialectic that does not result in absolute knowing. The two central themes of Aesthetic Theory are thus that there is no absolute for art to grasp, only infinite complexity and change, and that there is in any case a contradiction in the very idea of representation or mimesis, although art cannot be understood except as representation or mimesis. So if art’s promise of happiness is based not on a mere promise of pleasure without further practical or theoretical significance – as we have already seen, Adorno thinks it is not – but on its completely coherent promise of a better future in a fully realized absolute, then indeed its promise of happiness has to be broken. We have already seen evidence of Adorno’s rejection of a Hegelian absolute in Minima Moralia. Aesthetic Theory emphasizes the contradictions inherent in both the content and the form of art from the outset: Artworks participate in enlightenment because they do not lie: They do not feign the literalness of what speaks out of them. They are real as answers to the puzzle externally posed to them. Their own tension is binding in relation to the tension external to them. The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil. . . . The complex of tensions in artworks crystallizes undisturbed in these problems of form and through emancipation from the external world’s facade converges with the real essence. . . . Accordingly, the pure concept of art could not define the fixed circumference of a sphere that has been secured once and for all; rather, its closure is achieved only in an intermittent and fragile balance. . . . If artworks are answers to their own questions, they themselves thereby truly become questions.115

Internally and externally, artworks are in “tension.” They are in external tension because the world that they represent is itself a puzzle constantly in tension with itself: Though it is constantly trying to convince us that it is an orderly, rational place, and we are constantly trying to convince ourselves of that, the essence of the world is in fact only that it is a “complex of tensions” that are never fully brought into balance, and it is precisely by expressing that fact in the tension of its own form 115

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 5–6.

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that art is veridical. The largest part of Aesthetic Theory is then devoted to detailing the tensions or outright contradictions inherent in the form of works of art. The gist of Adorno’s theory of artistic form is that it is the means by which art distinguishes itself from mere matter as part of nature and also from the current state of nature in order to point to the possibility of a different life and thus a different nature than we currently have, but that art cannot escape from its materiality and thus from being a part of nature as it presently is and from mimesis or its representation of nature as it currently is, so that the project of art is essentially paradoxical and this is why its promise of happiness in a utopia or better nature is inevitably broken. He makes this point in innumerable ways and contexts – a few examples will have to stand for many. At the outset of the work, he writes: There is no aesthetic refraction without something being refracted; no imagination without something imagined. . . . In its relation to empirical reality art sublimates the latter’s governing principle of sese conservare [selfconservation] as the ideal of the self-identity of its works; as Schoenberg said, one paints a painting, not what it represents. Inherently every artwork desires identity with itself . . . Only by virtue of separation from empirical reality, which sanctions art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work’s own need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence. Artworks are afterimages of empirical life insofar as they help the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere and thereby free it from that to which they are condemned by reified external experience.

But “art negates the categorial determinations stamped on the empirical world and yet harbors what is empirically existing in its own substance.”116 Through forms of one kind or another, each of which has its own logic, art attempts to escape from the empirical world of which it is a part and which it represents, in order to represent the possibility of another world, but it cannot escape the empirical world of which it is part and which it represents, so it remains inexorably torn between materiality and spirituality, between its being part of this world and representing another. Later, Adorno makes the same point in a complicated passage that describes art as an attempt to use rationality to overcome magic, but, since rationality is co-opted by capitalism, art also has to retain magic in order to overcome rationality. 116

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 4–5.

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In art the subject exposes itself, at various levels of autonomy, to its other, separated from it and yet not altogether separated. Art’s disavowal of magical practices – its antecedents – implies participation in rationality. That art, something mimetic, is possible in the midst of rationality, and that it employs its means, is a response to the faulty irrationality of the rational world as an overadministered world. For the aim of all rationality – the quintessence of the means for dominating nature – would have to be something other than means, hence something not rational. Capitalist society hides and disavows precisely this irrationality, and in contrast to this, art represents truth in a double sense: It maintains the image of its aim, which has been obscured by rationality, and it convicts the status quo of its irrationality and absurdity.

Yet, art cannot fulfill its concept. This strikes each and every one of its works, even the highest, with an ineluctable imperfectness that repudiates the idea of perfection toward which artworks must aspire. . . . The aporia of art, pulled between regression to literal magic or surrender of the mimetic impulse to thinglike rationality, dictates its laws of motion; the aporia cannot be eliminated. . . . Only because no artwork can succeed emphatically are its forces set free; only as a result of this does art catch a glimpse of reconciliation. Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it. . . . Rational and irrational theories of art are therefore equally faulty.117

Hegel was wrong to think that art must be superseded because the sensuous is ultimately incapable of representing the fully rational; rather, reality itself is never fully rational, just as often using one layer of rationality to suppress another, and art itself must use rational means – its formal structure – in opposition to rationality, at least as that is currently understood by society. That this paradox is inescapable means that there is no possible perfection in art, and the best art finds this realization liberating, so it can experiment with the freedom afforded to it, but it still cannot overcome its paradoxical character. Adorno also makes his point by identifying the conflict between the better world represented by art and its historical situation with the unresolvable conflict between the spirituality of art and its sensuality or materiality. “At every aesthetic level the antagonism between the unreality of the imago and the reality of the appearing historical content is renewed.” Art strives to escape its historical and material context by becoming pure form and thus pure spirit: That through which artworks, by becoming appearance, are more than they are: This is their spirit. . . . What appears in artworks and is neither to be 117

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 54–5.

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separated from their appearance nor to be held simply identical to it – the nonfactual in their facticity – is their spirit. It makes artworks, things among things, something other than thing. . . . The spirit of artworks is their immanent mediation, which transforms their sensual moments and their objective arrangement; this is mediation in the strict sense that each and every element in the artwork becomes manifestly its own other.118

But art cannot fully transform the material into pure form, into a completed image of the spiritual, or of an alternative to the actual world: The strict immanence of the spirit of artworks is contradicted on the other hand by a countertendency that is no less immanent: the tendency of artworks to wrest themselves free of the internal unity of their own construction, to introduce within themselves ceasuras that no longer permit the totality of the appearance. Because the spirit of the works is not identical with them, spirit breaks up the objective form through which it is constituted. . . . If the spirit of artworks flashes up in their sensual appearance, it does so only as their negation: Unitary with the phenomenon, spirit is at the same time its other. The spirit of artworks is bound up with their form, but spirit is such only insofar as it points beyond that form.119

The tension between form and matter, that through matter form or spirit must be intimated but yet it cannot be completely intimated because that would require an escape from matter or sensuality, is no doubt the source of the tension that makes artworks creative and interesting, but it is also what makes art paradoxical and incapable of delivering more than a glimpse of the reconciliation of conflicts in the better world the possibility of which it is supposed to reveal. Again, that is for Adorno why art’s promise of happiness is inevitably broken. Another passage concludes that “all art is endowed with sadness” because the claim of every work of art to be an internal unity is belied by the fact that it is always part of a world larger than itself and the claim of any work of mimetic art to represent something other than itself is belied by the fact that it inevitably remains itself. Thus for Adorno a purely formalist theory of art is incompatible with both the fact that a work of art is always part of a larger world and that it typically represents something other than itself, but the representational character of art is internally incoherent. He writes: No artwork is an undiminished unity; each must simulate it, and thus collides with itself. Confronted with an antagonistic reality, the aesthetic unity that is established in opposition to it immanently becomes a semblance. The integration of artworks culminates in the semblance that their life is 118 119

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 86–7. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 88–9.

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precisely that of their elements. However, the elements import the heterogeneous into artworks and their semblance becomes apocryphal. In fact, every penetrating analysis of an artwork turns up fiction in its claim to aesthetic unity. . . . The artwork is semblance not only as the antithesis to existence but also in its own terms. It is beleaguered with inconsistencies.

Here Adorno argues that the formal unity that a work of art seeks is inevitably undermined by the materiality of its elements. Then he turns to meaning or content and argues that the intended meaning of the work of art, which is an image of a world better than the one we have, remains mere semblance, because the work of art cannot escape from the world of which it is a part. Thus “meaning, whenever it is manifest in an artwork, remains bound up with semblance, all art is endowed with sadness; art grieves all the more, the more completely its successful unification suggests meaning, and the sadness is heightened by the feeling of ‘Oh, were it only so.’ Melancholy is the shadow of what in all form is heterogenous, which form strives to banish: mere existence.”120 For Adorno, art always remains torn between two worlds: the world of matter that it cannot escape and the world of form by which it attempts to escape the world of matter, the better world that it tries to mean and the actual world that it cannot escape and that turns its intended meaning into mere semblance, something we know is merely make-believe. Some might find art’s tenuous position between matter and form and between actual and possible a matter of pure pleasure, something at which to marvel (recall Adam Smith’s theory of imitation), but for Adorno it is only a matter for sadness and melancholy. Adorno’s melancholic view of the impossibility of art’s escape from nature is perhaps indicated most clearly of all in a striking discussion that is about natural beauty, a topic that he claims had been largely neglected since the start of the nineteenth century (he takes no notice of the fact that it was a central topic for empathy theorists such as the Vischers and Lipps), but even more about the representation of nature in art. “The concept of natural beauty,” he says, “rubs on a wound . . . the violence that the artwork – a pure artifact – inflicts on nature.” Wholly artifactual, the artwork seems to be the opposite of what is not made, nature. As pure antitheses, however, each refers to the other: nature to the experience of a mediated and objectified world, the artwork to nature as the mediated plenipotentiary of immediacy. Therefore reflection on natural beauty is irrevocably requisite to the theory of art.121 120 121

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 105. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 61–2.

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By the claim that nature refers to the experience of a mediated and objectified world, Adorno alludes to the traditional idea that in experiencing natural beauty we experience it at least to an extent as if it were a work of art, on older theories such as Mendelssohn’s as if it were actually a work of divine art; on Kant’s theory as if it led us to the merely regulative idea of a supersensible artist; on the theories of the British picturesque as if it had to be improved by some artistic touches, such as artificial ruins; on more recent theories as if it had to be seen from a proper vantage point and as if through a frame or on a pedestal, the way we view a work of visual art. By the claim that the artwork refers to nature as the mediated plenipotentiary of immediacy, however, Adorno means that works of art often invoke nature as the domain where we could live free of the conflicts of society, and thus enjoy the happiness that art promises. He illustrates this point with several examples from late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury art, thus art created when natural beauty was still a central theme for aesthetic theory: “Thus the last act of Figaro is played out of doors, and in Freischütz [the 1821 opera by Carl Maria von Weber] Agathe, standing on the balcony, suddenly becomes aware of the starry night.” But he also illustrates the point with a reference to a paradigmatic twentieth-century work: “In Proust, whose Recherche is an artwork and a metaphysics of art, the experience of a hawthorn hedge figures as a fundamental phenomenon of aesthetic comportment.”122 The promise of happiness through natural beauty is reinforced by the conception of nature as the domain in which good things happen automatically, that is, naturally, a conception of nature as “exclusively the appearance, never the stuff of labor and the reproduction of life, let alone the substratum of science,” a conception of which “nature, as appearing beauty, is not perceived as an object of action.”123 But of course any such promise of happiness is doomed to be broken, because nature as much as society is a domain of conflict – society is, after all, itself just part of nature, and the conflicts in human social life are part of human nature – and the idea of nature as a domain free of conflict is just a myth: That the experience of natural beauty, at least according to its subjective consciousness, is entirely distinct from the domination of nature, as if the experience were at one with the primordial origin, marks out both the strength and the weakness of the experience: its strength, because it recollects a world without domination, one that probably never existed; its

122 123

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 63. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 65.

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weakness, because through this recollection it dissolves back into that amorphousness out of which genius once arose and for the first time became consciousness of the idea of freedom that could be realized in a world free from domination. The anamnesis of freedom in natural beauty deceives because it seeks freedom in the old unfreedom. Natural beauty is myth transposed into the imagination and thus, perhaps, requited.124

At first it might seem as if Adorno has gotten matters backward in this passage: It ought to be the weakness rather than the strength of the artistic invocation of an unconflicted domain of natural beauty that it represents a world without domination that probably never existed, and it ought to be the strength rather than the weakness of this artistic appeal to nature that it recalls the freedom from which genius arose and gives us the possibility of imagining a world that would once again be free from domination. But Adorno puts things the other way around because he takes the idea of a world free from domination to be an illusion and thus takes it to be a strength of art that precisely because it is not mere nature it reminds us that there never was such a world. Indeed, Adorno finds melancholy not only in the artistic representation of nature but in what to many would seem the most innocent form of natural beauty itself: The song of birds is found beautiful by everyone; no feeling person in whom something of the European tradition survives fails to be moved by the sound of a robin after a rain shower. Yet something frightening lurks in the song of birds precisely because it is not a song but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed. The fright appears as well in the threat of migratory flocks, which bespeak ancient divination, forever presaging ill fortune.125

Many would see the semiannual appearance of migratory flocks as an uplifting sign that no matter what the foibles of mankind, nature takes its reassuring course, but for Adorno they are just another sign that the realm of nature is no more free of conflict and doom than the realm of human society. (If he had pushed his argument a little further, he could have appealed to the many cases in which the annual migration of birds has been diminished or destroyed by the destructive activities of human beings, which anybody might find melancholy – but he did not, perhaps because even undiminished nature is melancholy enough for him.) In the end, Adorno sees art as the only product of human expression that can offer a glimpse of a better world, but refuses to accept any promise of this world even from art. As we have already seen, this attitude is 124 125

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 66. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 66.

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evident throughout his works but is summed up particularly well in a complex passage in Aesthetic Theory where it becomes clear that his polemic is not just with Hegel but is also another part of the polemic with Plato that has persisted through the history of aesthetics.126 He begins in an optimistic tone: “By its form alone art promises what is not; it registers objectively, however refractedly, the claim that because the nonexistent appears it must indeed be possible.” At first, he credits Plato with having understood this: “The unstillable longing in the face of beauty, for which Plato found words fresh with its first experience, is the longing for the fulfillment of what was promised,” and he only turns his argument against the dual targets of Hegelian idealism and the Romanticism that Hegel himself opposed: “Idealist aesthetics,” on the one hand, “fails by its inability to do justice to art’s promesse de bonheur,” because “it reduces the artwork to what it in theoretical terms symbolizes and thus trespasses against the spirit in that artwork,” while Romanticism, on the other hand, although in “epitomiz[ing] the unsubsumable and as such challeng[ing] the prevailing principle of reality: that of exchangeability,” “it grasped something essential about art,” nevertheless narrowed what it grasped “to a particular, to the praise of a specific and putatively inwardly infinite comportment of art.”127 In other words, it translated its glimpse of the possibility of release from the world of exchange and domination into the goal of merely personal release therefrom. Plato saw art as striving for the universal, the better world embodied in the ideas, and thus did not see art as merely symbolizing this better realm, as Hegelian idealism did, nor settling for merely personal redemption, as Romanticism did (Friedrich Schegel’s conversion to Catholicism can count as the image of this). But of course Plato saw art as a failure, because it cannot actually deliver knowledge of the ideas, or even compete with the expert general’s or expert shoemaker’s knowledge of empirical reality. Thus Adorno criticizes Plato for having failed to see that art does not try to cognize existing reality, whether at the imperfect level of empirical reality or at the perfect level of real ideas, but tries to offer us knowledge of a better realm of pure possibility and by that means to promise us happiness: “If the Platonic ideas were existence-in-itself, art would not be needed: the ontologists of antiquity mistrusted art and sought pragmatic control over it because in their innermost being they knew that the hypostatized 126

127

The polemic with Plato is also on display in the 1958–9 lectures, which include a lengthy discussion of the Phaedrus that in turn includes a discussion of the “paradox of beauty”; see Ästhetik (1958/59), pp. 139–85. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 82–3.

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universal concept is not what beauty promises. Plato’s critique of art is indeed not compelling, because art negates the literal reality of its thematic content, which Plato had indicted as a lie”: That is, Plato mistook both the epistemic and the moral attitude of art: he saw it as a poor copy of existing reality rather than realizing that it is meant as an indictment of present reality and a promise of a better one. But then Adorno once again turns against art’s promesse de bonheur: In spite of all this, however, the blemish of mendacity obviously cannot be rubbed off art; nothing guarantees that it will keep its objective promise. Therefore every theory of art must at the same time be the critique of art. Even radical art is a lie insofar as it fails to create the possible to which it gives rises as semblance. Artworks draw credit from a praxis that has yet to begin and no one knows whether anything backs their letters of credit.128

In fact, what Adorno wants from art is not a mere glimpse of the possibility of a better world but a guarantee of the imminence of a better world, the strongest claim to knowledge we might imagine. The utopian hopes that Hegel had placed in the cunning of history or Adam Smith or Karl Marx in the invisible hand of the economy or the visible self-destruction of capitalism have been displaced onto art. Of course, that is too much of a burden for art to bear, just as much as it is too much of a burden for history or economics to bear. Maybe we should settle, gratefully, for a glimpse of the possibility of a better world without expecting art or anything else to guarantee its realizability. Another way of explaining why for Adorno art’s promesse de bonheur must inevitably be broken is because he looks to art to deliver something beyond itself, redemption from a broken society, and rejects the view that art or the aesthetic more generally (that is, natural beauty as well) might offer an opportunity for a self-rewarding play of our powers that can bring us pleasure without having to take on the burden of transforming society all by itself. Another eccentric Marxist aesthetician who did recognize the importance of play as an aesthetic response and indeed thought that the ultimate purpose of the transformation of society was to free the human being to play was Herbert Marcuse.

3. Marcuse Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) spent more of his life in the United States than in Germany. But his thought was indelibly marked by his 128

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 83.

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German education; he was closely associated with the Frankfurt school, and especially with Adorno, and at the height of his popularity during the 1970s he was as influential in Germany as in the United States. For these reasons, it seems appropriate to consider him here in conjunction with Adorno, rather than in our subsequent study of American academic aesthetics, in which he, unlike Ernst Cassirer, had no influence. Like Walter Benjamin, Marcuse was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. He earned his doctorate at Freiburg in 1922 and after several years in publishing returned in 1928 to study with Husserl, then completed his habilitation in 1932 with the work Hegel’s Ontology and Theory of Historicity.129 His path to an academic career blocked by the rise of the Nazis, he too turned to the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, where in 1933 he published a review of Marx’s early manuscripts, an important document for liberal Marxism in the West. In 1934 he emigrated to the United States. In 1941 he published Reason and Revolution,130 then spent the war in U.S. intelligence services working on anti-Nazi propaganda and de-Nazification; after the war he served in the State Department on Central European matters until 1951. His academic career began only in 1952, when he was already fifty-four, and he subsequently taught at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and the University of California, San Diego. His best-known books were Eros and Civilization (1955),131 which presented a conception of human liberation based on Freudianism as well as Marxism, and One Dimensional Man (1961),132 which, in ways similar to Adorno’s attack upon the culture industry, diagnosed mechanisms of repression in supposedly liberal democratic regimes. The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse’s final work, was published in 1978, the year before his death.133 It and Eros and Civilization are the most important sources for Marcuse’s aesthetics.134 129

130

131

132

133

134

Herbert Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology and Theory of Historicity, trans. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941). Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978). An additional volume of papers on aesthetics is Herbert Marcuse, Nachgelassene Schriften, Band 2: Kunst und Befreiung, ed. Peter-Erwin Jansen (Lüneberg: Dietrich zu Klampen Verlag, 2000). General works on Marcuse include Alasdair MacIntyre, Marcuse (London: Fontana, 1970); Barry Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation (London: Verso, 1982);

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Marcuse shared in other Marxists’ diagnoses of the economic bases of repression in modern society, but he did not think that the sole concern of reform should be economic equality. He was more concerned with the liberation of individual subjectivity and argued that more traditional Marxist aesthetics had “shared in the devalution of subjectivity.”135 He held that art could and should be a liberating and “dissenting force” through its cognitive power: “Art is committed to that perception of the world which alienates individuals from their functional existence and performance in society”; in other words, art can cut through the screen of illusion that a repressive society creates to mask its true distribution of wealth and power and thereby help individuals free themselves from those forces. But what art liberates people for is the full exercise of all their powers in their private as well as public lives: “It is committed to an emancipation of sensibility, imagination, and reason in all spheres of subjectivity and objectivity.”136 “It is all too easy to relegate love and hate, joy and sorrow, hope and despair to the domain of psychology, thereby removing them from the concerns of radical praxis,”137 Marcuse writes, and traditional Marxist aesthetics has shared in this displacement, but love and hate, joy and sorrow, hope and despair are proper responses to art (and life) that should not be so relegated. The liberation that art makes possible through its cognitive dimension is liberation to enjoy the experience of our own emotions both in response to art and throughout our lives. In this way Marcuse makes it clear that in his view the cognitive and emotional aspects of the experience of art are inseparably linked.

135 136 137

Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); and Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (London: Routledge, 2005). Richard Wolin places Marcuse in connection with other early students of Heidegger in Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), while Leszek Kołakowski discusses Marcuse’s Marxism in The Main Currents of Marxism, pp. 1104–23. On Marcuse’s aesthetics specifically, see Timothy J. Lukes, The Flight into Inwardness: An Exposition and Critique of Herbert Marcuse’s Liberative Aesthetics (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1986), and B.M. Katz, “The Liberation of Art and the Art of Liberation: The Aesthetics of Herbert Marcuse,” in The Aesthetics of the Critical Theorists: Studies in Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas, ed. Ronald Roblin (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), pp. 152–87. A collection is Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, ed. Robert Pippin, Andrew Feenberg, and Charles Webel (Westport: Greenwood, 1987). Some of what follows is drawn from my article “Marcuse and Classical Aesthetics,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 62 (2008): 349–65. Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, p. 6. Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, pp. 8–9. Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, p. 5.

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Thus far, nothing has been said about aesthetic experience as a form of play. But in Marcuse’s synthesis of Marxism with Freudianism, the possibility of a playful experience of life, or of the achievement of a free harmony between our sensuous and our rational nature, is the fundamental desideratum in human life, and like Schiller, a hero for him both early and late, Marcuse thinks that the experience of art is an indispensable means toward the realization of this goal. Marcuse’s earliest publication had been a bibliography of Schiller,138 and thirty years later Schiller is a central figure along with Marx and Freud in Eros and Civilization. This work celebrates Freud for teaching that the principle of Eros, or love of life, should not be confined to genital sexuality and should instead pervade the life of the adult as it does that of the infant, but criticizes Freud for failing to see that what stands in the way of this is not just individual psychopathology but the “surplus repression” that is imposed by a dominant class in society on all members of society – even its own members – in order to hold on to power.139 Marcuse turns to Schiller for a model of a thinker who recognizes the possibility of human life lived free from the antierotic constraints of surplus repression and also recognizes that society must be transformed before human life can be lived this way, but also as a model of a thinker who avoids bifurcation between means and end in the transformation of human life because he treats the aesthetic experience of beauty, which he understands as a free harmony between our sensuous and our rational nature, as both the end or aim of the transformation of society and the means to it. Marcuse sees Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind as “written largely under the impact of [Kant’s] Critique of Judgment” as well as aiming “at a remaking of civilization by virtue of the liberating force of the aesthetic function.”140 Indeed, his central characterizations of the goal of the remaking of civilization sound remarkably Kantian. Thus, while Marcuse sometimes characterizes his goal as “the erotic reconciliation (union) of man and nature in the aesthetic attitude, where order is beauty and work is play,”141 he often employs formulations that use the 138

139

140 141

Herbert Marcuse, Schiller-Bibliographie unter Benutzung der Trämelschen Schiller-Bibliothek (Berlin: S. Martin Fraenkel, 1925). The concept of “surplus repression” is introduced into Eros and Civilization at p. 32, where it is defined as “restrictions necessitated by social domination” in contrast to “basic repression,” the “‘modifications’ of the instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization,” presumably regardless of its particular relations of production and governance. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 164. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 160.

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Kantian notion of “free play” without explicit reference to the very unKantian notion of “erotic reconciliation.” Thus he argues that modern technology ought to be freed from surplus repression because it has the potential for “freeing energy for the attainment of objectives set by the free play of individual faculties”;142 that while a just and rational organization of material production can never itself be “a realm of freedom and gratification,” it could nevertheless “release time and energy for the free play of human faculties outside the realm of alienated labor”;143 and that the goal of social transformation is an “expanding realm of freedom” that “becomes truly a realm of play – of the free play of individual faculties.”144 It is impossible not to hear echoes here of Kant’s description of the experience of beauty as, for example, “the facilitated play of both powers of the mind (imagination and understanding), enlivened through mutual agreement,”145 and of course Marcuse does begin the chapter “Aesthetic Dimension” in Eros and Civilization (the source for the title of his last book) with a discussion of the seminal role of the third Critique as the first “philosophical effort to mediate, in the aesthetic dimension, between sensuousness and reason,” thus “as an attempt to reconcile the two spheres of the human existence which were torn asunder by a repressive reality principle.”146 However, we should recall that Kant always describes the experience of beauty as one of free and harmonious play between two higher cognitive powers of the mind, not sensuous desire and reason but imagination and understanding, thus, given Kant’s definitions of those faculties, the powers to reproduce sensory representations and the power to unify them, which is ordinarily effected by the use of determinate concepts but which is somehow done in the case of the beautiful without such concepts. For Kant aesthetic experience is a condition in which two strictly cognitive powers are in play, not the general powers of desire and reason. And even what counts here as the “lower” power of cognition, namely, the imagination, is not directly equated with sensory perception, but is the power to reproduce sensory perception, thus, to borrow a Platonic phrase, already at one remove from it. Kant also distances the imagination from immediate 142 143 144 145

146

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 84. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 142; see also pp. 178 and 195. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 204. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) §9, 5:219 (abbreviated throughout this work as CPJ ). Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 164.

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sensory perception, let alone from any suggestion of direct enjoyment of sensory perception as such, by speaking of it as the “faculty of a priori intuitions,” an allusion to his doctrine that the proper object of taste is not all of the sensory aspects of objects, such as their colors or timbres (let alone their tastes or smells), but only their spatial and/or temporal form or design.147 Thus, Kant does not analyze the experience of beauty as one in which all of our faculties, including our capacity for sensory desires or even all aspects of our capacity for sensory perception, are freely and pleasurably at play, but as one in which only a purified – or, someone unfriendly to Kant might say, repressed or sublimated – subset of our powers is involved. And this, of course, is what enables Kant to insist on his rigid separation between the beautiful and the merely agreeable, and to maintain that our pleasure in beauty is connected to no interest in the existence of its object.148 Kant’s conception of the human faculties that are involved in free play in aesthetic experience is thus narrower than that which Marcuse wants to promote. Now surely Marcuse must have known this, so perhaps in spite of his Kantian language he meant to praise Kant himself only as a precursor of Schiller. That may be, but then it has to be observed that Schiller too understands the free play of our powers in aesthetic experience in more narrowly cognitive and metaphysical and less globally psychological terms than Marcuse does. Schiller does go beyond Kant in characterizing the aesthetic condition as harmonizing freedom and necessity as well as imagination and understanding, thus giving it a practical as well as cognitive dimension. But his account is far from stressing the role of sensuality and sexuality in aesthetic experience, the way Marcuse’s ideal of aesthetic experience does. Throughout the central letters of Aesthetic Education, that is, Letters XI through XXI, Schiller describes a series of contrasts or even conflicts in human nature and experience that are to be overcome through aesthetic experience and thus through aesthetic education. He begins in Letter XI with a contrast between “person” and “condition,” or that which is constant in a human being and that which changes. He also glosses this as the distinction between the atemporal and the temporal, the phenomenal and the intelligible, form and matter, and even the divine and the human. The task for the human being is to overcome these conflicts, by finding a form of experience and ultimately a way of 147 148

See especially CPJ, §14, 5:225. See Kant, CPJ, §§2–3, 5:204–7.

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life in which both sides of the contrasts are balanced with each other. In Schiller’s most abstract terms, there are “two fundamental laws” in mankind’s “sensuous-rational nature”: The first insists upon absolute reality: he is to turn everything which is mere form into world, and make all his potentialities fully manifest. The second insists upon absolute formality: he is to destroy everything which is mere world, and bring harmony into all his changes. In other words, he is to externalize all that is within him, and give form to all that is outside him. Both these tasks, conceived in their highest fulfillment, lead us back to that concept of divinity from which I started.149

Schiller’s statement that it is a law of our “sensuous-rational nature” to make all of our potentialities fully manifest sounds much like Marcuse’s goal of the free exercise of all of our individual capacities, but Schiller’s abstract language makes it unclear that he has anything as specific as our sexuality in mind, and his concluding suggestion that it is our goal to become something like a divinity hardly suggests this either. Thus, for all of Schiller’s emphasis on the development of the full potentialities of the human being through the experience of beauty and the cultivation of the taste for it, what he actually seems to have in mind is primarily the proper development of the full range of human cognitive abilities, which are necessary for both the conduct of scientific inquiry and conduct in the moral sense. In his famous diagnosis of alienation in modern society, a model for Marcuse and many others, he emphasizes that the modern state – not, it should be noted, the modern economy – fragments human beings, allowing each to develop only a part of his or her potentialities,150 and that this is what aesthetic education is to overcome. But what the subsequent development of his argument suggests is that the damage that modern society does is primarily to the cognitive and in the moral context empathetic powers of human beings rather than specifically to their imagination as a creative power and to their ability to enjoy their sexuality in a way free from the constraints of surplus repression. Thus Schiller’s conception of the enjoyment of the full potentialities of human beings seems, to put it politely, at best a minimal anticipation of Marcuse’s conception of the free play of all of our individual faculties. 149

150

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Preess, 1967), Letter XI, p. 77. In the last sentence of the extract, I have translated Gottheit by “divinity” rather than the archaic “Godhead” that Wilkinson and Willoughby used. See Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter VI, pp. 31–43.

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But this is not to suggest that Marcuse could not have appealed to the eighteenth century for support or at least a pedigree for his hopes for aesthetic experience. He could have found support for his approach, but in different quarters. Specifically, Marcuse could have found contributions to his own views in the mid-eighteenth-century theories of Edmund Burke and Moses Mendelssohn. Marcuse could have found support for his view that art liberates us for eros as well as for civilization in Burke’s analysis that the experience of beauty is produced by the perception of properties that we find sexually attractive, even in circumstances where for either natural or social reasons there is no thought of actual sexual activity. Burke recognizes sexual attractiveness as a fundamental generalizable source of beauty, and not as anything that needs to be repressed, although it may well need to be generalized through processes of association if we are to explain how we find beautiful those things with which we might think about mating but with which we cannot for one reason or another mate, or those things with which we cannot even think about mating, such as members of other species, crystals, landscapes, and so on. But Burke’s key idea remains that what we find beautiful is that which in one way or another and to one degree or another stirs our sexual desire, and that this is a fundamental fact about human nature that we have no reason to repress. Mendelssohn, by contrast, although he was one of the first in Germany to respond to Burke’s work, did not emphasize a specifically sexual dimension in the object of aesthetic experience as Burke did, but he did recognize the involvement of our bodies as well as our minds in our response to beauty, no matter how remote from anything sexual or even bodily the object to which we respond might be. Mendelssohn, as we saw in Volume 1, added to Alexander Baumgarten’s recognition of our pleasure in sensory representation considered as a cognitive state of mind a further pleasure in the bodily effects of sensory representation. The aesthetic theories of the next generation, that is, of Kant and Schiller, provided Marcuse with his terminology of the free play of our faculties or capacities. But he could have found in the earlier theories of Burke and Mendelssohn more of the content that he wanted for his own ideal of aesthetic experience: In Burke, the idea that sexuality is essentially connected to the content of beauty, and in Mendelssohn, the idea that aesthetic response comprises a generalized sense of bodily as well as mental well-being. And precisely because on Mendelssohn’s account aesthetic response and thus its bodily element are not directed at specifically sexual subject matter, it might even be argued that his account anticipates Marcuse’s conception of an aesthetic response that is like the pleasure

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of generalized rather than specifically genital sexuality. Like many of the German philosophers of his own generation, Marcuse looked primarily to Kant and his aftermath for such inspiration as he was willing to accept from the philosophical tradition, and in Eros and Civilization, of course, he drew upon Freud, who himself drew more upon nineteenth- than on eighteenth-century philosophy for his own inspiration. But Marcuse could have added substance as well as pedigree to his conception of aesthetic experience by looking back to these pre-Kantian philosophers. Leaving aside the issue whether Schiller really meant to include the bodily and even sexual capacities of human beings in his conception of play, it is clear that Marcuse could nevertheless borrow the outlines of his own conception from the earlier author. Marcuse culminates his description of Schiller’s conception of play in Eros and Civilization thus: Once it has really gained ascendancy as a principle of civilization, the play impulse would literally transform the reality. Nature, the objective world, would then be experienced primarily, neither as dominating man (as in the primitive society), nor as being dominated by man (as in the established civilization), but rather as an object of “contemplation.” With this change in the basic and formative experience, the object of experience itself changes: released from violent domination and exploitation, and instead shaped by the play impulse, nature would also be liberated from its own brutality and would become free to display the wealth of its purposeless forms which express the “inner life” of its objects. And a corresponding change would take place in the subjective world. . . . [Man’s] existence would still be activity, but “what he possesses and produces need bear no longer the traces of servitude, the fearful design of its purpose”; beyond want and anxiety, human activity becomes display – the free manifestation of potentialities.151

The suggestion that a transformation in our own attitudes would necessarily produce a change in nature itself might seem more like eighteenthor early nineteenth-century idealism than what we should expect from a twentieth-century Marxist materialist; on the other hand, for a materialist a change in the attitudes of mankind is itself a change in part of nature, and perhaps the only part of nature really relevant to Marcuse’s concerns. In any case, what is important in the passage is the idea that freedom from servitude, want, and anxiety would also be the liberation of mankind for “the free manifestation of potentialities.” Marcuse does not explain what he means by “display” in this passage, but perhaps that is an allusion to the specific and dual function of art: Art is an expression 151

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 173. Words in quotation marks are Marcuse’s quotations from Schiller.

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of the free manifestation of potentialities on the part of the artist, but also a model and means for the free manifestation of potentialities on the part of the audience, who can be led to introduce the dimension of liberation and play into their own lives that the artist has enjoyed in creating art. The relation between the freedom of the artist and the audience cannot be considered automatic, however, the freedom of the audience being directly caused by the freedom of the artist, for that would be inconsistent with the freedom of the audience after all. Thus Marcuse emphasizes that “the free individual must himself bring about the harmony between individual and universal gratification. . . . Order is freedom only if it is founded on and sustained by the free gratification of the individuals.”152 Marcuse’s motivation for this remark may lie in his political theory, but it brings out an essential element of any aesthetic use of the concept of play that was hinted at in Kant’s theory of genius and by a few others, such as Dilthey, but that has rarely been made explicit in the history of aesthetics: that if art must originate in the free play of potentialities in the artist but must also produce a free play of such faculties in its audience, then the work of the artist must somehow trigger but cannot fully determine the response of the audience. The freedom of the audience is as essential to the aesthetic experience as that of the artist. Marcuse’s reassembly of the central elements of a Kantian-Schillerian conception of play must thus apply to both artist and audience. The first “main element” or, perhaps better, precondition for aesthetic play is provision of the outward conditions for the exercise of inward freedom on the part of both, something that in Marcuse’s view of course requires revolution: “The transformation of toil (labor) into play, and of repressive productivity into ‘display’ – a transformation that must be preceded by the conquest of want (scarcity) as the determining factor of civilization.” This allows for two results, each of which must again be able to take place in both artist and audience, namely, “the self-sublimation of sensuousness (of the sensuous impulse) and the de-sublimation of reason (of the form-impulse) in order to reconcile the two basic antagonistic impulses” – in other words, sense and reason, sexuality and self-control, must learn to play nicely together – and “the conquest of time in so far as time is destructive of lasting gratification.”153 Marcuse has not quite explained how the latter, we might say anti-Schopenhauerian effect is supposed to follow from Schillerian free play, but perhaps the idea is 152 153

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 174–5. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 176.

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that if we are reasonable about our pleasures we will not undermine our pleasure in them by expecting them to last forever, an expectation that can only be disappointed, but if we are not suppressed by external forces neither will we have to expect that they cannot be repeated or varied in the future. Marcuse’s celebration of Kant and Schiller leads him to underemphasize the bodily and sexual aspects of aesthetic experience that are necessary for his own conception of aesthetic experience as the “free manifestation of potentialities.” But his conception of free play compensates for this by its emphasis on autonomy, which can be understood as making clear that if free play is essential to aesthetic experience, then there must be room for it on the part of both artist and audience. More generally, Marcuse has suggested a synthesis of the cognitive, emotional, and play aspects of aesthetic experience by arguing that art affords us knowledge of both social realities and the possibility of transforming them, and that the transformation of society that such knowledge makes possible would liberate us to enjoy the exercise of all our faculties, including our physical and emotional as well as intellectual faculties. Marcuse’s celebration of the possibility of play within a transformed society does not seem to have been constrained by Adorno’s pessimism that neither the outward transformation of society nor the inward transformation of human beings so envisioned is really possible. Perhaps the real reason for the absence of free play from Adorno’s aesthetics was precisely that he did not think that free play is a genuine possibility for human beings under any circumstances, whereas Marcuse could make free play central to his own conception of the “aesthetic dimension” because he thought that human beings are capable of bringing about the social conditions in which play for both artists and audiences is really possible. Marcuse’s suggestion of a comprehensive aesthetic theory in which play is a central factor – it is only a suggestion, after all, with his aesthetics composed largely by the one chapter on the “aesthetic dimension” in Eros and Civilization and his brief final work under that title, primarily a parting shot at traditional Marxist aesthetics – has not been taken up in subsequent German aesthetics. In conjunction with Gadamer, we saw how his student Dieter Henrich supplemented the conceptual aspect of Gadamer’s conception of aesthetic experience with his own conception of the “protoaesthetic” or more purely sensory aspect of aesthetic experience but did not take up Gadamer’s own addition of room for play to Heidegger’s truth-based aesthetics. In a brief coda to this chapter, we will see how another recent German theorist explicitly recognizes play as an

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aspect of aesthetic experience but nevertheless gives a strongly cognitivist account of the concept of play.

4. Coda: Seel’s Aesthetics of Appearing Martin Seel (b. 1954) is one of contemporary Germany’s most prominent aestheticians. He was educated at Konstanz, where he received his Ph.D. for the work published as Die Kunst der Entzweiung (“Art of Bifurcation”)154 and was habilitated in 1990 on the basis of Eine Ästhetik der Natur (“An Aesthetics of Nature”).155 His 2000 work Ästhetik des Erscheinens (“Aesthetics of Appearing”) was translated into English in 2005156 and is thus that work of his that is best known internationally. Seel is currently professor of philosophy at Frankfurt, and has written on his predecessor Adorno, but his aesthetics is not an aesthetics of social and historical cognition, like Adorno’s; it is an aesthetics that emphasizes perceptual rather than conceptual cognition of the appearances of objects rather than insight into truths or contradictions in what lies beyond the surfaces of things, especially the artifacts of human society. The concept of play figures in both his Aesthetics of Nature and his more general Aesthetics of Appearing but is actually more broadly conceived in the earlier than in the later book. In the Aesthetics of Nature, Seel argues that we can enjoy nature as a “space for contemplation,” where we enjoy the surface beauty of objects and processes in nature, or the “play of appearances” of objects and processes; as a “corresponding place,” a place where we feel bodily and spiritually at home; and as a “showplace for the imagination,” a place in which we imagine alternatives to our current lives, which we idealize, and so on; he then argues that while we can enjoy nature in each of these ways separately, we can also enjoy nature in these ways together, particularly that in the artistic representation of nature, or landscape, all three of these ways of enjoying nature may be involved.157 Although Seel introduces the term “play” (Spiel) more quickly in his account of what he means by nature as “room for contemplation”158 than in his exposition of nature as a “showcase for the 154

155 156

157 158

Martin Seel, Die Kunst der Entzweiung: Zum Begriff der ästhetischen Rationalität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985). Martin Seel, Eine Ästhetik der Natur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991). Martin Seel, Ästhetik des Erscheinens (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2000); Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Seel, Ästhetik der Natur, pp. 5–6, 9–10, and passim. Seel, Ästhetik der Natur, pp. 38–46.

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imagination,” 159 it could be argued that it is the latter sense of play, in which we may “transform the surrounding landscape in an image of the world after examples from art”160 where a “freedom of imagination” is opened, “an imagination of the world, which is not constrained – either by the reality of the world . . . nor by the example of art,” that “frees us from the demand of particular forms and determinate interpretations of art”161 that more fully captures the traditional notion of free play in aesthetics, the notion of Kant and Schiller that, Marcuse emphasized, must leave room for the freedom of the spectator as well as the artist. But whether the traditional notion of play is more prominent in one part of Seel’s account of our artistic pleasure in nature than in another might also not matter so much, for if we take his conception of our pleasure in the contemplation of nature as essentially a pleasure in a form of cognition and his conception of our pleasure in feeling at home in nature as an emotional response to nature, then we can say that his argument that these are both equally important but can also be joined with our pleasure in nature as a showcase for our imagination to be an example of the synthesis of the cognitive, emotional, and play approaches to aesthetic experience, at least in the case of the aesthetic experience of nature, and that there is no need to worry about the relative importance of these three factors, let alone about whether play is more important in one than in another. However, Seel’s later work Aesthetics of Appearing takes a more purely cognitive approach to aesthetic experience and reduces play to the first of its senses in the previous work, that is, to an aspect of cognition rather than an alternative or addition to cognition on the part of the imagination. The central idea of this work goes back to Baumgarten’s contrast between logic and aesthetics as the sciences of the higher and lower cognitive powers, or of conceptualization and sense, respectively, as well as to Kant’s idea of aesthetic judgment as disinterested and not grounded on concepts, as Seel’s opening “Rough History of Modern Aesthetics” makes clear.162 His claim is that “to perceive something in the process of its appearing for the sake of its appearing is the focal point of aesthetic perception, the point at which every exercise of this perception is directed, however it might otherwise unfold”163 thus aesthetic 159 160 161 162 163

Seel, Ästhetik der Natur, pp. 145–59. Seel, Ästhetik der Natur, p. 145. Seel, Ästhetik der Nature, p. 159. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, pp. 1–18, at pp. 2–3. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, p. 24.

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perception is simply perceiving how something looks, sounds, and so on, without regard to what it is (Sosein);164 aesthetic objects are objects that are or can be perceived in this way; thus “aesthetic objects are objects in a particular situation of perception or objects for such a situation . . . occasions or opportunities to perceive sensuously in a particular way”;165 and works of art are objects intentionally produced to be aesthetic objects. By play Seel then means just the process or sequence of perceiving an object’s appearances in this way not further interested in classification or any use dependent on classification of the object, a process that Seel calls play because it can be described as involving an interplay of the object’s sensuous aspects. In a way somewhat analogous to what Henrich was arguing about the same time, Seel claims that “the special presence of the object of perception is thus tied to a special presence of the exercise of this perception,” that we thus “cannot pay attention to the presence of an object without becoming aware of our own presence,” and then he continues: Because of this double character, the concept of the play of aesthetic perception introduced by Kant is so appropriate. It portrays perception and what is perceived in the same manner. It points to a processuality of both the objects and the beholding of these objects. What reaches perception in aesthetic beholding is an interplay of the [object’s] sensuous aspects, an interplay with a particular presence in each case.166

There are in fact two forms of interplay here, interplay among the different sensuous aspects of an object as we perceive them and interplay between our sense of an object and our sense of ourselves. But it is not clear that these are anything more than an oscillation among different perceptual states, or how either of these forms of interplay involves the imagination. For Kant, however, the free play of aesthetic response was a harmony between imagination, which includes the senses, and the understanding, or our power of conceptualization; and in the specific case of fine art, the “spirit” of which is furnished by aesthetic ideas, the free play that Kant has in mind is a harmony between the perceptual form (and matter, we should add) of an object, on the one hand, and its conceptual content or significance, on the other, a relation that has to be ascribed to the imagination in particular because although the work of art has some 164 165 166

Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, p. 22. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, p. 21. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, p. 31.

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conceptual or, better, ideational content, that content supplies no rules for its own illustration or presentation to the senses. By contrast to Kant’s idea of play, Seel’s idea of play in this work is simply a part of perceiving appearances, not a play of the imagination with appearances. The play that he has in mind thus seems to be part of perception as one kind of cognition, not a play of the imagination with cognition. For Seel, play is simply “the ease of access to a multitude of an object’s sensuously distinguishable aspects.”167 The place of emotional response in Seel’s aesthetics of appearing is also tenuous. The essence of aesthetic experience on Seel’s account is making the phenomenal properties of appearance present to ourselves, and the role of imagination in aesthetic experience is basically limited to making present to us the phenomenal properties of objects that are not themselves currently present. Thus, “we can not only perceive sensuous objects; we can also imagine them. Sensuous perception requires that its objects be present; sensuous imagination does not.”168 Emotions in the presence of objects, or in response to their appearances, are among what can be presented by imagination when the objects themselves are not present: Thus “I make present the smell and taste of the sea, the light of the countryside . . . the action and inaction of my playmates, and much more,” and “these imaginative reminiscences are connected to a recollection of the expectations and disappointments, the hopes and fears, the mix and change of feelings and moods that dominated me at the time.”169 In other words, what can be present in imaginative aesthetic experience is the recollection or anticipation of emotions. But this seems to be a form of cognition rather than the experience of emotions themselves – in the presence of an image of an aesthetic object, we can imagine what emotions we might have or have had, but not, apparently, experience actual emotions. This might well be entailed by what we can call the “presentism” of Seel’s conception of aesthetic perception. For him, aesthetic perception is always momentary, of what is actually present or imagined to be present, but on the classical conception of such emotions as pity and fear that he mentions, these always include an intrinsic reference to the past or future – we pity someone now for what has been done to him, we fear what may happen to ourselves in the future, we are

167 168 169

Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, p. 45. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, p. 70. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, pp. 74–5.

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angry now not merely because of but at what has been done to us in the past, and so on.170 Seel’s statement that “aesthetic intuition is a radical form of residency in the here and now”171 seems to preclude that the actual experience of emotions can be part of aesthetic experience. Seel’s aesthetics of appearing thus seems to reduce both the element of play in aesthetic experience and its emotional impact to forms of cognition, in particular to the purely perceptual cognition that he identifies as the essence of aesthetic experience and the appropriate response to aesthetic objects. As we have seen throughout this part, the grip of the cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience has been very strong throughout twentieth-century German aesthetics, even if there have been a few thinkers such as Gadamer and Marcuse who have attempted to make room for other aspects, the case of play in the case of Gadamer, and the case of both play and genuine emotion in the case of Marcuse. The grip of this paradigm on a work such as Seel’s, published in the last year of the twentieth century, and even in the face of his earlier work on the aesthetics of nature, which took a more comprehensive approach, shows just how strong it has been. We will now turn to the aesthetics of twentieth-century Britain and America to see how well a comprehensive or pluralistic approach has fared in those traditions. What we will see is that while monistic rather than pluralistic approaches continued to enjoy some success in Britain, in America pluralistic have often triumphed over monistic approaches. Perhaps given the pluralism and pragmatism that at least at times have been characteristic of American intellectual life in general this will not come as a complete surprise.

170

171

Aristotle’s Rhetoric provides the classical analyses of the emotions; see Book II, ch. 2, 5, and 8. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, p. 33.

Part Two

AESTHETICS IN BRITAIN UNTIL WORLD WAR II

T

his part will first discuss aesthetics in Britain from the turn of the twentieth century to the outbreak of World War I, with the exception of Bernard Bosanquet’s 1915 Lectures, which have previously been discussed in conjunction with his History of Æsthetic published in 1892. It might therefore be a surprise that the name of the Italian Benedetto Croce is included in the title of its first chapter. But in spite of Croce’s indubitable centrality in the history of Italian philosophy, he will be considered here because of his enormous influence in Anglophone, especially British, aesthetics in the first part of the twentieth century. As we will see in the second and third chapters of this part, British aestheticians in the 1920s and 1930s responded far more to Croce’s version of idealism in aesthetics than to the more homegrown idealism of Bosanquet. Indeed, were we concerned solely with the background in the prewar years to what would happen in the 1920s and 1930s, we could confine this chapter to Croce. But the Anglicization of Croce, if we may call it that, was not the only thing that happened in aesthetics in prewar Britain. The tradition of aestheticism was carried on by the art critic Clive Bell, one of the central figures of “Bloomsbury,” the artistic and intellectual movement centered around the two daughters of Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia Wolff and her sister Vanessa Bell, the wife of Clive Bell, after it so to speak passed through the crucible of the philosophy of G.E. Moore, the Cambridge professor who inspired many of the Bloomsburians. The name of Clive Bell is in turn almost always linked with that of another art critic, Roger Fry, who introduced Bell to the style of painting that they dubbed “Post-Impressionism” and organized several exhibits with him, but it will be argued here that their aesthetic theories need to be more carefully distinguished than they usually are, Fry’s being more comprehensive than Bell’s highly reductive approach to the 105

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aesthetic. It will also be argued that the contemporaneous aesthetic theory of Edward Bullough, another Cambridge professor although not personally connected with Moore or his followers, must likewise be distinguished from Bell’s version of aestheticism: Bullough’s famous 1912 paper on “aesthetic distance” has often been read to reduce aesthetic experience to a single-minded focus on the appearances of objects (not indeed unlike Martin Seel’s “aesthetics of appearing” a century later, discussed at the conclusion of the previous chapter); but we shall see, looking at Bullough’s work as a whole, that his position is actually much more comprehensive than that and is if anything focused on the emotional rather than purely perceptual impact of aesthetic objects. In Chapters 4 and 5, we will examine British aesthetics through the Principles of Art of R.G. Collingwood, published in 1938. I will be particularly concerned to understand the complex argument of that book as Collingwood’s attempt to reconcile his commitment to some of Croce’s most basic ideas with the most important criticisms of Croce that had emerged in the preceding decades. While Collingwood shifts our attention from Cambridge and London to Oxford, the reader might also expect to find in this chapter reference to something that did take place in Cambridge in 1938, namely, the Austrian emigré Ludwig Wittgenstein’s sole recorded lectures on aesthetics. But these lectures were published only in 1967, and more generally the effect of the work that Wittgenstein began in Cambridge in the 1930s was felt primarily after World War II and was as great in the United States as in Britain. Discussion of Wittgenstein, including his 1938 lectures, will therefore be reserved for the final part of this volume, which will consider his impact on aesthetics in both Britain and the United States. So much for historiography. As far as the substance of the aesthetic theories to be discussed is concerned, we will see that Bell presented a narrow view of aesthetic experience as a form of perception, thus cognition, and while he spoke of a special “aesthetic emotion,” this was firmly distinguished from all ordinary emotions, so his conception of the emotional impact of art was very limited, and there is no room in his theory of aesthetic experience for the free play of imagination at all. Both Roger Fry and Edward Bullough, one personally close to Bell and the other not, sought to make room for a much fuller range of emotions in our aesthetic experience. Croce, meanwhile, although starting from different premises, also interpreted aesthetic experience as a form of perceptual cognition and had his own reasons for excluding emotional impact from such experience. The response to Croce, however, criticized him more

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for his rejection of the importance of the materiality of art than for his exclusion of emotional impact from our response to art. Collingwood reconciled the obvious emotional impact of art with Croce’s cognitivism by arguing that the primary goal of art is nothing less than the clarification of emotions, while he tried to accommodate the critique of Croce’s rejection of the materiality of art within his own still idealist approach. In this part we will see that British aesthetics before World War II, taken as a whole, was ultimately more successful in combining a recognition of the emotional impact of art with acknowledgment of its cognitive potential than in finding ways to admit the free play of the imagination into the mix. In Part Three of this volume, we shall see that American aestheticians in this period often took a more comprehensive approach than their British peers. In Part Four, we shall see that the impact of Wittgenstein had a reductive or even destructive effect on the comprehensive approach to aesthetics that at least some Americans had achieved, although eventually a few innovative philosophers, notably Richard Wollheim, who began his career in Britain but completed it in the United States, and Stanley Cavell, thoroughly American, took different lessons from Wittgenstein than his first readers did, and each in his own way eventually restored a comprehensive approach to aesthetics.

3 Bloomsbury, Croce, and Bullough

In this chapter, we will consider the foremost contributors to aesthetics in Britain between the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of World War I. These are the art theorists Clive Bell and Roger Fry, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, and the Cambridge professor of German and Italian literature Edward Bullough. The Italian Croce is included in this chapter because of his enormous influence on British aesthetics, ultimately greater than that of any of the others mentioned, and indeed his chief book on aesthetics, published in Italian in 1902 and translated into English in 1909, precedes the works of the others named. For that reason, it might seem natural to begin the chapter with Croce. But since the aesthetic theory of Clive Bell, although not published until 1914, can be seen as a philosophical version of the aestheticism of the previous century, we will begin with him in order to pick up the thread from our previous discussion of British aesthetics in Volume 2. And since it was Croce rather than Bell who had the greatest impact on British aesthetics in the decades after the First World War, it will create more continuity with what follows if we discuss him after Bell rather than before. Bell’s thought about aesthetics developed within the intellectual atmosphere created by the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore, especially by his Principia Ethica of 1903. So this chapter will begin with a brief discussion of Moore. Bell’s name is also typically associated with that of his fellow art critic Roger Fry, so we will discuss him after our treatment of Bell, arguing that their views should not be so closely identified as is often done. After our discussion of Croce, the chapter will then conclude with an examination of the work of Bullough.

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1. Moore, Bell, and Fry Among the British avant garde, the Aestheticist movement of the last decades of the nineteenth century was succeeded by the so-called Bloomsbury group in the early twentieth century, led by the novelist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), married to the publisher Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), and the painter Vanessa Bell (1879–1961), Virginia Woolf’s sister, who lived with the painter Duncan Grant (1885–1978) although never divorced from her husband the art critic Clive Bell (1881–1964), the author of the 1914 book Art that served as the aesthetic manifesto of the group. The gifted sisters were the daughters of Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), the first editor of the British Dictionary of National Biography and author of the still invaluable History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876–81)1 and The English Utilitarians.2 Many in the Bloomsbury group were influenced by the Cambridge philosopher G.E. (George Edward) Moore (1873–1958), who taught many of the male members of the group and whose 1903 book Principia Ethica revolutionized Anglophone moral philosophy as much as the 1910 Principia Mathematica by his Cambridge colleagues Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) revolutionized many areas of theoretical philosophy in the Anglo-American world. All of the Bloomsbury group were inspired by Moore’s bold statement “By far the most obvious things, which we can know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects”3 – although Moore himself, in this perhaps unlike some of his admirers, also recognized that “in the present state, in which but a very small portion of the good is attainable, the pursuit of beauty for its own sake must always be postponed to the pursuit of some greater good, which is equally attainable.”4 Regarding the pleasure offered by beautiful objects as entirely distinct from the pleasures of ordinary human intercourse and not raising the question of whether promoting the conditions for widened access to the pleasures of human intercourse should 1

2 3

4

Sir Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, with a new preface by Crane Brinton, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962) (based on third edition of 1902). Sir Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 3 vols. (London: Duckworth, 1900). G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica, ed. Thomas Baldwin, revised edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), §113, p. 237. Moore, Principia Ethica, §50, p. 136.

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take precedence over promoting the pleasures of beauty, Clive Bell developed an aesthetic theory that can be regarded as continuous with the nineteenth-century idea of art for art’s sake, especially in its simplest form as found, for example, in Poe and Baudelaire before it had been made more subtle by Pater and Wilde.

Moore Although as we shall subsequently see Bell did not agree with Moore on several issues of philosophical importance, he was inspired by more than Moore’s paean to the incomparable value of beauty, so several of Moore’s central ideas must be noted here before we can turn directly to Bell’s work.5 Moore conceived of his work as an attack upon the “naturalism” that he regarded as the central flaw of the characteristic British tradition in ethics, utilitarianism, from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth (from Richard Cumberland to Henry Sidgwick), and thus a centerpiece of his book was the critique of what he called the “naturalistic fallacy,” the supposition that the goodness of any object or state of affairs can be reduced to, thus explained in terms of, its other ordinary or natural properties. Instead, he argued, the concept of goodness is simple and therefore “indefinable,” like the concept of yellow,6 although that does not prevent us from explaining what properties of objects or states of affairs cause us to find them good, any more than the indefinability of yellow prevents us from explaining what causes us to perceive objects as yellow (roughly, their reflection of light within a certain spectrum of wavelength). The task of the science of ethics is then not to define goodness but to determine what we find good – ultimately, as already suggested, friendship and beauty above all else. As we will see, Bell was inspired by Moore’s doctrine of the indefinability of goodness to posit as the central conception of aesthetics a unique and indefinable “aesthetic emotion” that cannot be explicated in terms of other, ordinary human emotions or of other ordinary human values such as knowledge. 5

6

On the philosophy of Moore, see Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of G.E. Moore, second edition (New York: Tudor Press, 1952), A.J. Ayer, Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), and Thomas Baldwin, G.E. Moore (London: Routledge, 1990), as well as The Philosophy of G.E. Moore, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, Library of Living Philosophers (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1942). On Moore and his influence at Cambridge, see Paul Levy, Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980). Moore, Principia Ethica, §10, pp. 61–2.

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But this is not all that Bell took from Moore. A further idea of Moore’s is that what we find good can be characterized at the most abstract level as “organic unity,” a form of unity in which “a whole has an intrinsic value different in amount from the sum of the values of its parts.”7 Moore contrasted intrinsic value to instrumental value as a means to any end or as a cause to any effect, including any response on the part of any kind of audience to the object with intrinsic value.8 Thus, on Moore’s conception of intrinsic value, such value is not reducible to producing pleasure or any other favorable response in human subjects; rather, something that has intrinsic value has a value that makes it worth contemplating but that exists independently of any actual or even possible contemplation. Moore supposes that the organic whole that includes both an object worth contemplating and actual contemplation and enjoyment of it has greater intrinsic value than the object alone, although that greater intrinsic value is not reducible to the second-order contemplation of the organic whole consisting of the original object and its contemplator by any sort of second-order contemplator. From these premises, Moore drew a number of striking conclusions: that a beautiful world is more valuable than an ugly one even if there is no one to perceive it just because the former is an organic whole while the latter is not;9 that a beautiful world with someone to perceive it is, however, more valuable than a beautiful world without someone to perceive it because the former is more of an organic whole than the latter;10 and that a beautiful representation of something that also really exists is more valuable than a beautiful representation alone, again because it is more of an organic whole than the latter.11 Bell did not assert these specific conclusions, but Moore’s ideas that goodness is indefinable and that an organic whole can have a value independent of the sum of the values of its parts can be seen as underwriting his own ideas that there is an indefinable “aesthetic emotion” that is not reducible to or explicable in terms of the ordinary emotions of human life and that the object of this special emotion is “significant form,” a relation among parts of a work of art that is beautiful quite apart from the properties of the parts considered in themselves, above all apart from any representational and

7 8 9 10 11

Moore, Principia Ethica, §22, p. 87. Moore, Principia Ethica, §16, p. 73. Moore, Principia Ethica, §50, p. 135. Moore, Principia Ethica, §50, p. 136. Moore, Principia Ethica, §117, p. 243.

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thus cognitive significance that parts or aspects of the work considered on their own might happen to have. Although his central ideas have a Moorean heritage, Bell’s theory of significant form in particular differs from Moore’s own application of his idea of organic unity on several points. Moore did not write a separate work on aesthetics, but he did develop his conception of the intrinsic value of beauty for some pages in the final chapter of Principia Ethica, in which under the rubric of “The Ideal” he unfolded the normative conclusions that he thought followed from his metaethical theory. Moore states, “It is, I think, universally admitted that the proper appreciation of a beautiful object is a good thing in itself,” and using his notion of the intrinsic value of an organic whole he interprets this general statement, which could have been attributed to any number of theorists from Hutcheson and Kant to the advocates of art for art’s sake, in a novel way: For Moore, it is not just the beautiful object itself that is an organic whole, although it must be one in order for a universe consisting of beautiful objects to be more valuable than a universe consisting of nothing but a trash heap, even without any appreciating observers; rather, he interprets the organic whole consisting of the beautiful object plus the human response to it as a greater organic whole and thus more intrinsically valuable than the beautiful object alone. Thus he says that although “the mere existence of what is beautiful does appear to have some intrinsic value, . . . I regard it as indubitable . . . that such mere existence of what it is beautiful has value, so small as to be negligible, in comparison with that which attaches to the consciousness of beauty.”12 He then recognizes two particular features of human response that typically enter into the more intrinsically valuable because greater organic whole of beauty plus consciousness. The first is a special category of aesthetic emotions that are appropriate responses to particular kinds of beauty: It is plain that in those instances of aesthetic appreciation, which we think most valuable, there is included, not merely a bare cognition of what is beautiful in the object, but also some kind of feeling or emotions. It is not sufficient that a man should merely see the beautiful qualities in a picture and know that they are beautiful, in order that we may give his state of mind the highest praise. We require that he should also appreciate the beauty of that which he sees and which he knows to be beautiful – that he should feel and see its beauty. And by these expressions we certainly mean that he should have an appropriate emotion towards the beautiful qualities which he cognises. It is perhaps the case that all aesthetic emotions have some 12

Moore, Principia Ethica, §113, pp. 237–8.

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common quality; but it is certain that differences in the emotion seem to be appropriate to differences in the kind of beauty perceived; and by saying that different emotions are appropriate to different kinds of beauty, we mean that the whole which is formed by the consciousness of that kind of beauty together with the emotion appropriate to it, is better than if any other emotion had been felt in contemplating that particular beautiful object. Accordingly we have a large variety of different emotions, each of which is a necessary constituent in some state of consciousness which we judge to be good. All of these emotions are essential elements in great positive goods; they are parts of organic wholes, which have great intrinsic value.13

Note first that Moore’s position is not that the enjoyment of a beautiful object is better than the mere cognition of it because pleasure is the origin of all value, and thus a beautiful object with no response of pleasure to it has thus far no value at all; his idea is rather that the combination of a beautiful object with the kind of emotional response that is (somehow) appropriate to it is a greater organic unity that the combination of that object with no emotional response at all or with an inappropriate emotional response, and therefore of greater intrinsic value than the latter – not, again, because of the observer’s pleasure by itself, but rather because of its greater organic unity of which that pleasure is only a part. Note next that although Moore does not explicitly define the concept of “aesthetic emotions,” he seems to identify these emotions neither with pleasure as such – that would presumably be referred to in the singular, not the plural, and is presumably the second-order response to the organic whole consisting of the beautiful object plus the appropriate aesthetic emotion as a first-order response to it – nor with the ordinary emotions of life that might be triggered or expressed by a beautiful object. There is no mention of anything like the latter; rather, Moore’s idea seems to be that there is a special category of various aesthetic emotions that are the appropriate responses to various categories of beauty and to nothing else. This idea is what Bell takes over from Moore. There is a second kind of response to beautiful objects that Moore includes in the overall organic whole consisting of beautiful objects plus appropriate human responses to them, however, which Bell does not take over. Moore assumes that many beautiful works of art in particular do have representational content, that our response to such content is typically belief, and that it is a good thing if such belief is true; representational content is not merely an appropriately interesting aspect of a work of art that has it, although it may be that, but its truth 13

Moore, Principia Ethica, §114, pp. 238–9.

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contributes to the greater organic unity and intrinsic value of the whole object-plus-response complex. This seems to imply that what we might think of as truthful or in some very general sense realistic works of representational art are better than works of fantasy. And then Moore draws the yet more striking conclusion that the actual existence of an object or state of affairs contributes even more to intrinsic value than even a truthful representation of it does, so that a world containing beautiful objects that might be represented by art is even more valuable than any artistic representation of them. Moore writes: I think that the additional presence of a belief in the reality of the object makes the total state much better, if the belief is true; and worse, if the belief is false. In short, where there is belief, in the sense in which we do believe in the existence of Nature and horses, and do not believe in the existence of an ideal landscape and unicorns, the truth of what is believed does make a great difference to the value of the organic whole. If this be the case, I shall have vindicated the belief that knowledge . . . does contribute towards intrinsic value – that, at least in some cases, its presence as a part makes a whole more valuable than it could have been without. . . . We do think that the emotional contemplation of a natural scene, supposing its qualities equally beautiful, is in some way a better state of things than a painted landscape: we think that the world would be improved if we could substitute for the best works of representative art real objects equally beautiful.14

This remarkable argument might actually be a reductio ad absurdum, intended or unintended, of the idea of art for art’s sake or the autonomous value of the realization of beauty in art, although it does not undermine the idea of the intrinsic and irreducible value of beauty as such. Moore’s premise that there is greater intrinsic value in greater organic unity seems to lead him to the idea that there is greater value in works of art that have a representational element than in those that do not, greater intrinsic value in those that include a truthful representational element than in those that include a “false” one (although that might be a tendentious way to interpret mythological or fantastical representational content, such as the representation of unicorns), and above all greater value in natural beauty than in the beauty of art, or at least of representational art. At the very least, Moore places the beauty of at least representational art on a scale of value on which it does not occupy the highest point. Moore thus effected an uneasy synthesis between his strange ideas of organic beauty and peculiarly aesthetic emotions and the traditional 14

Moore, Principia Ethica, §117, p. 243.

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idea of the cognitive value of art as a vehicle of truth. Bell rejects such a synthesis, although in so doing he does not explicitly say that he is departing from Moore, by excluding representational content altogether from aesthetically significant form, thereby undermining any inference that the beauty of what is represented has more of at least the same kind of value as a beautiful representation; in his view, none of the specifically aesthetic value of art results from its being representational. This view may then be regarded as a form of the doctrine of art for art’s sake, specifically the view that art is valuable because of its special kind of form, which has nothing to do with the value of representation or of the value of anything outside art that might be represented, but that is nevertheless based on Moore’s idea of distinctively aesthetic emotion(s).

Bell Clive Bell was the son of a wealthy mining engineer and grew up in comfort in Wiltshire. He studied history as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, where the influence of Moore was strong, and upon graduation won a prize for a year’s study in Paris, where his interest turned toward art. Upon his return, he moved to London where he met and married (1907) the painter Vanessa Stephen, the sister, as mentioned, of Virginia Woolf. Clive and Vanessa had two sons, one of them Julian, a poet who died in the Spanish Civil War, and the other Quentin (1910–96), who would become an accomplished art historian in his own right,15 and whose own son, also Julian, would in turn become a painter and writer on art.16 By World War I, Vanessa had moved in with the painter Duncan Grant, although the Bells never divorced and Bell gave his own name to the daughter of Vanessa and Duncan. Clive Bell’s most enduring work is the manifesto Art of 1914;17 in addition to organizing several seminal exhibitions of “Post-Impressionist” art in London in 1910 and 1912 with Roger Fry (the second of these in spite of the fact that Fry had himself begun an affair with Vanessa in 1911, before she took up with Duncan Grant in 1913), Bell’s other works included the 15

16

17

See Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), and Bloomsbury Recalled (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). See Julian Bell, What Is Painting? Representation and Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), and Mirror of the World: A New History of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007). Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914; new edition, reprinted New York: Capricorn Books, 1958).

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books Since Cézanne (1922), Civilization (1928), Proust (1929), and An Account of French Painting (1931).18 In Art, Bell refers to “Mr. G.E. Moore, to whose Principia Ethica I owe so much,” especially “a passionate faith in the absolute value of certain states of minds.”19 He certainly owes to Moore the idea that the characteristic, indeed defining response to art is a distinctive kind of “aesthetic emotion,” the enjoyment of which is intrinsically valuable, indeed “the most potent and direct” state of mind that we possess,20 from which he infers that “creating works of art is as direct a means to good as a human being can practise.”21 Bell begins his argument with the assumption that “all sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art,” or more precisely a peculiar class of emotions, since he does “not mean, of course, that all works of art provoke the same emotion. On the contrary, every work produces a different emotion.” These distinctive emotions are in turn, he asserts, provoked by “some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist,” namely, “significant form,” which in the case of works of visual art – although Bell’s theory is not limited to that – consists of “lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of form,”22 or “forms arranged and combined according to certain unknown and mysterious laws” that “do move us in a particular way.”23 Just why some combinations of form should move us in that particular way, that is, to aesthetic emotion, and others not, Bell calls a “metaphysical” question that it is not part of aesthetics proper to answer,24 although, as it turns out, he will allow himself, in a considerable departure from Moore, a speculation on this subject.

18

19 20 21 22 23 24

On Bell’s aesthetics, see William G. Bywater Jr., Clive Bell’s Eye (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), and articles including George Dickie, “Clive Bell and the Method of Principia Ethica,” British Journal of Aesthetics 5 (1965): 139–43; Ruby Meager, “Clive Bell and Aesthetic Emotion,” British Journal of Aesthetics 5 (1965): 123–31; Noël Carroll, “Clive Bell’s Aesthetic Hypothesis,” in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie, Richard Sclafani, and Ronald Roblin, second edition (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), pp. 84–95, and “Formalism,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, second edition, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 109–19; Carol S. Gould, “Clive Bell on Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Truth,” British Journal of Aesthetics 34 (1994): 124–33; and Jeffrey T. Dean, “Clive Bell and G.E. Moore: The Good of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (1996): 135–45. Bell, Art, p. 66. Bell, Art, p. 83. Bell, Art, p. 84. Bell, Art, p. 17. Bell, Art, p. 19. Bell, Art, p. 43.

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Before we get to that, however, we must consider further Bell’s account of what is the proper subject of aesthetics, namely, the more detailed distinction between the special aesthetic emotions and other human emotions, on the one hand, and that between significant form and the objects of other emotions, on the other hand. On the first point, Bell asserts that aesthetic emotion is different from whatever emotions impel us to apply the epithet “beautiful” to lovely things in nature, such as butterflies or flowers,25 and especially that it is distinct from any emotions prompted by other human beings, even though we may also call them “beautiful” because of the nonaesthetic emotions that they stir. Bell writes: Indeed, most of us never dream of going for aesthetic emotions to human beings, from whom we ask something very different. This “something,” when we find it in a young woman, we are apt to call “beauty.” We live in a nice age. With the man-in-the-street “beautiful” is more often than not synonymous with “desirable”; the word does not necessarily connote any aesthetic reaction whatever, and I am tempted to believe that in the minds of many the sexual flavour of the word is stronger than the aesthetic.26

Properly, however, the genuinely aesthetic connotation of the word “beautiful” has nothing to do with our feelings of sexual or more generally social attractions to other human beings. Thus does Bell, although purportedly talking about ordinary usage, dismiss the entire tradition in aesthetics that found the attraction of artistic beauty in its playful arousal of sexual and social feelings, thus the entire associationist tradition from Burke to Alison and Richard Payne Knight,27 as well the theory that art is a sublimated form of sexuality of his contemporary Sigmund Freud. (One might also guess that Bell’s rigid separation of aesthetic emotion from all other human and especially sexual emotion may have seemed cold to a passionate painter such as his wife, Vanessa.) Corresponding to his separation of aesthetic emotion from all ordinary human emotions, Bell separates the object of aesthetic emotion, significant form, from all of the content of works of art that might suggest or arouse ordinary human emotions. That representational content

25 26 27

Bell, Art, p. 20. Bell, Art, p. 21. Knight (1750–1824), not discussed in Volume 1, was a theorist of the picturesque, author of a conventional treatise in aesthetics, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (London: T. Payne and J. White, 1806), but also of a remarkable early book on sexual symbolism in art, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (London: T. Spilsbury, 1786), reprinted in Sexual Symbolism: A History of Phallic Worship, with the 1866 treatise The Worship of the Generative Powers by Thomas Wright (New York: Julian Press, 1957).

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in art is connected to ordinary human emotions is the basis for Bell’s claim that “the representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant.”28 Bell precedes this summary statement with the argument that “Descriptive Painting” does not move us aesthetically. We are all familiar with pictures that interest us and excite our admiration, but do not move us as works of art. To this class belongs what I call “Descriptive Painting” – that is, painting in which forms are used not as objects of emotion, but as means of suggesting emotion or conveying information. Portraits of psychological and historical value, topographical works, pictures that tell stories and suggest situations, illustrations of all sorts, belong to this class. That we recognize the distinction is clear, for who has not said that such and such a drawing was excellent as illustration, but as a work of art worthless? Of course many descriptive pictures possess, amongst other qualities, formal significance, and are therefore works of art: but many more do not. They interest us; they may move us too in a hundred different ways, but they do not move us aesthetically. According to my hypothesis they are not art. They leave untouched our aesthetic emotions because it is not their forms but the ideas or information suggested or conveyed by their forms that affect us.29

Bell illustrates his point with a discussion of the painting The Railway Station by William Powell Frith (1819–1909), a detailed painting of London’s Paddington Station before which thousands including Bell himself may have whiled away “many a weary forty minutes . . . disentangling its fascinating incidents and forging for each an imaginary past and an improbable future” but before which no one has experienced “onehalf second of aesthetic rapture – although the picture contains several pretty passages of colour, and is by no means badly painted.”30 Because paintings are composed of lines and colors, Frith cannot, of course, simply avoid using them, but in his work they are used “to recount anecdotes, suggest ideas, and indicate the manners and customs of an age; they are not used to provoke aesthetic emotions.” Bell makes the point by saying that “forms and the relations of forms were for Frith not objects of emotions, but means of suggesting emotion and conveying ideas,”31 but his distinction between being the object of an emotion and suggesting an emotion needs to be unpacked. Bell’s basic assumption is that there is a fundamental difference between the special aesthetic emotions and 28 29 30 31

Bell, Art, p. 27. Bell, Art, p. 22. Bell, Art, pp. 22–3. Bell, Art, p. 23.

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all other ordinary human emotions, and from that he infers that what in a work of art popularly so called provokes those other emotions is not aesthetically significant while what provokes the distinctive aesthetic emotion is; then he infers without explaining it that the significant form of line and color in a painting can be the direct object of aesthetic emotion because it provokes it immediately, while a painting’s provocation of ordinary human emotions such as those connected with sexuality or sociability must be indirect, because of course a painting is not literally a human being in the way in which it is literally a combination of lines and colors, so the painting can only suggest those other emotions, not be their immediate object. But the force of this distinction does not rest on any premise that aesthetically significant emotions must be provoked directly rather than indirectly, for Bell has argued for no such premise; it rests rather on the antecedent claim that aesthetic emotion is simply different from ordinary human emotion. This rigid distinction is what leads Bell to exclude all representational content from what is aesthetically significant in art, and thus to restrict significant form to the features of a work of art abstracted from any representational significance (of course, in the medium of painting even representational content must be grounded in relations of line and color), hereby tacitly refusing to go along with Moore’s more open-ended conception of organic unity, which, as we saw, allowed representational content to combine with such more basic elements of form as line and color into an organic whole. The basis of Bell’s entire argument is, then, the distinction between aesthetic emotion and ordinary human emotions. There is one class of other, so to speak, extraordinary human emotions with which Bell is willing to associate aesthetic emotions, however, namely, what he calls religious emotion. But this is religious emotion in a very general sense, and Bell reaches this connection through what he calls his “metaphysical hypothesis.” In this case Bell goes further than Moore, pushing Moore’s conception in a direction that Moore had not, although as if in deference to Moore, Bell is much less insistent upon his metaphysical hypothesis than he is upon his aesthetic hypothesis. The starting point of Bell’s metaphysical hypothesis can be regarded as a verbal variation on Moore’s notion of intrinsic value: Bell states that in perceiving objects “as pure forms in certain relations to each other, and feel[ing] emotion for them as such,” which is what he assumes precedes expressing “what has been felt,” the forms of the object are appreciated as “ends in themselves” rather than as means to something else, namely, as suggestions of ordinary human emotions: “The emotion that the artist felt in his

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moment of inspiration he did not feel for objects seen as means, but for objects seen as pure forms – that is, as ends in themselves.”32 Moore did not call objects that have intrinsic value ends in themselves, but the use of that Kantian phrase for this purpose seems natural enough. However, Bell then associates the normative idea of an end in itself with the metaphysical idea of the thing in itself, reality as it really is rather than as it superficially appears. What is the significance of anything as an end in itself? What is that which is left when we have stripped a thing of all of its associations, of all of its significance as a means? What is left to provoke our emotion? What but that which philosophers used to call “the thing in itself” and now call “ultimate reality”? Shall I be altogether fantastic in suggesting, what some of the profoundest thinkers have believed, that the significance of the thing in itself is the significance of Reality? Is it possible that the answer to my question, “Why are we so profoundly moved by certain combinations of lines and colours?” should be, “Because artists can express in combinations of lines and colours an emotion felt for reality which reveals itself through line and colour”?33

Of course, for the philosopher who immortalized the concept of the thing in itself, this transition would have been unthinkable: Colors, of course, had been downgraded to secondary qualities of objects by scientists and philosophers such as Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and Locke, and Kant not only accepted that status for colors but then reduced space and thus line and all forms composed of line to features of our representations of objects rather than of objects as they are in themselves – that is Kant’s transcendental idealism, according to which objects that really exist independently of us are perceived by us in spatial form, but every aspect of their spatiality is a feature only of the way we represent them. (Although Kant also assumed a fundamental difference between the spatiotemporal form of representation, on the one hand, and the representation of color, on the other, namely, that the former is invariant across the whole human species and the latter not.)34 So what Bell identifies as significant form, combinations of line and color, is the last thing in art (or anything else) that Kant would have taken as representing reality as it is in itself, and Bell has reason from Kant as well as from Moore to be hesitant about his metaphysical hypothesis or ultimate explanation of our powerful emotion in significant form. But he nevertheless persists 32 33 34

Bell, Art, p. 44. Bell, Art, pp. 45–6. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 28–9, B 44–5.

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in it. Even if many people might hesitate at it because “though they feel the tremendous significance of form,” they “feel also a cautious dislike for big words” such as “reality,” Bell remains confident that “these prefer to say that what the artist surprises beyond form, or seizes by sheer force of imagination, is the all-pervading rhythm that informs all things; and I have said that I will never quarrel with that blessed word ‘rhythm.’”35 Once having made the connection between significant form and ultimate reality, Bell can then turn around and buttress his original distinction of aesthetic emotion from ordinary human emotion, on the ground that ultimate reality is surely more important and valuable than the objects of ordinary human concern. Thus, “if an object considered as an end in itself moves us more profoundly . . . than the same object considered as a means to practical ends or as thing related to human interests – and this is undoubtedly the case – we can only suppose that when we consider anything as an end in itself we become aware of that in it which is of greater moment than any qualities it may have acquired from keeping company with human beings.”36 Bell sums up his discussion of the metaphysical hypothesis by saying, “Be they artists or lovers of art, mystics or mathematicians, those who achieve ecstasy are those who have freed themselves from the arrogance of humanity.”37 This is what allows him to argue next that although aesthetic emotion is separate from the ordinary emotions of human life and superior to them, it is closely allied to religious emotion: Both aesthetic and religious emotions are emotions directed at and provoked by ultimate reality. “Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.”38 Really, they are means to the same state of mind, and if we understand religious emotion broadly enough we may then say that “art is a manifestation of the religious sense. If it be an expression of emotion – as I am persuaded that it is – it is an expression of that emotion which is the vital force of every religion, or, at any rate, it expresses an emotion which is the vital force in every religion.”39 Starting out from what looks like a simple assertion of art for art’s sake in its strict separation of aesthetic emotion from ordinary human emotion, Bell ends up with something more like an aesthetics of truth not alien in 35 36 37 38 39

Bell, Art, pp. 47–8. Bell, Art, p. 54. Bell, Art, p. 55. Bell, Art, p. 68. Bell, Art, pp. 68–9.

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spirit to the aesthetics of German Idealism, in which aesthetic emotion is an affective response to something that is regarded as a cognition of the ultimate nature of reality. This turn in his argument leads Bell to his chapter “Art and Ethics,” in which he most explicitly follows “what Mr. Moore has done exquisitely.”40 He accepts Moore’s argument that states of mind “alone are good as ends”41 and argues that the goodness of “the state of aesthetic contemplation” is not only “self-evident” but, as previously noted, that art is “the most direct and potent” means to good states of mind that we possess and indeed the most “excellent” and most “intense” state of mind that we can enjoy.42 So, contrary to those who would set art outside the sphere of morality, Bell actually argues that the creation and experience of art are the pinnacle of morality because they are the means to the most intrinsically valuable state of mind. And he specifically argues against that self-appointed moralist about art Leo Tolstoy that the latter’s “justification of art” by appeal to “its power of promoting good actions” puts the cart “obstructively” before the horse because “always it is the end in view that gives value to action.”43 On Bell’s account, actions are valuable only insofar as they lead to valuable states of mind, the most valuable state of mind is that of aesthetic/religious contemplation/emotion, and thus “creating works of art is as direct a means to good as a human being can practise.”44 Presumably for those of us who cannot create but can only experience works of art, taking the necessary steps to experience them is as direct a means to good as we can practice. This conclusion might seem to take Bell altogether outside the pale of the art for art’s sake movement, but as we have seen the most thoughtful proponents of this movement, such as Pater and Wilde, also ended up transforming it in a similar although perhaps slightly less self-consciously metaphysical direction; so Bell’s ultimate position seems more like the natural conclusion of the movement than a radical departure from or alternative to it. Bell’s view has often been linked to that of his colleague and friend Roger Fry – indeed, Bell describes Fry’s early essay on aesthetics as “the most helpful contribution to the scene that had been made since the days of Kant”45 – but Fry does not end up with the same moralistic, 40 41 42 43 44 45

Bell, Art, p. 80. Bell, Art, p. 81. Bell, Art, p. 83. Bell, Art, pp. 83–4. Bell, Art, p. 84. Bell, Art, p. 8.

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indeed practically apophantic conception of art as Bell does. This is because, as Bell recognizes, he and Fry “disagree profoundly” about “the principles of aesthetics”: They disagree at the most fundamental level of their thought, because although Fry talks of “emotions of the imaginative life,” which might sound like Bell’s “aesthetic emotions,” he means by this phrase not a special class of emotions completely disconnected from the emotions of ordinary life, but rather a heightened version of the emotions of ordinary life; thus he does not get started down the path that leads Bell to the identification of aesthetic emotion with the metaphysical, religious emotion that is supposed to be self-evidently more valuable than any other emotion and indeed than anything else.

Fry Roger Fry (1866–1934) was fifteen years senior to Bell and although also educated at Cambridge (King’s College), was also seven years older than Moore, and not influenced by him as Bell was. Fry was a painter and curator – in 1906 he was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and it was there that he discovered the work of Cézanne that would be so influential on his own painting as well as his writing – as well as a critic. It was Fry who coined the term “Post-Impressionism” for the painting of Cézanne and those influenced by him, and who initiated the 1910 and 1912 exhibitions of Post-Impressionism in London on which he collaborated with Bell. Fry’s first collection of essays, Vision and Design, appeared only in 1920,46 but its key chapter, “An Essay in Aesthetics,” had first appeared in 1909,47 and had been praised by Bell in Art.48 However, the view that Fry put forth in “An Essay in Aesthetics” is quite different from Bell’s view, as Fry made clear in the concluding “Retrospect” that he wrote for the 1920 collection of his essays, and rather points the way to a view more like that to be developed in the 1930s by R.G. Collingwood: Fry does not suppose that beauty in art produces a distinct class of aesthetic emotions that have nothing to do with the emotions of ordinary life, but rather supposes that what art does is to facilitate “clearness of presentment to consciousness” for the “emotions of actual life.”49 46

47

48 49

Roger Fry, Vision and Design (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920; ed. J.B. Bullen; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Roger Fry, “An Essay in Aesthetics,” New Quarterly 2 (April, 1909): 171–90; cited here from Vision and Design. Bell, Art, p. 8. Fry, “Essay in Aesthetics,” Vision and Design, p. 19.

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Fry’s own view is thus closer to the view that the fundamental aim and value of art are to provide cognition, but cognition of our own feelings and emotions, a view that as we have already seen was widespread at the turn of the century, for example, in Neo-Kantian aesthetics. The difference between Fry’s view and Bell’s is not apparent in the essay that he chose to place first in Vision and Design, the brief essay “Art and Life” that was apparently notes for a lecture given to the Fabian Society in 1917, eight years after “An Essay on Aesthetics” had first been published. In this essay he sketches a very brief history of Western art (painting, sculpture, and architecture) that culminates in a contrast between Impressionism and the Post-Impressionism that he had baptized a decade earlier. He described the Impressionists as having “upheld, more categorically than ever before, the complete detachment of the artistic vision from the values imposed on vision by everyday life,” but also as having “used this freedom” from the concerns of ordinary life “for the quasi-scientific description of new effects of atmospheric colour and atmospheric perception.” He then states that “the pseudo-scientific and analytic method of these painters forced artists to accept pictures which lacked design and formal-coordination to a degree which had never before been permitted” – “They, or rather some of them, reduced the artistic vision to a continuous patchwork or mosaic of coloured patches without architectural framework or structural coherence.”50 By so doing, however, the Impressionists inadvertently revealed that “the pseudoscientific assumption that art aimed at representation” and “fidelity to appearance . . . had no logical foundation,” thus allowing for the “reestablishment of purely aesthetic criteria,” namely, “the principles of structural design and harmony,”51 by the Post-Impressionists. In this essay Fry thus separates the aesthetic response to art from any connection to ordinary life and thereby from the representation of the objects and events of ordinary life and instead finds aesthetic significance only in structural coherence and harmony – in other words, he seems to accept Bell’s conceptions of aesthetic emotion and significant form as its immediate object. But that is not at all what he had argued in his “Essay in Aesthetics” nor what he would argue in the conclusion to Vision and Design (so one cannot help but wonder why he even included the sketchy notes for “Art 50 51

Fry, “Art and Life,” Vision and Design, p. 7. Fry, “Art and Life,” Vision and Design, p. 8.

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and Life” in the volume). The “Essay in Aesthetics” begins with the claim that “if imitation is the sole purpose of the graphic arts, it is surprising that the works of such arts are ever looked upon as more than curiosities, or ingenious toys, are ever taken seriously by grown-up people.”52 This might well suggest that he is again about to argue that since the primary aim of art is not the representation of ordinary life, our response to it must have no connection with the emotions of ordinary life. But that is not what he next argues. Rather, he argues that because art is in the business of imagination rather than representation, it does not lead directly to action, and that this very fact allows one to focus more fully upon “the perceptive and emotional aspects” of experience, thereby getting “a different kind of perception” of ordinary human emotions. He illustrates this claim, remarkably enough for an essay first published in 1909, with an appeal to the “cinematograph,” that is, cinema: We can get a curious side glimpse of the nature of this imaginative life from the cinematograph. This resembles actual life in almost every respect, except that what the psychologists call the conative part of our reaction to sensations, that is to say, the appropriate resultant action is cut off. . . . The result is that in the first place we see the event much more clearly. . . . In the second place, with regard to the visions of the cinematograph, one notices that whatever emotions are aroused by them, though they are likely to be weaker than those of ordinary life, are presented more clearly to the consciousness. If the scene presented be one of an accident, our pity and horror, though weak, since we know that no one is really hurt, are felt quite purely, since they cannot, as they would in life, pass at once into actions of assistance.53

Fry calls the emotions aroused by art emotions of the “imaginative life,” but he does not mean by this that they are different in kind from the emotions of ordinary life; he means instead that they arise under special conditions, in which there is no question of immediate action, and thus we can experience the emotions themselves more fully and more clearly in the psychological space thereby opened up. I say there is no question of immediate action because it is not any part of Fry’s argument that the fuller experience and knowledge of emotions we can get from art might not have indirect, long-term effects on our values and dispositions to action, although he himself might not have fully realized this, and makes a blunter contrast between art and morality than he needs to, one that 52 53

Fry, “Essay in Aesthetics,” Vision and Design, p. 12. Fry, “Essay in Aesthetics,” Vision and Design, pp. 13–14.

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seems to identify his position with the simplicity of the earlier phases of the art for art’s sake movement. He states that art, then, is an expression and a stimulus of this imaginative life, which is separated from actual life by the absence of responsive action. Now this responsive action implies in actual life moral responsibility. In art we have no such moral responsibility – it presents a life freed from the binding necessities of our actual existence.54

The last clause is an obvious overstatement: Even if we are free from the demands of action in the experience of a work of art, that does not imply that we are freed from any of our moral responsibilities in the rest of our lives, or presented with a life freed from binding necessities. But more importantly, it might be the case that in virtue of the “greater clearness of its perception, and the greater purity and freedom of its emotion” in the immediate experience of the “imaginative life”55 it can actually contribute indirectly to our future ability to satisfy the demands of the moral life, precisely because an improved understanding of the nature of human emotions may be necessary for a full comprehension of the effects of our actions, for better and worse, on others. Fry asserts only something more abstract than this – “Since the imaginative life comes in the course of time to represent more or less what mankind feels to be the completest expression of its own nature, the freest use of its innate capacities, the actual life may be explained and justified by its approximation here and there, however partially and inadequately, to that freer and fuller life”56 – but even if art can be justified because it leads to the “completest expression” of our own nature, that is not incompatible with the clearer perception of the nature of human emotions that it allows also having some indirect moral benefit. Fry stresses that in real life “the need for responsive action hurries us along and prevents us from ever realising fully what the emotion is that we feel, from co-ordinating it perfectly with other states” and suggests that since the emotions of the imaginative life require no responsive action, we can give them a “new valuation,” namely, the appreciation of emotion “in and for itself,”57 where “another standard than morality is applicable.”58 This makes it sound as if the value of the heightened perception of emotion in aesthetic experience is entirely affective – the pleasure that it might 54 55 56 57 58

Fry, “Essay in Aesthetics,” Vision and Design, p. 15. Fry, “Essay in Aesthetics,” Vision and Design, p. 17. Fry, “Essay in Aesthetics,” Vision and Design, p. 16. Fry, “Essay in Aesthetics,” Vision and Design, p. 19. Fry, “Essay in Aesthetics,” Vision and Design, p. 20.

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afford – and cognitive. But there is nothing in Fry’s argument to block the inference that increased clarity about the nature of our emotions and “co-ordinating them perfectly with other states” might be morally valuable as well. Of course, even if that may be, the ultimate moral value of increased clarity about the nature of our emotions would depend upon the freedom of art from immediate moral demands, because freedom from the demand for responsive action is necessary in order to be able to experience this increased clarity in the first place. Fry attempts to reconcile the tension between the first two essays of Vision and Design in its “Retrospect,” while persisting in his view that the clarification of emotions through art separates art from morality instead of allowing that it might be of indirect service to morality. He praises Tolstoy for delivering his own generation from the impasse of “wearisome speculation around the question of the nature of beauty” that had prevailed during his youth, stating, “I think that one may date from the appearance of What Is Art? the beginning of fruitful speculation in aesthetic.”59 What Fry prizes in Tolstoy is not his “preposterous valuation of works of art” but rather “his luminous criticism of past aesthetic systems, above all, his suggestion that art had no special or necessary concern with what is beautiful in nature.” Instead, “Tolstoy saw that the essence of art was that it was a means of communication between human beings . . . par excellence the language of emotions.” Tolstoy was mistaken to think that “the value of a work of art corresponded to the moral value of the emotion expressed,”60 and thus his own view that art is valuable only insofar as it communicates specific religious emotions was false. But the alternative to Tolstoy’s mistake is that art is valuable precisely because it communicates the artist’s particularly clear contemplation and comprehension of a wide range of ordinary human emotions to the audience, emotions like love, fear, and pity. Fry says that the “expression in art has some similarity to the expression of these emotions in actual life, but it is never identical,” because “the artist feels these emotions in a special manner, . . . he is not entirely under their influence, but sufficiently withdrawn to contemplate and comprehend them”61 – that is, the emotions with which art is concerned and which it communicates are ordinary human emotions, but they are captured and expressed with an extraordinary degree of clarity.

59 60 61

Fry, “Retrospect,” Vision and Design, pp. 204–5. Fry, “Retrospect,” Vision and Design, p. 205. Fry, “Retrospect,” Vision and Design, p. 205.

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This is the view that Fry ascribes in his “Retrospect” to his “Essay in Aesthetics,” but he then connects it to his initial emphasis on form in “Art and Life” by saying that it is form that is “the direct outcome of an apprehension of some emotion of actual life by the artist”62 and in turn that which allows the artist to communicate the emotion he has so clearly perceived to the audience. However, he then distinguishes his view from that of “Mr. Clive Bell in his book, Art,” precisely by asserting that Bell’s “hypothesis that however much the emotions of life might appear to play a part in the work of art, the artist was really not concerned with them, but only with the expression of a special and unique kind of emotion, the aesthetic emotion . . . seemed to me always to go too far.” Instead of postulating such a special emotion and inferring from this the representation of everything that suggests the ordinary emotions of life, Fry argues that Bell should have stopped at the view that “the artist is free to choose any degree of representational accuracy which suits the expression of his feeling. There is no single fact, or set of facts, about nature that can be held to be obligatory for artistic form.”63 This confirms that Fry’s own view is that art is in the business of communicating neither a special aesthetic emotion nor any special religious emotion (in the end, as we saw, Bell had identified these two and thus, surprisingly changed his own view back to something approximating Tolstoy’s position) but is concerned with communicating the ordinary emotions of actual life but with the special degree of clarity afforded by coherent and harmonious form or structure. It would take Collingwood to recognize that this fact about art does not set it apart from or above the sphere of morality but may make art of the most profound importance for morals and politics without reducing it to what he would call “propaganda.” Collingwood may be regarded as clarifying Fry’s view that artists are in the business of clarifying ordinary human emotions, but Collingwood will do this within a philosophical framework influenced by both Croce and the ensuing response to Croce in Britain. So we next turn to the aesthetics of Croce.

2. Croce The most influential philosophical aesthetician in turn of the century Britain was not a Briton at all, but the Italian philosopher Benedetto 62 63

Fry, “Retrospect,” Vision and Design, p. 206. Fry, “Retrospect,” Vision and Design, pp. 206–7.

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Croce (1866–1952). Like Bernard Bosanquet, Croce is typically classified as a Neo-Hegelian idealist, indeed as the leading Neo-Hegelian of the twentieth century. In favor of this classification is the fact that Croce did consider philosophy to be the account of the chief forms of what, like Hegel, he called “Spirit.” But unlike Hegel, Croce (and the many who would be influenced by him) clearly equated spirit only with human consciousness and its expression in human action and did not posit any further identity between human and divine spirit – there is no hint of theology in Croce’s philosophy. And also unlike Hegel, he did not regard the Kantian dichotomies between theoretical and practical and within the theoretical sphere between intuition and concept as divisions to be overcome in a dialectical progress toward absolute knowing; on the contrary, he regarded these Kantian distinctions as fundamental and insuperable and built his philosophy around them. For Croce, the domain of knowledge or theory is divided by the distinction between intuition and concept, a distinction that he understands along Kantian lines as the distinction between immediate acquaintance with particulars and mediate knowledge of universals, and the realm of knowledge is in turn divided from the realm of practice, which is further divided by a slightly different distinction between particular and universal, namely, the distinction between purely self-regarding action and action that takes equal regard of others. These distinctions lead to Croce’s fourfold division of philosophy into aesthetics, which concerns the cognition of particulars (here Croce reminds us of Baumgarten’s original conception of the discipline); logic, which concerns the cognition of universals; economics, which concerns self-regarding action; and ethics, which concerns actions that regard others equally with oneself. Croce uses this framework to reproduce and justify some of the fundamental assumptions of modern aesthetics: Since it concerns intuitions rather than concepts, the aesthetic does not concern or yield classifications and rules, and since it concerns the theoretical rather than the practical, the aesthetic is not concerned with the satisfaction of human interests, not even the interest in pleasure itself – thus Croce arrives at the Kantian conclusions that aesthetic experience is nonconceptual and disinterested, neither of which claims are characteristic of Hegel.64 And while, in this like the more orthodox NeoKantians, Croce’s account of the aesthetic initially appears decidedly 64

One of Croce’s earlier philosophical works was What Is Living and Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel? (1907), trans. Douglas Ainslie (London: Macmillan, 1915), in which he indicates his highly selective relation to Hegel.

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more cognitivist than Kant’s – on his account, aesthetic experience does not appear to involve a harmony of our cognitive faculties, indeed it does not seem to involve all of our cognitive faculties, but to be simply a form of cognition, namely, cognition of intuitions, and Croce seems downright hostile to the idea that aesthetic experience is a form of play, this initial appearance is misleading. As we will see, in his explicit rejection of the concept of the aesthetic as a form of play Croce has in mind a particularly psychologistic concept of play as the discharge of psychic energy, namely, Herbert Spencer’s version of the theory of play, but at a deeper level his view of aesthetic experience as a form of cognition is also a view of it as a form of imaginative activity that puts his theory into closer contact with the central concept of Kant’s theory.65 However, Croce’s rejection of the superficial, Spencerian version of aesthetics of play would be accepted at face value by his immediate British followers, to be overcome only by the greatest of them, namely, Collingwood, a quarter of a century after Croce’s main work in aesthetics. All that, however, will be the subject of the following chapter. Croce was born to a wealthy Neapolitan family with landholdings in Abruzzo. When he was seventeen, his parents and sister died in an earthquake at their vacation home on Ischia, which Croce himself survived only after being trapped for hours in the rubble. Left orphaned but wealthy by that event, he and his younger brother then lived for several years in Rome with their uncle Silvio Spaventa, a prominent liberal politician and brother of the Hegelian philosopher Bertrando Spaventa. Croce attended lectures at the university in Rome but was bored by what he heard and never took a degree. However, he was influenced in Rome by Antonio Labriola (1843–1904), who introduced him to the work of both the Kantian Johann Friedrich Herbart and Karl Marx; Croce’s first philosophical book would be Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx (1900). In 1886, Croce moved back to Naples, where he would live the rest of his life as a private scholar, although he became a public figure with his commencement of the journal La Critica in

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The editor of the English edition of Croce’s Breviario or Guide to Aesthetics, Patrick Romanell, also rejects the standard interpretation of Croce as a Hegelian and says that “of all the classical German philosophers, he is closest to Immanuel Kant,” although he mentions in defense of this claim only Croce’s opposition, supposedly like Kant’s, to “traditional Metaphysics with a capital ‘M’” (Guide to Aesthetics, trans. Patrick Romanell [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965, reprinted Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1995], pp. xiii–xiv). Here we will examine in more detail Croce’s affinity with Kant in aesthetic theory in particular.

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1903, with his appointment as a life senator of the Italian republic in 1910, and with his service as minister of education in 1920 and 1921, in the last pre-Fascist cabinet of interwar Italy. Like many other intellectuals, he initially supported Mussolini’s government as a bulwark against Communism, but he decisively broke with Fascism and with his former friend Giovanni Gentile in the 1925 “Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals.” Gentile would become the official philosopher of the Fascist state, while Croce would become a leading antagonist of the state and spokesman for liberalism: After the fall of Mussolini’s government in 1943, Croce again served in the cabinet of the liberated portion of Italy on behalf of the liberals, helping to negotiate the withdrawal of King Victor Emmanuel III, and headed a party that tried to steer a way between the Communists and the Christian Democrats, although as that party veered to the right he withdrew and again retired to his life as a private scholar.66 As befit the foundational role of intuition in his division of the theoretical and practical powers of spirit, Croce began the publication of his philosophical system with his aesthetics, The Aesthetic as the Science 66

For an account of Croce’s life and career with an emphasis upon the political dimension, see Cecil Sprigge, Benedetto Croce: Man and Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), published in the year of Croce’s death. In Italian, see Fausto Nicolini, Benedetto Croce: Vita intellettuale l’erudito (Naples: G. Cacciavillani, 1944) and Benedetto Croce (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1962). For work on Croce’s philosophy in general, see Raffaele Piccoli, Benedetto Croce: An Introduction to his Philosophy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922); David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); and the collection edited by Jack D’Amico, Dain A. Trafton, and Massimo Verdicchio, The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). See also John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, second edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 299–302. For work on Croce’s aesthetics, see Herbert Wildon Carr, The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce: The Problem of Art and History (London: Macmillan, 1917); V. Sainati, L’estetica di Croce (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1953); Calvin Seerfeld, Benedetto Croce’s Earlier Aesthetic Theories and Literary Criticism (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1958); G.N.G. Orsini, Benedetto Croce: Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961); Merle E. Brown, Neo-Idealistic Aesthetics: Croce-GentileCollingwood (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966); René Wellek, Four Critics: Croce, Valéry, Lukács, and Ingarden (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981); and M.E. Moss, Benedetto Croce Reconsidered: Truth and Error in Theories of Art, Literature, and History (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987). There are brief discussions of Croce’s aesthetics in Antony L. Cothey, The Nature of Art (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 83–7; Gordon Graham, “Expressivism: Croce and Collingwood,” in Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, second edition (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 133–46; and Marie-Luise Raters, Kunst, Wahrheit, und Gefühl: Schelling, Hegel, und die Ästhetisk des angelsäschischen Idealismus (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2005), pp. 289–321.

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of Expression and of the Linguistic in General in 1902.67 The remainder of Croce’s system was published as Logic as the Science of Science of the Pure Concept (1905, revised 1909) and Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic (1909), both also quickly translated into English.68 The Aesthetic of 1902 was followed by further works in aesthetics, including the Breviario, or Guide to Aesthetics of 1912, written (although not personally delivered) on the occasion of the founding of Rice University, and Poetry and Literature (1936),69 as well as many works of criticism, such as Goethe (1919),70 a friendly but deflationary treatment of the great German in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and Ariosto, Shakespeare, Corneille (1920),71 the heart of which is a likewise deflationary treatment of Shakespeare as a genuine artist of the particular rather than a pseudophilosopher. Croce also wrote many works of historiography and history, especially Italian history, beginning with The Theory and History of Historiography (1917).72 Not surprisingly, Croce was an admirer of the great eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, and his works also include a volume on Vico (1911), translated in turn by Croce’s own British admirer Collingwood.73 We will begin with Croce’s original statement of his aesthetic theory in 1902, subsequently considering a key refinement made in his 1912 Guide that makes explicit Croce’s affinity with the mainstream of 67

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This work has been translated into English twice, first, including both the systematic and larger historical part, as Æsthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (London: Macmillan, 1909, revised 1922), and second, without the historical part, which was promised but has not appeared, as The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General, trans. Colin Lyas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Quotations from the systematic part of the work will be from the latter translation, abbreviated Aesthetic ; quotations from the historical part will be from the older version, abbreviated Æsthetic. Benedetto Croce, Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept, trans. Douglas Ainslie (London: Macmillan, 1917), and Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (London: Macmillan, 1913). Benedetto Croce, Poetry and Literature: An Inroduction to Its Criticism and History, trans. Giovanni Gullace (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981). Benedetto Croce, Goethe, trans. Emily Anderson (London: Methuen and New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923). Benedetto Croce, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Corneille, trans. Douglas Ainslie (New York: Holt, 1920). Benedetto Croce, Theory and History of Historiography, trans. Douglas Ainslie (London: Harrap, 1921). Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R.G. Collingwood (London: Howard Latimer, 1913), with a new introduction by Alan Sica (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2002).

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late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aesthetics that has been described in this chapter. Croce’s 1902 Aesthetic consists of two parts, a systematic statement of his own position followed by historical survey, with emphasis upon aesthetic theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that evaluates prior theories in light of his own. Croce’s own position is expounded by means of inferences from his assignment of the aesthetic to cognition as opposed to practice, and within cognition to the intuitive rather than the conceptual. Following Kant’s original contrast between intuitions and concepts, by intuitive knowledge Croce means knowledge of individuals rather than universals: Knowledge takes two forms: it is either intuitive knowledge or logical knowledge; knowledge obtained by means of our power to create mental representations, or knowledge obtained by means of the intellect; knowledge of individuals, or knowledge of universals; of particular things, or of the relationships between them; it is, in short, either that which produces representations or that which produces concepts.74

More precisely, what Croce means is that intuitive knowledge is particular knowledge of the particular, the representation in particularized form of something that is itself concrete rather than abstract. This is why he equates intuition with expression: Expression is the representation in a particularized way of a content that is itself particular and concrete rather than universal and abstract. Intuition for Croce is not just the formless flow of raw experience, but moments or aspects of experience singled out and grasped, which is what expression does and which thus makes intuition and expression equivalent, or makes the content of intuition identical to its form: “An intuition or representation is to be distinguished from that which feels and endures, from the flood and flux of sensation, from psychic material, as form; and this form, this taking possession, is expression. To intuit is to express; and nothing else (nothing more, but nothing less), than to express.”75 Thus one cannot refer to intuitions without mentioning their mode of expression as well as their contents: “The impression of moonlight, depicted by a painter; the contours of a country, drawn by a cartographer; a tender or dynamic musical motif; the words of a plaintive lyric, or those with which we ask for things, give orders or make complaints in everyday life, can all perfectly well be intuitions.”76 In this list, Croce appears to mingle artistic expressions 74 75 76

Croce, Aesthetic, p. 1. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 11. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 2.

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of intuition with quotidian, nonartistic ones, but in fact his view is that in principle “intuitive or expressive knowledge” is to be “equated” with “aesthetic or artistic” knowledge, thus that art is not a “distinct species” of intuition and expression, but differs from more quotidian intuition and expression only in degree of difficulty: “Some rather more complex and difficult expressions are more rarely attained, and these are called ‘works of art,’” and those who have the “greater aptitude, a readier bent” to produce these more complex and difficult expressions are called “artists.”77 Thus Croce emphasizes the continuity of aesthetic experience and artistic expression with the grasp of intuition that is the starting point of all knowledge, although he will go on to argue that because intuition is theoretical rather than practical, therefore the aesthetic as such is independent of the practical concerns that might seem to be paramount in everyday experience. Croce pays more attention to the distinction between intuition and conceptual knowledge and between the theoretical and the practical in general than he does to the details of the content and form of intuition itself, so his accounts of the latter are quite brief. The examples already cited suggest that any concrete, particularized aspect of experience can be the content for intuition and thus for artistic expression, and even though Croce sometimes attaches the word “feeling” to this content, no special restriction of suitable content for artistic expression to the emotional dimension of human experience seems to be intended; indeed the ordinary connotation of “feeling” seems to be excluded: “And if there is an insistence that art is feeling, that insistence has the same motivation: having in fact excluded the conceptual as the content of art . . . no other content remains save reality in its unadorned and immediate form, in a vital upsurge, as feeling, that is, again, as pure intuition”78 – what is felt is simply that which is not abstractly conceived, so apparently there can be a feeling of or for the light of the moon or the contours of a land as well as for an emotion in any ordinary sense, as long as it is concretely grasped rather than abstractly conceived. “Intuitions are: this river, this lake, this brook, this rain, this glass of water”79 as well as, presumably, this longing, this love, and so on – the crucial thing is the “this,” the particularity, rather than what follows it. Here Croce seems to be thinking along the same lines as orthodox Neo-Kantians such as Cohen and Cohn 77 78 79

Croce, Aesthetic, pp. 12, 14. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 19. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 24.

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that art is our way of grasping the most immediate aspects of experience without restriction. Croce’s account of form is as brief as his account of the content of intuition and expression. Form is essentially whatever allows us to grasp and hold before ourselves what would otherwise pass by indistinctly, that “which seeks to encompass that which comes from without and to possess it.”80 Thus, for example, The painter is a painter because he sees what others only feel or glimpse but do not actually see. We think we see a smile, but in reality we have only a vague impression of it, we do not perceive all the characteristic traits from which it arises as, having worked on it, the painter perceives them, who can, therefore, capture them fully on canvas.81

Whatever allows the painter or other artist to pass from vague impression to something that is not vague counts as form – although, as we will see, that the artist can capture such form on canvas or in some other physical medium is for Croce inessential to the aesthetic and to art as such. Beyond this, Croce says only that making this transition from the vague and indeterminate to the concrete and determinate is a product of human activity: Form is “spiritual activity,”82 the “spiritual activity of expression.”83 When Croce attempts to be more specific about form than this, he falls back on the traditional trope of unity amidst variety, in its contemporary guise of organic unity also employed by G.E. Moore: The form of intuition and expression is the unification of the multitude of impressions of ordinary experience into something that can be grasped as a unit and a whole: Another corollary of the conception of expression as an activity is the indivisibility of the work of art. Every expression is a unified expression. Aesthetic activity fuses impressions into an organic whole. And it is this fact that people are always after when they say that a work of art must have unity or, what comes to the same thing, unity in variety. Expression is the synthesis of variety, or multiplicity, into unity.84

Perhaps one might have thought that the most immediate level of experience is atomistic, already divided into units, and that intuition would just consist in the contemplation of one unit of experience or another. 80 81 82 83 84

Croce, Aesthetic, p. 6. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 10. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 4. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 16. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 21.

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But that would be the wrong picture; it is better to think of experience as indefinitely complex, and any grasp of unity in experience as thus the creation of unity out of multiplicity. Form, whatever allows us to grasp unity, is thus always something added to experience by the activity of the mind. Form is also that which allows us to put some distance between ourselves and the immediate, perhaps otherwise overwhelming flow of experience, and for this reason the creation of intuition and expression is also a form of liberation, that which allows us to recognize a contrast between the passive flow of experience and our active selves: By working on our impressions we liberate ourselves. By bringing them as objects before our minds, we detach them from ourselves and raise ourselves above them. The liberating and purifying function of art is another aspect of its character as an activity. Activity is a liberator precisely because it drives out passivity.85

In a passage such as this, Croce surely echoes an eighteenth-century thinker such as Schiller and, as we will see, anticipates and influences views of the next generation such as those of Dewey and Collingwood. As we shall shortly see, however, Croce also wants to keep his distance from any conventional account of the moral value of art; the liberating and purifying he has in mind is not a purification of emotions for moral purposes. To understand how Croce can see artistic expression as a form of liberation without moralizing it, we must examine his contrast between the aesthetic as one form of cognition and all forms of the practical. Before we do that, however, we should look at some of the implications of Croce’s contrast between the aesthetic and the other form of cognition, the conceptual. Like eighteenth-century thinkers, Croce infers from his identification of the aesthetic with intuitive rather than conceptual knowledge that there can be no meaningful general rules for the creation or evaluation of art, but he goes beyond the eighteenth century in also insisting that traditional distinctions among media and genres of art are without any sound foundation. He also uses his position to attack philosophical pretensions for art, thus rejecting Schelling’s thesis that art is the highest form of philosophy, on the one hand, and Hegel’s thesis that art can be and has been superseded by philosophy, on the other. The first of these points is evident in Croce’s insistence, similar to Dilthey’s, on “the identity between taste and genius,” or that “the activity

85

Croce, Aesthetic, p. 22.

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of judging, which criticises and recognises beauty, is identical with the activity which produces it”:86 If the capacity for producing art is called genius to indicate that art cannot be produced simply by following rules, then the identity of the capacity for the production of art with the capacity for judging it implies that the latter is also not governed by rules; both claims follow from the claim that the content of art, here identified with beauty, is always completely particular, not a universal. This premise is made explicit a page later, in the critique of “absolutism (intellectualism)” in aesthetics; here Croce states that absolutists, insofar as they assert the possibility of judging the beautiful, are right; but the theory that they put at the basis of their claim cannot be sustained, because it conceives the beautiful, that is, aesthetic value, as something located outside aesthetic activity, as a concept, a model which an artist actualises in his work, and of which the critic avails himself in order to judge that same work. In art there aren’t such concepts or models, as is well recognised as soon as people begin to say that every work of art can only be evaluated in its own terms, and contains within itself its own model: by which is denied the existence of objective models of beauty, be they intellectual concepts or ideas suspended in some metaphysical heaven.87

By his initial statement that “absolutists” are right to assert the possibility of judgments of beauty Croce means that they are right to reject relativism, that is, the doctrine that there are no interpersonally valid judgments of beauty, and thus implies that his own particularism about aesthetic experience and thus aesthetic judgment does not imply relativism: Even though every intuition and thus every genuinely aesthetic expression of intuition is unique and thus aesthetic evaluations cannot be inferred from general rules, what is genuinely beautiful or otherwise aesthetically successful for one person should be so for all. He does not make any positive argument for this claim, however, rather relying only on his famous claim that beauty is nothing other than successful expression – “It seems appropriate for us to define the beautiful as successful expression, or better, as expression simpliciter, since expression, when it is not successful, is not expression”88 – and the implicit premise that what is successful expression for one must be successful expression for all. Like Hume and Kant, Croce attempts to steer his way between the Scylla that there is no disputing about taste and the Charybdis that there must be determinate rules for taste, but without attempting either an empirical 86 87 88

Croce, Aesthetic, p. 134. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 135. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 87.

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or a transcendental justification for his assumption that all must respond to successful expression in the same way. Croce makes the second point noted earlier when he asserts that the “theory of literary and artistic genres” is “the most conspicuous triumph of the intellectualist error.”89 He does not, of course, mean that it is not possible to group multiple works of art into sorts, whether by medium, genre, or subject matter, such as – his list of examples jumbles all three kinds of classification just mentioned – “costumes, landscapes, portraits, domestic life, battles, animals, flowers, seas, countries, lakes, deserts, events that are tragic, comic, piteous, cruel, lyric, epic, dramatic, courtly, idyllic; and the like: often, too, into merely quantitative categories such as, small picture, picture, small statue, group, madrigal, song, sonnet, sonnet sequence, poetry, poem, novel, romance and so forth.”90 What he does mean is, first, that such classification under concepts is logical rather than aesthetic activity, part of science about the aesthetic rather than any part of the aesthetic itself,91 and, second and more important, that such classifications entail no rules for the creation and evaluation of works of art: “Error begins when we seek to deduce what has been expressed from what has been conceptualised and to find in the thing substituted laws applying to the thing for which it is substituted.” The error would be to expect to be able to infer from “literary and artistic genres” and other such classifications answers to questions such as “What is the aesthetic form for the representation of domestic life, the idyllic, cruelty, and so on? how must such contents be represented?”92 Croce’s position is that there are no answers to such questions, because aesthetic expression is always of something entirely particular and must therefore itself be entirely particular. There is a difference between successful and unsuccessful expression, to be sure, the difference between the beautiful and the ugly, but it is not to be inferred from any rules; it must simply be recognized. This is a point that Croce particularly stresses in his last major work on aesthetics, the book Poetry and Literature from 1936, where he writes that “the judgment of poetry,” for example, has a single indivisible category, that of beauty; “Thus the category of beauty is one and indivisible, although its single manifestations are infinite and can be grouped

89 90 91 92

Croce, Aesthetic, p. 39. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 40. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 39. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 40.

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into completely empirical classes (as classes always are) having nothing in common with the speculative distinctions determined by a rational concept”93 – that is, distinctions that could serve as grounds for rulegoverned inferences that works are beautiful or not. Works of art, of course, can be grouped into all sorts of empirical classes for all sorts of purposes – cataloging, selling, and so forth – but “the beautiful insofar as it is beautiful allows for no divisions and distinctions.” “The terminology of the beautiful,” Croce continues, “is a continual series of synonyms which, by the words ‘harmony,’ ‘truth,’ ‘simplicity,’ ‘unity in variety,’ ‘naturalness,’ ‘sincerity,’ ‘imaginative vigor,’ ‘lyrical intensity,’ ‘delicacy,’ ‘serenity,’ ‘sublimity,’ and the like, repeat the same concept of ‘beautiful expression.’”94 These various terms are not the names for different artistic media or genres; rather they are names for what have often been thought of as distinct aesthetic properties or characteristics, but Croce’s point is the same: What makes a particular work of art beautiful is that it is a successful expression of something particular, and while there might be various empirical similarities among various successful expressions that it is informative for us to name in some context or other, those empirical similarities never function as grounds for inferences that an object is a successful expression or not – that must be directly intuited. Finally, Croce uses the intuitive rather than conceptual character of the aesthetic to argue against the assumption, whether made by philosophers or by artists themselves, that art should have abstract or philosophical ideas as its content. To think it proper “for art to exhibit concepts, to unite the intelligible with the perceivable, to represent ideas, that is, universals” is to confuse art with science. Or more precisely, it is to assume that all art must exhibit concepts or universals that is the error, the confusion of “artistic activity in general . . . with the particular case in which it takes the form of the logico-aesthetic.”95 Thus, Croce does not reject “symbolic” and “allegorical” art as such, but he does reject any assumption that all art must be symbolic or allegorical, and he also rejects any art in which symbolism or allegory would be “a separable element” that could just as readily be expressed in one form as in another. If “a symbol is thought of as a separable element, if, on the one hand, one can express the symbol, and, on the other, the thing symbolised, one again falls into the intellectualist error: the supposed symbol is a 93 94 95

Croce, Poetry and Literature, pp. 131–2. Croce, Poetry and Literature, p. 139. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 37.

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way of exhibiting a concept, it is an allegory, it is science, or art that apes science.”96 Likewise, Croce holds that any theory that all art must have “religious” or “metaphysical” content is false, a confusion of an accidental character of some art with an essential character of all, and therefore rejects both the view that art is necessarily “immortal” because it is an indispensable or even the most successful part of “the sphere of absolute spirit” as well as the view that it is necessarily “mortal” because it aspires to be part of that sphere but cannot do it as well as first religion and then philosophy itself. Croce writes that from the idea that art must have religious or metaphysical content there has sometimes been deduced the immortality of art, as belonging, along with its sisters, to the sphere or the absolute spirit. Sometimes, rather, considering that religion proved mortal and is subsumed into philosophy, people have proclaimed the mortality, or rather the actual death, or at least the death throes of art. For us such questions are meaningless; since the artistic form is a necessary level of the spirit, to ask if art is eliminable would be no more and no less than to ask if sensation or intelligence can be dispensed with. . . . Criticism is possible only by refusing to play this game, that is to say, the very possibility of Metaphysics, whenever it appears in the form we have discussed.97

In keeping with the terse style of the systematic portion of his 1902 book, Croce does not make the historical references of his criticism explicit, although the rejection of Hegel’s “death of art” thesis is unmistakable. But his criticism of both Schelling and Hegel is explicit in the more expansive historical part of the work. Here Croce states that for Schelling “the individual forms of art, being in themselves representatives of the infinite and the universe, are called Ideas,”98 that Schelling thus places “beauty in the region of the Idea, inaccessible to common consciousness,”99 instead of realizing that art gives expression to our immediate intuitions, and that therefore he effaces the line between art and philosophy.100 Hegel “emphasized the cognitive character of art” to “a greater degree than any of his predecessors,” “but this very merit brought him into a difficulty more easily avoided by the rest,” namely: “Art being placed in the sphere of absolute Spirit, in company with Religion and Philosophy, how will she be able to hold her own in such powerful and aggressive company, 96 97 98 99 100

Croce, Aesthetic, pp. 38–9. Croce, Aesthetic, pp. 73–4. Croce, Æsthetic, p. 294. Croce, Æsthetic, p. 297. Croce, Æsthetic, p. 295.

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especially in that of Philosophy, which in the Hegelian system stands at the summit of all spiritual evolution?” The answer is that obviously art cannot hold its own in such company and thus can be attributed no value at all, or at the very most “may have that sort of value which attaches to transitory historical phases in the life of humanity.”101 Thus Hegel ends up delivering “the funeral oration” of art: “He passes in review the successive forms of art, shows the progressive steps of internal consumption and lays the whole in its grave, leaving Philosophy to write its epitaph,” while “Romanticism and metaphysical idealism . . . elevated art to such a fantastic height among the clouds that at least they were obliged to admit that it was so far away as to be absolutely useless.”102 For Croce, however, the thesis that art is essentially the expression of intuition and only accidentally the symbolization of abstract ideas means that it is an indispensable level of human experience rather than a transitional stage in a teleological development of the spirit, not to be transcended by philosophy or science. In his later work, it might be noted, Croce is friendlier to what we might think of as philosophical art, holding in Poetry and Literature that poetry “ties the particular to the universal, it embraces suffering and pleasure, transcending them, and, rising above the clash between the parts, it reveals the place of each part in the whole, the harmony over the conflict, the sweep of the infinite over the narrowness of the finite.”103 This sounds as if it might have been said by Schelling, but Croce still insists that what is distinctive about poetry, here a stand-in for any genuine art, is that it must transform its matter, or content, into images, indeed into images with “fullness.” Art always remains concrete while science and philosophy proper remain abstract, so even if there is some sense in which they can or even must have similar content there is no mistaking them or effacing the line between them, thus no question of either superseding the other – art can neither supersede philosophy, as in Schelling, nor be superseded by it, as in Hegel. Having drawn these crucial inferences from his distinction between intuitive and conceptual cognition, Croce then turns to the consequences of the assignment of the aesthetic to the cognitive rather than practical sphere of the human spirit. The first consequence that he draws is his famous position that works of art are internal rather than external, 101 102 103

Croce, Æsthetic, p. 301. Croce, Æsthetic, pp. 300–1. Croce, Poetry and Literature, pp. 15–16.

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that is, mental rather than physical. His premise for this position is the assumption that the production of a physical object or performance is an act of will that thus falls into the practical rather than theoretical sphere and is therefore an act distinct from and additional to the production of the expression of intuition that is the work of art proper. He writes: We must condemn as erroneous any theory that lumps together aesthetic and practical activity . . . those who . . . treat the aesthetic as if it were practical, do not do so in jest, or because they are groping in the dark, but because they have an eye to something that really is practical. However, the practical that they are thinking of is not the aesthetic or contained within the sphere of the aesthetic, but exists apart from and side by side with the aesthetic. . . . The aesthetic stage is completely over and done with when impressions have been worked up into expressions. When we have captured the internal world, formed an apt and lively idea of a figure or a statue, found a musical motif, expression has begun and ended; there is no need for anything else. That we then open, or want to open, our mouths in order to speak, or our throats in order to sing, and, that is, say aloud and full throat what we have already said and sung sotto voce within ourselves; and that we stretch out, or wish to stretch out, our hands to touch the keys of a piano, or take a brush or chisel, following, so to speak, on a larger scale those small and swift actions which we have already executed, translating these into a material where traces of them will remain more or less durably; – all this is something additional, and obeys quite different laws from those governing that earlier activity . . . the latter activity produces objects and is practical or voluntary.104

Croce has often been read as saying here that the work of art exists entirely in the mind of the artist. He does not actually say that here, however, stating rather only that the work of art exists entirely in the mind, and his position, already mentioned, that there is no essential difference between the creation and the reception of art, only a difference of degree, implies that at least in principle the work of art can exist as much in the mind of the audience as in the mind of the artist. So his position must be that the incorporation of the artist’s idea in a physical event or object, spoken words or sculpted stone, which we might ordinarily assume to be necessary to communicate the idea from one mind to others, is distinct from the work of art itself – even if physical realization is necessary to communicate an idea from one mind to others, that is a fact about the practical world, not a fact about the aesthetic as such.

104

Croce, Aesthetic, pp. 56–7.

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Croce does emphasize the mind of the artist, however, when he tries to obviate the objection that even the mental act of finding expression for some inchoate experience is voluntary, a matter of choice, and therefore already in the sphere of the practical; he denies this, insisting that “the true artist, in fact, finds himself pregnant with his subject and does not know how; he feels the moment of birth approach, but cannot will or not will it.”105 This may seem to be implausible in its own right as well as to jeopardize Croce’s general position that aesthetic expression is a form of activity in contrast to the passivity of immediate experience itself. But it does allow Croce to mount a defense of the autonomy of art: By maintaining that the creation of art proper is not a matter of will, Croce removes it from the sphere of moral evaluation, while by distinguishing the creation of art proper from its communication through some external medium and placing the latter within the sphere of the practical, Croce does allow that the latter, like any other voluntary action of a person, is potentially subject to moral evaluation. Immediately following the passage we have been discussing, Croce does not draw the line between the aesthetic as part of the theoretical sphere and the practical sphere quite correctly: He says that what “cannot be open to censure from a practical or moral point of view” is the “subject or content” of a work of art, while what may be blamed is “the way in which the artist has dealt” with the subject or content that involuntarily came to him, “an expression which is unsuccessful by virtue of the contradictions it contains.”106 This belies Croce’s claim that in expression content and form are in fact fully melded and inseparable, and that expression itself, or genuine intuition, is internal, to be distinguished from any physical externalization that might allow an expression or intuition to be communicated from one person to others or even, as Croce subsequently stresses, recalled by the artist himself. But in a later chapter, Croce puts the point better, arguing that while art, as art, is independent of utility and morality, that is to say, of any form of practical value, . . . it would be an error to pretend that this assertion of the independence of art, which is the independence of internal vision, or of the intuition or expression of the artist, must be extended without qualification to the practical activity of externally expressing and communicating, which may or may not follow the creation of the aesthetic object.

105 106

Croce, Aesthetic, p. 57. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 58.

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Here Croce does not drive a wedge between form and content within a work of art, which would be inconsistent with his own theory, but rather consistently distinguishes between the work of art as such as internal expression, not part of the practical sphere and therefore exempt from prudential and moral evaluation, and the externalization of such an internal object – which may be, to be sure, what is ordinarily meant by “expression” – which is within the sphere of the practical and therefore is subject to such evaluation. “If we understand by art the external expression of art,” Croce says, then indeed “utility and morality enter as of right,” and our choices concerning the external expression of art must be “guided by criteria which have to do with the economic ordering of our lives and their moral direction” – in this sphere “there is always the question to be pondered, whether it is worth communicating to others, and to whom, and when, and how: deliberations that fall wholly under both a utilitarian and an ethical criterion.”107 This conclusion seems eminently plausible, although we do not have to accept Croce’s initial claim that the creation of an internal expression is not a voluntary act in order to reach it: We could simply distinguish between internal acts that do not necessarily affect other people or even one’s own economic or moral condition and external acts that do and are therefore liable to economic and moral evaluation. But even more problematic than Croce’s claim that internal expression is not voluntary is his claim that the work of art is always an internal expression distinct from any externalization of it in a physical medium such as speech, song, or stone. This is simply more plausible for some kinds of art than others. We may well suppose that a lyric poet can fully form a poem in her mind and that it is quite contingent whether she writes it down so that she can remember it later or others can enjoy it. We may even suppose that the blind Milton could conceive an epic in his mind or the deaf Beethoven a complex later string quartet, although here we might well think that aids to memory, whether Milton’s verses as transcribed by his daughters or the movements of the work written down by Beethoven himself, are causally if not logically necessary to the completion of works that would test the limits of ordinary human memory. But when it comes to other media, such as painting, sculpture, or architecture, we might well want to argue that what exists in the mind of the artist is just an idea, not an achieved work, and that a painting does not exist until it is painted, with all the colors and textures that can be realized not in the mind’s eye but 107

Croce, Aesthetic, p. 130.

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only on specific paper, board, or canvas, with specific pigments, specific vehicles and solvents, and so on; nor does a sculpture exist until it is specifically carved out of some particular stone or cast in some particular metal, nor a building until it is constructed from specific materials, on a specific site with the specific vistas that it affords, none of which can ever be fully imagined. In other words, what seems contingent is not whether a work of art is accompanied with a physical realization, but that some types of art can be achieved without physical realization. As we will subsequently see, Croce’s denial of the essential materiality of art was a major sticking point for all of his British readers, and even Croce’s British follower Collingwood, who initially accepts the Italian philosopher’s rigid distinction between the internal and the external, does come to see that it cannot be maintained for all kinds of art; so we can defer further discussion of this point for now and instead turn to the second of Croce’s main inferences from his assignment of the aesthetic to the theoretical rather than practical sphere. Croce infers from the nonpractical character of the aesthetic that it is not aimed at the pursuit or production of pleasure as such, which is the province of what he calls the economic or nonmoral, self-directed domain of the practical. Thus he criticizes what he calls “hedonism,” the confusion of “pleasure in expression, that is, beauty, with what is pleasurable simpliciter, with pleasure of every other sort,”108 even if that is made to seem respectable by the claim that the pleasure of beauty is a refined sort of pleasure or pleasure of the “higher senses,” that is, solely the visual or auditory senses, as so many eighteenth-century theorists held. As part of his attack upon aesthetic hedonism, Croce specifically attacks the “theory of play.” As we have seen throughout this discussion, Croce treats aesthetic experience as a form of cognition, and his attack upon the theory of play would seem to imply that for all his particular criticisms of the development of the overly conceptual cognitivist approach to aesthetics by, for example, such post-Kantians as Schelling and Hegel, he has no room within his theory for an understanding of aesthetic experience as free mental activity and thus cannot be counted among those who synthesized the truth and the play theories of the aesthetic, such as Kant and in his own time, as we have seen, Dilthey. But to conclude this would be to be misled by Croce’s choice of terminology. What he means to exclude by his “critique of the theory of play” is specifically the psychological explanation of our pleasure in beauty as “that pleasure that arises from the sudden 108

Croce, Aesthetic, p. 91.

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discharge of the surging energy of the organism”109 that we found in Herbert Spencer. In Croce’s view, this would be a strictly practical explanation of the aesthetic, as would be similar late nineteenth-century views such as the crudely Darwinistic view that artistic creation is simply a (typically male) form of sexual display like “fighting cocks raising their crests, or like turkeys spreading their feathers in display behaviour,” or a form of domination more generally.110 But this is a very narrow sense of “play,” and Croce does not deny that “the concept of play has sometimes helped the recognition of the active nature of expression.” Indeed, he even makes a favorable allusion to Schiller’s Aesthetic Education: “Man (it has been said) is not really man until he begins to play (that is, until by spiritual creativity, he detaches himself from the stream of what is caused naturally and mechanically).”111 In fact, Croce’s general view is that while the creation and reception of art are not practical activities undertaken simply for the pursuit of pleasure simpliciter, or pleasure as an end that could just as satisfactorily be supplied by other means, pleasure is the natural outcome of unhindered and successful activity, and aesthetic pleasure, or, put in terms of a property, beauty, is nothing other than the pleasure of the unhindered and successful activity of finding expression for experience, and our displeasure in ugliness is our dissatisfaction with the unsuccessful activity of expression. “Value is activity that freely unfolds itself,” Croce maintains, and aesthetic value or beauty in particular is the “unfolding of spiritual activity” that leads to “expression,” while “in consequence, the ugly is flawed expression.”112 In other words, even though the aesthetic is a form of cognition, its value is not simply that of knowing something independently of how it comes to be known, but is interdependent with the activity of coming to know and the pleasure of that activity, or the pleasure in that activity freely unfolding itself. Thus, for all his rigid distinction between the theoretical and the practical spheres and his rejection of specific versions of the play theory, Croce, like Dilthey, achieves his own synthesis of the truth and play theories of the aesthetic and in this demonstrates that at the deepest level of his thought he is not a Hegelian, but, like Dilthey, more of a genuine Neo-Kantian than the self-designated Neo-Kantians like Cohen and Cohn.

109 110 111 112

Croce, Aesthetic, p. 92. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 91. Croce, Aesthetic, p. 92. Croce, Aesthetic, pp. 86–7.

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In the condensed and polemical text of the systematic portion of his Aesthetic, Croce does not give us much illustration of what he means by the pleasure of the freely unfolding activity of expression. But we can get a sense of what he values in aesthetic experience from his criticism, for example, from his portrayal of Goethe. With the agenda of rescuing the image of Goethe from the clutches of German Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, and nationalism and claiming him for the liberal tradition, he asks And what, in substance, did he teach? To be above all, whatever else one may be, thoroughly and wholly human, ever working with all one’s faculties in harmony, never separating feeling and thought, never working on externals or as a pedant . . . he realized in himself and advised others to seek true totality in the particular, in one’s particular work, mastery in “selflimitation,” and, on the other hand, not to shut one’s heart to passions and affections, not to become their prey, and to develop in oneself ever more and more fully the element of activity, training oneself not to desire and to dream, but to will and to act. He knew that passions, and especially love, come uncalled for and assert themselves. He never thought of combating or eradicating these passions by ascetic abstention, or of suppressing feeling by over-developing the rational part of his nature; but he endeavoured to reconcile both elements and, when feeling and imagination threatened him and finally gained the upper hand, he used to free himself by representing these phases in works of art . . . this method is really nothing but the faculty of objectifying our mental conditions to ourselves, of contemplating them, and of thus opening a way to meditation and liberation.113

Croce goes on to illustrate this general characterization by discussing each of Goethe’s main works and showing how even in such a work as Part II of Faust Goethe did not aim at grand philosophical abstractions, but explored the wide variety of human circumstances and feelings in a wide variety of forms and genres. What is crucial to Croce’s image of Goethe is that he did not attempt to achieve freedom by separating himself from human experience in all of its messy complexity, but rather precisely by exploring human experience in all of its complexity: His freedom lay in the unhindered activity of finding expression for human experience rather than rejecting it, in giving form to human experience rather than simply distancing himself from it. This is at least some of what Croce means by expression as an activity rather than mere knowledge. It might be noticed that in this illustration of Croce’s aesthetic (from 1919) there has been more emphasis on human feelings in particular 113

Croce, Goethe, pp. 4–6.

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than on the immediate objects of human experience in general (“this lake, this brook, this rain, this glass of water”) that furnished his examples of the contents of artistic expression at least at the outset of his 1902 work. This reflects a significant refinement of Croce’s aesthetics that is evidenced in his 1912 Guide to Aesthetics, the four lectures that he wrote in honor of the founding of Rice University, although in the event he did not deliver them in person. The first lecture in this work is entitled “What Is Art?” in quotes – an obvious although ironic allusion to Tolstoy, whose view of art as a medium for the communication of feeling, like an infection, Croce rejects in favor of his view that the aim of art is the articulate expression of feeling. Croce begins this section, as he began the argument in his 1902 Aesthetic, by asserting that “art is vision or intuition,”114 and then inferring from that four “negations” that parallel inferences drawn in the earlier work. First he denies that “art is a physical fact,”115 or that the work of art can be identified with the external, physical object that might record or communicate it. Next he infers that “art considered in terms of its own nature has nothing to do with the useful, or with pleasure and pain, as such.”116 Then he states that “a third negation effected with the help of the theory of art as intuition is the denial of art as a moral act,”117 arguing again that art is not the product of an act of will, thus that it is not exempt from moral evaluation but simply irrelevant to moral evaluation, although he again adds that even “if art is beyond morals, the artist is not, since he is neither beyond nor this side of it, but under its domination” insofar as he is a human being, with all that this implies.118 Finally he claims, as “the last, and perhaps the most important, of the general negations which it suits [his] purposes to mention,” that “with the definition of art as intuition goes the denial that it has the character of conceptual knowledge.”119 Thus far Croce has only restated even more compactly the already succinct arguments of his earlier book. But now he adds that intuition is the expression of “intense feeling,” that its content is above all feeling and what unifies a manifold of experience into a single intuition is above all the emotional unity of a single intense feeling: 114 115 116 117 118 119

Croce, Guide, p. 8. Croce, Guide, p. 9. Croce, Guide, p. 10. Croce, Guide, p. 12. Croce, Guide, p. 14. Croce, Guide, p. 14.

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What lends coherence and unity to intuition is intense feeling. Intuition is truly such because it expresses an intense feeling, and can arise only when the latter is its source and basis. Not idea but intense feeling is what confers upon art the ethereal lightness of the symbol. Art is precisely a yearning kept within the bounds of a representation. In art the yearning [for expression] is there solely for the sake of the representation, and representation solely for the sake of the yearning.120

Croce rejects any idea that art is simply “virtual outbursts of feeling” in favor of the view that art is always “feeling transformed into contemplation,”121 raw experience formed into intuition or expression, but now he accepts, or at least makes explicit in a way that he did not before, that it is not just experience as such that is so formed and transformed by art, but the experience of feeling, or emotion in the ordinary sense. For this reason he also maintains that “artistic intuition is, therefore, always lyric intuition.”122 The freedom of activity or liberation inherent in art becomes in turn “liberation from emotional excitement” by “objectifying it in a lyrical image,”123 in other words the freedom exemplified by Goethe in Croce’s description of him from a few years later. With this narrowing of his conception of art from intuition or expression in general to the intuition or expression of feeling or emotion in particular, Croce does add something not from Kant but from his own time, although he does not thereby draw any closer to Hegel, for whom the content of art always remained, for better or worse, philosophical abstraction, not human emotion. Like others in his time, Croce ultimately turned the cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience inward, making our own emotions rather than metaphysical or religious ideas the paradigmatic content of art while deemphasizing the immediate experience of emotions in response to art, but unlike most he also found a way to synthesize this version of aesthetic cognitivism with the view that aesthetic pleasure arises not simply from the content of art but from the free activity of our own mental powers in the creation and reception of art. He synthesized two of the main approaches of modern but still kept the third at some distance.

120

121 122 123

Croce, Guide, p. 25. The bracketed insertion is from the editor and translator of the English version, Patrick Romanell. Croce, Guide, p. 26. Croce, Guide, p. 27. Croce, Guide, p. 50.

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3. Bullough The influence of Croce on British aesthetics was rapid and, as we will see, immense. But before we turn to the group of authors whom we may regard as the British Croceans, we will pause to look at one writer who, although he would complete his career as a professor of Italian literature, did not fall under the spell of Croce. This is the Cambridge scholar Edward Bullough (1880–1934), who published a widely read article entitled “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Æsthetic Principle” in 1912, a year before Bell’s book appeared.124 Like Bell, Bullough was not a professional philosopher but, as the son of a German mother and English father, a specialist in modern languages who had been trained at a gymnasium in Dresden before attending Cambridge, where he taught French, German, and Russian before becoming university lecturer and finally professor of Italian just one year before his death. But he was the first to lecture on aesthetics at Cambridge, giving a course on the subject as early as 1907, and was also secretary to the university Faculty Board of Architecture from 1909; so he brought to the subject of aesthetics an unusually broad background in both literature and the visual arts. Further, not only “Psychical Distance” but four of his other articles from 1907 to 1919 were published in the British Journal of Psychology, and in 1921 he published the report “Recent Work in Experimental Æsthetics” in the proceedings of the 1920 Congress of Philosophy at Oxford. A devout Catholic, he also translated Émile Gilson’s Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas in 1924. So he brought to his work in aesthetics a broad background in philosophy and psychology as well.125 In “Psychical Distance,” however, Bullough appears to offer a highly restricted conception of aesthetic experience and its proper object that makes little use of his own rich experience of literature: He seems to suggest that in aesthetic experience we “distance” ourselves from all of 124

125

Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Æsthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology 5 (1912): 87–118. A report on Bullough’s life and a bibliography of his works are provided in Edward Bullough, Æsthetics: Lectures and Essays, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. xi–xv. Citations to “Psychical Distance” and his 1907 lectures “The Modern Conception of Æsthetics” in what follows are drawn from this volume. Articles about Bullough include George Dickie, “Bullough and the Concept of Psychical Distance,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 22 (1961): 233–8, and “Psychical Distance: In a Fog at Sea,” British Journal of Aesthetics 13 (1973): 17–29; Kingsley Price, “The Truth about Psychical Distance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35 (1977): 411–12; and H. Gene Blocker, “A New Look at Psychical Distance,” British Journal of Aesthetics 17 (1977): 219–29.

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our normal concerns and emotions in order to enjoy nothing but the immediate appearance of objects – a conception of aesthetic experience that might be applicable to arts that have sensory objects, such as the visual arts or music and dance, but that it is difficult to imagine could apply to Bullough’s own field of literature. At least this is the impression that is created by Bullough’s well-known opening example of a fog at sea. Ordinarily, he writes (in the same year as the sinking of the Titanic!), “for most people” a fog at sea “is an experience of acute unpleasantness,” involving not only “physical annoyance” and “delays” but also “feelings of peculiar anxiety, fears of invisible danger, strains of watching and listening for distant and unlocalised signals,” and the like. “Nevertheless, a fog at sea can be the source of intense relish and enjoyment” if one “distances” oneself from one’s ordinary cares and the emotions connected with those cares and focuses on the appearance of the fog itself: Abstract from the experience of the sea fog, for the moment, its danger and practical unpleasantness, just as everyone in the enjoyment of a mountainclimb disregards its physical labour and its danger (though, it is not denied, that these may incidentally enter into the enjoyment and enhance it); direct the attention to the features ‘“objectively” constituting the phenomenon – the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outlines of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe the carrying-power of the air, producing the impression as if you could touch some far-off siren by merely putting out your hand and letting it lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothness of the water; and, above all, the strange solitude and remoteness from the world, as it can be found only on the highest mountaintops; and the experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of repose and terror, a flavour of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrast sharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its other aspects.126

Here it seems as if aesthetic experience is the pleasure that can arise from detaching oneself from all normal human emotions in order to enjoy the look of objects alone (in this case, the curiously dairylike look of the fog), thus an experience that we might be able to take in natural phenomena, like the fog, or in works of art such as painting or music that might be thought to appeal solely to our senses, as if they were just natural phenomena without intellectual content of any kind. However, it soon emerges that Bullough’s introductory example is somewhat misleading, and that what he is actually arguing is that in both the creation and the reception of art it is necessary for the artist and audience 126

Bullough, “Psychical Distance,” in Æsthetics, pp. 93–4.

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to distance themselves from their ordinary particular and personal practical concerns and emotional responses in order to open themselves up to the other emotions that the aesthetic object, and especially not purely sensory objects but objects that involve our intellects as literature paradigmatically does, have to offer. This is already implicit toward the end of the passage about the fog, where what Bullough is actually saying is that distancing oneself from the ordinary fear of the possible practical consequences of the fog will allow one to experience the “concentrated poignancy and delight” of the “uncanny mingling of repose and terror” suggested by the appearance of the fog: If one experiences this, then one is not just enjoying the merely sensory quality of the fog, as one might simply enjoy the taste of some flavoring, but one is enjoying distinctive emotions, just different emotions from those that one would have if one were focused only on the potential practical and personal consequences of the fog. But Bullough brings his point out more clearly several pages later: Distance does not imply an impersonal . . . relation. . . . On the contrary, it describes a personal relation, often highly emotionally coloured, but of a peculiar character. Its peculiarity lies in that the personal character of the relation has been, so to speak, filtered. It has been cleared of the practical, concrete nature of its appeal, without, however, thereby losing its original constitution. One of the best-known examples is to be found in the attitude toward the events and characters of the drama: they appeal to us like persons and incidents of normal experience, except that that side of their appeal, which would usually affect us in a directly personal manner, is held in abeyance. . . . Distance, by changing our relation to the characters, renders them seemingly fictitious, not that the fictiousness of the characters alters our feelings toward them.127

Bullough’s thesis is thus that “distance,” or bracketing our own particular concerns and emotions, allows us to open ourselves up to other emotions – not a special emotion, like Bell’s “aesthetic emotion,” that is unrelated to any of our normal human emotions, but just to other human emotions than those that we would experience in a particular situation or with regard to a particular object if we viewed it only through the lens of our own particular and current needs and desires. (Thus Bullough’s position is also not the same as Schopenhauer’s, which was that we focus on the Platonic Ideas presented by particular objects in order to distance ourselves from emotion altogether.) His analysis thus applies most

127

Bullough, “Psychical Distance,” in Æsthetics, pp. 97–8.

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readily to those kinds of arts that do directly concern human emotions, such as most forms of literature and many forms of music and painting, rather than natural beauty or arts emphasizing purely sensory qualities and forms, as might initially have appeared. Bullough spends the rest of “Psychical Distance” discussing what he calls the “antinomy of Distance,”128 that is, the fact that, metaphorically speaking, the observer must be at just the right distance from the object, neither too close nor too far, in order to appreciate it, which means more literally that the observer (or creator) of an aesthetic object must be able to distance herself from her antecedent particular and private feelings but not distance herself from more general human capacities for emotion, since it is precisely in the experience of such shared rather than idiosyncratic emotions that aesthetic emotion consists – so, “without some degree of predisposition on our part” toward a wide range of human emotions, the typical work of art “must necessarily remain incomprehensible, and to that extent unappreciated.”129 He further discusses potential limits to distance, or qualities or topics in art that will lead to “underdistance” or make it difficult to distance – for example, “it is safe to infer that, in art practice, explicit references to organic affections, to the material existence of the body, especially to sexual matters, lie normally below the Distance-limit, and can be touched upon by Art only with special precautions”130 (though this does not mean that art cannot deal with sexuality – that would belie too much of the history of art – but only that it must do so with, precisely, heightened artistry). He also discusses the qualities that will lead to suitable distance, here arguing that the formal features of art that on another theory might be thought to be the primary and direct object of aesthetic experience and enjoyment are rather the means to achieving the distance from one’s own emotions that is necessary in order to enjoy the experience of different emotions that the work has to offer. Thus he writes: A general help towards Distance . . . is to be found in the unification of “presentment” of all art-objects. By unification of presentment are meant such qualities as symmetry, opposition, proportion, balance, rhythmical distribution of parts, light-arrangements, in fact all so-called “formal” features, “composition” in the widest sense. Unquestionably, distance is not the only, nor even the principal function of composition; it serves to render

128 129 130

Bullough, “Psychical Distance,” in Æsthetics, p. 98. Bullough, “Psychical Distance,” in Æsthetics, p. 98. Bullough, “Psychical Distance,” in Æsthetics, p. 101.

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our grasp of the presentation easier and to increase its intelligibility. It may even in itself constitute the principal æsthetic feature of the object, as in linear complexes or patterns, partly also in architectural designs. Yet, its distancing effect can hardly be underrated.131

That is, while purely formal features may sometimes be the primary object of aesthetic pleasure and interest in an object, ordinarily they are not, but they are rather aids to the artist’s task of abstracting from her own personal needs and emotions so that she might create something of broader emotional appeal and interest, as well as aids to the observer’s task of abstracting from his own personal needs and emotions so that he might enjoy those other emotions that the work has to offer or communicate. This is a very different theory of the typical role of form than Bell’s theory of “Significant Form.” What the essay “Psychical Distance” does not very clearly do, however, is to explain just what the value of distancing ourselves from our own emotions in order to open ourselves to a wider range of emotions is, or why we take pleasure in works that do that. Without explicitly mentioning the concept of distance, however, this is what Bullough’s lectures “The Modern Conception of Aesthetics” of five years earlier do. After spending what must have been some tedious hours justifying the academic study of aesthetics, Bullough expresses his view of the value of aesthetic experience succinctly. First, he argues that experience of the qualities of objects in their concreteness and immediacy rather than through the mediating lens of abstract concepts gives us an enjoyable sense of vitality, of being alive and embodied and not just abstract thinkers: This immanent contemplativeness of the æsthetic attitude is the magical wand which invests all things it touches with a charm and interest. . . . It gives a plasticity and relief to objects and experiences which they inevitably lose in the long perspectives of scientific or ethical vistas. An action may be damaging or beneficial in its consequences; it may be inspired by good or bad motives; or it may represent the final link in a long chain of psychic states, the concomitant phenomenon of certain emotion conditions. But it may also be the concrete expression of a concentrated vitality. The desperate leap of a prisoner for freedom, the wild rush of an attack, the deliberate act of taking one’s life, may be ethically approved or condemned, they may be scientifically analysed. But only to the æsthetic consciousness is revealed what the act meant to the doer, the overflowing fullness of living energy and the clenched resolve of the performance. Not so much to live happily rather than miserably, or to lead a godly rather than a wicked life, but to live, to force life of the highest quality in its deepest and intensest 131

Bullough, “Psychical Distance,” in Æsthetics, p. 114.

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form into the span of a human existence, is an ideal purely æsthetic. . . . It is this illuminating of the trivial and of the great things of existence with the grace of being well done which is the privilege of the æsthetic consciousness. Again it is Pater who found the most concise formulation: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is an end in itself.”132

Here the suggestion is that the intensity of feeling, the feeling of being alive, can be communicated from the doer of a deed to the observer of the deed, who can in turn enjoy that feeling for himself; what is not explicitly argued but what seems obvious is that the observer needs to distance himself from the actual circumstances of the deed – in an actual case of suicide, for example, the doer would perhaps be tempted to intervene if there is time to prevent it, or be overwhelmed by regret if he cannot, but in neither case would he be likely to share in the intensity of feeling that might have led the suicide to attempt his act – and so can most successfully experience this intensity of feeling when the deed or event is represented in art, with its formal, distancing devices, rather than if it is presented in reality. As Bullough continues, it also becomes clear that the experience of intensity of emotion, of being alive, that he is here identifying as a fundamental source of aesthetic pleasure is not occasioned only by the communication of feeling from a represented subject to an actual observer, but can also be occasioned by the concreteness of appearances as such when objects are experienced without the distraction of our ordinary practical concerns: Æsthetic appreciation is incomparably deeper and fuller even in its appreciation of the external aspect of things than the practical “judging by appearances.” I go further and insist that it is the only way in which appearances are apprehended at their full value. There is no other way in which we become actually and intensely conscious of the phenomenal aspect of things, and thereby of their beauties and perfections. The practical “judging of appearances” is not apprehension of appearances as such, for their own sake, but only as indicative of whatever the practical consciousness imagines, or would like to find, behind them. . . . On the other hand, both these characteristics, sensuous concreteness and individualisation, infuse into æsthetic appreciation that peculiar human interest and element which are so conspicuously lacking in the abstract scientific standpoint and to some extent also in ethical speculation.133

So here Bullough’s idea seems to be that the aesthetic experience of objects that we can have when we distance ourselves from our ordinary 132 133

Bullough, “The Modern Conception of Aesthetics,” in Aesthetics, p. 75. Bullough, “The Modern Conception of Aesthetics,” in Aesthetics, p. 77.

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scientific and practical attitudes toward them is enjoyable in part simply because the former sort of experience has a kind of concreteness and intensity that the latter lack. Here Bullough’s position is not dissimilar to that of Croce. But Bullough departs more from Croce when he argues that the aesthetic experience of emotions is enjoyable because it offers us all broader knowledge of the human experience and condition than any of us could obtain from our own actual, particular lives; Æsthetically speaking, we must, I think, see the function of Art, its place in the economy of the universe, as the enlargement and enrichment of our complete personality, the enhancement and quickening of our total conscious existence. The contemplative immanence of æsthetic consciousness is par excellence the medium for extending the limited range of our personal experience and of forcing those experiences which do fall within it into the highest relief of which they are susceptible. We cannot get away from the fact that we are all shut in within the narrow, but impenetrable walls of our own self. . . . Our range of personal, actually realised experiences is deplorably small. For experiences are not communicable by intellectual knowledge about them, but only through our actual realisation of them. This realisation, which we as concrete individuals cannot make owing to the limitations of our sphere of actions and of our practical personality, is only possible æsthetically and through the medium of Art. . . . What we are, the sum total of our most personal being, we undoubtedly owe in a much larger degree to experiences made through the medium of æsthetic impressions, than to the extension of our personality by contact with the real world. . . . Only “æsthetic culture” educates our whole being, enriches all our faculties and extends our total inward life beyond the small holding which in practical life is allotted to each of us.134

The real reason that we have to distance ourselves from our own personal concerns in order to enjoy art is that our personal concerns are too limited, while what art has to offer us is concrete experience of the full range of human experience, above all of human emotion. It might seem surprising that what art has to offer us is the “actual realisation” of human emotions when what it so often represents is fictional rather than actual persons, thus what it portrays are in some sense fictional rather than actual emotions – but it is just a psychological fact about us that we can respond to such fictions with emotions that are in many ways more intense than those that we experience – or can allow ourselves to experience – in everyday life.

134

Bullough, “The Modern Conception of Aesthetics,” in Aesthetics, pp. 87–9.

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In the end, then, Bullough offers us a cognitivist theory of aesthetic experience, although one that depends on the assumption that we actually experience emotions in response to works of art. The pleasure of aesthetic experience arises from the knowledge of the full range of human emotions that it has to offer us, from the way in which it extends our knowledge of human emotions not only beyond our own limited experience but also beyond the abstractions about emotions that science and ethics have to offer us. This knowledge clearly depends upon the power of the human imagination – again, we are obtaining this knowledge from the representation of typically fictional characters in a variety of media, or even in ways that do not directly involve the representation of human characters, the ordinary bearers of emotions, at all (think not only of Verdi or Puccini operas, but also of the emotion-laden but nonrepresentational music of late Romantic composers like Richard Strauss or Arnold Schoenberg with which Bullough could well have been familiar), and to do so clearly requires extensive exercise of the imagination on the part of both artist and audience. But apart from Bullough’s one allusion to the fact that aesthetic culture “enriches all our faculties,” there is no suggestion that the free play of the imagination or its free play together with our other faculties is the object of our enjoyment; the exercise of the imagination that distance makes possible, or that makes distance possible, is the means to the primary source of aesthetic enjoyment – the concrete and complete cognition of the full range of human emotions – that it makes possible, not the object of aesthetic enjoyment itself. Thus Bullough, like Croce, synthesizes two but not all three of the approaches to aesthetics that we have been tracing throughout this work. While Croce synthesized the cognitivist approach with the theory that aesthetic experience is a form of free activity while deemphasizing the emotional impact of art, Bullough made the cognitive value of art depend on its emotional impact, but while emphasizing the necessity of the imagination for experiencing that emotional impact he had nothing to say about the free play of the imagination. Nor did we find any threefold synthesis in the Moorean aesthetics of Clive Bell. So it seems that if we are to find such a synthesis in Anglophone aesthetics in the first part of the twentieth century, it will be either in another generation or in another country. Let us look at the next generation of British aestheticians before turning to aesthetics in America.

4 First Responses to Croce

Having looked at the independent Bullough, we can now return to the impact of Croce on British aesthetics from the turn of the twentieth century until World War II. We shall see that those who remained closest to Croce, such as E.F. Carritt and Louis Arnaud Reid, nevertheless broke with him on the issue of the materiality of art, while Samuel Alexander used the issue of materiality to depart more radically from Croce. Ironically, the author who in many ways tried to remain closest to Croce, namely, Collingwood, ended up not only breaking with him on the issue of materiality but also more fully recognized imaginative activity as central to aesthetic experience and thus came closer to a more comprehensive approach to aesthetics than his master had.

1. Carritt The first of the British aestheticians to be influenced by Croce was Edgar Frederick Carritt (1876–1964). Carritt was a fellow of University College at Oxford, where he was associated with both the Oxford realism of John Cook Wilson in theoretical philosophy and the Oxford intuitionism in moral philosophy of H.A. Prichard and David Ross. Carritt published numerous works in moral and political philosophy, including The Theory of Morals (1928), Ethical and Political Thinking (1947), and Morals and Politics (1952), and was known for his polemics against utilitarianism, Hegel’s political theory, and Marxist dialectical materialism.1 But he was known earliest and remains best known for his work in aesthetics, and 1

He contributed to a book entitled Aspects of Dialectical Materialism by H. Levy, John Macmurray, Ralph Fox, R. Page Arnot, J. D. Bernal, and E. F. Carritt (London: Watts, 1935).

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we shall consider that work here. Carritt originally laid out his views in The Theory of Beauty, first published in 1914;2 he also published a widely used anthology of texts in aesthetics, Philosophies of Beauty: From Socrates to Robert Bridges, Being the Sources of Aesthetics,3 and two introductions to aesthetics, What Is Beauty? A First Introduction to the Subject and Its Modern Theories 4 and An Introduction to Aesthetics.5 He also produced A Calendar of British Taste from 1600 to 1800: Being a Museum of Specimens & Landmarks Chronologically Arranged.6 Like Collingwood, Carritt was also among those who helped translate Croce’s vast oeuvre into English.7 Our discussion of Carritt’s version of expressionism will be based on his original work, The Theory of Beauty, and the amplification of his conception of expression in his Introduction of thirty-five years later.8 Carritt’s position in aesthetics was based on the Crocean thesis “that everything is beautiful in whose imaginative contemplation – or creation – man expresses or makes sensible to himself the implicit content of that active spirit which is his or in which he shares.”9 Indeed, he confessed, “I believe that a greater amount of truth is contained in Croce’s Estetica than in any other philosophy of beauty that I have read.” But he also claimed that Croce’s “method, both in theory and history, is too brilliantly cursory to be conciliating; and that it does not succeed in curing the dazed scepticism that in æsthetic, even more than in other departments of philosophy, often arises from the survey of so many systems, each in itself so plausible, which arrive at apparently contradictory results because they have concealed incompatible presuppositions.”10 In Carritt’s view, Croce did not adequately defend the insight that beauty is successful expression because he remained too far from the facts of aesthetic experience, criticizing other theories on systematic grounds and deducing his own position schematically from the demands of his own classification of the different manifestations of the human spirit. Carritt’s own first book proceeds largely by the criticism of other 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10

E.F. Carritt, The Theory of Beauty, fifth edition (London: Methuen, 1949). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932. London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1947. London: Routledge, 1949. Benedetto Croce, My Philosophy: Essays on the Moral and Political Problems of Our Time, ed. Raymond Klibansky, trans. E.F. Carritt (London: Macmillan, 1949). There is a brief memoir of Carritt by Ruth Lydia Saw in British Journal of Aesthetics 4 (1964): 3–6. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 44. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, pp. 281–2.

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aesthetic theories, but he claims, “I have tried to criticize various theories in respect of their harmony with those facts of æsthetic consciousness which it was their business to explain, and not at all from their compatibility with the general philosophical positions of their authors or from the truth of those positions.”11 In fact, the largest part of Carritt’s book consists of critical expositions of some of the main preceding theories in aesthetics, culminating with his discussion of Croce, in the course of which he gradually amplifies his own conception of expression, but a direct analysis of the concept of expression would await his later work. Carritt’s classification and in some cases interpretation of previous theories are distinctive. He begins with a critique of what he calls the “Hedonistic-Moral Theory,” which he ascribes to Plato, Tolstoy, and Ruskin. One might think that “hedonistic” and “moral” are virtually contraries, but what Carritt means is that adherents of this view share with hedonism the assumption that the primary effect of beauty is the production of pleasure, yet then argue against any assumption that beauty could be valuable just for producing pleasure that it can be valuable only if that pleasure is accompanied by or results from a moral lesson. But “of all these anti-æsthetics,” Carritt writes, “which reduce the value of that pleasant thing called beauty to the moral lesson imparted by an artist, we must barely say that they do not describe our æsthetic experience.”12 Carritt particularly disfavors the view that a moral lesson can be separated from a work of art itself, and that pleasure in the work is then approved or disapproved depending on the value of the moral lesson. Instead, he uses the criticism of the hedonistic-moral view to argue that art is not extrinsically valuable because of a lesson that it may impart but that it is intrinsically valuable because as the lucid expression of any emotion whatever art is illuminating and liberating. Treating the Aristotelian concept of katharsis as another form of the hedonistic-moral theory, he writes that “the artistic expression frees us from the desire for expression, which is just the artistic activity . . . beating against the bars of ugliness and incoherence. Not only from pity and fear but from triumph and envy and the burden of every other emotion does art in a sense free us; yet from the burden of none of them simply but only as craving for expression, yet unexpressed and therefore ugly.”13 In Carritt’s view, our pleasure in art arises not from a moral lesson but from the satisfaction of 11 12 13

Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 282. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 64. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, pp. 71–2.

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transforming our unexpressed emotion, whatever it is, into an expressed and clear emotion. “Here we seem to have found an account of the relation of art to morality which we may accept,” he says, adding that the connection of this view “with Croce is apparent, it is the rationalisation of the intuitive feeling of poets from Milton to Shelley.”14 This view, Carritt continues, holds that art aims separately “neither at pleasure nor edification,” hedonism nor morals, “but that we are better, more human, less brutal beings, for that æsthetic experience in which we learn what the world of man’s spirit, apart from our particular desires and convenience, really is.”15 Carritt next turns to the criticism of imitation or mimetic theories of art, which he calls “the Realistic-Typical Theory.”16 He argues that some arts, such as architecture, as well as natural beauty, are not imitative at all,17 but that even where art is imitative, it is not the imitation of types of external objects, human or otherwise, that is important; rather, “what the artist must always imitate, or, as we prefer to say, express, is . . . his own passions and volitions,” an insight that in this case “Plato saw in describing music.”18 But whereas one might think that an artist’s expressing his own emotion rather than imitating some general type of objects might reduce the interest of the artist’s work to others, Carritt argues the opposite, saying that “the universality rightly ascribed to a successful artistic communication is not that it has drawn a portrait like many people, but that it has really expressed and communicated a real human feeling.” This does not condemn expressive art to idiosyncrasy rather than universal validity, Carritt argues, because of the commonality of human nature: If an artist successfully expresses his own feeling, then he is likely to be expressing something that the rest of us feel and need to express as well. If we find a work of art “expressive that must be because it expresses a potentiality of our own; and we thereby recognize the kinship of our minds to the artist’s, both in feeling and expression, a kinship which ideally extends to all humanity.”19 This argument is necessary to preclude the objection that the equation of beauty with the expression of the artist’s emotion inevitably makes beauty merely idiosyncratic; Collingwood will make this argument as well. 14 15 16 17 18 19

Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 72. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 73. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 75. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 79. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 87. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 92.

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Carritt thus uses his critique of the imitation theory of art to avoid an objection to the theory that beauty is expression, without expanding his analysis of expression itself. He next criticizes what he calls the “Intellectualist Theories” of Kant, and here he expands his account of what may be beautifully expressed by ascribing to Kant the view that aesthetic experience is a kind of self-knowledge of our inner mental processes. But Carritt sees Kant himself as a sort of Moses who looked upon but did not actually enter into the promised land of expression, and whose theory is particularly weakened by his emphasis upon an excessively restrictive conception of essentially meaningless form, such as the form of the arabesque, as the proper object of taste. Remarkably, Carritt also manages to expound his interpretation of Kant without using the term “play.” He describes Kant’s central notion of the harmony of the cognitive powers in the experience of beauty as an “interaction of these faculties” that is “perhaps not more harmonious than in ordinary perception” but “is more free,”20 but does not call this free play. Instead, he interprets Kant’s idea that the experience of beauty is an interaction of the cognitive faculties that does not lead to conceptual knowledge of an external object to mean, “if we may put into our own language the conclusion to which Kant continually seems to be striving, but from which he always recoils,” that “the æsthetic activity is the intuition of an individual as it is in itself, transcending or escaping the concepts both of science and of historical existence, and further” that “this individual is in the last resort a state of our own mind.”21 In other words, Carritt transforms Kant’s idea of the nonconceptual and noncognitive play of the cognitive faculties into the idea of cognition of the individual rather than the general – he transforms Kant’s idea of free play into a precursor of Croce’s idea of aesthetic experience as intuition rather than concept. And he then criticizes Kant because of “the great gulf which Kant has fixed between pure or formal beauty on the one side and expressive or adherent beauty and sublimity on the other; with his analogous though less thorough separation of art and nature; and with his rejection of the beauties of music and colour as in the main unæsthetic because sensuous or emotional.”22 Carritt quite rightly criticizes Kant for excluding color (in the case of visual art) from aesthetic significance just because responses to it may not be as universal as responses to form – he clearly 20 21 22

Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 103. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 106. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 107.

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recognizes that this secures universal validity for judgments of taste only by begging the question – but he also criticizes Kant for failing to see that form by itself is also aesthetically indifferent: Form as well as color “to be expressive, – and that is to be beautiful, – must be modified, informed and unified by a ‘predominant passion’ which is the emotion that in its abstract form he also disallows.”23 So while Kant lays the foundation for understanding the experience of beauty as cognitive expression of our own inmost states (this is of course a Neo-Kantian interpretation of Kant), his insistence upon form as the proper object of taste to the exclusion of all else but especially emotion prevents him from seeing that what is expressed in beauty above all is our investiture of objects with our own emotion. Kant’s rigid distinction between the beautiful and the sublime is similarly symptomatic of his restriction of beauty to form: Since his concept of beauty, “thus abstracted and impoverished, was patently unable to sustain the passion and exaltation which we connect with many ‘presentations’ unassignable to a concept,”24 any aesthetic experience of emotion has to be consigned to the realm of the sublime. Carritt concludes his chapter on Kant with a brief section on Coleridge, in which he argues that his own criticisms of Kant are confirmed by Coleridge’s modification of Kant’s doctrine, “often unconscious or implicit,” into the view that “Beauty is the ‘subjection of matter to spirit so as to be transformed into a symbol, in and through which the spirit reveals itself.’ There is not one beauty of every flower, which the artist must see and copy or lose all; there are beauties awaiting him in all as infinite as the passions of his own heart.”25 However, Carritt does not see the main line of the development toward Croce’s conception of beauty as expression as passing through Coleridge, but through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and not so much through as around Hegel. Carritt credits Schopenhauer with recognizing that aesthetic experience is “purely contemplative, interested in something for its own sake – for its proper character or quality,” and praises him for the “profound and new suggestion that the object of this contemplative activity is the will . . . for by a brilliant afterthought Schopenhauer reminds us that the shows of things could never reveal to us their inward nature, were it not that within us too that same will is active, and that we have first become aware in our own

23 24 25

Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 110. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 116. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 119.

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feeling of that which we afterwards æsthetically divine in them.”26 But Carritt criticizes Schopenhauer for his assumption that the will always leads to frustration, and for his inference that the point of contemplation, even contemplation of the will itself, is only to free us from the demands of the will; he objects that “the world, though it does not satisfy all our cravings, is good, not demonstrably for the understanding, but to the impartial intuition,” and this premise of course can be at least part of the explanation for why the experience of beauty as expression of our own emotion should be pleasant. Carritt also criticizes Schopenhauer for his claim that in most arts we express merely low-grade objectifications of the will, “in plain language, kinds of things and actions,” and that we express the will itself only in music; “the error of supposing that beauty arises in the contemplation of Ideas, – which for all his efforts really remain abstract concepts, – led Schopenhauer to suppose that what is in truth the nature of all beauty was peculiar to music.” For Carritt, on the contrary, even that art form that seems least likely to express emotion, namely, architecture, also “expresses directly the movements of the Will, that is to say, human feelings, and not the feigned tensions of physics.”27 Carritt then argues that Nietzsche improves upon Schopenhauer by transforming the distinction between art that trades in merely charming imagery and art that deals with the deepest human emotion from a distinction among the arts into a distinction between approaches to any art, namely, the distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. But for Carritt Nietzsche still falls short in failing to recognize that the Apollonian and Dionysian must be synthesized into expression: The truth is that for any expression there must be presupposed a blind affection, which we can only figure to ourselves as an appalling nightmare, or intoxicating delirium, of incoherence; but its expression, which without it would be the impossible expression of nothing, is the essential joy of spiritual life, vision and creation. What had to be expressed we know only in its expression, and therein we know nothing else. It may turn out to be an emotion towards an absolute creative force or our individual love and terror; both if really expressed, are alike art and beauty, and, in the æsthetic sense, true.28

26

27 28

Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 131. What I have elided from this quotation is Carritt’s insertion of Wordsworth’s famous characterization of poetry in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads as “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” In the present passage, Carritt refers to his original quotation of Wordsworth on p. 39. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, pp. 137–8. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, pp. 144–5.

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Nietzsche recognizes that the full range of human emotion is the proper matter of art but with his distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian sees some art as attempting to mask such emotion rather than seeing all beauty as the expression of emotion. But this is a lesser failure than that of Hegel, whom Carritt sees as an “intellectualist” who treats all art as the attempt to express a single metaphysical abstraction rather than the infinite range of particular human emotion, and as doomed to historical irrelevance because of its inadequacy to that task. Although Carritt, like Croce, is often considered a Neo-Hegelian, his criticism of Hegel’s aesthetics is trenchant. Carritt records Hegel’s view that “The content of Art is the Idea, its form is the plastic use of images accessible to sense,”29; recounts Hegel’s argument that the history of art “reveals the inherent imperfection of art itself – its inability to present, in the sensuous reality which is its necessary medium, a content which is truly infinite,”30; and then asks: Can any theory of æsthetic be accepted of which it is an essential doctrine that the day of beauty is passed; not only in the sense that future artists will never equal the ancients, – an indemonstrable thesis which has been and again might be the subject for much agreeable speculation, – but with the deeper meaning that in philosophy and the Christian religion we have found actual substitutes, which better fulfil the very same functions to which art, in the world’s childhood, had set its prentice hand?31

The answer to this rhetorical question is of course that Hegel’s view of art as merely a preliminary and inadequate stage on the way to absolute knowing is untrue to our experience of art. The truth is rather that “neither philosophy, nor morality, nor religion can satisfy our whole being; from each and all we turn or return to beauty with unsated appetite, no less than from beauty to them. All are necessary, just because they are different and are not less or more perfect ways of doing, or rather knowing, the same thing.”32 As Carritt’s last clause makes clear, he accepts the view that the experience of beauty is ultimately a form of knowing but rejects the view that all forms of knowing are merely stepping-stones on the path to philosophy as the one true way of knowing. The rejection of Hegel’s version of cognitivist aesthetics is necessary for anyone who accepts Croce’s distinction between intuition and concept

29 30 31 32

Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 150. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 153. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, pp. 156–7. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 158.

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as two fundamental forms of cognition, and Carritt immediately credits Croce for his criticism of Hegel. He follows Croce in concluding that “Hegel’s great achievement in philosophy was to discover, or at least first to elaborate and make explicit . . . that in any pair of opposites . . . each of the two terms is by itself abstract, incomplete and ultimately impossible without the other,”33 but that his mistake was to fail to see that this applies to the relation between intuition and concept, art and philosophy, itself, as well as to various contrasts within art: The truth is that there are several functions of the mind, of which some may be seen to be prior to others as art is to philosophy, but none of which, least of all the prior, can be dispensed with, any more than we can abandon breathing when we learn to walk. And within the special function of art there are as many ways of creating beauty as beautiful objects to be created, and each creation, so far as it is beautiful, is perfect.34

Carritt makes the criticism of Hegel that he shares with Croce even more specific by arguing that Hegel treats an artistic expression as a mere “symptom” and thus assumes that “the human body is the only adequate artistic presentation of mind” but also an adequate presentation only of merely human mind, not Spirit in its broader meaning, because only the human body can directly manifest symptoms of human mentality.35 Hegel fails to recognize that the creative human mind is not restricted to mere symptoms of its own emotions but can use anything as a stimulus to expressive activity or invest any object with an expression of its own emotion. For this reason too Hegel draws an unnecessary distinction between artistic and natural beauty, not realizing that nature is not merely a stimulus to our emotions but can also be invested with our emotion. “From the confusion of sign and expression arises, I think, Hegel’s preference of art to nature and of art dealing with humanity to any other.”36 The critique of Hegel leads Carritt to Croce and the “Expressionist Theory.” What Croce got exactly right, according to Carritt, is his distinction between intuition and concept within the sphere of cognition, thus his view that beauty consists in the intuition of the particulars of human feeling rather than in the sensory presentation of abstract ideas, as in Hegel. What Croce got wrong, however, is his rigid distinction between the theoretical and the practical, thus his identification of artistic 33 34 35 36

Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 158. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 160. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, pp. 166–7. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 170.

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expression with the intuition of feeling in the mind of the artist and his demotion of the external work of art to a merely practical instrument for the communication of an artistic intuition as a goal that is separate from and secondary to the primary artistic goal of self-understanding. The rejection of Croce’s rigid distinction between the inner aesthetic intuition or expression and its external communication is characteristic of all of his British followers, even in the end, as we shall see, of the one who starts off by most fully accepting it, namely, Collingwood. Carritt begins by praising Croce’s view that “art is indeed the knowledge of the individual . . . no more to be confused with thinking or philosophy whose object is the universal, than with moral or hedonistic conduct.” He opposes Croce to Aristotle, who “was mistaken in thinking that while poetry deals with the universal, history is confined to the particular,” when in fact both are concerned with the particular and “what truly differentiates history is that, since it is matter of fact, its faculty is perception or memory; while that of art is imagination, – or, if this word implies feigning, intuition, – for which there is neither truth nor falsehood, reality nor fiction but only the intuited or imagined individual. And this intuition for Croce is the same thing as expression.” Carritt then poses the “two crucial difficulties of the Estetica: How can we identify intuition with expression? and: What, according to Croce, is expressed (or intuited), – what is that matter (to use his own language) whose form the æsthetic activity must supply?”37 The answer to the second question is easy, although here Carritt emphasizes the emotional nature of the intuitions we express more than Croce did, at least in his early work: The matter of aesthetic intuition and expression is “a state of our own passions . . . a world desired or loathed, or mingled of desire and loathing . . . what as individuals we experience, suffer or desire.”38 Nevertheless, Croce was right to hold that intuition of such feelings is closer to feeling them than perceiving them, “qualifying” or “defining” them as if they were something external to the self. But he went too far in simply identifying the intuition of feelings with the expression of them. For Croce, expression is an internal cognitive state, and if someone other than the one who first forms an expression – an audience as contrasted to an artist – should form an expression similar to the artist’s, that is essentially contingent. For Carritt, however, “art recreates ideally and expresses my momentary situation; and the image it produces, free 37 38

Carritt, Theory of Beauty, pp. 184–5. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 188.

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from time and space, can be again created and contemplated in its ideal reality from any point of space or time. The great artists reveal us to ourselves because their imagination is identical with our own, and the difference between us is merely a matter of degree.”39 In other words, expression is an essentially intersubjective accomplishment, and there should be a clear conceptual distinction between intuition, as the internal, cognitive state of a subject, and expression, as the intersubjective communication of intuitions through the use of media such as language, paint, clay, and so on. In failing to see this, Croce has fallen victim to his own abstract distinction between the theoretical and the practical rather than remaining true to our actual aesthetic experience, as Carritt claims he himself does. In spite of this criticism of Croce, Carritt praises two of Croce’s “many important contributions to the theory of beauty,”40 first, Croce’s view that “a philosophical classification of beauties is a forlorn hope”41 precisely because each beauty is a highly particular expression of a highly particular emotion, although this particularity is not a bar to communicability; classifications of arts and genres, to which traditional aesthetic theories devoted so much effort, are merely “empirical and practical devices for convenience, aids to memory, which may facilitate, some more and others less, the indication and recovery of the individual which is our aim.”42 Second and more important, Carritt accepts Croce’s view that since a work of art is not a conceptual cognition of its subject, it is also not a vehicle for evaluation of its subject, but only for expression of our feelings: “A poem then may in one sense be full of morality or of wickedness, a picture of philosophy or scepticism, a cathedral of religious truth or falsehood, but in a sense they care for none of these things; they affirm none but only express our feelings about them, and in so doing they are beautiful just as is the expression of simplest passion.”43 Here Carritt is close to the advocates of art for art’s sake, and indeed he footnotes this statement with a passage from the lecture “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake” by the great Oxford Shakespeare scholar A.C. Bradley, who writes that “Shakespeare’s knowledge or his moral insight, Milton’s greatness of soul . . . – all these have as such no poetical worth; they have that worth only when, passing through the unity of the poet’s being, they 39 40 41 42 43

Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 195. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 204. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 205. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 206. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, pp. 213–14.

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reappear as qualities of imagination, and then are indeed mighty powers in the world of poetry.”44 It will await Collingwood to argue that the clear expression of our own emotions, although certainly different from the expression of a moral valuation, is itself morally valuable, indeed indispensable. By means of his review of the aesthetic theories of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Croce, with allusions to many others, Carritt has argued that the core of aesthetic experience or beauty itself is the expression of human emotions in intersubjectively accessible form for the purpose of self-understanding rather than anything else. His late Introduction to Aesthetics only briefly amplifies his conceptions of expression and emotion. He expands his previous contrast between expression and symptom (deployed in his criticism of Hegel) to a contrast between expression and “three other things: symptom or sign, symbol, and stimulus or argument.” The difference between an expression and a symptom is that in the case of the latter we make a clear distinction between the condition and its symptom, whereas in the case of an expression, even an ordinary expression like a smile or frown, “we say we see or feel a man’s friendliness or anger and indeed its nature”;45 this suggests that in an artistic expression there will be a unity of form and content that is missing from a mere symptom. Second, “if symptoms may be called purely physical signs, symbols could be defined as arbitrary or intellectual signs,” and that in turn means that they can have completely determinate and translatable meaning while artistic expressions always have a fullness of meaning that is never completely translatable.46 Third, in an argument that, as we will subsequently see, may have been influenced by the intervening publication of Collingwood’s Principles of Art, Carritt argues that artistic expression is not, like an argument or a piece of propaganda, supposed to stimulate in its audience a mere feeling, but is rather supposed to initiate contemplation of such a feeling – something certainly incompatible with the aims of propaganda. But while driving home the point that art is not supposed merely to communicate raw emotion, Carritt seems to withdraw his earlier criticism of Croce and to draw a rigid distinction between the act of artistic expression and the separate act of creating a vehicle for communication, internalizing artis-

44

45 46

Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p. 214n, citing Bradley’s Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1909), p. 7. Carritt, Introduction, p. 56. E.F. Carritt, An Introduction to Aesthetics (London: Hutchinson, n.d.), p. 58.

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tic creation proper and reducing the creation of an external medium for communication to mere craft: Yet it remains a fact that artistic creation discovers its aim only, if ever, in the achievement, which may or may not require the aid of some material upon which to experiment and record, such as paper, wax, a pipe or a piano. But once this internal expression has been perfected, its communication, however difficult or impossible, would be a matter of craft; we should know already what it is required to do. So then for the production of what is commonly called a “great work of art” two distinguishable qualities seem required, though we may think it possible that they usually coincide: imagination or inspiration and craft or technique.47

We shall next see that although Carritt thus apparently tried to take back his earlier critique of Croce on this point, other British aestheticians writing soon after Carritt’s first book did not. On the subject of emotion, Carritt merely considers two objections to the thesis that art or its beauty consists in the expression of the emotion. The first is the moralistic objection that “some emotions are so bestial, monstrous or wicked that their expression can only be vile”;48 here Carritt reiterates his earlier point that art is not in the business of issuing moral evaluations of emotions, but simply expressing clearly what they are. The second objection is that “not all emotions can be beautifully expressed” because of “psychological rather than ethical grounds,” for example, “Can vomiting, cramp, the taste of pâté-de-fois-gras, any mere pang or titillation, be expressed aesthetically?”49 To this objection, Carritt’s reply is that these are not true emotions, but mere sensations, and it is not part of his view that the expression of any mere sensation is beautiful or suitable for art. Carritt thus adds informative restrictions to his conceptions of emotion and its expression but does not further develop the positive analysis of either concept. So let us now leave him and turn to two writers both of whom take seriously his earlier rejection of Croce’s separation between the mental work of art proper and its merely practical external vehicle. Although the younger of the two, Louis Arnaud Reid, not only presented his view as a modification of Croce while the other, Samuel Alexander, presented himself as a more radical opponent of Croce, but also published his work two years ahead of Alexander’s main work, we will consider Reid first. 47 48 49

Carritt, Introduction, p. 62. Carritt, Introduction, p. 64. Carrit, Introduction, p. 65.

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2. Reid Louis Arnaud Reid (1895–1986) enjoyed a long life and career; he taught philosophy at Liverpool when he published his first influential work, A Study in Aesthetics,50 in 1931; he subsequently became the first professor of the philosophy of education in the University of London, where he focused on the role of the arts in education, and was emeritus from that position when he published his second chief work in aesthetics, Meaning in the Arts,51 as late as 1969. His other works included Knowledge and Truth: An Epistemological Essay (1923), Creative Morality (1937), Preface to Faith (1939), The Rediscovery of Belief (1945), Ways of Knowledge and Experience (1961), Philosophy and Education (1962), and, weeks before he died, Ways of Understanding and Education (1986).52 In A Study in Aesthetics, Reid begins from the Crocean position that “beauty is perfect expressiveness”53 and aesthetic experience the contemplation of such expressiveness: “In aesthetic, as distinct from other kinds of contemplation, the object is so regarded that the very arrangement of the perceptual data as we apprehend them seems in itself to embody some valuable meaning, something the apprehension of which moves, interests, excites us.”54 As this passage already hints, Reid adds to the idea of expression what most would regard as the antiCrocean claim, although he attributes it to Croce himself, that expression is always the embodiment of meaning in a physical, perceptible, and therefore public medium; thus that beauty is nothing less than “embodied meaning,”55 and indeed in his later work he argues that it would be better to call the object of aesthetic experience “embodiment” rather than “expression.”56 Reid also argues that while all forms of beauty involve the expression of meaning, works of art are typically constituted by a multitude of embodied meanings, and thus they must also strive for unity or coherence as well as expressiveness in order for us to be capable of meaningful and enjoyable contemplation of them. Thus Reid argues that the traditional “principle of variety-in-unity” as 50 51 52

53 54 55

56

Louis Arnaud Reid, A Study in Aesthetics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931). Louis Arnaud Reid, Meaning in the Arts (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969). There was a memoir of Reid by Malcolm Ross in British Journal of Aesthetics 27 (1987): 101–3. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 31n. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 39. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 43. As we will see later, this phrase, also used in this period by DeWitt Parker, was adopted by Arthur Danto in his later work in aesthetics. Reid, Meaning in the Arts, p. 75.

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well as the contemporary principle of expressiveness are necessary to understand art.57 But Reid does not associate the principle of variety in unity with the concept of play; like Croce, he regards contemplation as a form of cognition and is dismissive of play as a minor impulse in the creation of art.58 Reid makes explicit at the outset of his first work that his view that “beauty is perfect expressiveness . . . is a different view from one very commonly held, that the ‘beautiful’ is the serene, the well-proportioned, that which makes an immediate appeal on account of its harmoniousness and balance.” Although “these qualities may, and perhaps in some sense do always, enter into concretely beautiful things,” they are not part of what define or constitute beauty. This distinction is important because he does not want beauty as expressiveness to be confined “to such serene objects as the Apollo of Belvedere or the Aphrodite of Melos,” but wants it instead to include “much of what is at first sight adjudged to be ugly, and . . . much that is ‘difficult.’”59 Although not everything that is beautiful on Reid’s view is serene, however, he will certainly allow that there is always pleasure in the contemplation of successful expression; this is the pleasure in the contemplation of meaning in the special case in which it is given perceptually and yet transcends what is merely given perceptually. This is what is essential to aesthetic experience: Pictures and statues and symphonies yield a delight and a pleasure which is certainly in part sensuous, but is never only so. It is certainly for pleasure or enjoyment of a sort that we go to picture galleries or concert halls, or to the theatre to see great tragedies. But no aesthetic theory which identified such satisfaction with the mere sense-pleasure of a perception could be worthy of consideration. Such a theory might account – though in fact it is almost certain that it does not – for the ‘aesthetic pleasure’ in simple colour- or sound-combinations. But a theory of aesthetic experience must also account for those aesthetic experiences which seem to shake the very foundations of our being. The temple is a pile of stones, the dance a set of movements. But these possess meanings for aesthetic contemplation which it is beyond words to describe. It is beyond words to describe them, not merely because they may appear profound as life itself, but because they are in their essence untranslatable, being just the embodied meanings of stones, sounds, movements. To understand the nature of this embodiment is to understand the essence of aesthetic.60

57 58 59 60

Reid, Study in Aestheticcs, p. 114. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 186. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 31n. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 42.

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In his irenic manner, Reid suggests that this unification of meaning with perceived form must have been at least part of what Clive Bell meant by “significant form.” This is questionable, since Bell was intent on excluding from the proper object of genuinely aesthetic experience all reference to any content beyond what is immediately perceived, whereas Reid’s conception of embodied meaning seems to break down any rigid barrier between immediately perceived perceptual form and merely inferred intellectual content and instead to locate the distinctive pleasure of aesthetic experience precisely in our enjoyment of the transgression of this boundary. His idea here is closer to Kant’s conception of aesthetic ideas than to Bell’s notion of significant form. Reid’s statement suggests that the central question for aesthetic theory is to understand how meaning can be embodied in perception, how meaning and perceived forms can be united. His answer to this question is that this is accomplished by imagination; thus for the first time among the Croceans, the involvement of the imagination becomes crucial to the definition of aesthetic contemplation or experience and the proper objects of such experience: When an object of perception – whether actual or imaginal perception or both – is contemplated “‘imaginatively,” that is, so that it appears in its very qualities and forms to express or embody valuable meaning, and when that embodied meaning is enjoyed intrinsically, for its own sake, and not for its practical, or cognitive, or existential implications, then the contemplation is “aesthetic” contemplation, and the total complex before the mind we may call an “aesthetic” object.61

This brief passage is replete with both references to the history of aesthetics and its own complexities. Obviously Reid is relying upon tradition in contrasting the intrinsic enjoyment of embodied meaning to its instrumental enjoyment for practical or “existential” purposes, or for cognitive purposes, that is, presumably, cognitive purposes other than cognition of the meaning before one. He is also presuming a distinction between “imaginal perception” and “imaginative” contemplation, where the former presumably implies the not-presently-actual or notcurrently-present status of the object being contemplated and the latter connotes how the perceptual object, whether currently present and actual or not, is being contemplated, and he is likewise presuming that an expressed meaning may be valuable in its own right as well as valuable for the particular way in which it is embodied and the distinctive kind 61

Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 43.

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of contemplation that embodiment makes possible. But what Reid is not doing here is making very clear what embodiment and its “imaginative” contemplation actually are. What his subsequent discussion suggests, however, is that what is crucial to these concepts is the imagined unity of medium and meaning, the fact that the meaning is not literally contained in the object perceived in the way a physical property is and thus must in some way be projected into it, or be a feature of our response to it, yet we nevertheless experience the object and its meaning as a unity. Thus he says that “the aesthetic object is an imagined unity of a what, or content, and a ‘body,’ in the entity we call concretely an ‘embodiment.’ We simply cannot . . . regard the what apart from the body without changing the nature of the what,” and that “by saying that the aesthetic unit is imaginatively contemplated I mean simply, as I have just said, that we apprehend embodiment as embodying in its very qualities and forms valuable meaning.”62 The key to the embodiment of meaning and thus to the character of aesthetic expression and its experience is not merely that meaning is in some sense inherent in our response to objects rather than physically inherent in the objects themselves, for that is always the case, but rather in the fact that we nevertheless experience the meaning as in the object. Or as Reid also puts it, using hyphenations to convey this sense of unity, “In aesthetic experience we are in fact always concerned with the experience-of-value, and not with conceivable values out of all relation to appreciating mind.”63 Here Reid is close to the view of the empathy theorists, but he appeals not to them but to both Bosanquet and Santayana in attempting to develop his idea further. He praises Bosanquet for the legitimacy of his question “How does feeling get into an object?,” although he thinks Bosanquet did not go very far in answering this question.64 He criticizes Santayana’s definition of beauty as pleasure objectified (which we will discuss in the next part) on the ground that it suggests that pleasure is the only value that can be embodied into a beautiful work, although “‘pleasure-objectified’ is good in so far as it stresses the value-aspect of aesthetic expression”;65 what Reid is suggesting here is that we need to make the distinction, which he thinks Santayana did not make, between the wide range of values as meanings that may be embodied in works of art and the pleasure that we take in contemplating the embodiment of any and 62 63 64 65

Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 53. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 61. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 93, referring to Bosanquet’s Three Lectures, p. 74. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 94.

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all of them. Whether Reid himself has enough to say in explanation of how feelings enter into objects or values become objectified is debatable, but he does make explicit what should be at least one premise for such an explanation, the absence of a rigid barrier between body and mind and therefore between merely perceptual qualities and meanings: In the world we know our experience is one and continuous, and it is therefore impossible to stop short with bodily meanings. The experiences of our bodies, or, if preferred, the bodily meanings, which are imputed to objects, are fused and intermingled with a tissue of associated meanings, to whose boundaries and implications it is impossible to set limits. We are not bodies only, nor are bodily things our only objects. We are bodies-and-minds; and, because minds are the minds of bodies, and bodies the bodies of minds, the things of the body and the things perceived through the body are charged with significance, with valuable significance, with a whole world of valuable meanings. They are nothing less than the whole inheritance of life.66

Reid’s conception of imagination is thus founded in a profoundly antiCartesian conception of the unity of mind and body. Here he writes in the tradition of Mendelssohn and Herder, although they are not among his references. Because of this view of the continuity of physical and mental properties, Reid is able to argue that imaginative meaning may be found in simple physical properties of sounds and colors,67 in forms like “arrangement, plan, structure,”68 for example, curves that “suggest grace, or fluidity, or, again, vigour” or others that “suggest uncertainty and hesitation,”69 and in all sorts of associations, partly “individual history, partly . . . associations common to all.”70 Such associations can satisfy the requirement of felt unity that is the key to imaginative contemplation: “You feel as you see it that you are living in a gracious world, full of loveliness and delight.”71 This would not turn up in a physicist’s description of the world, of course, but is how we may experience the world because of our capacity for imagination. Reid’s conception of the mind-body continuum provides a sounder basis for an expressionist theory of the aesthetic than dualism or idealism. His view of art also represents progress over previous statements of

66 67 68 69 70 71

Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 95. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 78. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 81. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 83. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 101. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 102.

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the expressionist theory. As previously mentioned, in Reid’s view what is distinctive about art is the complexity of the expression and therefore imagination that it typically involves, and therefore the need for unity as well as expression in successful art, a need, however, that he thinks traditional theory has often mistaken for the essence of beauty. Reid writes: When we are in aesthetic mood our excitement tends to elaboration and complication and completion of what is impartial and imperfect, and to supplementation of one perfection by its opposite, uniting them in turn in a larger, more complex whole which has more meaning. Although the entities we have considered are always form and matter, and never mere matter, they may be matter in relation to larger and more complex wholes. These larger, more complex, more significant, wholes, are the things we call works of art.72

It is because of the complexity of expression involved in a work of art that art must satisfy the requirement for unity as well as expressiveness: But this principle of the unity of complexity – which need not assume great importance in dealing with entities like colours or sounds (or words) – becomes extremely important when we come to consider the work of art. In the work of art we have presented to us a vast complexity of separate items which are yet somehow united to constitute a single unified whole which makes direct appeal. This unification is so important that the principle of variety-in-unity (or unified variety) has often been made the central doctrine of aesthetics. If we are right, this claim to first place cannot be ceded, for in speaking of first principles we have put “expression” in the premier position. But unity-of-variety must find a place in the theory of art.73

Reid thus argues that a traditionally predominant conception of the essence of art is not false but should be subordinate to the conception of expression as essential to art. His further discussion of the work of art argues that a variety of other phenomena previously identified as the essence of art should be understood as things that can contribute to the complexity of art, but always subject to the supremacy of expression in the work of art and our experience of it. With an allusion to antiquity as well as Romanticism, he argues that “inspiration” should be understood as a “conscious apprehension of some object which is such that an artistic process is set going,”74 but as only one factor among the complex motivations that lead to the production of a work of art. Another of 72 73 74

Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 113. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 114. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 159.

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these motivations is “desire for communication,”75 which Reid thus does not, unlike Croce, relegate to a secondary, “practical” concern that is not part of the motivation for art proper. He holds that “imitation may be, sometimes, a part of the [artistic] process, but is never its essential principle”;76 sometimes imitation is useful for the creation of expressiveness, but not always. He considers a variety of “unifying devices” and formal elements that can make complex expressions coherent, such as a common subject.77 But above all, just as he stresses the continuity of mind with body in his account of imaginative contemplation as the essence of aesthetic experience, so he stresses the centrality of the embodiment of values in material in the creation of art (and thus of course in our response to art). Here he quotes a long passage from Bosanquet’s Three Lectures, culminating in an assertion of the “whole delight and interest of ‘body-and-mind’ in handling the clay or metal or wood or molten glass. . . . The feeling for the medium, the sense of what can rightly be done in it only or better than in anything else, and the charm and fascination of doing it so.”78 This point is so important to Reid that, in contrast to Bosanquet and other “first-rate experts” who do not find it in Croce, he does attempt to find it in Croce, to whom of course he credits his central conception of beauty as expression. He argues none too convincingly that Croce’s general idealism should not be taken to imply idealism within aesthetics. He does criticize Croce for not realizing how dependent the stimulation of imagination is upon antecedent perception,79 but he then defends Croce on the ground that, especially in the later Guide to Aesthetics, Croce has emphasized the physicality of aesthetic experience, the way in which words, for example, “run through our whole organism, soliciting the muscles of our mouth and ringing internally in our ears . . . trills in the throat and shivers in the fingers.” However, Reid admits that for Croce even if the aesthetic thought cannot be separated from the artist’s experience of his own body, it need not lead to any physical production or interaction with a medium other than the artist’s own body, thus that the work of art “need not be actually declaimed or performed or painted,” and he concedes that Croce’s recognition of the bodily aspect of aesthetic imagination is “negatived in other parts of his writings by confusions and 75 76 77 78 79

Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 181. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 178. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, pp. 190–1. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 166, quoting from Bosanquet, Three Lectures, pp. 60–1. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 168.

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ambiguities arising from what will certainly appear to many present-day thinkers to be a false view of knowledge,”80 by which he no doubt means Croce’s rigid distinction between the theoretical and practical spheres, which led him to his rigid separation between the work of art proper and the creation of any publicly accessible physical object for the communication of the artist’s intuition. As we will see when we turn to Alexander and Collingwood, the physicality and publicity of the work of art would remain a central issue for both opponents and adherents of Croce. Reid is thus disposed to draw together what previous theories in aesthetics often kept apart, for example, beauty and expression, form and content, idea and physical object, and so on. But although he emphasizes the importance of unity amidst variety in the complex experience of art, and that was often seen as a stimulus for or product of the free play of imagination, Reid is not disposed to introduce the concept of play into the broad tent of his aesthetics. Indeed, he says only that “the theory which makes art an outcome of the special impulse of play . . . has been often enough dealt with by other writers,” and that “it is certainly not compatible with what we have said, except in so far as the need for play (and this applied to any other need whatever) may enter as an item to be fulfilled through artistic production.”81 He seems, like Croce, to be thinking of play in Spencer’s purely physiological terms, as an outlet for excess energy, and, while not accepting Croce’s fence between the theoretical and the practical and therefore not forced to exclude play from the production of art altogether, he clearly thinks it is a very unimportant part of the motivation to create art, and does not consider that it might be any part of the response to art. So although Reid could have used his recognition of the complexity of art as an opening to draw together the theory of play and his own synthesis of the cognitive and emotional approaches to aesthetic experience represented by his theory of expression, he did not. Like Carritt, however, Reid does attempt to overcome the dichotomy between nature and art that was characteristic of so much of idealist aesthetics from Hegel to Croce; perhaps this may be considered another aspect of his rejection of mind-body dualism. He starts the final chapter of his work, “The Enigma of Natural Beauty,” by acknowledging the obvious fact that nature is not itself a work of art, and he acknowledges that sometimes our coloration of nature by our own moods is very superficial, 80 81

Reid, Study in Aesthetics, pp. 168–9. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 186.

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“nature being little more to us than a symbol for what we most desire,” “sleep and restfulness when we are jaded, vigour and clean strength when we are cloyed with artificial living,” and the like.82 But sometimes, he argues, we may take a more “objective” attitude to nature and “apprehend natural structures imaginatively, so that they come to appear to express values in their perceived forms.”83 Since aesthetic experience is always the imaginative contemplation of objects, there is no bar to a genuinely aesthetic experience of nature. We can invest the appearance of functionality in nature with our feeling of value for what serves our own purposes even when what we are admiring in nature does not serve any purpose of our own; we can take delight that is both sensuous and aesthetic in the materials and forms of nature; and we can invest our experience of particular objects in nature with our admiration for the larger system of nature or great chain of being in which, we think, such particular objects fit: In our aesthetic experience of nature we are sensuously in contact, not with some artificially arranged expressive medium, but with a real nature which we know to be interconnected with a system which is nothing less than the whole natural cosmos. We do not, of course, necessarily think consciously of this in all our contacts with nature. But the indefinite, the (relatively) infinite, context of natural objects, is unquestionably a notable factor in our experience of nature. It is part of the basis of the “cosmic” feeling . . . and it becomes fused into the aesthetic experience.84

Expressiveness always involves the imaginative importation of our own sense of values into something, whether it is a human artifact or not, that does not literally contain our value-laden response to it; any object in nature can become the bearer of a wide range of our values, from the enjoyment of sensory qualities to our admiration of the cosmos or anything in between. An object does not need to be an artifact produced out of an experience of imaginative contemplation in order to be a proper object of such contemplation. Although Reid blurs many of the boundaries that Croce drew, he still cleaves to a conception of aesthetic experience as contemplation without conceding that the imaginative character of such contemplation may fundamentally blur any firm line between cognition and play. We will shortly turn to the aesthetics of R.G. Collingwood to see whether even

82 83 84

Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 385. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, p. 390. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, pp. 397–8.

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though he was a more orthodox Crocean than Reid in some regards, he might not have been more willing than Reid to break down the barrier between cognition and play in his understanding of aesthetic experience. But before we turn to Collingwood, let us look at the work of Samuel Alexander, who, although much older than Reid, published his chief work in aesthetics in 1933, thus five years ahead of Collingwood’s best known work in aesthetics.

3. Alexander Samuel Alexander lived from 1859 to 1938 and was thus the exact contemporary of such luminaries as Edmund Husserl and Sigmund Freud. Born in Sydney but educated at Balliol College, Oxford, when he was elected to a fellowship at Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1882, Alexander became the first Jew to be elected to a college fellowship at either Oxford or Cambridge. His first book, Moral Order and Progress (1889), was influenced by the Oxford idealism of the day, but Alexander soon moved to a more naturalistic approach to philosophy. He resigned his fellowship to work in the psychological laboratory of Hugo Münsterberg at Freiburg. He was elected to the chair of philosophy at Owens College, which became the Victoria University of Manchester, in 1893, and remained in that chair until his retirement in 1924. After his early book on moral philosophy, a short work on Locke (1908) remained his only other book until his Gifford Lectures of 1915 were published as the two-volume Space, Time, and Deity in 1920.85 After that, he published his main works in aesthetics, the Adamson lecture Art and the Material in 192586 and Beauty and Other Forms of Value in 1933.87 In Space, Time, and Deity, Alexander developed a naturalistic metaphysics according to which human mentality as we currently know it, as well as perhaps as yet unknown but very much intra- rather than 85

86

87

Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1920). A commentary is Bertram D. Brettschneider, The Philosophy of Samuel Alexander: Idealism in Space, Time, and Deity (New York: Humanities Press, 1964). Samuel Alexander, Art and the Material: The Adamson Lecture for 1925 (Manchester: University Press, 1925). Samuel Alexander, Beauty and Other Forms of Value (London: Macmillan, 1933). General works on Alexander’s philosophy are John W. McCarthy, The Naturalism of Samuel Alexander (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1948), and Michael A. Weinstein, Unity and Variety in the Philosophy of Samuel Alexander (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1984). See also Passmore, Hundred Years of Philosophy, pp. 265–78. An article on Alexander’s aesthetics is Paul Ziff, “Art and the Object of Art,” Mind 60 (1951): 466–80.

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extramundane forms of thinking and social organization that we refer to as if they were divine, are emergent properties of spatiotemporal matter, emergent in the sense that their existence is entirely dependent on matter even though they are properly described in terms that go beyond the terms of the basic sciences of matter such as physics and chemistry. Thus Alexander’s opposition to any form of idealism was fundamental, and the rejection of any rigid barrier between mind and body that Reid, for example, worked out within his study of aesthetics was the premise with which Alexander approached aesthetics. Thus Alexander begins his aesthetics with the premise that all “valuation is an act of the mind whereby we attach value to an object or regard it as valuable, and presumably in the same sense as we call an object pleasant because it gives us pleasure,”88 and thus beauty as a form of value is also attached to objects by the mind, but this does not involve crossing any metaphysical boundaries – it is rather a matter of one sort of body, namely, the sort that feels and thinks, investing its own or other bodies with value because of its own response to those bodies, just as it invests its own or other bodies with properties such as color or smell because of its own response to those bodies. Beauty may thus be considered a “tertiary quality” of bodies, a phrase that Alexander adopts from Bosanquet.89 But by this Alexander does not mean exactly the same as what Hutcheson, for example, meant by calling beauty a reflexive quality, namely, that it is constituted by our pleasure in the primary and secondary qualities of bodies (spatiotemporal form and color). He means rather that it is constituted by the importation of meaning from human life into spatiotemporal bodies or events, either those created by us in the case of artistic beauty or those selected by us in the case of natural beauty. Beauty, like mind itself, is an emergent property of matter, the emergent property that arises when feeling and thought are imported into matter. Alexander’s view thus has affinities with that of the empathy theorists. Alexander expounds this view by describing a continuum from material through craft to fine art. He begins with the assumption that art of all kinds, including fine art, constructs the work of art out of physical materials, wood or stone or pigments or words or, as in music, tones, or, it may be, bodily movements as in the dance. A poem, whatever else may be said of it, is made of words, a picture of paints, a sonata of tones. There may be beauty of imagery or of thoughts. But images are images of things, and

88 89

Alexander, Beauty, p. 7. Alexander, Beauty, pp. 179–80, 183.

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so in some more difficult sense are thoughts, when they are thoughts of physical things, physical things. The objects of the mind’s internal visions are drawn in the lines and colours of external things. . . . Art, then, is the construction of material works of art, and fine art of beautiful material or physical things.90

For Alexander, reality is physical, thought about reality is both physical and about the physical, and our importation of higher levels of feeling and meaning into the physical media of art is not grafting something alien to the physical world onto them but more like moving properties from one part of the physical world, us, onto others. The practice of some physical beings transforming others does not, of course, begin with human beings, let alone with human fine art. It begins with animals, such as birds building their nests and bees their hives. “But such animal constructiveness falls far short of fine art. It is exhausted in practice and serves practical ends,” such as storage of food or preservation of the young, “which the animal itself may be unaware of.” Conscious creation begins with human craft, which is “the next stage upwards from animal construction and differs from it in that the end is purposed and not merely attained. Accordingly all manner of thinking and devices may enter into it.”91 That is, in craft the ends of the work are conscious to the craftsperson and the techniques of the craft are consciously adopted as means to those ends. But art emerges in the practice of craft, and the craftsperson “becomes an artist in so far as he treats his materials also for themselves, and the craftsman may be and is perpetually besieged by dreams of beauty in his work.”92 “Art grows out of craft and goes beyond it,” Alexander amplifies, “when the worker handles his materials not, or not only, as a means of reaching a certain practical end but for their own sakes, and becomes contemplative instead of merely practical,”93 although in fact “the greater part of what is commonly known as fine art” remains at the level of craft, much painting and architecture, for example, remaining primarily of practical value.94 But what is to aim at beauty rather than mere practical purposiveness, to make material fit for contemplation and not merely use? “The answer is to be found in an old phrase which describes the work of art – homo additus naturae, the

90 91 92 93 94

Alexander, Beauty, pp. 15–16. Alexander, Beauty, p. 17. Alexander, Beauty, p. 17. Alexander, Beauty, p. 18. Alexander, Beauty, p. 17.

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addition of man to nature.”95 What the artist adds to material beyond the practical transformations effected by craft is meaning or significance from and for human life. The artist mixes himself with his materials. Not only does he arrange the materials in a form which they themselves, as he finds them, have not; the craftsman also does that, which is implied in mere construction. He introduces into his materials, through the form he gives them, characters, or rather the appearance of character, which in their practical use they do not possess. He gives the bronze breath and living features to the marble. . . . He does not merely interpret as we do in ordinary perception the data of sense by his past experience of things, perceiving the orange which he merely sees as fragrant and juicy fruit, and so add to things as he experiences them characters which they do actually possess in practical experience. He imputes to his materials characters which in practical experience they do not possess. . . . Now it is the admixture to the given material of meaning imported from the artist himself, and not belonging to the material itself, which detaches the materials from their mere natural use in practice and makes them objects treated for their own sakes.96

By importing meaning from the artist himself into his work, of course, Alexander does not mean that the artist always imports a personal association into his work; typically what is imported into the work is an association, a feeling or thought, that is significant for many human beings. Even when, “possessed by the excitement which is produced in him by the subject which occupies him, let us say the face of a ‘beautiful’ woman, and by the feel of the material in which he works in consequence of his excitement (for the mere touch of clay or the mere sound of a word may excite him into production) . . . the artist constructs spontaneously out of the fulness of his constructive impulse . . . [and] his materials acquire an attachment to himself which detaches them from the mere world of nature,”97 the artist is not producing something of merely personal interest. Although conceptions of human beauty may vary across cultures, they are still often widespread within cultures, and pleasure in the use of various materials may be spread even across cultures, so when the artist manages to invest a lump of clay with his sense of the beauty of a woman and with his own pleasure in working with the clay, he is transforming the clay into something that will carry meaning for many others as well. This is a central part of Alexander’s conception of beauty: Not only does he

95 96 97

Alexander, Beauty, p. 19. Alexander, Beauty, pp. 19–20. Alexander, Beauty, pp. 20–1.

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begin from the assumption that art starts with our impulse to transform the material, thus with the recognition that the transformation of matter is not secondary to or separate from the basic process of art, and thus distinguish his view from Croce’s in this way; he also explicitly rejects the Crocean idea that the artist’s communication of his vision of meaning is secondary to the proper artistic work of creating an intuition of that meaning. Alexander expresses his rejection of Croce’s diminishment of the importance to art of both materiality and communication with British understatement: “Mr. Croce . . . still urges that the artistic experience, though it is essentially expression, is purely mental, and that the actual physical embodiment of the experience is a technical matter and merely serves the purpose of communication. . . . I believe there is at least much obscurity in [this doctrine] and even in the end error.”98 Having offered one illustration of what he means by the importation of meaning into material with the example of the clay sculpture of a beautiful face, Alexander turns to what he considers a more difficult case, the case of “artistic speech” such as poetry. Artistic speech might seem to be an easier case for his analysis because speech is obviously a physical event – the creation of sound waves – that is intended to carry meaning, but it is actually a more difficult case precisely because all speech carries meaning and obviously not all speech is artistic. Alexander addresses this problem by distinguishing between speech that is “manifestly practical,” as when “To say ‘I am cold’ means in general ‘help me to get warm’”, and a poetic statement like “Dissolve frigus, ligna super fuoco/Large reponens,” “Thaw away the cold, piling generous logs upon the fire,” where “the subject is indeed practical, but the words are not practical speech; they are used lovingly as words, though they express the same practical thought as before.”99 The poetry does not just convey a desire or demand, thus is not merely practical speech directed at the realization of an end; the poetry expresses a feeling about the demand, that it would be generous to satisfy it, and a feeling that almost any human being could understand. This explication is too simple, of course: The poetry does not lead to just one further thought, but to what Alexander calls “constructive activity,” to a series of thoughts and feelings, or even “constructive passion.”100 As a naturalist, Alexander is eager to emphasize that “the statement that in art the artist mixes his mind with the materials demands explanation 98 99 100

Alexander, Beauty, p. 57. Alexander, Beauty, pp. 22–3. The lines are from Horace, Odes, Book I, 9, lines 5–6. Alexander, Beauty, p. 24.

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but it conceals no mystery, and implies no miracle. There is no literal blending of the mind with physical materials, as if such an idea could even be intelligible,” but just a transformation of physical material that is stimulated by a thought or feeling and in turn leads others through the perception of the transformed physical material to that thought or feeling. Alexander illustrates this with a nice analogy: It used to be said of a famous cricketer that he bowled or batted, I forgot which, with his head. The use of his head was exhibited in the cunning direction which he gave to the ball. In the same way, the mixing of the artist’s mind with his materials means that elements in the work of art, whether actual new material, or the form given to the material before him, are supplied at the initiative of the mind instead of that of something outside him.101

But the work of art is not just initiated by something in the artist’s mind; it also “embodies his vision,” that is, conveys what was in the artist’s mind to an audience, at least to an appropriate audience. The relation between the artist’s thought and the transformed objects, in other words, is not just causation; it is expression. As a naturalist and antiidealist, however, Alexander is also eager to make room in his theory for natural beauty. To do this he argues that the appreciation of natural beauty “is itself creation, creation in the less exacting form of selection. Nature is beautiful only if we see it with the artist’s eye, and all of us are artists in our degree in so far as we find beauty in nature.”102 The creation that Alexander has in mind can take several forms: It can mean simply the isolation of attention on something, such as pure colors or gradations of colors or lines, that may be lost in an ordinary, practical glance at our surroundings but that can offer pleasure when noticed, or it may be “the response of the landscape to a mood which selects from nature the shapes and colours that suit that mood,” in which case “it is the mute Keats or Wordsworth or the numb Turner within us which makes these scenes lovely.”103 In the case of natural beauty, the physical work of transformation is not, of course, done by a human being (Alexander does not consider the borderline case of natural beauty, the case of a landscape transformed by agriculture or a plant or animal variety transformed by selective breeding), but the “actual real things of nature the admirer moulds to suit his imagination, and makes 101 102 103

Alexander, Beauty, p. 25. Alexander, Beauty, p. 30. Alexander, Beauty, p. 33.

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of the landscape a composition.” Such a composition can be pleasing simply in virtue of the perceptual features selected but can also be a vehicle for our own thoughts and feelings, as the clay becomes when physically molded into a statue: Thus we make “the marigold go to bed with the sun and with him rise weeping.” It would be the “pathetic fallacy,” of course, to think that the marigold actually goes to bed or arises only sadly, for the marigold has no feelings and does not engage in human practices, but it is not a fallacy to let the landscape “yield to the pathetic fallacy”104 by experiencing it as if it shared our moods; that is rather the nature of aesthetic creation. Alexander amplifies his initial account of beauty by enumerating five “characters” of it, which situate his own position in the history of aesthetics. First, he states that “the beautiful as that which satisfies an impulse become contemplative is disinterested,” a “feature that has been unquestionable ever since Kant first made it plain.”105 Second, “the beautiful is in a certain sense illusory, or rather contains an element of illusion,” a term that might make one think of Schiller (Schein), but by means of which Alexander means to refer to his view that “the artist introduces into his materials . . . elements derived from his own personality and expressed in turn in the material form,”106 for example, the look or feeling of life into what would otherwise be a lifeless block of marble107 or “characters which are foreign” to words that are ordinarily of merely “practical use.”108 The second example demonstrates the intimate connection between disinterestedness and Alexander’s understanding of aesthetic illusion. Third, now relating his own view to a more contemporary antecedent, Alexander states that the “work of art has significant form” and even says that his whole account of “the part which mind plays in the beautiful may in fact be regarded as a commentary upon the conception” of Roger Fry and Clive Bell “as it presents itself to me,”109 although it should be clear that his account of significant form differs at least from that of Bell. For Bell, as we saw, significant form was simply whatever produced the aesthetic emotion, supposedly distinct from all other, ordinary emotion; for Alexander, however, significant form is whatever transformation it is that allows matter to carry anything that is meaningful for 104 105 106 107 108 109

Alexander, Beauty, p. 33. Alexander, Beauty, p. 35. Alexander, Beauty, pp. 35–6. Alexander, Beauty, p. 36. Alexander, Beauty, p. 37. Alexander, Beauty, pp. 46–7.

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human beings: “Replace the word significant by ‘meaningful,’ and the difficulties of the phrase ‘significant form’ perhaps disappear.”110 Indeed they do, but then the concept of significant form is no longer Bell’s, but the concept of expressiveness. Fourth, like Reid, Alexander now adds that “the work of art presents the character anciently ascribed to it of unity in variety,” which it must possess “because of the unity of the act of construction of the work out of its many and various elements.” Here Alexander alludes to the doctrine of G.E. Moore, stating that the act that produces the work of art gives it “an organic character”111 and suggesting that in the case of natural beauty what we select out of nature is also organic unity, but in both cases he emphasizes more the “instinct of constructiveness” in artistic creation and in the appreciation of nature, his use of the term “instinct” showing his comfort with a naturalistic approach to value rather than with Moore’s nonnaturalistic approach. Finally, Alexander accepts the common view that “the subject matter of fine art, unlike that of science, is particular or rather individual and not general or universal, concrete and not abstract, sensuous and not intellectual.”112 Here Alexander accepts a point that was central to Croce and before him to a long line of theorists going back at least to Baumgarten, but he explains the point in a way that once again emphasizes his opposition to Croce: “In reality it follows from the material character of art, and corresponds in the subject matter to the particular character of the material.”113 It is precisely the fact that thoughts that might be quite general have to be embodied in material that is always particular that makes the work of art concrete rather than abstract. So Alexander argues that all of the traditional characterizations of beauty are right, but only when understood as expressions of his own conception that beauty is essentially the expression or embodiment of meaning in a physical medium transformed by the artist or at least by the mind of the appreciator of nature. Alexander’s conception of the embodiment of meaning clearly includes the artist’s investment of emotion into objects and implies the audience’s withdrawal of that investment, that they will experience with emotion the object the artist has invested with emotion. One might think that Alexander’s emphasis on the “constructive process” of both artistic creation and aesthetic appreciation could also put his view in the camp 110 111 112 113

Alexander, Beauty, p. 47. Alexander, Beauty, p. 47. Alexander, Beauty, p. 50. Alexander, Beauty, p. 51.

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of the aesthetics of play. But in his allusion to Kant as the source of the idea of the disinterestedness of beauty (an idea that Kant of course did not himself invent), Alexander does not take the opportunity to mention play; nor in his discussion of aesthetic illusion, which as suggested could be a tacit reference to Schiller, does he mention the idea of play, which if anything Schiller emphasized even more than Kant. So although Alexander launches no attack upon the idea of the sort that we found in Croce, Carritt, and Reid, neither does he pick up on the idea of play as another way in which to express his opposition to Croce. His emphasis on the materiality of art, culminating in his use of materiality to explain the individuality rather than generality of art, carries the burden of this opposition. So Alexander opposes to Croce’s idealist form of aesthetic cognitivism chiefly an emphasis on the investment of the materials of both art and nature with meaning, especially emotional significance, without adding the aesthetic significance of play into his own account.

5 Collingwood

Let us now turn to the aesthetics of R.G. Collingwood. His chief work, The Principles of Art, appeared five years after Alexander’s book on beauty and at least begins as a riposte to it on behalf of Croce: In particular, Collingwood’s insistence upon the distinction between craft and art can be considered as a rebuttal of Alexander’s suggestion of more of a continuum from craft to art and of a large element of craft in all art. The Principles of Art also begins with a strongly cognitivist conception of art, in apparent contrast to any recognition of the importance of emotional impact in the experience of art as well as the recognition of any element of play in aesthetic creation and experience. A view of Collingwood’s work in aesthetics beyond Book I of the Principles, however, suggests a more complicated picture. Collingwood’s writings on aesthetics from the 1920s reveal a commitment to the centrality of imagination in art that may connect him to the tradition of play as well as to the cognitivist tradition in aesthetics, and the later books of the Principles make it clear not only that emotion is the central subject of aesthetic cognition but also that its actual experience is a necessary condition for its cognition. At the end of Book I, the Principles also introduces a conception of the “Total Imaginative Activity” that seems to connect Collingwood to the aesthetics of play. Further, in both Collingwood’s earlier work and the final book of the Principles work we may find a more complicated position on the relation between idea and materiality of art than Croce held and with which the Principles begins, one closer to the position of Croce’s critics than to Croce’s own. It is indeed somewhat difficult to explain why The Principles of Art begins on such a Crocean note when it ends on such an anti-Crocean one. We will see that there is some real point to Collingwood’s Crocean pose at the outset of the work, but it is also clear that Collingwood was a man who liked to swim against the stream, and we might think of him 189

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as having been forced into an exaggerated Croceanism at the start of his book by his desire to distinguish himself from his contemporaries but as having been forced back into some importantly anti-Crocean positions at the end of it by his sheer good sense. Robin George Collingwood was born in 1889, the son of William Gershom Collingwood (1854–1932) and Edith Mary Isaac (1857– 1928). His father met John Ruskin while a student at University College, Oxford, where his son would later study, and subsequently studied art with Ruskin, became his secretary, and published an important biography of him in 1893.1 He also had a variegated career as a painter (as did his wife), archaeologist, and antiquarian, becoming a prominent expert on Roman and Norse settlements in northern England, novelist, professor of fine art at the University of Reading, and finally, on the basis of his studies of Norse art, a designer of memorials after World War I. Robin was taught by his father until thirteen, like John Stuart Mill starting Latin at four and Greek at six.2 Growing up in an artistic household, he had the run of his father’s library and described how at the age of eight he tried reading a translation of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and attributed his philosophical vocation to this event: Although the “words were English” and the “sentences were grammatical,” its “meaning baffled” him, but he felt that the “contents of this work, although I could not understand it, were somehow my business: a matter personal to myself, or rather to some future self of my own.”3 At thirteen, he went to the Rugby School, where Matthew Arnold’s father had once been headmaster, although he felt he got little out of it. “Going up to Oxford,” however, “was like being let out of prison.”4 Collingwood describes much of his pleasure at Oxford as due to his liberty to read what and as much of it as he wanted. But his formal studies in philosophy and ancient literature, history, and archaeology also had a great impact on him. In philosophy his tutor was Carritt; in ancient history and archaeology, his chief influence was F.J. Haverfield, the leading student of the Roman-British settlements. Collingwood was familiar with archaeological digs from his father and spent his summers during college and for most of his life on digs in the Roman settlements in Britain. During World War I, he was spared the trenches by a position in naval intelligence in London and was the only 1 2 3 4

W.G. Collingwood, The Life of John Ruskin (London: Methuen, 1893). R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 1. Collingwood, Autobiography, p. 4. Collingwood, Autobiography, p. 12.

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one of Haverfield’s students to survive; Haverfield himself died in 1919, leaving his great collection of Roman-British inscriptions incomplete. Collingwood took it upon himself to complete that work, leading to the publication of The Roman Inscriptions of Britain;5 in addition to hundreds of articles on Romano-British archaeology, he published a short book on Roman Britain in 1923,6 and then, with J.N.L. Myres, the monumental volume on Roman Britain in The Oxford History of England.7 Collingwood’s historical and archaeological work was of the first importance in its own right, but in his Autobiography he also ascribed the development of his philosophical outlook to his experience of historical research and especially archaeological fieldwork. The Oxford philosophical scene of his college years was dominated by the “realist” reaction of John Cook Wilson, H.A. Prichard, and H.W.B. Joseph8 to the idealists of the previous generation, led by T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet. The Oxford realists, like Bertrand Russell and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge, were deeply impressed by modern logic and the Platonist philosophy that accompanied it at the hands of Gottlob Frege and conceived of the object of knowledge as a body of timeless propositions standing in relationships that could be passively apprehended and merely organized by the tool of formal logic.9 Collingwood, however, conceived of knowledge as the answer to a question, and thus as a historical process rather than a timeless body of truth: Knowledge consists in the best available answers to actual questions, but both what the questions are and what the best available answers to them are constantly changing, and thus knowledge itself is historical rather than timeless.10 Collingwood claimed that he developed this conception of knowledge in reflection on the practice of archaeology, as he realized that a trench dug without a specific question in mind yields only museum cases full of meaningless artifacts, not genuine knowledge of historical events.11 He also attributed it to his reflection on Gilbert Scott’s Alfred Memorial, which he passed every day during the war on his walk to the 5

6 7

8

9 10 11

R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright (and others), The Roman Inscriptions of Britain, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–95). R.G. Collingwood, Roman Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923). R.G. Collingwood and J.N.L. Myres, Roman Britain and the English Settlements, Oxford History of England, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). On these philosophers, see Passmore, Hundred Years of Philosophy, ch. 10, “Cook Wilson and Oxford Philosophy,” pp. 240–57. Collingwood, Autobiography, pp. 25–7. Collingwood, Autobiography, ch. V, “Question and Answer,” pp. 29–43. Collingwood, Autobiography, p. 24.

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Admiralty:12 this work was inexplicable by contemporary aesthetic standards, Collingwood thought, but that could only mean that Scott must have designed it to solve other problems than those that might be suggested by contemporary aesthetic practice and theories; so the work of a historian trying to interpret the actions of agents whom he must assume to be rational, Collingwood reflected, must always begin with determining what problems those agents were attempting to solve, which will not necessarily be identical with those of later actors, including the historian himself. Collingwood did not conceive of his position as a version of idealism, however, but rather argued that it transcended the traditional realism-idealism distinction.13 Collingwood first worked out his philosophical position based on such reflections in a manuscript entitled “Truth and Contradiction” in 1917, the central idea of which was that what seem to be contradictions to formal logicians are often not when the historical context of the supposedly contradictory propositions is taken into account, but this work was not accepted for publication under wartime conditions, and Collingwood did not publish it later.14 However, he did work out his position later in a series of works including An Essay on Philosophical Method published in 1933,15 the Autobiography of 1939, An Essay on Metaphysics of 1940,16 and the posthumous Idea of History published in 1946.17 (Collingwood’s health deteriorated after adult-onset chicken pox in 1931 and the first of a series of strokes in 1938, and he was not quite fifty-four when he died in January 1943). Collingwood’s works also included the translation of two of the works of Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico,18 published in 1913 when Collingwood was only twenty-four years old, and Croce’s Autobiography,19 in 1927. Collingwood is often seen as a 12 13

14 15 16

17

18

19

Collingwood, Autobiography, p. 29. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, ed. James Donnelly and Giuseppina D’Oro, new edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), correspondence with Gilbert Ryle, 9 May 1935, p. 256. Collingwood, Autobiography, pp. 42–3. Cited in the previous paragraph. R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), revised edition with additional material edited by Rex Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), ed. Jan van der Dussen, revised edition with Lectures 1926–8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R.G. Collingwood, with a new introduction by Alan Sica (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2002). Benedetto Croce, An Autobiography, trans. R.G. Collingwood, with an introduction by J.A. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927).

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disciple of Croce, but as already suggested, he ultimately argues for some profoundly anti-Crocean positions. Perhaps his youthful enthusiasm for Croce was also part of what prevented him from fully seeing or admitting this later on.20 Collingwood does not discuss his aesthetics at any length in his Autobiography, mentioning only that since he had just published The Principles of Art the previous year,21 the reader can “find out all he needs” about “the motives which led me to work at the philosophy of art, the process of training by which I qualified myself for that work, or the way in which my thoughts about it progressed during long years.”22 Since Collingwood says nothing more about The Principles of Art in the Autobiography, one challenge for the interpreter of Collingwood’s aesthetics is to explain how it fits into the conception of philosophy developed in Collingwood’s other main works of the 1930s. But another challenge arises from the fact that Collingwood had in fact published extensively on aesthetics during the preceding decade, first with a chapter on art in his first major philosophical work, Speculum Mentis: Or The Map of Knowledge

20

21 22

For Collingwood’s life, in addition to his own marvelous autobiography, see Fred Inglis, History Man: The Life of R.G. Collingwood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Literature on Collingwood includes Alan Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Louis O. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969); Lionel Rubinoff, Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970); W.J. Van der Dussen, History as a Science: The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981); David Boucher, The Social and Political Thought of R.G. Collingwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); William H. Dray, History as Re-Enactment: R.G. Collingwood’s Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Peter Johnson, R.G. Collingwood: An Introduction (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999); Giuseppina D’Oro, Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience (London: Routledge, 2002); and the collection edited by Michael Krausz, Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) (with articles on Collingwood’s aesthetics by Peter Jones and Richard Wollheim). See also Passmore, Hundred Years of Philosophy, pp. 302–8. On Collingwood’s aesthetics, see also Aaron Ridley, Collingwood (London: Routledge, 1997) and “Not Ideal: Collingwood’s Expression Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (1997): 263–72; T.J. Diffey, “Some Thoughts on the Relationship between Gadamer and Collingwood,” Philosophical Inquiry: International Quarterly 20 (1998): 1–12; Gary Kemp, “The Croce-Collingwood Theory as Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61 (2003): 171–93; Graham, “Expressivism: Croce and Collingwood,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, pp. 133–46; Raters, Kunst, Wahrheit und Gefühl, pp. 421– 50 and 511–68, dividing her discussion between early and late Collingwood; and David Davies, “Collingwood’s ‘Performance’ Theory of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (2008): 162–74. R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938). Collingwood, Autobiography, p. 118n.

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of 1924,23 and then with the more extensive Outlines of a Philosophy of Art in 1925.24 Collingwood says that The Principles of Art was written to replace the earlier Outlines when that went out of print,25 but the relation between Collingwood’s conception of art in the two works is not always apparent, and so another challenge for the interpreter of Collingwood’s aesthetics is to determine how its two presentations, that of 1924–5 and that of 1938, are related. The present discussion of Collingwood’s aesthetics will thus seek to determine how its two phases are related and how it is related to his general philosophy as well as to explain its place in the larger history of twentieth-century aesthetics.

1. Collingwood’s Early Aesthetics The challenge to understanding the relation of the two phases of Collingwood’s aesthetics to each other as well as to determining his place in the history of modern aesthetics arises from the fact that his early work begins by emphasizing that art is “pure imagination.”26 Everything that Collingwood has to say about art in Speculum Mentis and the Outlines of a Philosophy of Art depends on this claim, but it might seem to contradict both Collingwood’s underlying assumption in Speculum Mentis : Or The Map of Knowledge, after all – that each of the “provinces of art, religion, science, history, and philosophy” is not only “a concrete form of experience, an activity of the whole self in which every faculty, if it is permissible to distinguish between faculties, is engaged,” but also “in some sense a kind of knowledge, an activity of the cognitive mind,”27 as well as the emphasis on aesthetic experience as cognition in his later work. The two remarks from Speculum Mentis naturally raise two questions. First, how can art be both an activity of the cognitive mind and yet pure imagination? But more generally, how can an activity of the cognitive mind also be an activity of the whole self in which every faculty is engaged? The answers to these questions will turn out to be connected. The answer to the more general question lies in the opening comment of Speculum Mentis, “All thought exists for the sake of action. We try to 23

24

25 26 27

R.G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis: Or, The Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). R.G. Collingwood, Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), reprinted (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994). Collingwood, Principles of Art, p. v. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 61; Outlines, p. 11. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 39.

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understand ourselves and our world in order that we may learn how to live.”28 Collingwood always tried to distinguish his position from that of the pragmatists, whom he understood as maintaining that practical needs determine what is true and false, a view that he rejected;29 his own view is rather that our practical needs determine what questions we ask, but not what the right answers to those questions are, which will rather be determined by the whole panoply of our methods of inquiry. And this then leads to Collingwood’s resolution of the paradox of the cognitive yet imaginative character of art: Cognition not only leads to action but is also itself an activity or process, and one that must begin with imagination in order to formulate the questions that it then attempts to answer, and art is the first stage or primordial form of asking questions. This in turn shows why it is misleading to classify Collingwood as a Hegelian, as is usually done: He does not think that art is a primitive stage of thought that can be once and for all superseded by religion and philosophy; he rather thinks that art is always the medium for the early stage of any intellectual and practical development, never the same but never superseded. As he puts it, “Art is the primary and fundamental activity of the mind, the original soil out of which all other activities grow. It is not a primitive form of religion or science or philosophy, it is something more primitive than these, something that underlies them and makes them possible.”30 The plausibility of such a claim depends upon a compelling account of the imagination as both the essence of art and the origin of all knowledge. As is often the case with accounts of the imagination, however, Collingwood largely attempts to say what it is by saying what it is not. This is especially true in Speculum Mentis. Here Collingwood begins his discussion of art with the same sort of bold statement just quoted from the Outlines, stating that “art is the foundation, the soil, the womb and night of the spirit; all experience issues forth from it and rests upon it; all education begins with it; all religion, all science, are as it were specialized and peculiar modifications of it,”31 and then immediately turns to a negative characterization of the imaginative character of art. “The waking life of the soul is the distinction of truth and falsehood, the assertion of this as real and that as unreal,” Collingwood says, but “art is the sleep of the soul”: What is distinctive about it is precisely that “the aesthetic 28 29 30 31

Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 15. Collingwood, Autobiography, p. 36. Collingwood, Outlines, p. 14. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 59.

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experience cares nothing for the reality or unreality of its object. It is neither true or false of set purpose: it simply ignores the distinction. . . . Its apparent assertions are not real assertions but the very suspension of assertion.” “This non-assertive, non-logical attitude is imagination in the proper sense of the word.”32 Imagination deals with possibilities; other forms of cognitive activity then determine whether they are actual. But of course the determination of actuality begins with the consideration of possibility, so knowledge begins with imagination, and since action in turn begins with knowledge, action too begins with imagination. It is in this sense that imagination and thus art is the foundation, the soil, and the sleep of the spirit, that from which the spirit awakes as it seeks to turn imagination into knowledge. But it is not the artist who seeks to transform imagination into knowledge, or insofar as a person does so, he is no longer functioning as an artist but as a scientist or philosopher: “The artist’s world is not a world of facts or laws, it is a world of imaginations. He is all made of fantasy, and the world in which he is interested is a world made of the stuff of dreams.”33 Collingwood amplifies this negative characterization of imagination in the Outlines only by expanding on the connection between imagination and beauty that he briefly expounds in Speculum Mentis. In the earlier work, revealing that in many ways his position is more Kantian than Hegelian, he distinguishes art from science by saying that art does not aim for concepts but for beauty, which is “not a concept” but “the guise under which concepts in general appear to the aesthetic consciousness. Beauty means structure, organization, seen from the aesthetic point of view,” but in turn all that this means is that it is “imagined and not conceived” – “Beauty cannot be truly defined except as the correlative of imagination.”34 In the Outlines, Collingwood is somewhat more informative, using a traditional characterization in telling us that “beauty is the unity or coherence of the imaginative object: ugliness its lack of unity, its incoherence.” Collingwood does not claim originality for this idea; rather he claims specificity, although the specification that he initially offers does not seem to explicate the connection between beauty and imagination that he has already asserted: This is no new doctrine; it is generally recognized that beauty is harmony, unity in diversity, symmetry, congruity, or the like. But such phrases are only 32 33 34

Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 60. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 63. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 66.

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generic, not specific; for truth also, and utility, and goodness, may all be described in the same kind of language. That which distinguishes beauty from these is that it is not any unity, but an imaginative unity. This is a specific unity whose source is the unity of the act of imagination.35

Here we seem to be trapped in a very tight circle: Imagination is what produces beauty, but beauty is simply the unity produced by imagination. As he continues, however, Collingwood expands this circle at least a bit by suggesting that imagination produces its distinctive unity and thus beauty by following its own laws rather than laws of nature or society that are external to it. We may or may not imagine our hero as dying on the last page; but if we do, we must not imagine anything inconsistent with this. We must “imagine out” his death in all its implications; we must imagine him in a world where a death of this particular kind is possible; we must imagine that his life is such as to expose him to this death. Thus the whole story will be selfcoherent; it will be a unity in diversity, a harmony of its various parts. The mere act of imagination, by being itself, by being this act and not a different act, generates in its object that unity which is beauty. But it is clearly possible to imagine different and incompatible things and to waver between one act of imagination and another, to fail to make up one’s mind whether one is imagining one version of a story or a different version; and in that case the story falls to pieces, loses its unity, becomes confused and ugly.36

Collingwood’s idea is that the coherence of beauty is that of a possibility, the internal coherence of the parts of a complex representation, potentially the representation of an entire world, not the coherence between a representation and a world external to it that is the foundation of actuality; so the imagination that produces beauty is an imagination that is not simply indifferent to assertion, but is indifferent to the specific question of whether what it constructs corresponds to what is external to it. The investigation of that must be left to other cognitive activities. In the Outlines, Collingwood adds one element to his conception of imaginative coherence that points toward but is not identical with his mature view. This is that “beauty is an emotional colouring which transfuses the entire experience of the imagined object.”37 Collingwood approaches this point by considering the view that pleasure is the essence of the experience of beauty and thus the aim of art. He rejects this position on the ground that “every activity is at once pleasant and painful: 35 36 37

Collingwood, Outlines, p. 21. Collingwood, Outlines, pp. 21–2. Collingwood, Outlines, p. 27.

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pleasant in so far as it succeeds in being or doing what it is trying to be or do, painful in so far as it fails”;38 thus the connection to pleasure is not unique to aesthetic experience; nor is aesthetic experience exclusively pleasant. Nevertheless, Collingwood holds that “hedonism, while no doubt just as unsatisfactory in the philosophy of art as in logic or ethics, is a great deal more plausible here than elsewhere” because emotion, though not unmitigated pleasure but a mixture of pleasure and pain, does not seem to be a detached consequence of the experience of beauty but seems inseparable from it: As he says, it transfuses the entire experience of the object. Thus he writes: In a previous section beauty has been defined as imaginative coherence. This coherence is qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, distinct from the coherence of an object of thought. Quantitatively, the coherence of imagination is the coherence of the object with itself, whereas the coherence of thought is not merely this but also a further coherence of the object with other objects as part of a larger whole. But there is also a qualitative distinction. The coherence of the object of thought is apprehended intellectually or discursively as a system of relations between parts each of which can be thought of separately; the coherence of the object of imagination is intuitively felt as an incandescence, so to speak, of the whole. It is only under analysis that this incandescence or emotional colouring is found to consist in an immediate or intuitive awareness of relations between the parts of the object. What is felt as a peculiar thrill, indescribable but easily recognizable, at the point in the Waldstein Sonata which a small boy used to call the “moonrise,” turns out on analysis to be the contrast between the key of E major and that of C in which the sonata began; the thrill is the fusion of these two keys into a single indivisible experience in which each acquires its significance from the simultaneous awareness of the other. . . . The imaginative activity is therefore one in which the relation between theoretical, practical, and emotional elements is peculiarly close. . . . Beauty is present to the mind simply in the form of emotion. This emotion is bipolar, it is not merely pleasant, but pleasant and painful. This pain is caused not only by the spectacle of bad art, but equally, though in a different way, by all acute awareness of beauty . . . from fear of too great beauty.39

This remarkable passage makes a number of points. Collingwood’s assertion that “the imaginative activity is . . . one in which the relation between theoretical, practical, and emotional elements is peculiarly close” suggests a comprehensive approach to aesthetics, combining the cognitive and emotional significance of art with or into the idea of imaginative activity. It also suggests three more specific points. First, it amplifies 38 39

Collingwood, Outlines, p. 26. Collingwood, Outlines, pp. 27–9.

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Collingwood’s underlying conception of imagination as concerned only with the internal coherence of its created object rather than with the external coherence of its object with the rest of the real world; this is what Collingwood also calls the “monadism of art.”40 Second, it emphasizes the emotional rather than purely intellectual character of aesthetic experience, that in ordinary listening to an exemplary piece of music, for example, one does not think about the transition from one key to another but rather experiences that transition emotionally, with a thrill. Third, Collingwood makes the unusual claim that the emotional experience of beauty is never simply pleasurable, but also includes an element of pain, although an unexplained pain at the thought that beauty can be too great. However, the last two points raise as many questions as they answer. The second point might suggest that, like Clive Bell, Collingwood thinks that there is a single, distinctive aesthetic emotion triggered by any beautiful object, rather than that art triggers the full range of human emotions; at least he does not explicitly say that the thrill of the not explicitly so conceived transition from E major to C is different from the thrill of the transition between two other keys or between two different colors in a passage of painting or two moods in a passage of lyric poetry, although perhaps his association of this thrill with the image of “moonrise” is meant to suggest that there is something distinctive about it, different, for example, from the thrill that might be associated with the image of “sunrise.” And the third point might make greater sense if what Collingwood has in mind is that specific beauties have specific emotional colorations rather than a generic one: It is not clear why anyone should fear too much beauty in general, unless the thought is simply that any experience of great beauty is inevitably tinged with pain at the thought that either such beauty or the experience of it cannot last forever, but if the idea is that every experience of beauty has a specific emotional coloration, and that there is always a danger of being overwhelmed by any particular emotion, then Collingwood’s claim might make sense. If Collingwood were actually thinking along the latter lines in the present passage, then his later philosophy of art can be seen as extending and clarifying this thought. For there his argument, clearly distinguished from Clive Bell’s, will be that art is engaged in the clarification of particular emotions, that the creation and experience of art always involve a passage from the emotion that is disturbing precisely because it is vague or 40

Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, pp. 68–73; Outlines, pp. 23–6.

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obscure to an illumination of emotion that is liberating precisely because it clarifies the emotion as the specific emotion that it is. This account could also explain why the experience of beauty must always involve an element of pain as well as pleasure, because the pleasure of clarity would follow the pain associated with unclarity. But in the work of the 1920s, the precise meaning of Collingwood’s conception of beauty as emotional coloration and of its mixed character is certainly not clear. Nor is this the only problem with Collingwood’s early account of imagination. One further problem is that while the account of coherence as consistency may seem plausible for some, narrative arts, such as storytelling, it is not immediately apparent how it would apply to nonnarrative arts, such as music without words or program or nonhistorical or even nonrepresentational painting. Another problem is that it is not clear that even in the case of narrative arts the boundary between the laws of imagination and the laws of the actual world is as clear as Collingwood makes it appear here: Must we not rely upon our knowledge of how things work in the actual world in order to tell whether, for example, a certain kind of death is consistent with a certain kind of life in an imagined, possible world? But let us set aside such questions for the moment and see what inferences Collingwood himself draws from his characterization of art as pure imagination and beauty as the coherence of imagination. The first of these inferences is Collingwood’s famous position that “every work of art is really just so far as it is imagined and no further,” that “whether the work of art has or has not an existence independent of the apprehension of it is a question which has, for the aesthetic consciousness, no meaning whatever.”41 This is Collingwood’s version of a position with which we are already familiar from Croce, of course, but it is noteworthy that Collingwood derives this position from the claim that art is pure imagination, not from a predetermined and rigid boundary between the theoretical and the practical; thus this is a position influenced by Collingwood’s teacher Carritt rather than directly by Croce himself. Collingwood expounds his position in Speculum Mentis. He begins with the claim that “if art is pure imagination, it is not therefore a purely immediate, instinctive and undifferentiated activity such as would be implied by placing its essence in feeling, emotion, or sensation. Art is concrete activity: feeling and sensation are abstract elements which can be distinguished within any concrete activity but cannot form the 41

Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, pp. 64–5.

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whole or essence of any.”42 Collingwood’s term “concrete activity” might suggest that he means that artistic activity is necessarily physical, working in a physical medium to produce a physical object or event, but that is not what he means. What he means rather is that the activity of the imagination, whether in the creation of art or in its appreciation, involves feeling, emotion, and sensation without separation, but the activity is mental rather than physical. “The aesthetic experience is thus, in its concrete actuality, the creation or apprehension of works of art,” but “whether the work of art has or has not an existence independent of the apprehension of it is a question which has, for the aesthetic consciousness, no meaning whatever.” Collingwood continues: From the point of view of that consciousness, every work of art is real just so far as it is imagined and no further. Now this process of imagining a whole, or creating a work of art, is, as we have seen, no mere rudderless drifting of images across the mind; it is a process of unification in which the mind strives to see the world as a whole, the “world” being just the work of art which for the time being absorbs the whole gaze of the mind. The various feelings, emotions, sensations, or by whatever other name we call the subsidiary imaginations, are modified and adapted so as to fall into such an imaginable totality, a single coherent imaginary whole in constructing which we tentatively imagine subsidiary parts and either fit them in or reject them. . . . The whole is not first held in the mind as a whole and then filled out in detail; for it were ever held in the mind (that is, imagined as a whole), the work would already be complete; the whole comes into imaginary existence only in the critical process of experimenting with its parts.43

Here Collingwood subtly distorts our ordinary understanding of the idea of the work of art: We ordinarily take that to mean the physical object produced by artistic activity, and thus think of that activity as a prelude to that object and as arriving at a terminus in it, but for Collingwood the term “work” implies activity or process, and therefore precisely not an object that is the terminus of such a process, but the process itself. Even with this assumption, however, he could still hold that the activity is essentially one of working on or interacting with physical material and just hold the unusual position that the physical object usually identified as the work of art is just a by-product of this both mental and physical activity. But he takes the even stronger position that the imaginative activity of aesthetic creation and appreciation is essentially mental, and that any physical activity on the part of the artist is only an aid 42 43

Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 63. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 65.

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to his mental process of imagination, and the product of that physical activity all the more a mere by-product of the essential artistic activity. Thus Collingwood continues: The concrete life of art is the creation of works of art. But this creation is altogether the act of imagination. The paper and ink, the paints and the clay that we handle are not its materials, and the written page and the painted picture are not its result. An artist paints with one motive only: that he may help himself to see, and to see in the sense of to imagine. His picture, when it is painted, has done that, and he is not further interested in it. Art lives not on canvases but in the fancy; and only those who are strangers to its inner life can suppose that it has any special connexion to the objects stored in galleries and bookshelves.44

The physical objects produced by artistic activity are of significance at most as crutches for those with limited imagination, who could not engage in artistic work on their own, but who may derive some pallid sense of it from the accidental by-products of genuine artistic work. “Thus the work of art in the false sense, the perceptible painting or writing, is valued not at all by its author, but highly by the aesthetic weakling, because it helps him to aesthetic activities which he could not have achieved alone.”45 In all of this Collingwood seems to have broken down the distinction between emotion and cognition in aesthetic experience, but only at the cost of driving Croce’s wedge between the essential mental existence of the work of art and its inessential physical embodiment. Indeed, Croce’s way of deriving the purely mental status of the work of art from his distinction between the theoretical and the practical spheres, thus between the activity of artistic thought and the physical techniques of artistic production, did not require quite such a sneer at those aesthetic weaklings who need the physical by-product of the artist’s imaginative work to stimulate their own, weaker imaginations, and we will see that Collingwood’s later way of deriving the position from the distinction between art and craft, closer to Croce’s argument although grounded in an appeal to commonsense distinctions rather than to a philosophical system, does not require it either. We will also see that Collingwood’s initially stark statement of the Crocean view in The Principles of Art seems to be modified over the course of that work. But even within his treatment of art in Speculum Mentis his initial insistence that the work of art is strictly mental and internal to the artist seems to be modified as he continues. 44 45

Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 67. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 67.

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One modification occurrs in the section entitled “The Dialectic of Art.” This section is actually an attack upon Croce’s identification of intuition and expression. This attack may rest upon a misunderstanding of Croce, for Collingwood interprets intuition to be something like “a mere chaotic riot of fantasies in which every image, by its mere transitoriness, would be wholly indeterminate, incapable of being called an image at all,”46 and as we can predict from Collingwood’s account of art as pure imagination, art and thus artistic expression emerge only from the gradual transformation of such an immediate chaos into something coherent, which takes thought as well as intuition. Intuition and thought are inseparable, being only the immediacy (actuality, positiveness) and mediation (reflection upon itself) of all experience. Now experience as such is not partly intuitive and partly conceptual, it is all intuitive and all conceptual. But the life of art is a life which falsely conceives itself to be merely intuitive. Now this very life must in reality be conceptual as well.47

The first dialectical aspect of art that Collingwood has in mind is thus that art involves the transformation of mere intuition by conceptualization, although since art is not identical to science this never results in the mere replacement of intuition by concept and intuition is never merely left behind – both elements must continue to exist in creative tension. But Collingwood further argues that there is also a dialectical relation between form and matter in art, that the latter is transformed by the former but never merely transformed into it, that on the contrary artistic forms remains embedded in matter: In the true life of art, then, the presence of structure is explicit, and a deliberate effort is made to be systematic. But this structure is still wholly intuitive, wholly embedded in the work itself, and incapable of being abstracted from its material and set over against it as “meaning” distinguished from the “words.” Art lives, as art, by keeping the meaning and the words together in an immediate unity.48

Presumably the point is meant to be general, “words” being only one instance of the more general realm of physical media such as paint and canvas, stone and clay, the sounds produced by instruments that realize the mathematical structures of music, and so on, and the claim is then that art consists neither in mere thought nor mere matter but in the 46 47 48

Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, pp. 91–2. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 95. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 96.

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ideas of the imagination embedded in one kind of matter or another. Without imagination, Collingwood argues, “words would lose their unique or poetic significance” and become mere prose, “the life with which art vibrates would vanish, and the whole would become a dead mechanism,” but likewise without the matter, mere imagination would also not become living art. Collingwood states his point even more broadly by saying that “all art maintains itself in existence by staving off this separation of body and soul”;49 in spite of his initial separation of imagination from the external world, Collingwood, like both Reid and Alexander, was not in the end a metaphysical idealist but rather believed that mind and body are two levels of description of a single, unified reality,50 and this carries over to the activity of the imagination as well – it has a mental but also a physical aspect. Thus he describes the dialectic of art not only as one between intuition and concept but also as one between form and physical matter, even writing as if the latter followed from the former: The concrete life of art is thus explicitly both imaginative and conceptual, and has thus overcome the one-sidedness of pure imagination. And because this is so, because the work of art is constructed on a framework of thought, art is not the withdrawal of the soul into a purely imaginative fairyland but is concrete fact. Hence the necessity for physical works of art and for the recognition by the artist of real minds other than his own – including among these his own future and past mind – with which he desires to communicate, teaching them and learning from them. If art were pure intuition there could be no society of artists, no communication, no physical works of art.51

Here the creation of physical objects does not seem to be a mere byproduct of an essentially mental process; nor does the communication of ideas from the artist to others seem to be a concession to aesthetic weaklings. Rather, communication with others, certainly with other artists but perhaps with ordinary audiences as well (this will also become explicit in the last part of The Principles of Art), is an essential part of artistic creation, and the use of physical media an essential tool for communication as well as an essential part of imaginative activity as well. 49 50

51

Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 97. This seems to be the underlying message of Collingwood’s argument in An Essay on Philosophical Method that philosophical concepts do not describe mutually exclusive extensions (like reptiles and mammals or protons and electrons) but “overlapping concepts” on “scales of forms” (chs. II–III). The ultimate example of overlapping concepts of a single kind of entity that can be understood in both lower and higher forms is body and mind. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, pp. 98–9.

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The second modification to the initial appearance of Collingwood’s acceptance of Croce’s strict distinction between the genuine internal work of art and its inessential external realization as part of his general distinction between the theoretical and practical is in Collingwood’s explicit defense in his early aesthetics of the intimate connection between art and play. The key to his connection of art with play is his assertion that “the distinction of will and intellect” is itself “a merely abstract or ideal distinction” that “does not become explicit till we reach the level of scientific thought,” so that “art and play can only be distinguished from a scientific, and not from an aesthetic, point of view,”52 that is to say, not experientially. In the course of his discussion of play, which receives a full subsection in Speculum Mentis although only a briefer mention as part of the section “Art and the Life of the Spirit” in the Outlines, Collingwood defends Schiller’s identification of art with play (but makes no mention of Kant) and rejects the Spencerian view that play is a mere discharge of excess energy, thus distancing himself from the attack on the play theory by Croce and his more orthodox disciples such as Carritt. Collingwood begins the discussion of art and play in Speculum Mentis with the assertion that “as thought, in its most rudimentary form, is art, so action in its most rudimentary form is play. The aesthetic consciousness,” he continues, “frames to itself an object which is not asserted but only imagined; that is to say, the distinction between truth and falsehood does not matter to it. . . . But this is the very definition of play; which is that form of action in which the will is untroubled by any question as to right and wrong, expedient or inexpedient, and chooses an end which is an end only because it is thus irresponsibly chosen.”53 From a variety of theoretical points of view, the “autonomy of the aesthetic spirit” and the autonomy of play are illusory, because both can be shown to have beneficial consequences, as “the games of young animals and of children anticipate the serious work of life and train them unawares to meet the problems which will face them later.” But such explanations, even if true, are not any part of the experience of these phenomena and thus should not become any part of the philosophical account of them: “All such explanations of play are in part mythological and forced, because they ascribe to it motives which the player, by his very character as a player, does not feel. From its own point of view play is motiveless, 52 53

Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 103. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 102.

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immediate, intuitive; what motive it has is implicit only.”54 As this passage makes clear, part of Collingwood’s difference from Croce arises from the fact that his account of the aesthetic is constrained by phenomenology rather than driven by metaphysical distinctions. And it is at this point in the argument that Collingwood makes his claim that the distinction between intellect and will is itself a theoretical abstraction, so that art and play are not just analogous, but from within their own point of views there is no distinction between them. “Thus, from the child’s point of view, all playing is playing ‘at’ something – playing at robbers, at bears, and so forth – which is imaginative or dramatic personification; and thus the famous identification of art with play, which has so scandalized scientific theorists, is due not to a philosopher but to an artist, Schiller.”55 Collingwood’s assumption here is that the point of view of the artist is actually the right point of view from which to generate aesthetic theory, not the point of view of the “philosopher,” which in this context means the point of view of theoretical distinctions that have no experiential basis or import. Perhaps to make this point clearer, Collingwood goes even further in the Outlines, stating that “play is the practical aspect of art, art the theoretical aspect of play”:56 Art and play are not just analogous but are really the same thing, although from the theoretical point of view the more practical and the more theoretical side of this essentially unitary activity can be distinguished. Collingwood develops his defense of Schiller and rejection of the Crocean critique of play theory in two paragraphs in Speculum Mentis that need to be quoted at length: Schiller’s identification has often been rejected because art is a high and serious thing and play a childish and trivial; or because art is a thing of the spirit and play a thing of the body, its source the mere exuberance of physical energy, its aim merely physical pleasure. But these antitheses are totally false. Serious art is serious and trivial art is trivial; children’s games are for children and men’s games are for men. But as children are naturally and instinctively artists, so they naturally and instinctively play; and as art for grown men is something recaptured, a primitive attitude indulged in moments of withdrawal from the life of fact, so play is for grown men something to be done as a legitimate and refreshing escape from “work.” Yet the distinction of play from work does not consist in its being less hard; children work astonishingly hard at their games, which do not on that account cease to be games; and many a man works harder on the football field or on 54 55 56

Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 103. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 103. Collingwood, Outlines, p. 89.

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the north face of Scapell than he ever worked in his office. The refreshment and relaxation of play are purely spiritual; they result from the fact that play is capricious, that in it we choose our end for no conscious reason whatever. Hence it is a complete mistake to suppose that play is the overflow of mere physical energy and aimed at mere physical pleasure. . . . The prejudice against play on this double head is therefore groundless. What may legitimately be said in depreciation of all play is precisely what may be said against art as such: namely that it is a primitive, innocent and childlike attitude; one which has not faced the problems of life and seems to transcend them only by evading them. Yet for this very reason play, like art, gives one a foretaste, as it were, of that condition in which the mind will be when it has faced its problems and conquered them.57

The only misleading note in this passage is the suggestion that both play and art are “purely spiritual”; what Collingwood is actually arguing is that neither play nor art is a mere release of physical energy, insignificant from any serious intellectual point of view, but rather that play and presumably also art achieve their spiritual goals of refreshment and relaxation through their use of bodily energy without the conscious intention of solving any specific practical problem; thus the rejection of a rigid division between mind and body is essential to Collingwood’s defense of both play and art and of the identification of the two. Collingwood’s argument also implies a rejection of a rigid distinction between childhood and adulthood, thus between both the play and the art of childhood and adulthood. Neither in childhood nor in adulthood need either play or art be childish, but either may at either stage of life be an engagement of both mental and physical powers that is entirely appropriate and even necessary for human well-being and development. Collingwood’s rejection of a dichotomy between the art as well as play of childhood and adulthood, unmistakably reminiscent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s statement a century earlier that it is “the character and privilege of genius” to “carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar,”58 is also a premise for his anti-Hegelian argument that art is not just a primitive stage of the development of the spirit, to be superseded by more advanced forms of cognition such as religion and philosophy, but an activity that can be possible and appropriate throughout individual and collective life. 57 58

Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, pp. 103–5. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. IV, ed. Shawcross, vol. I, p. 59.

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To be sure, “all play, even the most splendid, is only play,” and “beyond and above it stands the world of utility, and above that again the world of duty”;59 that is, to say that play and art always can be appropriate activities for either children or adults does not mean that they always are appropriate. There are plenty of situations in which either prudential or moral demands, or for that matter, we might also suppose, the demands of scientific or theoretical inquiry, can render indulgence in play or art untimely and inappropriate. Anyone who lived through any part of the twentieth century knew that. But this does not mean that there is one stage in either individual or collective life when play and art are appropriate, after which only economic, moral, and scientific activity are appropriate; human life is too complicated for that. Even more, in Collingwood’s view, play and art are always a stage in human progress: Whether we think in terms of the development of practical powers or of intellectual insight, play and art are where questions we cannot even quite yet formulate are probed, answers we do not yet realize are answers to questions we have not yet explicitly formulated are tried out, and powers we do not yet quite know we need are developed. As Collingwood concludes his defense of the identification of art and play and his discussion of art altogether in Speculum Mentis, The true defence of play is the same as the defence of art. Art is the cutting edge of the mind, the perpetual outreaching of thought into the unknown, the act in which thought externally sets itself a fresh problem. So play, which is identical with art, is the attitude which looks at the world as an infinite and indeterminate field for activity, a perpetual adventure. All life is an adventure, and the spirit of adventure, wherever it is found, can never be out of place. It is true that life is much more than this; it is never, even its most irresponsible moments, a mere adventure; but this it is; and therefore the spirit of play, the spirit of eternal youth, is the foundation and beginning of all real life.60

At the conscious and intentional level, neither play nor art is undertaken to develop capacities that will be necessary for other endeavors, let alone to formulate specific questions and answers, but in general solving both theoretical and practical problems requires a spirit of adventure, and play and art certainly develop the spirit of adventure. Thus, while both play and art are engaged in for sheer joy not dependent on the realization of

59 60

Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, pp. 106–7. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 107.

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any goal outside themselves, the sense of adventure they require is also necessary for the realization of every goal outside themselves. In his works of the 1920s, then, Collingwood began with what seemed to be an appropriation of Croce’s purely internalist account of aesthetic intuition, but then transformed it into a celebration of imaginative play that seems to break down all of the dichotomies essential to Croce’s thought. Collingwood developed a comprehensive account of imagination as involved in all of our theoretical and practical activities and as having a specifically emotional dimension. He did not clearly argue that aesthetic experience involves the full range of human emotions, but he provided the fullest defense of the importance of understanding aesthetic experience as a form of play that we have thus far seen in twentieth-century British aesthetics, and in this regard he explicitly rejected Croce’s position. Thus Collingwood seemed to be well on the way to a comprehensive approach to aesthetic experience. Yet Collingwood’s best-known work in aesthetics, The Principles of Art, published a decade after the work we have just been discussing (1938), seems to restore the Crocean dichotomies, to step back from the defense of the Schillerian identification of art with play, and to return to a strictly cognitive account of art. In the end, the Principles too radically revises the Croceanism with which it begins. The puzzle is why Collingwood had to go through the same struggle with Croce twice.

2. Collingwood’s Later Aesthetics As in his earlier work, in The Principles of Art Collingwood stresses that art is the product of imagination. But he seems to give a more purely cognitive account of the imagination than before and thus to give a more purely cognitive account of art and aesthetic experience, treating art not as a form of play that precedes more determinate theoretical and practical activity – in fact, there is only one, although not a disapproving allusion to the theory of art as play in The Principles of Art 61 – but rather as a specific form of knowledge: “Art is knowledge; knowledge of the individual,” he writes,62 and specifically knowledge of the individual self that is the artist, even more specifically knowledge of the particular emotions of the artist. In saying this, Collingwood seems to draw back from his earlier 61 62

Collingwood, Principles, p. 80. Collingwood, Principles, p. 289.

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claim that art as imaginative has nothing to do with truth or falsehood and to argue instead that art has everything to do with truth, although with truth about how the artist feels rather than any other sort of truth, for example, truth about the source of the artist’s feeling, whether due more to conditions or processes within himself or external to himself and in the “world”: Art is not indifferent to truth; it is essentially the pursuit of truth. But the truth it pursues is not a truth of relation, it is a truth of individual fact. The truths art discovers are those single and self-contained individualities which from the intellectual point of view become the “terms” between which it is the business of intellect to establish or apprehend relations. Each of these individualities, as art discovers it, is a perfectly concrete individual, one from which nothing has yet been abstracted by the work of intellect. Each is an experience in which the distinction between what is due to myself and what is due to my world has not yet been made. If that experience consists in admiring a lady, I do not as a poet ask whether this happens because in herself she is somehow different from other ladies or because I am for some reason in an admiring mood.63

The task of art, in this case in the form of poetry, is to individualize what it is, for example, to admire a lady, indeed what it is for this man to admire this lady, but not to delve into the causes of why this man admires this lady. To explain such a feeling is the work of theoretical abstraction; capturing such a feeling and bringing it to expression is the work of imagination. But it is still a form of cognition, certainly, rather than a form of precognitive play. Indeed, given Collingwood’s emphasis in his Autobiography of the next year that all cognition takes the form of an answer to a specific question that the inquirer must pose, his view of art in The Principles could be stated by saying that a work of art is the answer to the question, What am I, the artist, feeling? “The artist proper is a person who, grappling with the problem of expressing a certain emotion, says, ‘I want to get this clear’”;64 “the act of expressing . . . is therefore an exploration of his own emotions. He is trying to find out what these emotions are.”65 In neither work does Collingwood make the connection between the general philosophical outlook of the Autobiography and the account of art in The Principles explicit, but it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that the new theory of art is the product of the application of the theory of knowledge in general as an answer to a specific question to 63 64 65

Collingwood, Principles, pp. 288–9. Collingwood, Principles, p. 114. Collingwood, Principles, p. 111.

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the particular question, What emotion is it that I am feeling? And thus at least at the outset of his work Collingwood seems to reject his earlier comprehensive approach to aesthetics in favor of a more reductive one. That Collingwood so insistently treats art as knowledge of feelings in The Principles also seems to be a reversion to Croce’s equation of art with the expression of intuition, and the work thus also seems to resume a strictly Crocean stance on the internality of the work of art although that position had seemed to be loosened over the course of his works in the 1920s. Perhaps this is a contrarian response to the anti-Crocean emphasis on materiality in the work of Reid and especially Alexander earlier in the 1930s, although Collingwood avowedly abjures much discussion of “other people’s aesthetic doctrines” in The Principles, “not because I have not studied them, nor because I have dismissed them as not worth considering, but because I have something of my own to say,”66 and none of his three passing references to Alexander touches on this issue. But although Collingwood begins The Principles by taking a strongly Crocean position on both the content of art, namely, as cognition of the artist’s own feelings, and its locus, namely, as internal rather than external, it should also be noted that consistently with his earlier insistence that the distinction between the theoretical and practical is itself only an abstraction he does not derive this position from Croce’s rigid distinction between these two realms but instead derives it from what he presents as a commonsense distinction between mere craft and fine art. This approach is consistent with Collingwood’s thesis in An Essay on Philosophical Method that philosophy, unlike science, does not teach us something we do not know, but rather clarifies and systematizes what at some level we all already do know.67 And it also leaves the distinction subject to modification by experience over the course of the work. So Collingwood begins The Principles with his famous contrast between craft and art proper, which can be construed as a rejection of Alexander’s argument that there is a continuum from craft to art. Craft, Collingwood maintains, is characterized by six features, none of which is found in art proper: (1) “Craft always involves a distinction between means and end, each clearly conceived as something distinct from the other but related to it”; (2) “It involves a distinction between planning and execution. The result to be obtained is preconceived or thought out before being arrived at”; (3) “Means and end are related in one way in the 66 67

Collingwood, Principles, p. vi. E.g., Collingwood, Philosophical Method, pp. 163–4.

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process of planning; in the opposite way in the process of execution,” namely, in planning the end must be conceived prior to the means while in execution the means must be employed before the end can be realized; (4) “There is a distinction between raw material and finished artifact”; (5) “There is a distinction between form and matter,” the matter being “what is identical in the raw material and the finished product” and the form “what is different, what the exercise of the craft changes”; and finally (6) “There is a hierarchical relation between various crafts, one supplying what another needs, one using what another provides,”68 as, for example, spinners and dyers may prepare the wool for weavers or knitters. Anticipating a view of the relation between a concept and the criteria for its application for which Wittgenstein was subsequently to become more famous, Collingwood adds that “without claiming that these features together exhaust the notion of craft, or that each of them separately is peculiar to it, we may claim with tolerable confidence that where most of them are absent from a certain activity that activity is not a craft, and, if it is called by that name, is so called either by mistake or in a vague and inaccurate way.”69 Collingwood then argues that these features are not characteristic of art, although they may well be involved in something closely connected to art, namely, the production of external objects for the externalization and communication of the work of art proper, close enough to produce the confusion between what is essential to art and what is accidental to it that leads to what Collingwood calls the “technical theory of art,” which he traces back to the Greeks, who first analyzed the concept of craft.70 Taking poetry as his example, Collingwood then argues that none of these criterial conditions of craft is satisfied in the case of genuine art. (1) A poem is not the means to the production of a certain state of mind in an audience, Collingwood argues, as a horseshoe, the product of the craft of smithing, may be the means to the production of a certain state of satisfaction in a man who has taken his horse to be shod; (2) while the “distinction between planning and executing” may exist “in some works of art, namely those which are also works of craft or artifacts,” this distinction is not a necessary feature of art, since there is no distinction between a planning stage and an execution in the composition of a poem; there is just the mental activity of composition itself, although 68 69 70

Collingwood, Principles, pp. 15–16. Collingwood, Principles, p. 17. Collingwood, Principles, p. 17.

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that may incidentally be followed by a further process of writing it down; (3) since there is no distinction between “means and end nor planning and execution” in “art proper” there also “obviously can be no reversal of order as between means and end, in planning and execution respectively”; (4) there is no distinction between materials and finished product in the creation of a work of art, the stock of words in a language not being raw material among which the poet picks and chooses as the smith may pick and choose ingots or bars at the iron yard, nor the emotions that the poet expresses being raw materials for his expression; (5) the form of a work of art cannot be understood as something imposed upon its matter, since there is no raw material for the work in the ordinary sense; and finally (6) there is no hierarchy of crafts among arts proper, for a lyricist, for example, does not produce raw material for a composer; rather “the poet and musician collaborate to produce a work of art which owes something to each of them.”71 One might well argue that, on the one hand, Collingwood has made craft seem more mechanical than would be accepted by many craftspeople, who would no doubt conceive of themselves more along the lines suggested by Alexander, as always aiming at beauty no matter what their other objectives are, and that, on the other, he has exaggerated the distance between craft and art proper by focusing on the most extreme case of art, namely, poetry, perhaps even lyric poetry, where many of the features that arise from the materiality of craftwork do not arise not because of the nature of art as such but because of the peculiar immateriality of this particular art. One might well insist that there is a genuine distinction between planning and execution in the case of a complex work of art such as a monumental sculpture or even an epic poem, a genuine distinction between raw materials and finished product in the case of such works of art as painting and sculpture, and even a hierarchy of crafts in the production of something like a large bronze sculpture, and that to hold that all of this is incidental to the work of art proper is simply to beg the question of what is essential to art and what is accidental to it. In the end, we will see, it is questionable just how strongly Collingwood is committed to the distinction between the immateriality of the work of art proper and the materiality of its incidental vehicle of communication, which is what much of the present distinction between craft and art, specifically features (2) through (6), turns upon. But what is crucial to Collingwood is the initial distinction (1) between the preconceived 71

Collinwood, Principles, pp. 20–5.

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ends of craft and the nonseparability of means and end in the case of art proper, for the real gravamen of Collingwood’s argument in the first part of The Principles is that art proper is not, or is not to be, used for a variety of specific ends. What Collingwood wants to argue is that art should not be used for the arousal of emotion for the sake of pleasure, or “amusement”; for the arousal of emotion for practical purposes, or “magic”; for the mere exercise of intellectual faculties, or as a “puzzle”; for the sake of conveying some specific piece of knowledge, or as “instruction”; for the stimulation of a certain practical activity as expedient, or as “advertisement” or “propaganda”; or for the stimulation of a particular conception of what is right, or as “exhortation.”72 Collingwood thus grounds his distinction between craft and art on claims about the artistic irrelevance of specific ends rather than on Croce’s completely a priori distinction between the theoretical realm into which art falls and the practical realm into which it does not, although at the same time he still tries to make it appear impossible rather than simply morally objectionable for genuine art to be used for purposes of mere amusement, propaganda, and so forth. Collingwood’s insistence that art does not have any end external to it might also seem difficult to reconcile with his insistence later in the work, as already noted, that art is above all a form of self-knowledge, for this, after all, naturally enough suggests that the creation of a work of art can be or even ordinarily is undertaken in order to achieve self-knowledge, a goal if ever there were one. But what seems really to be driving Collingwood’s thought in Part I of The Principles is precisely the fear that the specific ends for art that he abjures – amusement, magic, puzzle, instruction, advertisement, exhortation – are goals that are incompatible with self-knowledge or depend upon its absence, in either the artist or perhaps even more often in the audience: Seeking amusement is an alternative to seeking self-knowledge, being the victim of successful propaganda depends precisely on not having much self-knowledge, and so on. What ultimately seems most important to Collingwood is that the proper end of art is an alternative to all these diversions: Art is not a luxury, and bad art not a thing we can afford to tolerate. To know ourselves is the foundation of all life that develops beyond the merely psychical level of experience. Unless consciousness does its work successfully, the facts which it offers to intellect, the only things upon which intellect can build its fabric of thought, are false from the beginning. A truthful 72

Collingwood, Principles, p. 32.

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consciousness gives intellect a firm foundation upon which to build; a corrupt consciousness forces intellect to build on a quicksand. The falsehoods which an untruthful consciousness imposes on the intellect are falsehoods which intellect can never correct for itself. In so far as consciousness is corrupted, the very wells of truth are poisoned. Intellect can build nothing firm. Moral ideals are castles in the air. Political and economic systems are mere cobwebs. Even common sanity and bodily health are no longer secure. But corruption of consciousness is the same thing as bad art.73

Collingwood’s point is not really that art proper has no goals at all and that only mere craft has determinate goals. His distinction is rather that bad art has goals such as advertisement or propaganda or even mere amusement that depend upon the absence of self-knowledge, and that good art has the goal of self-knowledge, which is the conditio sine qua non of all other genuine individual and social goods. And as the present passage makes clear, this is not after all an argument from the ontology of art, but rests on an appeal to self-evident moral truths. This is quite different from Croce’s metaphysical argument. In spite of the obviously moral character of the real foundation of his position, Collingwood nevertheless persists in using the distinction between craft and art proper to promote the Crocean point that the genuine work of art is mental and internal rather than physical and external. But as his argument develops, it becomes clear that Collingwood’s reason for insisting upon this point is precisely to emphasize the role of the imagination in both the creation and the reception of art, and that once this goal has been achieved he can afford to relax his initially rigid dualism between the mental and the physical aspects of art. Collingwood sums up his contrast between craft and art proper in the form of three hypotheses: (1) This, then, is the first point we have learnt from our criticism: that there is in art proper a distinction resembling that between means and end, but not identical to it. (2) The element which the technical theory calls the end is defined by it as the arousing of emotion. The idea of arousing (i.e., of bringing into existence, by determinate means, something whose existence is conceived in advance as possible and desirable) belongs entirely to the philosophy of craft . . . This, then, is our second point. Art has something to do with emotion; what it does with it has a certain resemblance to arousing it, but is not arousing it. 73

Collingwood, Principles, pp. 284–5.

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(3) What the technical theory calls the means is defined by it as the making of an artifact called a work of art. . . . Art has something to do with making things, but these things are not material things, and they are not made by skill. They are things of some other kind, and are made in some other way.74 Collingwood says that “we now have three riddles to answer,” but there are really only two stages to his answer. The first is the argument that he now develops that the goal of art is to understand our emotions, not arouse them, but that there is no mechanical technique that can be considered the separable means to this as an end; there is only the self-aware concentration of our attention on our emotions, which he assigns, perhaps surprisingly, to our power of imagination. The second stage of his answer is that this exercise of imagination itself and not the production of a physical object is the work of art proper, although as his argument continues it turns out that the boundary between the exercise of imagination and the use of physical media is less clear than it initially seems. Relying upon his methodological position that philosophy only clarifies and systematizes what we already know, Collingwood begins his argument by stating that “nothing could be more commonplace” than to say that the “artist proper” expresses his emotions,75 and then interprets expression as the activity of clarifying one’s emotions, thus something very much to be distinguished from simply revealing or “betraying” one’s emotions.76 Collingwood writes: When a man is said to express emotion, what is being said about him comes to this. At first, he is conscious of having an emotion, but not conscious of what this emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is: “I feel . . . I don’t know what I feel.” From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. This is an activity which has something to do with what we call language: he expresses himself by speaking. It has also something to do with consciousness: the emotion expressed is an emotion of whose nature the person who feels it is no longer unconscious. It also has something to do with the way in which he feels the emotion. As unexpressed, he feels it in what we have called a helpless and oppressed way; as expressed, he

74 75 76

Collingwood, Principles, p. 108. Collingwood, Principles, p. 109. Collingwood, Principles, pp. 121–4.

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feels it in a way from which this sense of oppression has vanished. His mind is somehow lightened and eased.77

Collingwood anticipates both main points of his argument in this paragraph. The first stage of his argument consists of the second and third points that he makes here: that the expression of emotion requires the clarification of it by means of the heightened attention and self-awareness that he calls imagination, and that there is in this activity of expression the characteristic pleasure of resolving an intellectual difficulty, although this pleasure cannot be thought of as a separable end of this process that might have been realized by other means. The second stage of his argument amplifies the initial suggestion that expression requires language, specifically finding a suitable language by means of which to express the specific emotion being expressed, although we will see that Collingwood’s conception of language is broad and goes far beyond the use of sounds or inscriptions to designate objects. In the remainder of his first chapter on “Art Proper” as “Expression,” Collingwood amplifies several aspects of his claim that expression is the clarification of the artist’s emotion. For one, he stresses that this process of clarification is analogous but only analogous to the goal-directed use of preconceived means or technique: The “exploration” of the artist’s emotions is certainly “a directed process: an effort, that is, directed upon a certain end; but the end is not something that can be foreseen and preconceived, to which appropriate means can be thought out in the light of our knowledge of its special character. Expression is an activity of which there can be no technique.”78 The reason for this is that emotion is particular and cannot be captured by general descriptions that could be mastered in advance of the actual encounter with the emotion: Expression . . . individualizes. The anger which I feel here and now, with a certain person, for a certain cause, is no doubt an instance of anger . . . but it is much more than mere anger: it is a peculiar anger, not quite like any anger that I ever felt before, and probably not quite like any anger I shall ever feel again. To become fully conscious of it means becoming conscious of it not merely as an instance of anger, but as this quite peculiar anger.79

Second, without mentioning the name Clive Bell, Collingwood now makes it clear that his position on art and emotion is more complex 77 78 79

Collingwood, Principles, pp. 109–10. Collingwood, Principles, p. 111. Collingwood, Principles, pp. 112–13.

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than Bell’s. The view that among our other emotions there is a special “aesthetic emotion” that artists select for expression is “nonsense,” Collingwood argues, for artists are in the business of finding expression for the virtually infinitely variegated range of specific human emotions; however, “an unexpressed emotion is accompanied by a feeling of oppression” but “when it is expressed and thus comes into consciousness the same emotion is accompanied by a new feeling of alleviation or easement, the sense that this oppression is removed,” which “resembles the feeling of relief that comes when a burdensome intellectual or moral problem has been solved,” namely, “the specific feeling of having successfully expressed ourselves.”80 In other words, Bell treated aesthetic emotion as if it were an alternative to ordinary emotions, whereas for Collingwood it is a second-order emotion, the feeling of satisfaction that accompanies having successfully expressed an ordinary, first-order emotion. Finally, Collingwood stresses that although the artist is in the business of expressing his own and individual emotion, such emotions are not idiosyncratic: The artist does not have the goal of arousing an emotion in his audience or even primarily the goal of communicating his emotion to his audience, but making his emotion clear to himself also makes “his emotions clear to his audience.” Indeed, even though emotions are highly particular, my anger in this situation being different from my anger in another situation, these highly specific situations and therefore emotions can also be shared, and thus the artist who makes his own emotions clear to himself does not make only his emotions but also their own emotions clear to his audience. If a poet expresses, for example, a certain kind of fear, the only hearers who can understand him are those who are capable of experiencing that kind of fear themselves. Hence, when some one reads and understands a poem, he is not merely understanding the poet’s expression of his, the poet’s, emotions, he is expressing emotions of his own in the poet’s words, which have thus become his own words. As Coleridge put it, we know a man for a poet by the fact that he makes us poets. We know that he is expressing his emotions by the fact that he is enabling us to express ours.81

This point becomes important in Part III of The Principles, where Collingwood blurs not only the initially apparently rigid distinction between the mental and the physical but also the initially apparently rigid distinction between self and others. 80 81

Collingwood, Principles, p. 117. Collingwood, Principles, p. 118.

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In his account of the artistic expression of emotion, Collingwood has thus emphasized the specificity and therefore variety of emotions expressed by art and has done this in a way that makes it clear that the experience of emotions is internal to the experience of art: Although emotions can be experienced without being clarified, they cannot be clarified without being experienced. Collingwood has also hinted that the clarification of emotion by the artist is also a clarification of emotion for the audience. Yet in spite of this acknowledgment of the potential intersubjectivity of artistic expression, Collingwood seems to revert to a solipsistic conception of the work of art in his next chapter on “Art Proper” as “Imagination,” the final chapter of Part I of The Principles, and thus to stress the artist’s clarification of emotions in the creation of art at the cost of the audience’s experience of emotions in response to art. Here he begins by stressing again the difference between the technical “making” of craft and the nontechnical “creating” of art and infers from this that “a work of art need not be what we should call a real thing. . . . A work of art may be completely created when it has been created as a thing whose only place is in the artist’s mind.”82 However, Collingwood’s point seems to be to stress the element of imagination needed both to make and to appreciate a work of art; he is not so much interested in denying that the creation or perception of a physical object may be a necessary condition for the creation or reception of a work of art as he is in denying that the former can ever be a sufficient condition for the latter. On the side of creation, he wants to emphasize that art always involves an element of imagination or, as he is prepared to call it here, “make-believe,” that is, going beyond what is immediately perceived to create more meaning than can be immediately perceived; on the side of reception, Collingwood wants to emphasize that responding to a work of art is never simply apprehending a physical object by means of the senses alone, but using all our intellectual resources to recreate the feelings and thoughts that the artist has attempted to express and thus clarify by means of whatever public and sense-perceptible object he has created. Just as what we get out of [a] lecture is something other than the noises we hear proceeding from the lecturer’s mouth, so what we get out of the concert is something other than the noises made by the performers. In each case, what we get out of it is something which we have to reconstruct in our own minds, and by our own efforts; something which remains for ever inaccessibly to a person who cannot or will not make efforts of the right 82

Collingwood, Principles, p. 130.

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kind, however completely he hears the sounds that fill the room in which he is sitting.83

Once again, Collingwood sresses that it is “commonplace” that “the music to which we listen is not the heard sound, but that sound as amended in various ways by the listener’s imagination, and so with the other arts.”84 This emphasis on the activity of the audience in the reception of art is not, however, meant to drive a wedge between aesthetic experience and cognition; on the contrary, it is a pervasive theme of Collingwood’s entire philosophy that knowledge is never the passive reception of sensory data, but always involves the mental activity and indeed the imagination of the knower. This is the gist of Collingwood’s attack upon the Oxford realism of Cook Wilson, Prichard, and Joseph as well as on the contemporary philosophy of Cambridge, for example, Bertrand Russell’s conception of knowledge by acquaintance; it is implicit in his argument that knowledge never arises from merely collecting data but only from probing data to answer our own specific questions; and it is explicit in his argument in his final work, The Idea of History, that historical knowledge does not consist in merely accumulating sources (“scissors-and-paste” history), but only in using evidence to recreate by means of our own imagination the thought processes of human beings in the past, their perceptions of the problems before them, the strategies and intentions they developed and attempted to execute for dealing with their problems as they saw them. As Collingwood puts it, the object of mere “memory” may be “the past as immediately ‘apprehended’ by an act in which inference plays no part,” but the “object of history is the past as inferentially ‘reconstructed’ from evidence.”85 And in the case of history as in the case of art, Collingwood stresses that the necessity of reconstruction in one’s own imagination of the thought of the agent, or artist, is not incompatible with the intersubjective significance of the imaginative exercise: “History is ‘for’ human self-knowledge. . . . Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.”86 The centrality of imagination in the creation and experience of art for Collingwood

83 84 85

86

Collingwood, Principles, pp. 140–1. Collingwood, Principles, p. 143. Collingwood, The Idea of History, revised edition, “Outlines of a Philosophy of History,” p. 435. Collingwood, Idea of History, p. 10.

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does not imply that in his view aesthetic experience is not cognitive; the difference between aesthetic experience and other forms of cognition is in the first instance only in their objects, aesthetic experience giving rise to knowledge of our emotions and other forms of experience to knowledge of other things, history in particular to knowledge of the potentialities of human agency. And since, as Collingwood suggests in Part III of The Principles of Art, human action begins in human feeling, clarification of human feelings through the use of the imagination in the creation and reception of art is hardly a luxury, but indispensable for sound human action. The cognitive character of the aesthetic use of the imagination, but the compatibility indeed dependence of this upon actual experience, becomes even clearer in Part II of The Principles, which is indeed entitled “The Theory of Imagination,” while the ultimate intersubjectivity rather than solipsism of aesthetic experience will become clear in Part III. But before he launches the argument of Parts II and III, Collingwood completes the argument of Part I of The Principles, in a section entitled “The Total Imaginative Experience,”87 by rejecting the assumption that the data of consciousness, whatever it is we do with them in or by imagination, are ever simple impressions of a single sense. He makes this point, using the example of painting, by means of a remarkable celebration of Cézanne’s advance over Impressionism. “The Impressionist doctrine that what one paints is light was a pedantry,” Collingwood asserts, “which failed to destroy the painters it enslaved only because they remained painters in defiance of the doctrine: men of their hands, men who did their work with fingers and wrist and arm, and even (as they walked about the studio) with their legs and toes.” Cézanne, however, was not a painter malgré lui, but one who intentionally painted “a perplexing mixture of projections and recessions, over and round which we find ourselves feeling our way as one can imagine an infant feeling its way, when it has barely begun to crawl, among the nursery furniture.”88 In Cézanne’s work, although not for the first time, for following Bernard Berenson Collingwood also attributes this quality to the Renaissance painters Masaccio and Raphael, “the spectator’s experience on looking at a picture is not a specifically visual experience at all . . . it is also . . . the imaginary experience of certain complicated muscular movements. . . . So remote is this imaginative experience from the specialism of its sensuous basis, that we may go so 87 88

Collingwood, Principles, p. 144. Collingwood, Principles, pp. 144–5.

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far as to call it an imaginative experience of total activity.”89 Collingwood does not spell out the implication of this fact about what is clearly in his view the best painting that has been done to date, but it does not seem much of a stretch to suggest that our emotions are not triggered by and confined to isolated sensory data, but are part of our comprehensive and embodied experience of the world, so that only art that can create an “imaginative expression of total activity” can really express our emotions in all their particularity. Even though, as Collingwood stresses, our sensations in the experience of such art “are not actual motor sensations, they are imaginary motor sensations,”90 there is already a hint here that not only his distinction between cognition and emotion but also his distinction between the essentially mental and the inessentially physical aspects of art cannot be as important as he initially makes it appear. Collingwood does not equate his notion of total imaginative activity with play – on the contrary, it seems quite serious – but it does seem to integrate both the emotional and the cognitive and the mental and the physical in his conception of the experience of both the artist making art and the audience experiencing that art. But let us now turn to the central thought of Part II of The Principles, “The Theory of Imagination.” Here the collapse of any rigid distinction between the experience of emotion and the cognition of it in Collingwood’s thought becomes explicit; they are instead part of a continuum. The first chapter of this part, “Thinking and Feeling,” states Collingwood’s conception of the subject matter of imagination: Contrary to the traditional view of imagination, which treats sensation as its subject matter,91 for Collingwood its subject is neither sensation as such nor abstract ideas, whether of sensory or nonsensory objects, but rather the feeling or affect that accompanies all sensation – “every sensum has its own emotional charge”92 – although that is not initially nor ordinarily clearly separated from it, but experienced as a unity with it – “When an infant is terrified at the sight of a scarlet curtain blazing in the sunlight, there are not two distinct experiences in its mind, one a sensation of red and the other an emotion of fear; there is only one experience, a terrifying red.”93 Collingwood then makes the striking claim that it is 89 90 91

92 93

Collingwood, Principles, pp. 146–8. Collingwood, Principles, p. 147. Collingwood discusses views of the imagination from Descartes to Kant in the next chapter, “Sensation and Imagination,” ch. IX, §§2–6, pp. 174–87. Collingwood, Principles, p. 162. Collingwood, Principles, p. 161.

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the emotional charge upon sensation and not sensation itself that is the primary subject matter for thought: “Feeling provides for thought more than a mere substructure upon which it rests, and about which it may concern itself if it is so disposed. In its primary form, thought seems to be exclusively concerned with it, so that feeling affords its sole and universal subject-matter.”94 Next he claims that imagination is that “activity or manifestation of freedom . . . intermediate between the less free activity of mere feeling and the more free activity of what is generally called thought”95 that focuses our attention upon the emotional aspect of sensory experience and makes us aware of ourselves as having the sensation and having the feeling that goes along with it, thus as the means by which we separate the emotion from the sensation. “Attending to a feeling means holding it before the mind; rescuing it from the flux of mere sensation, and conserving it for so long as may be necessary in order that we should take note of it,”96 and such attention is in turn the basis for the mastery of our feelings: “As this consciousness of himself becomes firmer and more habitual,” the subject who thus attends to his feelings “finds that he can dominate the rage by the sheer act of attending to what he is doing, and thus stop howling, master his feelings instead of letting them master him.”97 And attention or awareness is a kind of activity different from mere feeling, and presupposing it. The essence of it is that instead of having our field of view wholly occupied by the sensations and emotions of the moment, we also become aware of ourselves, as the activity of feeling these things. Theoretically considered, this new activity is an enlargement of our field of view, which now takes in the act of feeling as well as the thing felt. Practically considered, it is the assertion of ourselves as the owners of our feelings. By this self-assertion, we dominate our feelings: they become no longer experiences forcing themselves upon us unawares, but experiences in which we experience our own activity. Their brute power over us is thus replaced by our power over them: we become able on the one hand to stand up to them so that they no longer unconditionally determine our conduct, and, on the other, to prolong and evoke them at will.98

Having earlier relied upon the commonsense distinction between craft and art rather than Croce’s absolute distinction between the theoretical and the practical to separate the essential work of art from its accidental 94 95 96 97 98

Collingwood, Principles, p. 164. Collingwood, Principles, pp. 197–8. Collingwood, Principles, p. 209. Collingwood, Principles, p. 208. Collingwood, Principles, p. 222.

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physical realization, Collingwood is now free to find both theoretical and practical elements within the consciousness of feeling that he is developing into his account of aesthetic experience. He further specifies the attention to the emotional aspect of sensory experience that is the basis for the practical accomplishment of mastery of it as drawing out the relationship of the specific emotional charge of that specific sensation to others. “We have in effect distinguished three stages in the life of a feeling. (1) First, as bare feeling, below the level of consciousness. (2) Secondly, as a feeling of which we have become conscious. (3) Thirdly, as a feeling which, in addition to becoming conscious of it, we have placed in its relation to others.”99 In equating consciousness of a feeling with awareness of its connections, Collingwood parallels the idea of aesthetic experience as “consummatory” experience, which, as we shall see in the next part, John Dewey had developed in the United States just a few years earlier. Finally, Collingwood reemphasizes that it is imagination that is the source of this clarification of the emotional aspect of sensation: “Imagination is thus the new form which feeling takes when transformed by the activity of consciousness.”100 More precisely, Collingwood speaks of imagination as both the activity that produces the clarification of emotion and the product of that activity. In the passage just quoted, he speaks in the latter manner, and he likewise does so when he speaks of feeling being transformed into imagination by consciousness.101 But he also speaks of imagination as the activity that clarifies the emotional aspects of our sensations and thus produces ideas. He speaks in this mode when he concludes his chapter “Imagination and Consciousness” by returning to his original conception of art as a goaldirected but nontechnical activity that produces enlightenment without the benefit of rules: When, therefore, it is said that imagination can summon up feelings at will, this does not mean that when I imagine I first form some idea of a feeling and then, as it were, summon it into my presence as a real feeling; still less, that I can review in fancy the various feelings which I might enjoy, and choose to evoke in myself the one which I prefer. To form an idea of a feeling is already to feel it in imagination. Thus imagination is “blind,” i.e., cannot anticipate its own results by conceiving them as purposes in advance of executing them. The freedom which it enjoys is not the freedom

99 100 101

Collingwood, Principles, p. 213. Collingwood, Principles, p. 215. Collingwood, Principles, pp. 222–3.

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to carry out a plan, or to choose between alternative possible plans. These are developments belonging to a later stage.102

Indeed, imagination bridges the gulf between craft and art on Collingwood’s original account because it does have a goal, but it does not have rules by which to achieve this goal. But while Collingwood’s description of imagination as blind in quotation marks is an unmistakable allusion to Kant’s famous statement that intuitions without concepts are blind while concepts without intuitions are empty,103 unlike in his earlier work, Collingwood does not use his own theory of the centrality of imagination to aesthetic experience to rise to the defense of the play theory of such experience or to attack the divide between play theories and cognitive theories of aesthetic experience. His present account of imagination as both the source and the result of heightened consciousness of our emotions has stressed the continuity between the actual experience of emotion and the clarification of it, thus synthesizing the approaches to aesthetic experience that emphasize cognition and emotional impact, but now it seems to threaten the connection between imagination and play that Collingwood had defended in his earlier work. We will have to see whether that remains true throughout the Principles of Art, but before we can turn to that question we must consider the second stage of Collingwood’s argument in Part II, in which he asserts that imagination as clarification of emotion requires language, indeed goes even further to argue that language itself “is an imaginative activity whose function is to express emotion,” at least in “its original or native state.”104 There are two key points to Collingwood’s position here: first, that the primary function of language is not to designate objects but to express our feelings about them, and, second, that we do this not by the use of sounds or other signs as mere symbols for objects but by the whole range of bodily activities involved in making sounds or other signs. Language can of course be “intellectualized” in order to express thought rather than emotion, but Collingwood holds that this is not its primary and certainly not its aesthetic function. Collingwood begins his argument with an account of the acquisition of language in early childhood. If “the linguistic theorist can obtain access to a nursery,” he maintains, “he will hear the mother not enunciating 102 103 104

Collingwood, Principles, p. 224. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 51/B 75. Collingwood, Principles, p. 225.

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single words to her child, but pouring out a flood of talk mostly devoted not to the naming of certain things but to the expression of her pleasure in its society,” and he will observe that the infant likewise responds not by repeating the mother’s words to designate objects but rather by imitating the mother’s use of language to express its own emotions. Thus, “its mother may have been in the habit of saying in her baby talk, when removing its bonnet, ‘Hatty off!’; and, if so, when [the baby] takes its own bonnet off and throws it out of the perambulator it will say in tones of great satisfaction, ‘Hattiaw!’”105 This verbalization, according to Collingwood, is not a symbol but an expression: “It does not express the act of removing the hat, but it expresses the peculiar satisfaction which for some reason the child takes in removing the hat . . . the feeling which it has in doing that act. More strictly, it is not the sound ‘hattiaw,’ but the act of making this sound, that is expressive.”106 The baby, we are to suppose, feels an emotion, be it of satisfaction at pleasing its mother by taking its hat off before the mother needs to do it or of satisfaction at taking its hat off precisely when the mother wants it on (of course, the baby is not supposed to understand which its emotion is, and even for adults that is precisely the sort of understanding to which only the exercise of imagination can lead), and it does not name this feeling or the object involved in it by its enunciation of the slightly garbled imitation of the mother’s words but rather expresses this feeling by the whole activity of which saying “Hattiaw!” is one part along with flinging the hat onto the floor, grinning and laughing, and whatever else it does in the relevant moment. Now one fictional example might not seem to be much of an argument to a contemporary child psychologist, and in any case even if Collingwood’s analysis of what is happening in a child’s earliest use of language were right it would hardly follow that what happens there remains in some sense essential to later uses of language. But given his stance that philosophy of art, like other philosophy, just makes explicit to us what we in some way already know, Collingwood does not need a deductive argument here, but only a telling example, itself perhaps a product of the imagination, that can lead us to recognize that expressing feeling not by mere designation or symbolization but by the whole of our action involving the utterance or creation of a symbol or other work is what we are in fact doing when we are making or for that matter appreciating art. 105 106

Collingwood, Principles, pp. 227–8. Collingwood, Principles, pp. 228–9.

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What we are supposed to recognize is that the baby’s act captures the essence of the adult aesthetic experience, although of course the adult experience is more intentional, may involve more invention or more subtle imitation, and so on. The example leads Collingwood to both a definition of language and a causal thesis about expression. The definition is that language is the whole means of expressing emotion: Bodily actions expressing certain emotions, in so far as they come under our control and are conceived by us, in our awareness of controlling them, as our way of expressing these emotions, are language. The word “language” is here used not in its narrow and etymologically proper sense to denote activities of our vocal organs, but in a wider sense in which it includes any activity of any organ which is expressive in the same way in which speech is expressive. In this wide sense, language is simply bodily expression of emotion, dominated by thought in its primitive form as consciousness.107

This leads Collingwood to a view of all of the arts as languages, but in this replete sense not as mere systems of denotational signs or symbols but as bodily expressions of emotions that involve symbols as one part of their complex totality: All the different kinds of language have a relation of this kind to bodily gesture. The art of painting is bound up with the expressiveness of the gestures made by the hand in drawing, and of the imaginary gestures through which a spectator of a painting appreciates its “tactile values.” Instrumental music has a similar relation to silent movements of the larynx, gestures of the player’s hand, and real or imaginary movements, as of dancing, in the audience. Every kind of language is in this way a specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that dance is the mother of all languages.108

The causal thesis is that linguistic activity in its full range of complexity is not accidental or incidental to imagination, for “on whatever level of experience an emotion may belong, it cannot be felt without being expressed. There are no unexpressed emotions.”109 Thus neither the child nor the artist as it were has and clarifies an emotion in imagination and then, for some further reason, seeks an external expression for it, to record it for future reference, to communicate it to another, to make money, or whatever; the bodily activity of expressing an emotion goes hand in hand with having and attending to it. Collingwood’s original Crocean distinction 107 108 109

Collingwood, Principles, p. 235. Collingwood, Principles, pp. 243–4. Collingwood, Principles, p. 238.

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between essential mental work of art and inessential physical work of craft has now been undermined by his theory of expression. Collingwood also attacks any idea that a language could be confined to a fixed stock of repeatable expressions as well as any idea that human beings could get by with a single linguistic medium rather than a full range of arts. The premise for both of his positions is the premise, again contrary to Bell, that human emotions are infinitely variable or infinitely subtle and can be adequately expressed only by a multiplicity of media each of which is itself infinitely variable. He says that “the imagination creates for itself, by an infinite work of refraction and reflection and condensation and dispersal, an infinity of emotions demanding for their expression an infinite subtlety in the articulations of the language it creates in expressing them,”110 which would imply that any one language must be infinitely variable and thus have room for the kind of invention and creativity that we associate with the artistic use of language, but he also claims that “there is no way of expressing the same feeling in two different media”; thus, for example, “music is one order of languages and speech is another; each expresses what it does express with absolute clarity and precision; but what they express is two different types of emotion, each proper to itself.”111 If no emotion can be unexpressed and not all emotions can be expressed by one type of language or art, then there must be a multiplicity of languages or arts. Collingwood does not offer an argument for this last claim, interesting as it might be as a premise for the traditional assumption that aesthetics should explain why we have not just art but a system of the arts. One might be inclined to object that Collingwood is mistaking the fact that we have different emotional responses to different arts, as evidenced by the fact that a trip to the art museum will not do when what we really crave is a night at the opera, with the supposition that each of the arts expresses a different kind of emotion to begin with. Perhaps Collingwood’s answer to this objection would be that since, as we saw in his response to Bell, the only “aesthetic emotion” that is common to all arts is the feeling of relief at the solution to the puzzle of what it is that we are feeling, every other emotional difference in our responses to works from different arts must be differences in what is clarified out of the original sensation-emotion complex that stimulated the creation of the work of art and that is then 110 111

Collingwood, Principles, p. 238. Collingwood, Principles, p. 245.

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so to speak reclarified in the appreciative reconstruction of the artist’s creation of the work. The justification for Collingwood’s assertion of the necessity of a multiplicity of arts may not be entirely explicit, but what is clear is that in his account of language and his assertion of the necessity of expression his original distinction between the internal work of art and an incidental external work of craft that might be associated with it has completely broken down. It may be recalled that Croce tried to preserve this distinction, which was necessary for him in order to preserve his fundamental distinction between the theoretical and the practical spheres, by insisting that all the apparently bodily aspects of aesthetic experience are imagined rather than actual, and actual bodily movements by either artist or audience are as it were only aids to the imagination. Collingwood wanted to use the distinction between craft and art to draw our attention to the difference between the goal of the clarification of emotion and all other uses to which art might be put, especially those that depend upon the continuing obscurity, obfuscation, or manipulation of emotion, such as propaganda, but he has no commitment to a fundamental difference between the theoretical and the practical, and as we have seen his view that the clarification of emotion also leads to mastery over emotion combines the theoretical and the practical. So once he has stressed that art is the product of imagination and that the experience of art can never be passive but must always involve the imaginative recreation of the experience of the artist, he can afford to recognize that the expression of the work of imagination in language is inherently also bodily. The important point has been for Collingwood to establish that both the creation and appreciation of art are the work of the imagination rather than merely the creation and perception of something bodily, even if the work of the imagination itself is always at least in part bodily. The inseparability of imagination and bodily activity is the premise of Part III of The Principles, its actual “Theory of Art,” to which we now turn briefly to conclude our discussion of Collingwood, and indeed of British aesthetics before the interruption of the Second World War and the delayed influence of Wittgenstein. The first two chapters of this part, “Art as Language” and “Art and Truth,” apply the results of the previous argument to the case of art: Art is the expression of emotion by language,112 where language is understood in the broad sense previously 112

Collingwood, Principles, p. 274.

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defined – which may well amount to a definition of language by a prior understanding of the range of artistic media rather than vice versa; and the goal of art is self-knowledge,113 “consciousness of our own emotions.”114 As previously mentioned, however, knowledge of one’s own emotions is not necessarily knowledge of idiosyncratic emotions, and in coming to know himself the artist can also facilitate self-knowledge for an audience that can recreate his experience. “Dante has fused the Thomistic philosophy into a poem expressing what it feels like to be a Thomist,”115 for example, but Dante was not the only Thomist: Other, less artistically gifted Thomists could understand their own feelings better by reading Dante (perhaps even Thomas himself could have done so if only he had lived longer), and those of us who are not Thomists can understand what it would feel like to be a Thomist from Dante. In the penultimate chapter of the book, “The Artist and the Community,” Collingwood finally makes clear that in spite of the centrality of imagination for the creation and reception of art, external relations – between the artist and his medium, between the artist and his audience – are not accidental or trivial, but an indispensable part of making art. He continues to hold that, for example, in the case of painting, “there are two experiences, an inward or imaginative one called seeing and an outward or bodily one called painting,” but now admits that these two are “inseparable” or “necessarily connected,”116 for the painter can come to see in his artistic, that is, imaginative way only in the physical process of painting itself: The transmuted or sensuous element in the aesthetic experience is the so-called outward element: in the case under examination, the artist’s psycho-physical activity of painting; his visual sensation of the colours and shapes of his subject, his felt gestures as he manipulates his brush, the seen shapes of paint patches that these gestures leave on his canvas: in short, the total sensuous (or rather, sensuous-emotional) experience of a man at work before his easel. Unless this sensuous experience were actually present, there would be nothing out of which consciousness could generate the aesthetic experience which is “externalized” or “recorded” or “expressed” by the painted picture.117

This might seem to be a merely causal claim on Collingwood’s part, an empirical claim that as a matter of fact the clarified consciousness of 113 114 115 116 117

Collingwood, Principles, p. 284. Collingwood, Principles, p. 292. Collingwood, Principles, p. 295. Collingwood, Principles, pp. 304–5. Collingwood, Principles, p. 307.

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emotion emerges only in interaction with a physical medium. If such a merely empirical claim clarified our own experience for us, it would be none the worse for that, but its foundation goes deeper in Collingwood’s theory, back to his original claim that emotion begins as a charge upon sensation: Emotion begins in our interaction with the physical world, so naturally it is also clarified only in interaction with that world. Likewise, the clarification of emotion is necessary for the artist but happens only in interaction with an audience, and vice versa: So the gap between artist and audience is also breached. Collingwood can arrive at this position without giving up on his original distinction of art from craft because on this account the production of a physical object, in this case a painting, is not an external goal of artistic activity as a technical process; it is more like a by-product of the artistic activity of coming to understand one’s own emotion. In the same way, the communication of the work of the artist’s imagination to others is not an external goal of a technique like advertisement or propaganda, but also part of the process of imagination: One test of whether one is succeeding in making one’s emotion clear to oneself is whether one is also succeeding in making it clear to a suitable audience. (I use the present imperfect rather than past perfect here to make it clear that for Collingwood the process of clarification, whether to self or others, like the process of knowledge in general, is never actually completed.) Collingwood actually makes this point in a narrow way, saying that sometimes an artist will take “it as his business to express not his own private emotions, irrespectively of whether any one else feels them or not, but the emotions he shares with his audience. Instead of conceiving of himself as a mystagogue . . . he will conceive himself as his audience’s spokesman, saying for it the things it wants to say but cannot say unaided,” in which case of course the audience’s reception of his work will be a test of its success: “If what he is trying to do is to express emotions that are not his own merely, but his audience’s as well, his success in doing this will be tested by his audience’s reception of what he has to say.”118 But even when speaking for his audience is not the artist’s goal, successfully speaking to at least some audience may still be a test of the artist’s success in clarifying his own emotion, since no man is an island and no one’s emotions are utterly idiosyncratic. While Collingwood firmly believes that no man is an island, neither does he believe that humans are ever fully transparent to one another.

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Collingwood, Principles, p. 312.

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This is true in the case of artist and audience because the artist is no doubt in some way or other an above-average emoter and self-knower; thus “we can never absolutely know that the imaginative experience we obtain from a work of art is identical with that of the artist. In proportion as the artist is a great one”; indeed, “we can be pretty certain that we have only caught his meaning partially and imperfectly.”119 But what is true in the special case of the relation between artist and audience, where the former is more emotionally and cognitively gifted than the latter, is in fact true in all use of language, where speaker and hearer can be assumed to have similar gifts. This is because “one does not first acquire a language and then use it”; rather “we only come to possess it by repeatedly and progressively attempting to use it.” The reader may object that if what is here maintained were true there could never be any absolute assurance, either for the hearer or the speaker, that the one had understood the other. That is so; but in fact there is no such assurance. The only assurance we possess is an empirical and relative assurance, becoming progressively stronger as conversation proceeds, and based on the fact that neither party seems to the other to be talking nonsense. The question is whether they understand each other solvitur interloquendo. If they understand each other well enough to go on talking, they understand each other as well as they need; and there is no better kind of understanding which they can regret not having attained.120

Here Collingwood makes a point that was crucial for several other philosophers of his own generation, both Gadamer, whom we have already discussed, and Wittgenstein, to whom we will come, both of whom would also emphasize that language works without any a priori guarantee of mutual understanding, as well as for one of a subsequent generation, namely, Stanley Cavell, who would argue that this fact is not only true of art but is part of the subject matter itself of art, in particular that tragedy expresses the failure to recognize this essential feature of the human condition and that comedy recognizes and celebrates it. But that is to look ahead. Let us now conclude this discussion of Collingwood by asking what has happened to our larger theme, the aesthetics of truth, emotion, and play, in his late work. We saw that in his writings on aesthetics in the 1920s Collingwood, unlike almost all of both the German and the British expression theorists before him, defended the theory of art as play and reconciled it with the theory of

119 120

Collingwood, Principles, p. 309. Collingwood, Principles, pp. 250–1.

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the experience of art as a form of cognition by describing both play and art as the stage of human self-exploration from which other forms of knowledge and action gradually emerge, although he did not see art as a stage that could ever be superseded in human history because he thought that since there are no finally valid forms of knowledge and action, new forms of exploration would also always be needed. In his later theory, Collingwood instead emphasizes the connection between cognition and emotion, arguing that in aesthetic experience they are fused rather than divided. In the late 1930s, with his own health failing and with the threat of the impending war with Fascism threatening all of Europe, Collingwood urgently emphasized the importance of art as the clarification of emotion, in contrast to the use of art for propaganda so widespread at this time, and in this historical situation, it may have seemed frivolous to him to talk of art as play, let alone defend it. But in fact nothing essential in his theory has changed. He has emphasized that imagination leads to self-awareness, but he has also argued that imagination cannot be carried out as a technical procedure, that it must be free, and in this regard it clearly retains an element of play as well as of knowledge. Indeed, in emphasizing the bodily aspect of language, the necessity of interacting with a physical medium for the achievement of clarification by imagination, and in arguing that art both depends upon and makes possible total imaginative activity rather than either mere sensations or mere abstractions, Collingwood drew out dimensions of artistic creation and experience that fit as well with the paradigm of aesthetic theory as play as with that of such experience as a form of cognition. Had he been able to put his aesthetic theory of the 1920s together with his theory of the 1930s into a single book, Collingwood would clearly have synthesized the aesthetics of truth, feeling, and play in a way that only a few before him had. Collingwood did not live to write such a book (nor do I mean to imply that he intended to), so he must count as one of the great implicit rather than explicit synthesizers of twentieth-century aesthetics. We will now turn to American aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth century, where we will find a number of explicit synthesizers.

Part Three

AMERICAN AESTHETICS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

T

his part will discuss American aesthetics from George Santayana to Nelson Goodman, while the final part of this volume will discuss Anglophone aesthetics, mostly but not entirely American, after the impact of Wittgenstein. The boundary lines of the present part are not neat. First, it will begin not in 1900, but with George Santayana’s first book, The Sense of Beauty, which was published in 1896. Other work from the 1890s or even from the first years of the twentieth century, such as works of Bernard Bosanquet, Karl Groos, Vernon Lee, and Ethel Puffer, have been included in the nineteenth century, but there are several reasons for including Santayana in the twentieth. For one, there was no tradition of academic aesthetics in America in the nineteenth century to which he could be attached, but Santayana inaugurated the vigorous pursuit of aesthetics in American philosophy departments in the twentieth century. Thus he should be seen as a starting point, not an end point. For another, there is the fact that he was a young man when he published The Sense of Beauty, and even though that remains his best-known work in aesthetics, the bulk of his work, including more work in aesthetics, was to come in the twentieth century – after all, he lived until 1952, thus dying a year later than the thoroughly twentieth-century Ludwig Wittgenstein. And finally, Santayana explicitly rejected what he saw as the metaphysical aesthetics of German Idealism and thus saw himself as a man of a new rather than an old century. Second, it would be arbitrary to choose a single year to divide this part and the next. While it seemed natural to use World War II to mark a genuine caesura in the history of twentieth-century British aesthetics, in the United States our chronology is complicated not merely by the fact that the war was not quite as disruptive of all other activity as it was in Britain, but, more importantly for our purposes, by the fact that several of the 235

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most important American aestheticians of midcentury, such as Monroe Beardsley, carried their work on into the 1950s and even 1960s in ways not deeply influenced by the arrival of the work of the later Wittgenstein on the philosophical scene and more continuous with earlier paradigms, such as the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Pierce and John Dewey and the theory of symbols of Ernst Cassirer, while others were deeply impacted by Wittgenstein as soon as his Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953. Thus this coverage of this part will extend as far as Nelson Goodman, whose chief work in aesthetics, Languages of Art, was published as late as 1968, while the next part will go back fifteen years to begin with Wittgenstein, or actually thirty years, since we will begin with Wittgenstein’s Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, which, although not published until 1967, record a class given in 1938. And of course the geographical boundaries of these two parts are not neat, either: Wittgenstein, of course, was an Austrian who eventually became a British citizen, but certainly not an American (he only visited once), while Cassirer, as mentioned in Part One of this book, was a German Jew who spent only the final years of his life in the United States and had done the great part of his work by then but who will nevertheless be considered here because his impact in the United States was far greater than in Germany (until recently). The present part, then, will consider exclusively American philosophers from Santayana to Goodman, with the sole exception of Cassirer, while the following part will begin with the Austro-Englishman Wittgenstein and then consider his impact on both British and American aesthetics, but with more emphasis on Americans than Britons. These two parts will thus cover American aesthetics throughout the twentieth century, but with some temporal overlap between them and with some geographical spillover as well. As far as substance is concerned, we shall see that from the outset Santayana adopted a pluralistic rather than monistic approach to the sources of pleasure in aesthetic experience, and that most American aestheticians in the first part of the twentieth century did too, although in a variety of ways, even including Dewey, whose focus on the “consummatory experience” sounds more single-minded than it is. In this period we shall consider a number of interesting aestheticians, such as DeWitt Parker, Theodore M. Greene, and D.W. Gotshalk, each of whom developed a version of a pluralistic approach to aesthetics, but whose memory was then largely effaced by the impact of Wittgenstein in the 1950s, which only a few, such as Beardsley and Goodman, resisted. We shall see

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that the initial impact of Wittgenstein represented a renewed moment of reductionism in aesthetics, not so much a reduction of acceptable approaches to aesthetic experience to a purely cognitive interpretation (that was Goodman’s role), but a reduction of the acceptable subject matter of aesthetics to questions about the definition of art and the logic of aesthetic discourse. We shall then see, however, that the subtler philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein, especially Richard Wollheim and Stanley Cavell, were able to broaden the topics of aesthetics once again and especially, each in his own way, to restore the threefold synthesis of the aesthetics of truth, of feeling, and of play. Finally, in an Epilogue, we shall see how these three approaches are being treated in a small sample of the work that has been done in the lively field of Anglo-American aesthetics in the last two decades.

6 Santayana

George Santayana (1863–1952) inaugurated aesthetics as a major part of academic philosophy in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and remained the most prominent writer on aesthetics in the United States in the first third of the twentieth, that is, until the appearance in 1934 of Art as Experience by his close contemporary John Dewey. While not part of the aestheticist movement – for example, he did not use the phrase “art for art’s sake”1 – Santayana did consider beauty, whether in nature or in art, an ultimate value, and indeed in his 1896 book The Sense of Beauty, his most enduring work, he held that beauty (and companionship in the enjoyment of it) is our only positive value, while the role of morality is negative: morality is concerned with the removal of evil, but even if all evil were removed, something to give positive value to life would still be needed and only beauty can do that. In Santayana’s words, “While æsthetic judgments are mainly positive, that is, perceptions of good, moral judgments are mainly and fundamentally negative, or perceptions of evil. . . . Morality is not mainly concerned with the attainment of pleasure; it is rather concerned, in all its deeper and more authoritative maxims, with the prevention of suffering.” But if morality were actually to be successful at eliminating suffering, then “the reign of duty” would have to give way “to the dispensation of grace” that comes from beauty. To be sure, Santayana recognized that in the present and foreseeable circumstances of human life, there is no likelihood that morality’s work of alleviating all human suffering actually will be done, so “the appreciation of beauty and its embodiment in the arts are activities which belong to our holiday life, when we are redeemed 1

See Willard E. Arnett, Santayana and the Sense of Beauty (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), p. 25.

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for the moment from the shadow of evil and the slavery of fear, and are following the bent of our nature where it chooses to lead us.”2 Thus, seven years before the publication of Principia Ethica, Santayana anticipates Moore’s claim that only beauty and friendship give positive value to life. Indeed, Santayana anticipates both parts of Moore’s claim when he says that “the variety of nature and the infinity of art, with the companionship of our fellows, would fill the leisure of that ideal existence. These are the elements of our positive happiness.”3 In fact, Santayana and Moore were friends during Santayana’s stay at Cambridge in 1896– 7, immediately after the publication of The Sense of Beauty,4 and it is possible that Santayana influenced and not merely anticipated Moore in this view. However, even these opening remarks make it clear that in the actual circumstances of human life beauty cannot be our sole value, even if it is our only purely positive value, and at the conclusion of The Sense of Beauty as well as in his second main work in aesthetics nine years later, Reason in Art, devoted, as its title suggests, to the nature of art rather than of beauty, Santayana makes it clear that morality always retains the role of ultimate arbiter, charged with finding ways to harmonize our various pursuits of value. So even though Santayana holds that beauty is our only purely positive value, he never considers our creation or pursuit of beauty exempt from moral constraints; thus he does not advocate the autonomy of art or the aesthetic if that would mean that art and beauty are exempt from moral standards. Santayana was born in Madrid, the son of a retired Spanish colonial civil servant and a Catalan mother, who had previously been married to an American merchant whom she had met in the Philippines. The family first lived in the ancient Spanish town of Avila, but after several years the mother took her three children by her first marriage as well as George to Boston in order to raise them in the bosom of and with some support from her late husband’s large family. Santayana’s father joined them when George was eight but did not adjust to America and soon returned to Spain; however, Santayana would remain close to his father until the latter’s death twenty years later and always regarded himself as more Spanish than American. The move to Boston allowed Santayana 2

3 4

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896; reprinted New York: Dover, 1955), §3, pp. 16–17. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §5, p. 20. See Santayana’s autobiography, Persons and Places, critical edition, ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1986). Santayana himself makes no claim that Moore took this idea from him.

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to receive an American education, first at the famous Boston Latin School and then at Harvard. After his undergraduate years, Santayana received a fellowship from Harvard to study at the University of Berlin, although by his own account he did not take to German philosophy and benefited more from a first visit to Oxford during that period. Rather than pursuing a Ph.D. in Germany he returned to Harvard, where he heard William James read from the manuscript of his forthcoming Principles of Psychology and studied Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit with Josiah Royce. In 1889 he completed a doctorate, at the suggestion of Royce, on the philosophy of Rudolph Lotze.5 (Half a century later, Santayana dismissed his thesis as “dull.”)6 He started his teaching career at Harvard as an instructor, taking over the course on the British empiricists from William James and the course on the Continental Rationalists from Francis Bowen, and slowly rose to full professor but held that position for only a few years before retiring, in 1912, at the age of fortyeight, when an inheritance from his mother as well as income from his publications made him independent – throughout his autobiography he claims that he had always planned to work as a teacher only until he could afford to live as a permanent student. After that he lived privately in Europe, spending World War I at Oxford and the years from 1941 until his death in 1952 at a British convent in Rome, where he had been given refuge after he had been unable to emigrate from Italy after the onset of World War II.7 5

6 7

George Santayana, Lotze’s System of Philosophy, ed. Paul Grimley Kurtz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). Santayana, Persons and Places, p. 390. Persons and Places is of course a fundamental source for Santayana’s biography. For biographies by others, see Daniel Cory, Santayana: The Later Years, a Portrait with Letters (New York: George Braziller, 1963), and John McCormack, George Santayana: A Biography (New York: Paragon House, 1987). For surveys of Santayana’s philosophy, see George W. Howgate, Santayana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938); Milton Munitz, The Moral Philosophy of Santayana (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939); Newton P. Stallknecht, George Santayana (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971); John Lachs, George Santayana (New York: Macmillan, 1988); Henry Samuel Levinson, Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Timothy L.S. Sprigge, Santayana: An Examination of His Philosophy, second edition (London: Routledge, 1995); and the collection edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of George Santayana, Library of Living Philosophers (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1940). For literature on Santayana’s aesthetics, in addition to Arnett, Santayana and the Sense of Beauty, see Jerome Ashmore, Santayana, Art and Aesthetics (Cleveland: Western Reserve University, 1955); and Irving Singer, Santayana’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), and George Santayana, Literary Philosopher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

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During all these years, Santayana continued to publish prolifically. His earliest publications were poetry; The Sense of Beauty was his first philosophical work, summing up lectures on aesthetic that he gave at Harvard from 1892 to 1895. After that, his publications alternated between purely philosophical works and more literary works. His other chief philosophical works were the five-volume series The Life of Reason: or the Phases of Human Progress (1905–6), of which Reason in Art8 was the fourth volume along with Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Religion, and Reason in Science; the epistemological introduction to his mature system of philosophy, Scepticism and Animal Faith of 1923; and then the four-volume systematic work Realms of Being (1927–40), comprising The Realm of Essence (1927), The Realm of Matter (1930), The Realm of Truth (1937), and The Realm of Spirit (1940). Among Santayana’s more literary works were Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe (1910), Character and Opinion in the United States (1920), the novel The Last Puritan (1936), and the autobiography Persons and Places (three volumes, 1944–53), the last two of which were best sellers. In his autobiography, Santayana wrote fondly but critically of both James and Royce, admiring James’s “honest humanity”9 and “masculine directness” and treasuring “his utterances on the medical side of things” but calling him “restless, spasmodic, [and] self-interrupted,”10 and ascribing to Royce a “powerful mind” but also an “intolerable” and “monotonous preoccupation with his own system.”11 He preferred to describe his own thought as inspired by the naturalism of Lucretius12 and Spinoza, on the one hand, and the idealism of Plato, on the other, but these historical figures can also be taken as stand-ins for his teachers James and Royce: Santayana always held that human beings are entirely natural creatures, but capable of forming cognitive and moral ideals, such as the ideal of truth itself, by means of which human action transforms the world that is given to humans, among which ideals must also be included the ultimate value of beauty. He claimed that it was during his abortive exposure to German Idealism in Berlin that he became “fully 8

9 10 11 12

George Santayana, Reason in Art (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905, reprinted 1934). Santayana, Persons and Places, p. 238. Santayana, Persons and Places, p. 401. Santayana, Persons and Places, p. 234. One of the subjects of his book, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1910).

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settled” in his own “naturalistic convictions,” which “revealed the real background, the true and safe foundation, for human courage, human reason, and human imagination” that “might then fill the foreground ad libitum with their creations, political and poetic.” “Both the Greeks and Spinoza,” Santayana continued, “combined the two insights that were for me essential: naturalism as to the origin and history of mankind, and fidelity, in moral sentiments, to the inspiration of reason, by which the human mind conceives truth and eternity, and participates in them ideally,”13 that is, by way of the ideals rather than facts expressed in their philosophy, art, and social institutions.

1. The Sense of Beauty The influence of James is strongest in the early work The Sense of Beauty. The gestation of this work as lectures given at Harvard from 1892 to 1895 means that it was written just after James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890, which Santayana had already heard as a graduate student, and thus before James himself had expounded his more purely philosophical pragmatism in such works as The Will to Believe (1897) and Pragmatism (1907). James’s influence is evident in the introduction to The Sense of Beauty, where Santayana rejects “didactic,” “historical,” and “metaphysical” approaches to aesthetics in favor of a “psychological” method. About metaphysical approaches in particular he says 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 they express, and in fact constitute, some of our later appreciations” – his idea is that metaphysical or theological theories cannot explain our basic appreciation of beauty, although if we are already committed to some metaphysical or theological ideas for other reasons, then it will be perfectly natural for us to read them into some of our aesthetic experiences. For example, the “expressiveness of the sky is due to certain qualities of the sensation, which bind it to all things happy and pure, and, in a mind in which the essence of purity and happiness is embodied in an idea of God, bind it also to that idea”14 – but in a mind not inclined to connect purity and happiness to an idea of God, aesthetic experience will not introduce that idea. So much for the “arbitrary and unreal theories” of a great deal of the history of aesthetics, 13 14

Santayana, Persons and Places, pp. 257–8. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, p. 7.

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especially of the first part of the nineteenth century. Instead, Santayana proposes only to “study human sensibility itself and our actual feelings about beauty, and we shall look for no deeper, unconscious causes of our æsthetic consciousness”;15 he will deal with “æsthetic judgments as phenomena of mind and products of mental evolution,” seeking to understand “the origin and conditions of these feelings and their relation to the rest of our economy,” thereby enabling us “to distinguish transitory preferences and ideals, which rest on peculiar conditions, from those which, springing from those elements of mind which all men share, are comparatively permanent and universal.”16 These remarks suggest that in addition to being influenced by James, Santayana must also have been influenced by the psychological aesthetics of eighteenth-century Britain; we shall see shortly that there are indeed important affinities between Santayana’s view and eighteenth-century aesthetics, although in spite of the last words quoted he in fact abjures the idea of completely universal standards of taste, which many eighteenth-century thinkers accepted. The most important idea that Santayana revived from eighteenthcentury aesthetics is the idea that the creation and the appreciation of beauty are “spontaneous” “liberal and imaginative activities of man” that can properly be called “play” rather than “work”; that it is “in the spontaneous play of his faculties that man finds himself and his happiness”; and that we may thus “measure the degree of happiness and civilization which any race has attained by the proportion of its energy which is devoted to free and generous pursuits, to the adornment of life and the culture of the imagination.”17 By these words Santayana reveals himself to have a far more favorable attitude toward the aesthetics of play than most of his contemporaries in Germany and Britain. Let us begin our discussion of The Sense of Beauty then by seeing how he reaches this position and what conclusions he draws from it in the opening chapter, “The Nature of Beauty.” Santayana begins with the claim that “there is no value apart from some appreciation of it, and no good apart from some preference of it before its absence or its opposite. In appreciation, in preference, lies the root and essence of all excellence.”18 Thus, “in the absence of all consciousness . . . value would be removed from the world,” and even in a world containing only “beings of a purely intellectual cast, minds in which the transformations of nature were mirrored without any 15 16 17 18

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, p. 7. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, pp. 5–6. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §4, pp. 18–19. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §2, p. 13.

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emotion” there would also be no value.19 For Santayana the existence of value is rooted entirely in the psychology of human preferences, and the Moorean idea that even apart from humans to enjoy it there would be more value in a world containing organic wholes than in one containing only trash heaps is incomprehensible: “Values spring from the immediate and inexplicable reaction of vital impulse, and from the irrational part of our nature.”20 It is then a matter for psychological investigation to discover what our human preferences are, and in particular to discover what our aesthetic preferences are, that is, to discover what are positive sources of pleasure and value rather than those that consist only in the alleviation of pain. Santayana’s first observation is that “we are naturally pleased by every perception, and recognition and surprise are particularly acute sensations,” so we are naturally pleased by “striking truth in any imitation” – this observation of course goes back beyond the eighteenth-century to Aristotle’s Poetics. So “truth and realism are therefore æsthetically good, but they are not all-sufficient, since the representation of everything is not equally pleasing.” “Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination,” and truthful representation is neither sufficient nor necessary for entertainment, since, as Santayana has just observed, some truthful representations are not especially pleasing and, as he will go on to argue, there are many things besides truthful representation that do stimulate our senses and imagination. So he concludes that truth enters into art “only as it subserves these ends.” More generally, he argues that “even the scientific value of truth is not . . . ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on æsthetic interests.”21 That is, truth is not intrinsically valuable – we have no irreducible preference for truth as such – but it is valuable only insofar as it is either a means to the satisfaction of a moral interest, that is, the removal of an evil, or insofar as it contributes, when it does, to some freely pleasing play of the senses and imagination, that is, to some aesthetic experience. Truth is not excluded from the free play of the mind, but it is of positive although not intrinsic value only when the mind can play with it. “Our whole intellectual life has its only justification in its connexion with our pleasure and pains.”22 That Santayana does not accept a reductive aesthetics of truth is clear from the outset, but neither 19 20 21 22

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §1, p. 13. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §2, p. 14. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §2, p. 15. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §2, p. 16.

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will he deny the appreciation of truth under the proper conditions a place in aesthetic pleasure. Santayana’s next step is to introduce the distinction between the negative value of morality and the positive value of the aesthetic that has already been described.23 He then identifies this distinction with “the famous contrast between work and play.”24 Santayana begins his discussion of this contrast provocatively, calling “everything play which is useless activity, exercise that springs from the physiological impulse to discharge the energy which the exigencies of life have not called out,” and work “all action that is necessary or useful for life.” It may thus seem that “play is essentially frivolous,” as we have seen that many of the critics of Herbert Spencer held. But “to condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content.”25 Rather, the useful is always only instrumental in value, good only as a means to something else, and that in turn must either itself be a further means to yet some other good or else something of intrinsic value, something “good in itself and for its own sake, else the whole process is futile, and the utility of our first object illusory.” And here is where Santayana then claims that “if we attempt to remove from life all its evils, as the popular imagination has done at times, we shall find little but æsthetic pleasures remaining to constitute unalloyed happiness.”26 Santayana holds that “this reduction of all values to immediate appreciations, to sensuous or vital activities, is so inevitable that it has struck even the minds most courageously rationalistic,”27 but it is part of his psychological approach that there can be no further explanation of the fact that the discharge of energy not called upon to solve the practical problems of life through free and spontaneous play is positively and intrinsically or ultimately pleasing; that is a matter of psychological observation. As we have just seen, Santayana also calls the intrinsic or ultimate character of aesthetic appreciation “immediate,” and that will become the first of his criteria for beauty. A further key component of his emerging definition of beauty is introduced when he distinguishes between physical and aesthetic pleasure. As a student of James, he is fully committed to the principle that aesthetic pleasures, like all other mental phenomena, 23 24 25 26 27

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §3, pp. 16–17. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §4, p. 17. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §4, pp. 17–18. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §5, p. 19–20. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §5, p. 20.

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are fully rooted in the human body; they “have physical conditions, they depend on the activity of the eye and the ear, of the memory and the other ideational functions of the brain.” Nevertheless there is what we might call a phenomenological difference – although Santayana does not use this term – between physical and aesthetic pleasures, namely, that “the organs of the latter must be transparent, they must not intercept our attention, but carry it directly to some external object,” whereas the “pleasures we call physical, and regard as low, on the contrary, are those which call our attention to some part of our own body, and which make no object so conspicuous to us as the organ in which they arise.” “The greater dignity and range of æsthetic pleasure is thus made very intelligible.”28 Santayana does not, however, actually explain why the fact that aesthetic pleasure calls our attention away from our own body toward another object should lend it greater dignity; there might be some unstated puritanism about the enjoyment of our own bodies at work here, but Santayana could not appeal explicitly to morality to ground any such premise given his insistence that it is aesthetics and not morality that is the source of positive values. Be that as it may, Santayana will use the criteria of immediacy and phenomenological objectivity, or as he calls it “objectification,” in order to define beauty. Before he does that, however, Santayana distinguishes the criteria for beauty that he is about to introduce into his definition from two that were prominent in earlier aesthetic theories, namely, disinterestedness and universal validity. He argues, particularly against Schopenhauer, that the immediacy of aesthetic pleasure should not be confused with its total independence from desire, that “appreciation of a picture is not identical with the desire to buy it, but it is, or ought to be, closely related to and preliminary to that desire.” “The truth which the theory is trying to state seems rather to be that when we seek æsthetic pleasures we have no further pleasure in mind; that we do not mix up the satisfaction of vanity and proprietorship with the delight of contemplation. . . . What fills the mind is no calculation, but the image of an object or event, suffused with emotion.”29 That is, aesthetic pleasure is not disconnected from desire; it is rather the ultimate value that gives rise to desire, and disinterestedness is a misdescription of the immediacy and objectification of aesthetic pleasure, that its value is intrinsic rather than instrumental and that it turns our attention away from our own bodies as the site 28 29

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §7, pp. 23–4. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §8, p. 25.

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of pleasure to the objects that cause that pleasure. Second, although without mentioning the name that it would be natural to mention here, namely, the name of Kant, Santayana denies that universality is a necessary condition of beauty, and moreover asserts that “it is unmeaning to say that what is beautiful to one man ought to be beautiful to another.”30 Instead, he says that while it is natural for us “to take a certain pleasure in having our own judgments supported by those of others,” to insist upon the universal validity of our own judgments rather than taking pleasure in the variety of human tastes is a sign of lack of confidence in our own judgments. Instead, the true test of merit in a work is not “the capacity of all men to appreciate it” but “the degree and kind of satisfaction it can give to him who appreciates it most.”31 Vigorous disagreements about matters of taste can even be signs of aesthetic health, showing that both sides really are feeling the genuine pleasure of the free play of their senses and imagination even if, for whatever reasons, they take such pleasure in different particular objects. As the insistence upon disinterestedness in aesthetic judgment is a misdescription of the immediacy of aesthetic pleasure, however, so Santayana also explains the insistence upon universality in aesthetic judgments as a misdescription of the phenomenological objectivity of aesthetic pleasure: “If we say that other men should see the beauties we see, it is because we think those beauties are in the object, like its colour, proportion, or size,” and this is how beauties really do strike us. This cannot be literally true, because “beauty, as we have seen, is a value; it cannot be conceived as an independent existence which affects our senses and we consequently perceive. It exists in perception, and cannot exist otherwise.”32 But it really is how beauty feels to us – again, a psychological observation that is not further explicable or derivable. This conclusion leads to Santayana’s definition of beauty as “value positive, intrinsic, and objectified,” or “pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.”33 This is just meant to sum up the results of the contrasts previously made. Like all value, beauty “is not a perception of a matter of fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature,” but unlike moral value, it is a positive value, not a value consisting only in the removal of an evil, and “a pure gain which brings no evil with it”; unlike utilitarian value, it is not pleasurable because it is 30 31 32 33

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §9, p. 27. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §9, p. 28. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §10, p. 29. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §11, p. 31.

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the means to something else that is pleasurable, “something that gives satisfaction to a natural function, to some fundamental need or capacity of our minds,” and unlike physical pleasure, which is indeed both positive (though no doubt if excessive then attended with evil) and immediate, it does not focus our attention on our own bodily organs of sensation but rather, “by the objectification of the elements and their appearance as qualities rather of things than of consciousness,” it draws our attention away from our bodies and to its own cause.34 Santayana has already shown himself to be open to a link between the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of play. In the lines just quoted he has also associated beauty with emotion, but it is not yet clear whether by that he means just pleasure, thus that beauty produces a special but single feeling of pleasure, or whether he means that our response to beauty potentially involves the full range of human emotions. As his argument proceeds, however, we will see that he means the latter, and thus that he is taking an approach to the experience of beauty that involves all three elements of cognition, play, and emotional impact. For the rest of The Sense of Beauty is devoted to arguing against reductionist and monistic theories of beauty that there is not just one kind of qualities of objects that can please us in this way but a wide range of qualities that can – indeed really all qualities of objects can please us in this way if we can involve them in a free and spontaneous play of our own senses and imagination rather than consider them from a purely intellectual or moral point of view. Although he does not himself state it this way, Santayana’s argument can thus be taken to show that the theory of aesthetic response as free play does not entail a formalist conception of beauty and the exclusion of emotion as Kant seemed to have thought, at least in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” – and Santayana’s position can thus also be taken as an argument avant la lettre against the emotional reductionism as well as formalism of someone like Bell. Santayana expresses his point by beginning the remainder of the book with the thesis that “all human functions can contribute to the sense of beauty . . . whenever they are inextricably associated with the objectifying activity of the understanding.”35 These human functions can be divided under the rubrics of materials, form, and expression, and so those are the topics of the remaining three parts of the book. Since materials and form can be considered as exhausting the properties that objects can 34 35

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §11, p. 31–2. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §12, p. 35.

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have insofar as we respond to them considered apart from one another, and under expression Santayana includes all the associations that we may form between the immediate objects of our responses and others, this division in fact implies that any properties of objects can become aesthetic properties of them if they can stimulate a spontaneous and free play of our senses, emotions, and understanding that can lead to a positive, immediate, and objectifiable pleasure. Beauty is thus to be defined entirely in terms of the character of our pleasure in objects and not restricted to any specific properties of objects or exclude any specific responses to them. Under the category of materials Santayana includes the most immediately sensed properties or effects of objects, thus the feel of objects to touch, tastes and smells of objects, sounds, and colors. “The senses of touch, taste, and smell,” however, “have not served in many for the purposes of intelligence so much as those of sight and hearing”; thus “they remain normally in the background of consciousness, and furnish the least part of our objectified ideas,” and therefore “the pleasures connected with them . . . also remain detached, and unused for the purpose of appreciation of nature.”36 For the most part, these qualities do not produce pleasure by stimulating a free and spontaneous play of our mental powers and they do not draw our attention away from our own sensory organs toward external objects, so they do not figure largely in the sense of beauty, although it is by no means impossible for poets, for example, to evoke scents and tastes, and Santayana even conjectures that as we move further away from puritanism such qualities may play a larger role in art. “Sound shares with the lower senses the disadvantage of having no intrinsic spatial character,” Santayana observes next, so “the pleasures of the ear cannot become, in the literal sense, qualities of things,” “but there is in sounds such an exquisite and continuing gradation in pitch, and such a measurable relation in length, that an object almost as complex and describable as the visible one can be built out of them,”37 and thus music does offer us both the possibility of free play of our mental capacities and the possibility of objectifying the resultant pleasure, that is, attributing it to the acoustic object that does seem to stand phenomenologically apart from our own sensations of sound. He does claim, however, that while music is “the purest and most impressive of the arts,” 36 37

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §15, p. 42. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §16, p. 44.

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it is also “the least human and instructive of them.”38 Santayana does not explain this claim, which seems somewhat strange following as it does immediately after a qualified endorsement of “Schopenhauer’s speculative assertion that music repeats the entire world of sense, and is a parallel method of expression of the underlying substance, or will,”39 but perhaps what he has in mind is that music cannot draw on as full a range of materials and associations as some other arts do, and therefore cannot occupy the mind as fully as some of the other arts do. Opera afficionados will no doubt beg to differ (and Santayana’s autobiography suggests that music did not loom large in his own aesthetic experience, which was much more informed by the visual arts and literature). Following his discussion of sound, Santayana turns to color, which he argues both offers immediate pleasures of its own and is essential to the perception of form, since “form cannot be the form of nothing.” From this observation he infers that if “in finding or creating beauty, we ignore the materials of things, and attend only to their form, we miss an ever-present opportunity to heighten our effects. For whatever delight the form may bring, the material might have given delight already, and so much would have been gained toward the value of the total result. . . . There is no effect of form which an effect of material could not enhance.”40 Santayana illustrates this point by observing that “the colours of the sunset have a brilliance that attracts attention, and a softness and illusiveness that enchant the eye; while the many associations of the evening and of heaven gather about this kindred charm and deepen it,” and “in stained glass, also, we have an example of masses of color made to exert their powerful direct influence, to intensify an emotion eventually to be attached to very ideal effects.”41 These examples suggest that he regards the immediate pleasure of purely sensory qualities and the pleasure of their emotional associations as at the very least deeply intertwined, as on the same plane phenomenologically and equally fit for objectification. Indeed, Santayana’s line between the sensory materials of aesthetic perception and emotional associations is even less rigid than this already lax phenomenology might suggest, for the first two factors that he discusses under the rubric of the materials of beauty are not in fact the deliverances of the “lower” senses at all but rather “the influence 38 39 40 41

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §16, p. 45. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §16, pp. 44–5. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §18, p. 49. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §17, p. 48.

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of the passion of love”42 and the “social instincts and their æsthetic influence”43 (here revealing the unmistakable heritage of Addison and Burke). Santayana states that the “sexual emotions” can be “simultaneously extended to various secondary objects,” and thus “the colour, the grace, and the form, which become the stimuli of sexual passion, acquire, before they can fulfil that office, a certain intrinsic charm”; through that effect, “the capacity to love gives our contemplation that flow without which it might often fail to manifest beauty; and the whole sentimental side of our æsthetic sensibility – without which it would be perceptive and mathematical rather than æsthetic – is due to our sexual organization remotely stirred.”44 By the aesthetic influence of social passions, Santayana has in mind the way in which sources of happiness such as “friendship, wealth, reputation, power, . . . influence,” “family life,” and “home” can become “materialized” in an object; for example, “‘home,’ which in its social sense is a concept of happiness, when it becomes materialized in a cottage and garden becomes an æsthetic concept, becomes a beautiful thing. The happiness is objectified, and the object beautified.”45 Again, the point is that whatever source of spontaneous mental play and thereby pleasure can be objectified can become material for beauty, and there is no need for a rigid distinction between internal properties and external associations. Although form is not the sole source of beauty for Santayana, it is at the heart of his account – as he puts it, “the most remarkable and characteristic problem of æsthetics is that of beauty of form,” the “mysterious” effect that takes place when even “sensible elements, by themselves indifferent, are so united as to please in combination.”46 Although the beauty of materials that Santayana has already described can to some extent stand on its own, the beauty of expression that he will subsequently describe presupposes the beauty of form, and in either case beauty of form is at the heart of aesthetic experience. This is because beauty of form is perceived through spontaneous and harmonious activity, in the simplest cases primarily bodily activity, as in the perception of “flowing and graceful” geometrical curves felt through “a natural and rhythmical set of movements in the optic muscles,” but in most cases 42 43 44 45 46

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §13, p. 37. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §14, p. 40. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §13, p. 38. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §14, p. 41. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §19, p. 53.

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through the mental activity that Santayana designates with the Kantian term “synthesis”: The synthesis, then, which constitutes form is an activity of the mind; the unity arises consciously, and is an insight into the relation of sensible elements separately perceived. It differs from sensation in the consciousness of the synthesis, and from expression in the homogeneity of the elements, and in their common presence to sense.47

Although Santayana makes only one passing reference to Kant, a few pages after this but in a different connection (discussing the sense of “multiplicity in uniformity,” which is what actually moves us in observing the “infinity” of the stars, Santayana notes Kant’s famous comparison between our awe for the “starry skies above” and the “moral law within”),48 his view can be regarded as reviving Kant’s theory that beauty is constituted by the pleasure that arises from the free play of our cognitive capacities with the elements of the representations of objects, although unlike Kant he sees no reason to exclude the pleasures of our play with our representations of the materials of objects and with their associations from this explanation (and of course in his theory of aesthetic ideas as central to the creation and experience of works of fine art, Kant too had relaxed his own initial restriction of the proper objects of aesthetic experience to form alone). The ancestry of Santayana’s view is further evident when he introduces the Kantian concept of “apperception” (also revived by Theodor Lipps) to characterize the experience of form.49 By this Santayana seems to mean consciousness of the relations among particular perceptions insofar as that consciousness is the product of the spontaneous activity of the mind and is thereby pleasing. Form brings “into play in a marked manner the faculty of apperception”: There is in the senses, as we have seen, a certain form of stimulation, a certain measure and rhythm of waves with which the æsthetic value of the sensation is connected. So when, in the perception of the object, a notable contribution is made by memory and mental habit, the value of the perception will be due, not only to the pleasantness of the external stimulus, but also to the pleasantness of the apperceptive reaction; and the latter source 47 48

49

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §23, p. 62. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §26, p. 67. Kant’s famous passage opens the Conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason (5:161–2). The concept of apperception as consciousness of the identity of the self through its various particular perceptions, or as Kant calls them representations, is the central idea in his “Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding” in the Critique of Pure Reason (e.g., A 116–19, B 130–7).

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of value will be more important in proportion as the object perceived is more dependent, for the form and meaning it presents, upon our past experience and imaginative trend, and less on the structure of the external object.50

By the distinctions between external stimulus and apperception and between the “structure of the external object” and “past experience and imaginative trend,” Santayana suggests that pleasure in beauty is not primarily an immediate sensory response to discrete stimuli, although no doubt some part of the beauty of materials can be so understood, but rather the enjoyment of the activity of the mind in exploring the relations among present, past, and possible future perceptions. Santayana implies that in aesthetic experience apperception is a spontaneous linkage of present with both past and possible future perception and thought in the following illustration: “A certain musical phrase . . . is played in the brain; the awakening of that echo is the act of apperception and the harmony of the present stimulation with the form of that phrase; the power of this particular object to develop and intensify that phrase in the direction of pleasure, is the test of the formal beauty of this example”51 – awakening an echo links present consciousness with past, and developing the phrase carries the present into the future. Going “in the direction of pleasure” requires that this mental activity be felt as free and spontaneous. Having revived the core notion of Kant’s aesthetics, Santayana next takes positions on a number of questions also raised by Kant and other eighteenth-century thinkers, although again without mentioning Kant’s name. In response to the question “Are all things beautiful?” Santayana first affirms that he is willing to accept the explanation of beauty as a peculiarly human response to objects and that he has no interest in disputing “mystics,” for example, “who declare that to God there is no distinction in the value of things”: “How things would appear to us if we were not human is, to a man, a question of no importance.”52 Santayana next maintains that the explanation of beauty as a peculiarly human response does not mean that humans can make anything and everything in nature appear beautiful, or equally beautiful: “When once the human bias is admitted as a legitimate, because for us a necessary, basis of preference, the whole wealth of nature is at once organized by that standard into a hierarchy of values. . . . Things differ immensely in this capacity to please 50 51 52

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §28, p. 71. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §28, p. 72. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §31, p. 79.

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us in the contemplation of them, and therefore they differ immensely in beauty.”53 However, unlike Kant and other eighteenth-century thinkers, Santayana makes no attempt to argue that there can be a standard of taste founded on the ideal agreement of all human beings under optimal conditions for aesthetic experience but denies that there can be such a standard. “Æsthetic capacity is . . . very unevenly distributed,” he maintains, “and the world of beauty is much vaster and more complex to one man than to another,”54 and while all humans are no doubt capable of developing their particular “aesthetic capacity” with appropriate opportunity, resources, and motivation, “the ideal enlargement of human capacity . . . has no tendency to constitute a single standard of beauty.” Rather, multiple “standards remain the expression of diverse habits of sense and imagination.”55 As Santayana had argued in the introduction to The Sense of Beauty, insistence upon the universal validity of judgments of taste is only a sign of lack of confidence in one’s own taste; those who are confident that their aesthetic pleasures result from the free and spontaneous play of their own experience and imagination can accept the fact that the genuinely aesthetic pleasures of others whose sensibilities and minds are different from their own because of both native bent and past experience will inevitably differ from their own. Finally, Santayana also takes up the eighteenth-century question of the relation between beauty of form and beauty of utility. In the previous century, this relation had been a matter of dispute, some, like Burke, arguing that beauty had nothing to do with utility, others, like Hume, arguing that the greatest part of beauty was nothing but the appearance of utility, and Kant, perhaps somewhat grudgingly, trying to steer his way through this dispute by recognizing both free and adherent beauty as species of a single genus. Santayana takes a generally Kantian line by distinguishing between the beauty of utility and the beauty of ornament but recognizes that we typically find both in many works of both nature and art. He begins by noting that even if we keep the ideas of utility and of beauty apart, they are both equally rooted in human responses to objects rather than in anything external to objects, so judgments of utility are certainly not more objective than judgments of beauty: “Beauty and rightness are relative to our judgment and emotion: they in no sense exist in nature or preside over her.”56 Our judgments of utility are natural and relatively 53 54 55 56

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §31, p. 80. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §31, p. 80. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §31, p. 81. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §39, p. 98.

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immediate responses to our recognition of the relations between our environments and our needs, but they have to be made more determinate than mere feelings of rightness. To some extent this happens mechanically, as when, for example, different patterns of precipitation lead to different rooflines and thus different angles for “the pediment of the Greek temple and the gable of the northern house,” and to this extent “the eye in each case accepts what utility imposes,” and thus we come to feel that what is useful is beautiful. But, Santayana counters, It would be an error . . . to conclude that habit alone establishes the right proportion in these various types of building . . . besides the unity of type and correspondence of parts which custom establishes, there are certain appeals to more fundamental susceptibilities of the human eye and imagination. There is, for instance, the value of abstract form, determined by the pleasantness and harmony of implicated retinal or muscular tensions. Different structures contain or suggest more or less of this kind of beauty.57

In other words, in responding to complex objects, including but not restricted to artifacts produced by humans, we respond partly with a sense of rightness, which can itself be determined partly by natural mechanisms of evolution but also just by the natural mechanism of custom, and partly with our sense of pleasure in the play of our sensory and more intellectual capacities. “We have accordingly,” Santayana continues, “two independent sources of effect,” first, “the useful form, which generates the type, and ultimately the beauty of form, when the type has been idealized by emphasizing its intrinsically pleasing traits,” and, second, “the beauty of ornament, which comes from the excitement of the senses, or of the imagination, by colour, or by profusion or delicacy of detail.”58 But in our overall experience of an object, we do not need to be conscious of any difference between the pleasure objectified into our representation of the object from one source and that from the other, and even on one side, that of our sense of the ideal form of the object as a member of a type as contrasted to the form of its ornament, the effects of its instrumentally and its intrinsically pleasing traits are intertwined. Santayana’s position can be summed up by saying that while the theorist can draw theoretical distinctions among the sources of aesthetic pleasure, these are not phenomenological distinctions in the objectified pleasure that constitutes beauty in real aesthetic experience.

57 58

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §40, p. 100. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §41, p. 101.

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Santayana emphasizes the unity of the human mind and therefore of aesthetic experience in beginning his final chapter: Although “we have found in the beauty of material and form the objectification of certain pleasures connected with the process of direct perception, with the formation, in the one case of a sensation, or quality, in the other of a synthesis of sensations or qualities . . . the human consciousness is not a perfectly clear mirror, with distinct boundaries and clear-cut images, determinate in number and exhaustively perceived,” and thus these aetiological distinctions are not phenomenological distinctions in aesthetic experience. But further, Santayana now argues: We not only construct visible unities and recognizable types, but remain aware of their affinities to what is not at the time perceived; that is, we find in them a certain tendency and quality, not original to them, a meaning and a tone, which upon investigation we shall see to have been the proper characteristics of other objects and feelings, associated with them once in our experience.59

This is what Santayana means by “expression,” which may thus either “make beautiful by suggestion things in themselves indifferent, or it may come to heighten the beauty which they already possess.” As with the distinction between beauty of material and beauty of form, Santayana makes it clear that the distinction between the beauty of expression and those other two sources of beauty is etiological but not phenomenological: “Expression then differs from material or formal value only as habit differs from instinct – in its origin. Physiologically, they are both pleasurable radiations of a given stimulus; mentally, they are both values incorporated in an object.”60 Santayana discusses a wide range of “second terms” that can become associated with the primary beauties of material and form: The latter can call up physical pleasure, passion, or even pain and transform them by their association; thus arise the comic, the tragic, and the sublime.61 The materials and forms of objects can stir up moral associations62 and associations with other kinds of truth, personal or general.63 Even such “elements of the value of an object” as “the rarity of its material, the labour of the manufacture, and the distance from which it is brought” can become part of the expressive force of an object: No associations of an object are excluded in principle from its aesthetic 59 60 61 62 63

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part IV, §48, p. 119. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part IV, §48, p. 120. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part IV, §50, pp. 124–5; see generally §§56–61. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part IV, §55, pp. 134–6. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part IV, §58, pp. 140–3.

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significance or beauty; the test is only whether our pleasure in those associations does in fact become objectified, or incorporated seamlessly into our pleasurable experience of the object – thus even “practical values, when suggested by and incorporated in any object, contribute to its beauty.”64 For Santayana there is no antecedent theoretical restriction on what can enter into the spontaneous play of our senses and imagination with an object and thus what can count as part of its beauty; the test for beauty is the purely phenomenological one of what can actually become objectified pleasure. Thus Santayana’s concept of beauty itself is one with roots in the eighteenth century – early in the century, Francis Hutcheson had introduced the ontological model that beauty is not a property of an object distinct from our response to it, but rather the pleasurable “idea rais’d in us” by an object65 – but unlike many eighteenth-century theorists Santayana does not insist that only form or only associations can stimulate the pleasure that is in turn represented as if it were a property of an external object; whatever can cause pleasure by stimulating the spontaneous play of our sensory and mental capacities and yet at the same time draw our attention away from ourselves and make it seem as if that pleasure is a property of the object itself can count as beauty. Thus our strictly sensory responses to objects, our emotional responses, and our conceptual responses can all enter into the sense of beauty. Precisely because he sees beauty as effacing not only any boundaries among its different sources but also the boundary between self and external world, Santayana can end The Sense of Beauty with the Kantian thought that the existence of beauty is a sign that the world is an arena hospitable to our own objectives and that we belong in it. Santayana writes: When our senses and imagination find what they crave, when the world so shapes itself or so moulds the mind that the correspondence between them is perfect, then perception is pleasure, and existence needs no apology. . . . Beauty therefore seems to be the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its possibility. If perfection is, as it should be, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.66

Lofty language, but no metaphysics: Santayana is not reverting to the idealist idea that our experience of beauty is a sign that human spirit and 64 65

66

Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part IV, §53, p. 131. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Treatise I, section I, §IX, p. 23. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part IV, §67, p. 164.

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world spirit are identical, or anything of the sort; he is just asserting that the objectification of pleasure as beauty is a product of natural processes and evidence that the human organism can enjoy its existence in nature and make it more pleasurable in many different ways.

2. Reason in Art Santayana’s second main work in aesthetics turns from the nature of beauty in general to the character of art and emphasizes that through art human beings not only transform their experience of nature by objectifying their pleasure into it but also transform nature itself, creating objects of pleasure in it. Santayana begins Reason in Art with the naturalistic and pragmatist premise – anticipating Dewey – that human life is an equilibrium maintained by bodily action guided by reason in the broadest sense of informed intelligence. Both in general and for human beings in particular, “Life is an equilibrium which is maintained now by accepting modification and now by imposing it. Since the organ for all activity is a body in mechanical relation to other material objects, objects which the creature’s instincts often compel him to appropriate or transform, changes in his habits and pursuits leave their marks.”67 For most creatures and even for many human transactions with the environment, the modification of both environment and self transpires without consciousness, let alone intention, but of course human action is sometimes conscious and intentional: “Sometimes . . . man’s traces are traces of useful action which has so changed natural objects as to make them congenial to his mind.” Intentionally transforming nature to fit our own needs is a fundamental part of the “life of reason” and constitutes art in the broadest sense: “Any operation which thus humanises and rationalises objects is called art.”68 In this broad sense, all art involves some “material embodiment,” some actual modification of the physical world, and this is one way in which art goes beyond merely intellectual activity: Of all reason’s embodiments art is therefore the most splendid and complete. Merely to attain categories by which inner experience may be articulated, or to feign analogies by which a universe may be conceived, would be but a visionary triumph if it remained ineffectual and went with no actual remodelling of the outer world, to render man’s dwelling more appropriate and his mind better fed and more largely transmissible. Mind grows self-

67 68

Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. I, p. 3. Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. I, p. 4.

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perpetuating only by its expression in matter. . . . Art, in establishing instruments for human life beyond the human body, and moulding outer things into sympathy with inner values, establishes a ground whence values may continually spring up.69 Art is action which transcending the body makes the world a more congenial stimulus to the soul.70

In general, “art may be expected to subserve all parts of the human ideal, to increase man’s comfort, knowledge, and delight.”71 Thus Santayana rejects Croce’s rigid distinction between the mental work of art and the physical work of craft, which was based on the latter’s equally rigid distinction between the theoretical and the practical. However, he allows that art in general may be divided into “mechanical or industrial art,” on the one hand, in which “untoward matter is better prepared” for the purpose of comfort, and “liberal” art, on the other, “in which perfectly fit matter is appropriated to ideal use and endowed with a direct spiritual function.” Liberal arts “bring to spiritual fruition the matter which either nature or industry has prepared and rendered propitious,” spiritual fruition in turn consisting “in the activity of turning an apt material into an expressive and delightful form.”72 The latter activity leads to fine art, although actually Santayana should divide liberal art into that directed primarily at knowledge and that directed primarily at delight and restrict fine art to the latter, though once again he does not want to compartmentalize our experience and activity in unnatural ways and notes “that all industry contains an element of fine art and all fine art an element of industry”; presumably he would say something similar even if he did make explicit a difference between liberal art aimed primarily at knowledge and fine art aimed primarily at delight. Two noteworthy points follow from Santayana’s distinction between industrial and fine art within a general concept of art (which is yet one more point in which the Kantian ancestry of his aesthetics is apparent).73 One is that Santayana carries over the assumption that art is always a transformation of material in the world beyond mere thought from the concept of art in general to the case of fine art, and there is always 69 70 71 72 73

Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. I, p. 13. Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. I, p. 15. Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. I, p. 17. Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. II, pp. 32–3. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Pave of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) §§43–5 (abbreviated through this work as CPJ).

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something that counts as material and therefore public, or perhaps better as public and therefore material, in fine art: Art needs to find a material relatively formless which its business is to shape; and this initial formlessness in matter is essential to art’s existence. Were there no stone not yet sculptured and built into walls, no sentiment not yet perfectly uttered in poetry, no distance or oblivion yet to be abolished by motion or inferential thought, activity of all sorts would have lost its occasion. Matter, or actuality in what is only potentially ideal, is therefore a necessary condition for realising an ideal at all.74

The assumption that the human being is an organism in constant interaction with a physical environment is fundamental to Santayana’s conception of fine art, something that he could have learned from his teacher William James and that would also be prominent in John Dewey’s aesthetics three decades later; as remarked, this assumption marks a striking difference between Santayana’s aesthetics and that of his contemporary Croce. In order to maintain this premise, Santayana is willing to treat something internal like sentiment or even things as abstract as distance and oblivion as material; it might seem more natural to think of these as themes for poetry or other forms of art rather than as material, or as material only in the sense of themes, and to think of something more concrete, such as speech, as the material for fine arts such as poetry. But what Santayana wants to stress by the concept of material here is the transformative even more than the public character of all art, including fine art: “Art, in calling for materials, calls for materials plastic to its influence and definitely predisposed to its ends.”75 Sentiments and abstractions (such as distance and oblivion) are feelings and ideas that art must transform into things with form just as it transforms stone. The second point that Santayana draws from his general conception of art is that in fine art as well as industrial art there is interaction between the constraints of material and material life, on the one hand, and the spontaneity of imagination, on the other. All art, not just fine art, “lies between two extremes. On the one side is purely spontaneous fancy, which would never foresee its own works and scarcely recognise or value them after they have been created . . . and on the other side is pure utility, which would deprive the work of all inherent ideality, and render it inexpressive or anything in man save his necessities.”76 Of course, the 74 75 76

Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. II, p. 30. Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. II, p. 31. Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. III, p. 36.

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emphasis is different in the two forms of art: In industrial art, no doubt, the need for utility is predominant and the spontaneity of imagination is thereby constrained, while in fine art, because the aim is delight, spontaneity predominates – but it must still be focused by the nature of the materials being transformed as well as by the natural human desire to communicate. In either case, art requires some equilibrium between necessity and freedom, although the balance can differ: “The meanest arts are those which lie near the limit either of utility or of automatic self-expression. They become nobler and more rational as their utility is rendered spontaneous or their spontaneity beneficial.”77 This point might also be expressed by saying that in Reason and Art Santayana’s contrast from The Sense of Beauty between work and play is now not absolute but relative: Industrial art and fine art do not differ by one being all work and the other all play, but they differ rather in the prominence of work and play. In the chapter “The Justification of Art,” Santayana similarly refines his earlier account of the relation between aesthetic experience and morality. In The Sense of Beauty he had argued, like G.E. Moore, that the pleasures of beauty and friendship are the only intrinsic goods, and that the value of morality is strictly instrumental, that of removing obstacles to the enjoyment of these goods, so that in an ideal world there would be no need for morality, although of course in the real world there is, and we can enjoy beauty as it were only on holiday. In Reason in Art he assigns morality a more enduring role in human life than this suggests but at the same time describes art as contributing to the achievement of morality and not just awaiting morality’s completion of its work. Santayana certainly does not retract his claim that the enjoyment of beauty, now in the form of the enjoyment of fine art, is an intrinsic good: “That art is prima facie and in itself a good cannot be doubted. It is a spontaneous activity, and that settles the question” – spontaneity is enjoyable and enjoyment is good. Yet Santayana now implies that aesthetic enjoyment may be one intrinsic good among many sources of pleasure, and that the function of morality is not simply to remove some external obstacles to the enjoyment of pleasure once and for all. Rather, morality plays an ongoing and permanent role in harmonizing our interests and activities: “The function of ethics is precisely to revise prima facie judgments of this kind and to fix the ultimate resultant of all given interests, so far as they can be combined.” This means first that the enjoyment of art must be given its proper weight in a balanced life, one 77

Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. III, p. 37.

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that is in equilibrium: “If art is excluded altogether or given only a trivial rôle, perhaps as a necessary relaxation, we feel at once that a philosophy so judging human arts is ascetic or post-rational,” but “if, on the contrary, art is prized as something supreme and irresponsible, if the poetic and mystic glow which it may bring seems its own complete justification, then philosophy is evidently still prerational. . . . To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and æsthetes in the world should pronounce it so.”78 But our natural interest in aesthetic experience is not just something that has to be balanced against other natural interests; in addition, Santayana suggests, from harmony within aesthetic experience human beings can form a more general conception of harmony and learn how to realize it in life more generally, thus advance the work of morality itself: “The influence which æsthetic habits exercise on thought and action should not be regarded as an intrusion to be resented, but rather as an original interest to be built upon and developed.” Aesthetic experience assists reason itself in its “function . . . to endow the parts of sentience with a consciousness of the system in which they lie, so that they may attain a mutual relevance and ideally support one another.”79 The function of morality is to harmonize our multiple interests, but one of the ways that we learn to harmonize is through our experience of harmony in the experience of beauty and our creation of harmony in the creation of art, so aesthetic experience does not just need to be constrained by morality but contributes to the realization of morality. If the influence of Kant is unmistakable in Santayana’s basic analysis of aesthetic experience, then the influence of Schiller is equally unmistakable in Santayana’s refined account of the relation between art and morality, though he too is unnamed. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Santayana takes a stand relevant to lively debate at the end of the century about whether moral and aesthetic value are independent, so that a moral “defect” in a work of art is not necessarily an “aesthetic defect” and might even be an aesthetic merit in a work.80 In Santayana’s view, “It is mere barbarism to feel that a thing is æsthetically good but morally evil, or morally good but hateful to perception. Things partially evil or partially ugly may have to be chosen under stress of unfavourable circumstances, lest some 78 79 80

Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. IX, pp. 166–7. Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. IX, p. 185. See Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Part IV, and Berys Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). This debate will be discussed in the Epilogue.

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worse thing come; but if a thing were ugly it would thereby not be wholly good, and if it were altogether good it would perforce be beautiful.”81 To hold this, Santayana must suppose that we objectify our feelings of moral approbation and disapprobation as well as our aesthetic feelings, and then when we objectify both kinds of feelings we combine them into a phenomenologically unitary representation of their object even though the philosopher can make a theoretical distinction between their sources. But this is a plausible thing for him to assume, since he holds that art “is addressed to a comprehensive mind,”82 and that it is because of the comprehensive or unifying character of the human mind that “æsthetic and other interests are not separable units, to be compared externally; they are rather strands interwoven in the texture of everything. Æsthetic sensibility colours every thought, qualifies every allegiance, and modifies every product of human labour.”83 But if the mind is truly unitary, then likewise every other form of sensibility, including moral sensibility, colors aesthetic response, and while there may be good reasons to distinguish aesthetic and moral grounds for judgment in philosophical inquiry this does not mean that they can be separated and prevented from influencing one another in real experience. Santayana’s argument here is comparable to that of James Beattie in the eighteenth century.84 Having made clear that the intrinsic rather than instrumental character of pleasure in beauty and art does not mean that it is exempt from moral governance, Santayana concludes by reaffirming that the ultimate goal of morality is to make human beings happy, that “the value of art lies in making people happy, first in practising the art and then in possessing the product,”85 and thus that art is not merely one way to learn to be moral but something that must be promoted by every morality. Thus, “a morality organised about the human heart in an ingenuous and sincere fashion would involve every fine art and would render the world pervasively beautiful,”86 and “the principle that all institutions should subserve happiness runs deeper than any cult for art.”87 With these last remarks Santayana opposes not just any puritanism or asceticism that would denigrate the value of aesthetic experience but also perhaps the 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. IX, p. 177. Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. IX, p. 177. Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. IX, p. 183. See Volume 1, Part Two. Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. XI, p. 222. Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. XI, p. 223. Santayana, Reason in Art, ch. XI, p. 224.

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aestheticist pretense that the value of aesthetic experience has nothing to do with morality and stands outside the domain of moral criticism. While Santayana shares with the advocates of art for art’s sake the underlying idea that aesthetic experience has an intrinsic value that is not merely instrumental for something else, if he had a motto, it would not be “art for art’s sake” but just “art for happiness’s sake” or even “art for humanity’s sake.” Thus Santayana neither reduced the value of art to some independent moral value nor separated art from moral value. Likewise he did not reduce aesthetic experience to any form of cognition, although under the rubric of “expression” he gave cognitive associations only a subordinate role in his account of aesthetic experience. His recognition of the centrality of spontaneous play in aesthetic experience saved him from any need to reduce aesthetic experience to either a purely moral or a purely cognitive foundation, but he clearly included basic sensory responses, emotions, moral sentiments, and cognitive meanings among the sources of “pleasure objectified.” Santayana thus inaugurated American aesthetics in the twentieth century with a comprehensive rather than reductive approach to aesthetic experience and its object, beauty – which of course were not distinct for him.

7 The American Reception of Expression Theory I Parker to Greene

The dominant figure in American aesthetics in the first half or almost two-thirds of the twentieth century was certainly John Dewey, whose Art as Experience was published midway through this period, in 1934. Dewey’s influence remains visible in the work of Monroe Beardsley, the leading American aesthetician from the 1940s through the 1960s, whose 1958 Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism builds upon Dewey’s central idea of “consummatory experience.” To be sure, there is an alternative stream of aesthetic thought, from the work of Susanne Langer in the 1940s and 1950s, in turn inspired by the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, to the widely discussed Languages of Art by Nelson Goodman, which forgoes discussion of aesthetic experience in favor of a focus upon the function of language and other symbolic systems in works of art. This difference in emphasis between consummatory experience, on the one hand, and the languages of art, on the other, can be seen as a manifestation of the fundamental divide between theories of art and aesthetic experience as a form of play and cognitive theories of art, although as we will see Dewey himself, like many of the German and British theorists of expression whom we have considered, tried to distance his view from Kant and the play theory. Before we turn to Dewey, however, it will be worth pausing over several American aestheticians who published their chief works in the 1920s and, like the British aestheticians of that period, defined their own positions by their to be sure qualified acceptance of Croce’s theory of art as expression. These are the University of Michigan philosopher DeWitt Henry Parker, the Brown philosopher Curt John Ducasse, the Harvard philosopher David Wight Prall, and the Princeton professor Walter T. Stace. In this chapter we will also discuss the aesthetics of Theodore M. Greene, who taught at Princeton and then Yale; his

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main work in aesthetics came out after Dewey’s book, but his views were already developing before Dewey’s book appeared.

1. Parker While working within the tradition of the theory of expression established by Croce, DeWitt Parker (1885–1949) did not reject the theory of aesthetic experience as a form of play as so many of the expression theorists did, but emphasized instead that artistic expression has affinities with both other forms of knowledge and other forms of play without being reducible to either. Parker, who studied at Harvard under William James and Josiah Royce, published two books in aesthetics, The Principles of Æsthetics in 1920 and The Analysis of Art in 1926.1 The first book, based according to Parker on his lectures at the University of Michigan, expounds his view that art is a form of expression but one with a multiplicity of sources of satisfaction going well beyond the satisfactions of cognition itself. The second book, originally a series of lectures delivered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is not only more sophisticated in tone, but also more daring in substance, emphasizing the role of imagination as a form of wish fulfillment in the creation and experience of art. And it is in this work that Parker departs from many of his contemporaries by emphasizing the analogies between art and play even though he does not identify the two. Parker includes feelings among what is expressed by art, so he can be seen as following in Santyana’s footsteps toward a comprehensive theory of aesthetic experience. Parker begins The Principles of Æsthetics with “the definition recently revived by Croce” that “art is expression” but also immediately signals his departure from Croce by describing expression, “for our own ends, as the putting forth of purpose, feeling or thought into a sensuous medium, where they can be experienced again by the one who expresses 1

DeWitt H. Parker, The Principles of Æsthetics (Boston: Silver, Burdett, 1920); The Analysis of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926). Parker’s other books were The Metaphysics of Historical Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1913); The Self and Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), a defense of pluralistic idealism; Human Values (New York: Harper Brothers, 1931), a study of intrinsic goods, which includes a chapter on the value of art (pp. 319–52); Experience and Substance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1941), a further development of idealism; and The Philosophy of Value, ed. William K. Frankena (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), a posthumous collection of papers. C.J. Ducasse, William Frankena, and Brand Blanshard wrote his memorial notice for the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, from which this information is derived.

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himself and communicated to others.”2 For Parker, both the sensuous embodiment of what is expressed and the goal of communicating what is expressed through the medium of its sensuous embodiment are essential rather than accidental to artistic expression. Parker also immediately observes that “although every work of art is an expression, not every expression is a work of art,”3 thereby rejecting Croce’s identification of aesthetics with linguistics as a “general science of expression.” This starts Parker on a search for the criteria of specifically artistic expression. Parker enumerates three such criteria, which draw on the Kantian tradition in aesthetics and reveal his project, evident elsewhere in his work as well, of reconciling the Kantian and Crocean approaches. First he asserts that “no matter what further purposes artistic expressions may serve, they are produced and valued for themselves; we linger in them; we neither merely execute them mechanically . . . nor hasten through them, our minds fixed upon some future end to be gained by them. . . . Both for the artist and the appreciator, they are ends in themselves.”4 Parker makes this point in umistakeably Kantian terms by saying that “art is indeed expression, but free or autonomous expression” but at the same time indicates that he by no means completely rejects Croce’s conception of expression by distinguishing artistic expression from other, more practical forms of expression; unlike those, artistic expression “brings its own reward in the pleasure of the activity itself ” as part of the “generous superfluity in all human behavior.”5 However, the freedom or self-rewarding character of artistic expression is still not enough to distinguish artistic from nonartistic expression, for scientific knowledge is also an end in itself and thus scientific expression is also at least in part an autonomous, self-rewarding activity.6 The second and “central difference” between artistic and nonartistic expression is then that artistic expressions are descriptions not of things only, but of the artist’s reactions to things, his mood or emotion in their presence. They are expressions of total, concrete experiences, which include the self of the observer as well as the things he observes. . . . Æsthetic expression is always integral, embodying a total state of mind, the core of which is some feeling. . . . Art, no less than science, may

2 3 4 5 6

Parker, Principles, p. 16. Parker, Principles, p. 17. Parker, Principles, p. 17. Parker, Principles, p. 18. Parker, Principles, p. 19.

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contain truthful images of things and abstract ideas, but never these alone; it always includes their life, their feeling tones, or values.7

The artist’s “mood or emotions” are thus the primary thing to be captured by art. Parker also states this point by saying that the “expression of value” is necessary for art, where by value he means not some Platonic value outside the artist but the artist’s own valuation of his subject, founded in his emotional response to it. Parker takes this to be a fundamental disagreement with Croce: For the Italian, the principal difference between art and science is “the limitation of art to the expression of the individual and of science to the expression of the concept,”8 but for Parker it is the inclusion rather than exclusion of the artist’s emotional response to his subject, whether that subject be an individual or something more abstract. Parker voices a further difference with Croce in his third criterion of artistic expression, namely, that “permanence and communication are essential to a complete conception of art.” “However much the artist may affect indifference to the public, he creates expecting to be understood. Mere self-expression does not satisfy him; he needs in addition appreciation. . . . Art is not mere inspiration, the transient expression of private moods, but a work of communication, meant to endure.”9 The idea of the “heroism of the poet . . . working on in loneliness” and indifferent to whether his personal project of self-expression finds an audience is, Parker implies, a piece of lingering romanticism. And of course, if what the art is expressing is his mood and emotion, then what he is communicating to his audience will also be mood and emotion. Finally, Parker notes that these three criteria are not entirely independent of one another. In particular, the use of a sensuous medium that is essential to the communicative function of art is also part of what makes art an end in itself over which we linger with pleasure rather than a mere tool for the accomplishment of some external goal: “In art the sensuous medium of the expression receives an attention and possesses a significance not to be found in other types of expression.” This is because while “outside of art, sensation is a mere transparent means to the end of communication and recognition . . . the æsthetic expression is meant to possess worth in itself and is deliberately fashioned to hold us to itself, and this purpose will be more certainly and effectively accomplished if the medium of the expression has the power to move and please.”10 Parker 7 8 9 10

Parker, Principles, pp. 20–1. Parker, Principles, p. 21. Parker, Principles, p. 27. Parker, Principles, p. 28.

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shares this emphasis on the centrality of the sensuous medium of artistic expression with the British respondents to Croce such as Alexander and Reid, and in the end even Collingwood. On the basis of this conception of expression, Parker rejects both a “hedonistic” theory according to which “the value of art consists” solely “in the satisfactions of sense which the media of æsthetic expression afford”11 and an “intellectualist” theory according to which “the purpose of art is truth,”12 as well as the “moralistic or Platonic” variant of the latter according to which art should deliver only uplifting truths about the good and thereby enable “us to experience edifying emotions or to contemplate noble objects.”13 He is particularly interested in rejecting the last of these positions because he has an abiding interest, unusual in theorists of his time, in explaining the aesthetic “value in the representation of evil.”14 This will become a central theme in the 1926 Analysis of Art, and we can defer discussion of it until we discuss that work; for now, our focus should be on the point that what Parker rejects about these theories is primarily their exclusivity. For him, what is crucial is that “æsthetic value . . . is not alone sensuous value or ethical or scientific or philosophical value. A work of art may contain one or all of these values,” but what is unique to art is that it realizes any or all of them in the form of “the free expression of experience in a form delightful and permanent, mediating communication.” Part of this value is certainly cognitive, because “experience, which is otherwise fluent and chaotic, or when orderly too busy with its ends to know itself, receives through expression the fixed, clear outlines of a thing, and can be contemplated like a thing.”15 Like the Neo-Kantians before him and Collingwood and Dewey after, Parker emphasizes that art and the appreciation of it are a form of knowledge, but of self-knowledge or knowledge of human experience itself rather than of objects considered apart from their meaning, especially their emotional significance, for us; as he also expresses this point, artistic expression “stabilizes” and “clarifies” our own experience for us16 – the word “clarifies” inevitably reminding us of Collingwood. But more so than any of these predecessors or successors, Parker also emphasizes that our sheer pleasure in the sensuous media of artistic 11 12 13 14 15 16

Parker, Principles, p. 31. Parker, Principles, p. 34. Parker, Principles, p. 32. Parker, Principles, p. 33. Parker, Principles, p. 37. Parker, Principles, p. 50.

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expression, although not the whole story about our pleasure in art, is an indispensable part of it. On this basis, Parker then constructs a fivefold account of the “elements” of aesthetic experience. (1) “Every experience of art contains, in the first place, the sensations which are the media of expression,” and these offer a variety of opportunities for pleasure in their own right. (2) “To this material, secondly, are attached vague feelings,” “moods” or “Stimmung” that may attach to colors or tones or words “quite apart from anything that they may mean or represent,”17 and these too may please us in their own right. (3) Third, “as a rule the sensations of art do not exist for their own sakes alone, but possess a function, to represent things,” and “ideas or meanings” of or in what they represent “are the third class of elements in the æsthetic experience,” things that we can enjoy understanding. (4) Fourth, “these ideas, in their turn, also arouse emotions, only not of the indefinite sort which belong to the sense elements, but definite, like the emotions aroused by things and events in real life.”18 Thus, we can enjoy in an artistic representation the apprehension of its sensuous medium and emotions directly connected with that, on the one hand, and, on the other, the comprehension of the representational significance that is presented through the sensory medium and the further emotions associated with that – the value of art cannot be understood by either hedonism or intellectualism alone, but recognizing that art expresses and communicates a broader range of feelings than mere pleasure. (5) Finally, “a fifth class will make our list complete,” consisting of further “images from the various sense departments – sight, hearing, taste, smell, temperature, movement – which arise in connection with the ideas or meanings, making them concrete or full.”19 Parker’s claim here is that the use of the elements in a sensuous medium, line and color, for example, in a landscape painting, does not just communicate to us some intellectual content and associated emotion, such as the feeling of contentment associated with the idea of a peaceful countryside and simple way of life, but also stimulates further associations, such as “faint images of warmth” in connection with the depiction of the sunlight in a landscape or even “faint odors” in a painting of flowers.20 To be sure, Parker does not want us to be carried away with the idea of the artistic stimulation of our senses of touch, taste, and smell and argues for 17 18 19 20

Parker, Principles, p. 53. Parker, Principles, p. 54. Parker, Principles, p. 54. Parker, Principles, p. 55.

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the traditional aesthetic superiority of vision and hearing on the grounds that we have a “greater power to control” the sensations of these senses and that “only colors and sounds can be woven into complex and stable wholes,”21 thus yielding the enduring and communicable rather than private and evanescent expressions at which art aims. The communicability of artistic expression is of vital importance for Parker, and thus he emphasizes that even though such expression deals with sensations and emotions as well as more obviously communicable ideas, our sensations and emotions are widely shared rather than idiosyncratic, and thus communicable art can be made out of what may seem entirely subjective. A further point that Parker emphasizes in connection with this analysis is that “if the question were raised, which is more fundamental in the æsthetic experience, idea or emotion? the answer would have to be, emotion.” His argument for this appeals to the fact that there is at least “one great art where no explicit ideas are present, music, whereas art without emotion does not exist. Take away the emotional content from expression and you get either a mere play of sensations, like fireworks, or else pseudo-science, like the modern naturalistic play.” This is not meant to deny “the supreme importance of the idea in art,” and even that music or abstract painting strives to convey an idea as well as an emotion, but it is meant to confirm that what is most essential to artistic expression is that it is the expression of our emotions about its objects, whether abstract patterns, concrete objects, or general ideas, and that the other sources of pleasure in art build upon this foundation.22 If we have to choose one factor of aesthetic experience as most important, then it will be emotion. Parker’s emphasis upon emotion as the core of what is expressed by art can be taken as an implicit criticism of Kant in spite of the Kantian tone of his characterization of artistic expression as free, autonomous, or self-rewarding, and it can also be taken as the explicit assertion of a position that Croce only tacitly reached in his theory of expression. Yet Parker also returns to a Kantian or more generally formalistic approach in his analysis of the “structure” rather than the “elements” of aesthetic experience. Here he argues that artistic expression is characterized by a high degree of “unity” (this is indeed another difference between artistic and other forms of expression),23 but that this is only in part “an 21 22 23

Parker, Principles, p. 56. Parker, Principles, p. 69. Parker, Principles, p. 80, cf. also pp. 29–30.

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image of the unity of the things in nature and mind which it expresses”; indeed it can at best be only in part the unity of what is represented because “free arts like music” do not represent things in nature and mind at all.24 Rather, there must be unity within the artistic expression itself, and that too has a “direct emotional appeal,”25 thus is yet another source for our satisfaction in art, in addition to the sensory and cognitive pleasures already described. This unity is in turn composed of “unity in variety, dominance, and equilibrium.” “Unity in variety was the earliest of the types to be observed and so is the most fundamental,” and what has often, as in G.E. Moore, gone under the name of “organic unity”: It is the unity something has when “no part can be taken away without damage to the whole, and when taken out of the whole, the part loses much of its own value.”26 It can be further analyzed into “the harmony of union of coöperating elements; the balance of contrasting or conflicting elements”; and “the development or evolution of a process toward an end or climax.”27 Dominance, secondly, consists in the centrality or superiority of some elements in a work of art as compared to others, for example, “in a well-constructed play there are one or more characters which are central to the action . . .; in every plot there is the catastrophe or turning point . . .; in a melody there is the keynote; in the larger composition there are the one or more themes whose working out is the piece”; and so on.28 And finally, there is the requirement of “equilibrium or impartiality,” a principle that counteracts dominance by demanding, “despite the subordination among the elements, that none be neglected.”29 All of these are means by which the work of art can “reëxpress and so enforce the values of the content,”30 but they are also clearly formal features that make the activity of creating and appreciating works of art self-sustaining and enjoyable. Thus, while like so many of his contemporaries Parker emphasizes the overwhelming importance of the expression and thus the clarification and stabilization of emotion as our source of satisfaction in aesthetic experience, he also emphasizes both the sensuous and the formal pleasures afforded by the media of expression. In this way he can be regarded as synthesizing the 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Parker, Principles, pp. 80–1. Parker, Principles, p. 84. Parker, Principles, p. 85. Parker, Principles, pp. 86–7. Parker, Principles, p. 93. Parker, Principles, p. 96. Parker, Principles, p. 98.

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cognitivist and particularly expressivist position that aesthetic pleasure is due to cognition, particularly the cognition of our own emotions, with the theory that the source of aesthetic satisfaction is the free play of our various cognitive and emotional capacities, both sensory and more abstract. Parker’s Principles thus represents an important response to the one-sided theory of expression that was so dominant in the preceding decades. Without rejecting any of the analysis of the elements and structure of aesthetic experience that he reached in this work, he pushes into new territory in his 1926 Metropolitan Museum lectures. While retaining his earlier model of the manifold sources of pleasure in the contents, emotional associations, elements, and structure of artistic expressions, in this work, as was appropriate for its original audience, Parker engages much more closely with particular works of art, especially visual art (it has seventy-two illustrations, some from then quite contemporary works of art, such as painting by Duchamp and sculpture by Brancusi). But that is not the main difference between The Analysis of Art and the earlier work. What is most striking about the newer book is its emphasis that “works of art, as products of the imagination, are at once characterized by the ‘as if ’ attitude and are satisfactions of wishes.”31 Parker’s argument is now that both the creation and the appreciation of art, like dreams and play although identical to neither, are means for the realization and satisfaction of our emotions “not through some practical relation to the environment, but by way of an occurrence that is entirely within my own mind and body, and for the time being at least, it is for me as if the satisfaction were real.”32 Parker illustrates his thesis first with the case of dance, where the audience’s satisfaction results from imaginatively sharing the experience, particularly the emotional experience, of the dancer, “when, in the imagination, I move with the motions of the dancer, experiencing vicariously her ease and her joy,” but where the dancer’s own experience is also imaginative, not just physical movement but “a satisfaction of impulses through occurrences within her own mind and body.”33 In music, too, even “absolute music,” music without words and without explicit representational content, our experience, whether as composer, performer, or listener, is of imagined emotions. To be sure, Parker admits, musical 31 32 33

Parker, Analysis, p. 5. Parker, Analysis, p. 8. Parker, Analysis, p. 7.

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experience begins with the formal relations of sound, or “what Hanslick called an arabesque,” but it does not stop there: My experience is richer than that. For on hearing the sound, various wishes, moods, emotions, are awakened in me . . . and these emotions and wishes find expression and fulfillment . . . in the sounds. . . . Music is beautiful as a voice that I hear storming, sobbing, making merry, lamenting, rejoicing, as the case may be, and it is as if that voice were my own. Hence music, too, belongs to the world of the imagination, in the larger and truer sense.34

In his book The Beautiful in Music (1854), the Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) had famously argued that no determinate meanings could be associated with music except for a narrow range of emotions directly associated with the ebb and flow of the music, such as feelings of expectation and release, because as a later mode of discourse would put it music simply does not accompany its elaborate syntax with a sufficiently determinate semantics to do that.35 But Parker stands on his appeal to the experience of all of us in arguing that our experience of music is nevertheless richly emotional. He makes similar claims for other typically nonrepresentational arts, for example, “a beautiful building makes us dream, becomes itself a dream,” and this applies as well, “if in a lower key, to beautiful specimens of the potter’s art, to color paintings, to oriental carpets: if they have for us the quality of beauty, they are not dead things, but things possessed of an imagined life.”36 Here it may be noted that although Parker’s general approach, like Collingwood’s, is an expression theory of aesthetic experience, his conception of what we can find emotionally expressive cuts across Collingwood’s distinction between mere craft and art; his idea of an “imagined life” for objects is also reminiscent of the empathy theorists. Of course, Parker’s case is more easily made for the representational arts. For example, he quotes the sculptor Rodin describing how the painter Titian poured his own “proud energy” and “aristocratic pride” into his “opulent nude women” and “landscapes, decorated by majestic trees and empurpled with triumphant sunsets,” and then says that “thus we are led to believe,” whether by Titian’s art or Rodin’s own, “that, in its 34 35

36

Parker, Analysis, p. 8. See Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen, seventh edition (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), especially ch. III. Hanslick has had notable defenders, especially Peter Kivy, most recently in Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009). Parker, Analysis, p. 9.

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deepest springs and origins, all art, even that which is superficially most impersonal, is an expression of the personality and life of the artist – but the essence of personality is wish.”37 That is, in Parker’s view, at the deepest level a human personality is defined by its wishes, some of which can find fulfillment in practical activity, others in imaginative activity, and art is one of the imaginative forms for the fulfillment of wishes. Thus Parker transforms the Kantian distinction between interested, instrumental activity and free, autonomous activity that he used in The Principles of Æsthetics as one of the defining differences between nonartistic and artistic expression into a psychological distinction between practical and imaginative wish fulfillment. Of course, this new conception of both the creation and the experience of art as a form of imaginative wish fulfillment has to be reconciled with his previous insistence upon communicability as an essential characteristic of artistic expression, and that is done by means of the assumption that most human wishes and emotions are widely shared or at least mutually comprehensible. Parker’s theory of art as a form of wish fulfillment – which he distinguishes from Freud’s by arguing that not all the wishes expressed in art are subconscious nor driven either by sex or by the fear of death38 – leads to an analysis of the multiple layers of emotional meaning in art analogous to his analyses of the multiple sources of satisfaction afforded by the elements and the structure of artistic expressions. He describes these layers of meaning in the following passage: A work of art may have several layers of meaning, some of which cannot be reduced to the subconscious. The deepest stratum is undoubtedly composed of wishes and emotions, of which the artist himself is hardly aware, whose source or object he has forgotten, going back often to his childhood or other remote epoch of his life, and cropping out in associations and symbolisms, vague and unaccountable. These provide that aura of mystery necessary to the profoundest beauty in art. . . . But no less important are the particular problems and conflicts, well known to the artist himself . . . which provide the immediate occasion of the work. These constitute a second layer of meaning in a work of art. Sometimes . . . they are freely and obviously expressed, but on other occasions they are expressed indirectly by dramatization through some story or legend or historical material. These dramatizations make a third and most evident layer of meaning which a work of art may contain.39 37 38 39

Parker, Analysis, pp. 10–11. See Parker, Analysis, pp. 14, 119. Parker, Analysis, p. 15.

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That these layers of meaning are all grounded in the experience and the wishes of the artist is not a bar to the communicability of artistic expression, however, for these wishes themselves are common human property. Thus “the artist and the spectator have the ability, through the sympathetic imagination . . . to feel themselves into lives and situations which are not their own, to become interested in them for their own sake, and to let their imaginations be governed by them.”40 Like Collingwood and Dewey in the next decade, Parker stresses that the artistic expression of all these layers of wish and emotion is a way to clarify and understand them: “Through expression we not only relive our experience in revery, but come to understand; we give to that which was hitherto a matter of dumb feeling and elusive image, the clearness and distinctness of thought,”41 and this is true not just for the artist but also for the audience: “Through artistic expression also the values of the original experience are relived in the imagination, and preserved there not merely for the artist himself, but for all men who care to make his experience theirs. In life, æsthetic expression is casual and transient; in art it is made permanent for all who can understand its language. . . . Furthermore, through artistic expression the dream is not only preserved, it is transformed. There is given to it inevitably a coherence, a clarity, an intelligibility, which otherwise it could not possess.”42 But all of this is accomplished without the loss of immediacy that is characteristic of scientific classification, for example: “All the while that we have translated our experience into words, we have not lost its emotional vividness or its imaginative freshness.”43 Parker’s addition of the element of imaginative wish fulfillment to his previous account of the complexity of artistic expression leads to two distinctive features of his aesthetic theory: his insistence on a place for the representation of pain and even evil in art, and his insistence on the affinities as well as the differences among art, dream, and play. One of the six lectures in The Analysis of Art is devoted to “Art and Pain.”44 What is distinctive about Parker’s approach to this issue is that he does not argue only that the artistic representation of the painful and evil is valuable 40 41 42 43 44

Parker, Analysis, pp. 15–16. Parker, Analysis, p. 25. Parker, Analysis, p. 26. Parker, Analysis, p. 25. This chapter was anticipated in The Principles of Æsthetics by the chapter “The Problem of Evil in Æsthetics, and Its Solution through the Tragic, Pathetic, and Comic” (ch. VI, pp. 100–25).

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because it satisfies our desire for knowledge of these aspects of life in a way that is ameliorated by the fact that art is merely imagination and even made more pleasurable by the various material and formal delights art has to offer. On the contrary, he thinks it is an error, for example, on the part of Croce, “to suppose that the interest in knowledge functions in art unmixed with other motives.”45 Rather, what he argues is that “despite their painfulness, man has a need for anger, fear, horror, hate, and pity – for all the emotions that are his natural reactions to the evil in the world,” and that “like all others, these tendencies demand stimulation and expression, and provide their modicum of pleasure when not too strong. Man has a need to hate as well as to love, to fear as well as to feel safe, to be angry as well as to be friendly, to destroy as well as to construct, even to experience pain itself.”46 Various forms of art then provide the means for the imaginative satisfaction of these emotional needs within tolerable limits. This theory should be distinguished from that offered by Du Bos at the outset of modern aesthetics, that the representation of unpleasant or evil objects is a way to alleviate the pain of ennui without the costs associated with other means of doing the same thing, such as gambling; Parker’s theory is that we have not a general need to alleviate boredom but a specific need to experience these painful emotions, and that this is what art allows us to do by means of our imagination. Parker does not mention Du Bos, but he does associate his theory with Aristotle’s concept of katharsis, although he observes that Aristotle’s subject, tragedy, “is only one small department of the painful in art.”47 He also adopts, although “without implying all that Nietzsche meant by the term,” the name “Dionysian art, art that gives pleasure through the satisfaction in the imagination of the primitive and often repressed elements of human nature, but at the same time may cause displeasure by offending the more civilized parts.”48 That art might at the same time both please and offend us is not an untoward conclusion that could be avoided by a clever theory, but an inexorable consequence of the complexity of human nature. This insight that art does not merely allow us knowledge of the painful aspects of human life but imaginatively satisfies our need to experience and express unpleasant emotions is one of the advantages of Parker’s theory of artistic expression as a form of wish fulfillment. The other is 45 46 47 48

Parker, Analysis, p. 116. Parker, Analysis, pp. 118–19. Parker, Analysis, p. 103. Parker, Analysis, p. 107.

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his openness to the affinity between art and play, rejected, as we have seen, not only by virtually the entire idealist tradition of aesthetics in the nineteenth century but also by so many of his more immediate predecessors and contemporaries, who so often had Herbert Spencer’s narrowly physiological conception of play in mind. Parker’s exploration of the similarities and differences between art and play is the central subject of his culminating lecture, “The Function of Art.” He begins from the premise that dreams, play, and art are all forms of imaginative wish fulfillment; but since dreams satisfy “our wishes only in their most primitive and undisciplined form”49 and dreams are not a form of voluntary activity, the relevant comparison is between art and play. Parker commences this comparison by arguing that all play, even sport, is indeed an exercise of the imagination, not just of the body; “in all play there is a simulation of the earnestness of real life,” for example, “a game is always a mock battle . . . in playing chess, I am exercising all my wits to circumvent my opponent, only instead of doing so on the field of battle, or in the market-place, I am operating on a chess-board.”50 This puts play in the same ballpark as art, to borrow a metaphor from the discussion of art, namely, the realm of “imaginative activity.” There are several further similarities between play and art. For one, both typically involve “certain principles – the rules of the game, the conventions of the art – which are accepted in either case, yet without the least feeling of constraint, for the reason that they are freely created by the artist or the player and are recognized as indispensable to the existence of the game or the work of art.”51 For another, both frequently involve an object to stimulate and center the imagination, for example, a doll in the case of play and a statue in the case of art,52 where the assumption is that the physical production of the statue is not the exhaustive goal of the art of sculpture but rather only a part of the activity of the imagination on the part of both sculptor and audience. However, there are also a number of key differences between play and art. First, Parker argues that communication with an audience is not essential to play: Some games to be sure are social or require multiple players, but art requires both an audience and yet also the “single dominating personality” of the artist who is communicating something to the

49 50 51 52

Parker, Analysis, p. 155. Parker, Analysis, p. 158. Parker, Analysis, p. 163. Parker, Analysis, pp. 164–5.

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audience, not just playing along with them.53 Here of course Parker is rejecting Croce’s assumption that communication with an audience is an inessential feature of artistic expression. Second, Parker argues for the “relative abstractness of play as compared with art,” by which he means that play does not engage as much of our emotional, imaginative, and physical capacities as art does: thus “against the authority of Schiller’s famous announcement, that man is a whole man only when he plays,” Parker holds that “in play he is usually only a fragment of himself. . . . Not in play but in art is man a whole man. For everything that has entered into the experience of the artist affects his art, nothing is lost; and as a man is, such is his appreciation of art.”54 Third, “in art we appropriate a world, while in play we construct one; in the one case we enter into a rich and varied experience already prepared for us by the artist, while in the other we are left, very largely, to our own resources and devices”;55 this might seem to apply only to the appreciation rather than to the creation of art, although it could be argued that art is usually created within some tradition and that the artist is in some way developing the tradition is important in a way that is usually not the case with mere play (although perhaps sports with an emphasis on their own history such as baseball might be a counterexample to this claim). Finally, Parker notes “the relative absence from play of beauty in the narrower sense of charm and expressiveness of the medium, and design or harmony of the elements”:56 the child playing with her doll really does not care whether the doll is beautiful by some aesthetic standard, but the artist and audience engaging their imaginations with a work of art also care about the beauty of the work of art, as explicated in the various dimensions Parker previously analyzed. “Yet for all the differences between them,” Parker maintains, “play, art, and dream, in the narrow sense, have, as forms of imagination, an identical function . . . the function of absorbing the excess of our wishes and emotions.”57 So an insistence upon the disanalogies between play and art risks obscuring what is essential to art, that it is an indispensable form of imaginative activity. And imagination itself is “an indispensable element in the delicate business of life.”58 Both play and art are vital to 53 54 55 56 57 58

Parker, Analysis, pp. 162–3. Parker, Analysis, pp. 165–6. Parker, Analysis, p. 167. Parker, Analysis, p. 168. Parker, Analysis, p. 168. Parker, Analysis, p. 174.

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human beings because “there are forms of will that cannot be absorbed in the business of life,” but neither can they simply be suppressed. Here Parker again invokes Aristotle against puritan moralists of all types, even the Schopenhauerian type that would have us escape from all normal emotions in art:59 The insatiable desire for victory and the excitement of its pursuit is not appeased by the daily, humdrum life of most men; hence their need for chess and cards or the cinema, through which this wish finds imaginative satisfaction. A reinterpretation of the Aristotelian notion of catharsis has application to both play and art: the provision of a play (imaginative) mode of satisfaction of otherwise insufficiently satisfied impulses clears the mind of their troublesome insistence, leaving it free for the performance of duty. The mind so cleared is a cheerful, a well-integrated mind. Few people can achieve cheerfulness without play or art.60

The work of DeWitt Parker thus stands out in its time for his synthesis of the cognitive theory of art, in its contemporary version as the theory of artistic expression as a form of self-knowledge, with an emphasis on the emotions that are expressed as well as with an emphasis on the affinity of art and play as varieties of imagination. Parker thus clearly synthesized the three main approaches of modern aesthetics. But his example was by no means uniformly followed; in the succeeding decades opposition at least between cognitivist and play approaches continued in some quarters.

2. Ducasse Curt John Ducasse (1881–1969), for instance, rejected the play theory and specifically rejected Parker’s theory of imagination as a form of wish fulfillment analogous to play. Ducasse was born in France and educated there and in England but did not go straight to university. He became interested in philosophy only after a series of odd jobs in dry goods, music publishing, and railroad engineering in Mexico, New York, and Seattle and thus started university at the late age of twenty-five. But then he made rapid progress, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Washington in 1908 and 1909. After teaching there for one year, he went to Harvard in 1910 and earned his Ph.D. in 1912.

59

60

In addition to writing his own books, Parker edited a volume of Schopenhauer’s works, Schopenhauer Selections (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928). Parker, Analysis, pp. 175–6.

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He returned to teach at Washington and while there published his first book, Causation and the Types of Necessity.61 He moved to Brown University in 1926, and his next book was The Philosophy of Art, published in 1929.62 This was followed by a second, more popular book in aesthetics in 1944,63 and by many others, including books on religion, immortality, and paranormal phenomena; Ducasse’s final work, once again on causation, was published in 1968,64 only one year before his death at the age of eighty-eight.65 Ducasse begins The Philosophy of Art with the claims that art is an activity that aims not at the “creation of beauty” but at “objective self-expression . . . essentially, to give adequate embodiment in words, lines, colors, or what not, to some particular and probably nameless feeling or emotion that possessed” the artist.66 By “objective” here Ducasse does not mean universal or intersubjectively valid, because he always emphasizes that the artist’s urge is to find expression for his own feeling and that it is of secondary interest whether that feeling is common to others (as he puts it, “art is not essentially communication but expression”);67 he means simply that the artist embodies his feeling in some medium. Although his claim that communication is not an essential goal in art puts him in agreement with Croce, his claim that embodiment is essential to art is the heart of his criticism of the Italian philosopher. He rejects Croce’s identification of intuition and expression on the ground that this collapses this distinction between feeling and its embodiment68 and further argues that Croce’s view that “the physical work of art is essentially an aid to the reproduction of the act of expression which created it” is a confusion resting on “a very questionable psychological analysis,” namely, the failure to see the difference between the creation and the reception of art: On his own account, the creation of a work of art is the attempt to express a feeling while the reception of a work of art 61

62 63 64

65

66 67 68

Curt John Ducasse, Causation and the Types of Necessity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1924). Curt John Ducasse, The Philosophy of Art (New York: Dial Press, 1929). Curt J. Ducasse, Art, the Critics and You (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1944). Curt J. Ducasse, Truth, Knowledge, and Causation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968). Biographical information from “Brunonia,” Brown University Office of Communications (http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/Databases/Encyclopedia/ search.php?serial=D01600). Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, pp. 15, 18. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 36. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, pp. 45–6.

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is the attempt to obtain one, “to have impressed upon us the feeling which the artist expressed”;69 thus for Ducasse it is crucial to separate the act of expression, which is what the artist does, from the contemplation by means of which art is received, which is closer to the notion of intuition. Ducasse’s insistence upon the necessity of embodiment for expression brings him into agreement with Parker as well as with most of his British contemporaries, as we have seen. He rejects Parker’s theory in The Analysis of Art that the experience of art is a form of imaginative wish fulfillment on the somewhat narrow ground that in imagination one does not actually fulfill a wish but only imagines that a wish is fulfilled70 but accepts Parker’s “inadvertent statements . . . where he refers to art as the expression of feeling.”71 He further exempts himself from Parker’s charge that “one fundamental vice of emotionalist theories of art is their neglect of the clarifying function of expression,” arguing that his own theory has “no difficult in giving an account of the clarification which follows expression.”72 The heart of his account of the clarification of emotion is nothing other than embodiment: The embodiment of an emotion whether in words or in some other medium “makes possible the prolonged contemplation of the analyzed” feeling, “and the clearness results from the double fact that what is then contemplated is an analyzed [feeling], and that the contemplation of it is prolonged at will”73 – the key to aesthetic clarification is not classification, or the subsumption of feeling under some general rubric, but contemplation, the act of holding the feeling before consciousness for prolonged study. Through this, clarification means “becoming conscious of the elements (and their relations), of which the feeling is the emergent.”74 Once again unlike Parker, Ducasse rejects the play theory of art, in good part because like Croce and Croceans such as Carritt he focuses on Herbert Spencer’s view of play “as the spontaneous expenditure of surplus energy accumulated in an organ” and Spencer’s argument that the pleasure of play results from the exercise of abilities that will be valuable to us in other circumstances.75 Ducasse objects to this conception of play that artistic creation is not the mere exercise of faculties that have their

69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 52. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, pp. 63–5. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 66. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 67. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 69. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 71. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, pp. 96–7.

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real use only elsewhere and that the reception of art is not play at all but contemplation. Just as he construed Parker’s theory of imagination very narrowly in criticizing it, Ducasse here criticizes a very narrow conception of play. In spite of his rejection of the play theory and his emphasis on the clarificatory character of contemplation, however, Ducasse does not clearly align his own theory with the cognitive approach to aesthetic experience, and indeed he does not mention the concept of truth at all. What Ducasse does do is stress that art is “endotelic,” or has an end in itself, rather than being “ectotelic” or “heterotelic,” that is, having an end entirely external to it, like work, or “autotelic,” being its own end, like play. Indeed, he even says that the internal end of art is “categorical”: “The obligation of art is a categorical imperative, uttered, as it were, to ourselves by ourselves. It is the obligation imposed by the laws of one’s inward being, to give birth to that which one bears darkly in oneself. From play, however, this character of obligation is wholly absent.”76 This obligation, which is essential to art and completely absent from play, is the compulsion to express oneself. More specifically, Ducasse argues that “endotelic art” may seek the expression of three sorts of states, namely, the artist’s “feelings, meanings, or volitions,” and that “aesthetic art” in particular, “is the conscious objectification of one’s feelings.”77 Ducasse means by “aesthetic art” what others had meant by “fine art,” and by this tripartite division he stipulates that genuine fine art objectifies feelings rather than ideas: “Expression of meaning or ideas is no part of aesthetic art.”78 This is as clear an example of the transformation from the classical truth theory in the form it took from Plato to the German Idealists that art is the sensuous appearance of ideas to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century view that art is the expression of our own feelings. And what is objectification? Here Ducasse moves a little closer to Croce than before, conceding that “objectification . . . is usually partially at least in perceptual stuff, but it might take place wholly in image-stuff, and thus remain private to the artist.”79 Even when objectification takes place in “perceptual stuff,” that is, in a physical, publicly accessible medium, what remains decisive is the artist’s own impulse to express his feeling and his own judgment that he has done so: What defines objectification is whether the artist can recognize 76 77 78 79

Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 106. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, pp. 111–12. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 127. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 112.

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in what he has created the feeling he was attempting to express. Thus Ducasse writes: What is meant here by speaking of objectification, or of expression as objective, is that the act of expression is (in such a case) creative of something (1) capable of being contemplated by the artist at least, and (2) such that in contemplation that thing yields back to him the feeling, meaning, or volition of which it was the attempted expression. Thus, one would be said to have objectified or expressed objectively one’s meaning if, in reading the words one wrote, one obtains back from them the very meaning which one attempted to express, so that one is then able to say, “Yes, that is exactly what I meant.”80

Of course, in the case of aesthetic art, this criterion for objectification is applied to feeling, not conceptual meaning. What is crucial here is that for Ducasse the motive for art is the artist’s impulse to express his feelings and the test of artistic success the artist’s own recognition of his feeling in what he has created. On this point Ducasse surely stands closer to Croce than to Parker, who had emphasized that communication is indispensable to art. Indeed, for Ducasse self-expression is self-evidently valuable. This is the premise for his extended argument that art is only contingently beautiful, though no doubt beautiful art is more accessible and lovable than art that is not beautiful. “Any object is to be called beautiful when, or in so far as, the feelings which one obtains in the aesthetic contemplation of it are pleasurable feelings. A beautiful object therefore may be, but need not be, a work of art; and a work of art may be, but need not be beautiful.”81 A beautiful work of art is one that expresses pleasurable feelings and is for that reason pleasant to experience, but the point of art is not to please, but to express the artist’s feelings, whatever they are, thus whether pleasant or not. The categorical imperative of art, to borrow Ducasse’s Kantian phrase, is not to please, but to express. This premise leads Ducasse into an extensive polemic about modern, nonrepresentational art. He holds that works of art may please in virtue of their nonrepresentational or merely “presentational” features – such as, color and line as such – as well as in virtue of what they represent, but that in general representation is needed for the objectification of feelings. “The entities which objectify most of the feelings that human beings experience and desire to express in art, are entities that cannot be presented directly, but only indirectly, that is to say, represented. For instance, 80 81

Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 113; Ducasse’s italics. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 124.

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most of the feelings with which the drama deals can be expressed only in an object consisting of some scheme of human relationships; and these are not to any considerable extent directly perceptual entities.”82 Generalizing from the case of drama, Ducasse argues that in all art “design,” on the one hand, and “dramatic entities,” on the other, offer possibilities of expression,83 but by far the greater part of the expressive potential of art lies in the domain of representation and drama rather than in presentation and design. Ducasse’s position throughout seems to be that the motivation for the creation of art is the artist’s own need for self-expression, but that art will easily find an audience when the artist expresses pleasurable feelings and perhaps find an audience with more difficulty if the artist’s self-expression of unpleasant emotions happens to be of interest. Ducasse clearly distinguishes the value of self-expression from the value of play, but in spite of his analysis of the kind of clarification offered by the aesthetic objectification of feeling he does not generally argue that art derives its value from the value of self-knowledge. The one exception to this conclusion is to be found in his discussion of tragedy in his penultimate chapter, “The Aesthetic Values.” Here he begins by arguing that the beautiful in a “narrow sense,” the pretty, the graceful, and the sublime, are all pleasing and for that reason self-evidently valuable, while the ugly again “in a narrow sense” is what fails to meet some aesthetic expectation and for that reason self-evidently disappoints.84 He then turns to the tragic and begins this discussion by arguing that the interpretation of catharsis as the purgation or discharge of preexisting fear and pity, even if this is what Aristotle might have meant by his concept, does not make any sense because the audience does not go to the theater with preexisting fear and pity that need to be discharged.85 Instead, Ducasse proposes, our “vicarious experience” of the fear and pity of the characters in a tragedy “makes a not inconsiderable contribution to the wisdom which is our most useful equipment in dealing with, or warding off, tragic events. . . . Enlightenment, even when it does nothing but reveal the inevitability of at least some tragic events, is valued. It prepares us for them and lessens the shock.”86 The “correct medical metaphor” for our response

82 83 84 85 86

Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 127. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, pp. 203–4. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, pp. 239–50. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 251. Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 253.

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to tragedy, Ducasse proposes, “is not purgation, but vaccination”:87 The knowledge of the inevitability of human disappointment and suffering that we acquire from the experience of tragedy prepares us to deal better with the disappointments and sufferings we will encounter in our own lives, and the knowledge that we obtain from tragedy is pleasurable for that reason, even though tragedy is not the expression of pleasant feelings. Ducasse thus rejects the play theory, although on a narrow construal of it, and seems only to back into accepting the truth theory of art, or to accept it only for a special case, that of tragedy; his general position seems to be that the value of self-expression to the artist is self-evident and that others can go along for the ride if they like.

3. Prall In another work published the same year as Ducasse’s Philosophy of Art, David Prall adopts a number of similar positions, but although without mentioning the play theory at all is closer to Parker’s synthesis of the play theory with the truth theory than Ducasse. Five years younger than Ducasse and only one year younger than Parker, David Wight Prall (1886–1940) took his bachelor’s degree at Michigan in 1909; thus his last year in college coincided with Parker’s first year of teaching, although Prall’s early interests were in literature rather than philosophy. Upon graduation, he was an assistant in German and rhetoric, taking an M.A. in 1910. He moved on to the University of Texas but there decided that the questions that interested him could be answered only in philosophy, and he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, to earn his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1918. He taught at Amherst College in 1918–19, spent the next year abroad, was an instructor at Harvard in 1920–1, and then taught at Berkeley for nine years, rising to professor. He returned to Harvard in 1930, accepting a reduction in rank to associate professor and rising to full professor again in 1938, only two years before his premature death. At Harvard he was also senior tutor in the new Leverett House and was the center of a circle that included the literary critic F.O. Matthieson, the budding musician Leonard Bernstein, the painter Robert Motherwell, and the poet Delmore Schwartz. His reputation is based on two books in aesthetics, Æsthetic Judgment published in 1929 and Æsthetic Analysis published in 1936.88 87 88

Ducasse, Philosophy of Art, p. 254. D.W. Prall, Æsthetic Judgment (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1929); Æsthetic Analysis (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1936).

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Æsthetic Judgment is the broader of the two works, although Æsthetic Analysis adds detail to the first book’s account of the elements and structure of aesthetic objects. Æsthetic Judgment, like much of the other work from the 1920s that we have examined, was clearly written in the shadow of Croce but differs from Croce on several key points. Prall draws a sharp distinction between aesthetic experience in general and the experience of the fine arts in particular, and instead of equating intuition with expression he distinguishes them, arguing that all aesthetic experience can be considered expressive but that expression is the product of intention and thus properly restricted to the fine arts as a subset of the more general domain of the aesthetic. Prall also emphasizes the importance of technique and therefore medium in the fine arts, thus rejecting Croce’s rigid separation of the domain of the aesthetic from that of the practical. At the same time, although his conception of aesthetic experience in general is close to Croce’s conception of intuition, he does not characterize it as a form of cognition. But unlike Parker, neither does he associate aesthetic experience with the imagination or with play, both concepts that are completely absent from his work. Thus Prall’s position seems closer to the aesthetics of truth than to the aesthetics of play. Finally, in Æsthetic Analysis Prall associates his conception of aesthetic experience with the central concept of Dewey’s Art as Experience, which had appeared in the interval between his own two books. Prall begins, as the name of his first book suggests, with the concept of aesthetic judgment, but his key concept is that of aesthetic experience, which aesthetic judgment “follows and records”: “It is always a record of direct æsthetic experience, of the fact that in the presence of some object that object’s beauty has been felt.”89 Aesthetic experience, in turn, “while it is an activity, a transaction in the flux of nature, culminates and has its characteristic point in an absolute static quality or determinate beauty,” and in such experience “attention is focussed on this qualitative identity . . . so that such experience is the antithesis of practical activity, moral or economic.”90 In this definition of aesthetic experience in general, the influence of Croce is evident. Prall introduces what is at least his own terminology when he further characterizes the object of such aesthetic experience and attention as “Æsthetic surface.” Without mentioning the name of the founding father Baumgarten, Prall defines aesthetic experience as the sensory experience of objects enjoyed for

89 90

Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 5. Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 10.

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their own sake – “æsthetic experience is an experience of an object as apprehended delightfully, primarily too, as so apprehended directly through the senses. This is what is properly signified by the term æsthetic in the first place”91 – and then says that in such apprehension what we are focused on is the surface of objects, and that our apprehension can be called intuition. Thus he writes: Of the delight that is apprehended it is better to say not that it is perceived but that it is intuited. For it is characteristic of æsthetic apprehension that the surface fully present to sense is the total object of apprehension. We do not so much perceive an object as intuit its appearance, and as we leave this surface in our attention, to go deeper into meanings or more broadly into connections and relations, we depart from the typically æsthetic attitude.92

The surface of any object of sensory perception apparently affords the possibility of such intuition or contemplation: “The surface of all our experience is æsthetic, . . . everywhere and at all times the surface that our senses come upon may be dwelt on for what it is in direct intuition.” Most of the time of course we do not focus on the surface of objects as they present themselves to our senses, instead hastening on to consider the cognitive or practical significance of objects, but we can always stop to enjoy the surface of objects, and sometimes the surface of an object grabs our attention and impels us to stop to contemplate it. For example: That the city roars about us is a fact in isolation from all the busy activities that cause the sound we hear, a sound that takes our attention, strikes us, and holds us. And if we remain attentive to this sound, or oblivious to the rest of the world and oblivious to our business in it, inevitably the sound becomes for us characterized simply by its own heard nature, which we take satisfaction in, or else try to blot out by other more vivid or more tolerable impressions. . . . The sound we are listening to is our sole object, simply as the specific sound it happens to be. That we do dwell on it for a moment is a clear enough indication that it is holding us, that we are enjoying it in contemplation.93

If there is any distinction between Prall’s conception of intuition and Croce’s thus far, it is only that Prall emphasizes that aesthetic attention is focused on the appearance of an object to our senses whereas Croce had characterized the object of aesthetic attention as the particular object

91 92 93

Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 19. Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 20. Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 33.

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itself, but since Croce had contrasted intuition of an object with any conceptualization of it, this is probably a distinction without a difference. (But especially as expressed by Prall, the theory anticipates Martin Seel’s “aesthetics of appearing,” discussed in Part One of this volume, by more than half a century.) Prall emphasizes that in full-blown aesthetic intuition we are focused not only upon individual sensory elements such as colors, tones, tastes, or smells, but also upon the order and structure of such elements insofar as they are apparent to our senses, and thus he argues in both of his works that we cannot have as much of an aesthetic experience of tastes and smells as we do of colors or tones because they cannot demonstrate order and structure, above all rhythm.94 But what is more important to his conception of aesthetic experience is the claim that our experience of the sensory surface of objects includes an emotional dimension, and that we draw no distinction between the sensory surface and this emotional dimension; thus this experience is unitary and immediate. For example, “the red that has really caught our attention fully, and upon which that attention has actually rested, is more than merely red – bright or glaring or hard or stirring, or lovely and rich and glowing, or fresh and clear and happy, or harsh or muddy or dull or distressing, ugly or beautiful in any one of a thousand or determinate and specific meanings of those words.”95 In this passage, the adjectives move from those that might be considered strictly sensory to those that can only be considered emotional: from “bright” to “stirring,” from “clear” to “happy,” from “muddy” to “distressing.” And Prall makes this transition explicit: “As we pass from the perceptually discriminated quality, taken as sensed, to the intuited beauty immediately felt, we pass from terms like bright and clear and red, to warmly red, pleasantly bright, charmingly clear, or to attractive or lovely or fascinating.”96 Prall argues that we need draw no rigid separation between sensory qualities such as red and emotional qualities such as warm or charming because even the former involve human responses to objects, not objects as it were entirely on their own, but he also emphasizes that we do not have a genuinely aesthetic response to a surface unless we have an emotional as well as a more narrowly sensory response, that is, a response falling under the traditional rubric of secondary quality. Thus he continues: “Not that all qualities are not found in a relation 94 95 96

See Æsthetic Judgment, pp. 57–68, and Æsthetic Analysis, pp. 47–8. Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 57. Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 58.

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to a subject who finds them, but that strictly æsthetic qualities involve not merely this finding, but such quality as is found, such quality as is perhaps only constituted at all, when the feelings of the subject are involved in its relation to the object.”97 Thus Prall’s conception of aesthetic surface does not exclude emotional response from aesthetic experience, but includes it, and the focus or contemplation that is the source of the pleasure of aesthetic experience certainly includes contemplation of this emotional dimension. Likewise, the contemplation of spatial form and temporal form, the latter summed up in the concept of rhythm, also has an emotional dimension, and that is crucial to our enjoyment of aesthetic structure as well as aesthetic elements. Insofar as including an emotional dimension suffices to make a quality expressive, all aesthetic qualities, even of natural objects, may be considered expressive. But Prall’s central thesis about fine art is that only it is intentionally expressive, or expression, and thus in addition to having clarified Croce’s obscure notion of intuition by his own conception of attention to both the sensory and emotional qualities of aesthetic surfaces he also draws a distinction that Croce did not draw between the intuition of aesthetic surfaces in general and expression as a characteristic of art only. Prall argues that, obviously, not all aesthetic surfaces are on works of art and, perhaps less obviously, that not all works of art involve the appreciation of aesthetic surfaces; different arts certainly involve the appreciation of aesthetic surfaces to different degrees. Prall begins with the premise that no æsthetic theory is even plausible that fails to notice that the arts themselves are directed human activities, operations and processes of creating, not mere æsthetic surfaces, and that like other human activities, – all of which, so far as they are occupied with forming external matter, the arts ultimately comprise, – their origin, their purpose, and their definition are to be sought not in the realm of æsthetics itself, but in the wider, deeper, and more engrossing realm of human wants in general, human purposes, and human satisfactions.98

Prall expands this statement into four points. First, “the value we attribute to works of art is often not primarily æsthetic at all, and to admit this point is neither to cast an aspersion on æsthetic value, nor does it involve any confusion as to the nature or function of fine art.” Second, “the various arts differ very greatly as to the proportion of their value 97 98

Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, pp. 58–9. Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 182.

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that is strictly æsthetic, music being almost purely æsthetic in essence, poetry very slightly so.” Third, “the fine arts are first of all, for any intelligent grasp of them, arts, and only secondarily fine,” which is to say that to the extent that it is some degree or other of strictly aesthetic interest that distinguishes the fine arts from other arts, that element of strictly aesthetic interest is not foremost in our experience of art. Finally, “It is only as works of art give specification – not linguistic names or any other sort of symbols merely, but actual present determination for direct sense perception – to human feelings, emotions, desires, and satisfactions, embodied in the sensuous surface and felt upon it as being its character and quality – only so do they share in the nature of actual concrete works of fine art.”99 This means that works of art do often affect us by their sensuous surface to some degree or other, but that what is primary in our response to their sensory surface is the feelings, emotions, desires, and satisfactions expressed by those surfaces rather than their strictly sensory qualities or even our immediate emotional reaction to those sensory qualities: So in a painting, for example, we do not respond merely to some red pigment, nor even just to the felt warmth of that red, but to the red and its warmth as an expression of some further human emotion, presumably warmth about something depicted or otherwise conveyed by the painting. This list concludes with the specification that what differentiates fine art from aesthetic objects that are not works of art is the expression of feeling, emotion, and so on. Prall’s next list of similarities and differences between art in general and fine art in particular begins with the premise that all works of art are “man-made,” thus “brought about by conscious processes employed to modify and combine materials given in nature, to produce other materials or manufactured articles,”100 and ends with the reiteration that fine art in particular is characterized by expression; combining these two claims yields the result that fine art is the activity of consciously or intentionally expressing feelings, and works of fine art are the products of such conscious intention. Prall adds to the first of these points the general claim that “the value of the products of human arts is then to be measured in terms of the fitness of these products for accomplishing all the various specific human purposes they are intended to serve,” and that for much of such value “the surface of the products as it lies before discriminating perception is largely irrelevant to 99 100

Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, pp. 183–5. Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 185.

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this primary value,”101 although we ordinarily expect that at a minimum the surfaces of objects created for various practical purposes will not offend the senses and we sometimes ornament their surfaces for purely aesthetic enjoyment. Prall next adds that in all arts, not just fine arts, we can enjoy the manifestation of good technique or “technical artistic perfection”102 for the achievement of the ends of art, whatever those might happen to be. Finally, Prall holds that the fine arts in particular satisfy the basic human desire for “imitation or representation”103 and for the expression of human emotions: If what produces the actuality of works of art, what brings them into being as objective structures, as well as lending them much of their specific differentiating beauties, is technique, what gives vitality and interest to their beauty is still another aspect of them, intimately bound up with their conceived aims and purposes for human minds – their expressiveness. A work of art may have a lovely sensuous æsthetic surface as form and structure for direct intuition, and reveal in this structure the technical nature of the processes that have produced it; but if it is a work of the human spirit, a work of art functions also in expressing that spirit’s feelings and emotions of desire and satisfaction.104

Here Prall links the manifestation of technique most closely to the creation of aesthetic surface in works of fine art, although since some forms of fine art manifest technique but involve very little or no aesthetic surface, such as poetry, technique cannot be connected exclusively to aesthetic surface. What is more important is that all works of fine art aim to express feeling, and that even when they also offer the pleasures of aesthetic surface they typically enlist aesthetic surface in the expression of emotion rather than expressing emotion and offering aesthetic surface as two separate sources of pleasure. Thus he continues that even in the case of poetry this expressive functioning does not take place through linguistic symbolism alone, which is common to verse and the least artistic prose discourse, but also through its whole artistic character, including its strictly æsthetic surface, which by means of sounds and rhythms is a verbal and auditory specification of the exact emotion effect that it embodies and thus expresses. And the vitality and life of art and of its æsthetic surface depend almost wholly upon this expressiveness.105 101 102 103 104 105

Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 186. Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 207. Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 196. Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, p. 213. Prall, Æsthetic Judgment, pp. 213–14.

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Aesthetic surface is not necessarily visual or tactile; sound can also have aesthetic surface, and thus the verbal arts can too. Thus fine art in general differs from both aesthetic objects more generally and from other forms of human art in recruiting aesthetic surface for the intentional expression of feeling. The difference between Prall’s position and Croce’s should now be apparent. On the one hand, it is crucial for Prall to make a distinction between mere aesthetic surface and expression, even when expression employs aesthetic surface; thus Croce’s identification of intuition and expression is rejected. On the other hand, Prall emphasizes that fine art, like all arts, involves the intentional manipulation and transformation of materials, and thus that technique is a genuine part of fine art and the appreciation of technique a genuine part of the appreciation of fine art although of course not the whole of it. Prall thereby rejects Croce’s distinction between the cognitive and the practical. Not that he explicitly argues that fine art is both cognitive and practical – he refrains from using these terms at all. Just as he refrains from explicitly employing the concepts of play and imagination, he also refrains from asserting what so many of his contemporaries did, namely, that the expression of emotion in art is a form of self-knowledge. He simply treats the expression of emotion as a basic human need and finds the satisfaction of this need in fine art, just as other human needs are satisfied by other arts. So Prall’s position is not easily pegged as an aesthetics of truth or an aesthetics of play. Still, we might think of it as closer to the positions that synthesize these approaches with the expression of emotion than to positions that separate these three factors in aesthetic experience: His argument that the appreciation of fine art involves both the enjoyment of aesthetic surface and the enjoyment of the expression of feeling and often the expression of feeling through aesthetic surface is surely a position that emphasizes the complexity of the experience of art and the motives for its creation rather than one that tries to reduce this complexity in one direction or the other. Prall emphasizes the pluralistic rather than reductive character of his approach even more clearly in his 1936 book Æsthetic Analysis, which begins by interpreting Dewey’s theory of consummatory experience, which had been introduced by Dewey as early as 1925 in Experience and Nature but given book-length treatment only in 1934 in Art as Experience, and which we will discuss in the next chapter, as a theory about our response to aesthetic surface. It is when in our experience of aesthetic surface “something qualitative is . . . made out and raised

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from the stream of the indifferent and undifferentiated conscious or semi-conscious” experience that we have an aesthetic experience; we have such experience “when the heightening is emphatic; when the aim of experiencing activity is felt to be achieved in a vital process of receiving; when. to use Mr. Dewey’s own terms, our doing has its own felt consummation.” Prall further interprets Dewey to be agreeing with his own position that “the concrete object of æsthetic perception is just this determinate and emotionally intuited content.”106 Prall then considers the objection that when everything in aesthetic experience has been explained in terms of an experience, even a consummatory experience, there is the risk of “formalism,” that is, that the object of attention will be reduced to relations among the purely sensory elements of aesthetic surface. “And as every one knows, the formal abstractness of the elements and relations taken as fundamental is fatal to any grasp of the subject matter of æsthetics, if this is to include either sensuous content or emotional depth or human significance.” But, he responds, This objection has already been answered. For the elements we have so far suggested are not only sensuously but emotionally toned, and the structural relations are sensuous relations apprehended sensuously and with feeling. Thus we run no risk of formalizing the subject in such a way as to neglect the richness of its humanly significant content. When all of the sensuous elements are apprehended in just those relational structures which they constitute by virtue of the relations established in their native order, this grasp would not be the concrete apprehending of an æsthetic object, were it not the fact that such apprehension is in its very nature feeling.107

We can defer until after we have discussed Dewey the question of whether Prall’s appropriation of him in defense of his own view is fair; what is clear now is that Prall clearly thought of his own approach in aesthetics as a synthetic one, in which the experience of emotion on the part of anyone responding to an aesthetic object – thus audience as well as artist – is prominent, but combined with rather than excluding other aspects of aesthetic experience, such as the perception of purely sensory features of objects and the exercise of other mental capacities in discovering relations among those and their emotional overtones.

106 107

Prall, Æsthetic Analysis, p. 9. Prall, Æsthetic Analysis, p. 19.

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4. Stace But before we can turn to Dewey, another American critic of Croce who should be mentioned here is Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967). Stace was an Englishman by birth, but he was Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton from 1935 to 1955, after a twenty-year career in the British civil service (including a term as the mayor of Colombo in the then British colony of Ceylon). Stace is perhaps best remembered for his 1924 book The Philosophy of Hegel,108 although his 1929 The Meaning of Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics109 was influenced more by Kant than by Hegel, and he was apparently considered an empiricist at Princeton,110 where he wrote many more books although no further books in aesthetics. In The Meaning of Beauty Stace in fact argues that many questions traditionally dealt with in philosophical aesthetics, such as the precise differences among various aesthetic qualities and differences among the arts, are empirical matters that should be dealt with by art critics, historians, and psychologists rather than by philosophers, but the central argument of the work has both conceptual and phenomenological premises that place it squarely in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics. The chief difference between Stace’s position and the others we have been considering in this chapter is that Stace rejects Croce’s conception of aesthetic experience as “intuition” on the ground that Croce’s conception of intuition is an ill-defined alternative to a straightforward conception of perception but then argues that in aesthetic experience perception is “fused” with conceptualization, while emotion is not what is embodied in art but is rather part of the embodiment of the concepts that art fuses with sensory perception. Stace begins his analysis with the Kantian assumption that aesthetic judgments claim universal validity, or “demand the agreement of others,”111 and then maintains that “that which alone can explain and justify this validity is, in one way or another, the concept.”112 But whereas Kant had argued that judgments of taste cannot be grounded on determinate concepts but must be grounded in the free play of the faculties that ordinarily apply concepts, Stace argues that beauty is the organic 108 109

110

111 112

W.T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel: A Systematic Exposition (London: Macmillan, 1924). W.T. Stace, The Meaning of Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics (London: Grant Richards and Humphrey Toulmin, 1929). See Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Stace, Meaning of Beauty, p. 33. Stace, Meaning of Beauty, p. 34.

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fusion of “empirical nonperceptual concepts” with the “concrete” side of the perceptual, not “the sensuous as in idealistic aesthetics,” but “both external and internal perception.”113 He distinguishes “empirical nonperceptual concepts” from both categories, “those concepts which universally and necessarily apply to all objects of experience,” such as unity, existence, and quality, as well as perceptual concepts, “such as the abstract ideas of house, man, star, redness,” and others, to which “percepts directly correspond.”114 Empirical nonperceptual concepts are less universal than categories but more universal than ordinary perceptual contents “because they consist, not of abstractions of particular entities, but of abstractions from areas of human experience so large that they cannot be grasped together in any single act of perception. Examples of empirical non-perceptual concepts are evolution, progress, harmony, goodness, civilisation, law, order, peace, gravitation, spirituality.”115 Stace’s claim is then that all forms of beauty, even the beauty of nature, consist in the fusion of such ideas with concrete, perceptual “fields,” a fusion “so complete that the intellectual content and the perceptual field become indistinguishable.”116 The bulk of Stace’s work is then devoted to illustrating how this fusion works in different arts and even in the case of natural beauty, and using his model of beauty to resolve several of the traditional problems of aesthetics. But once having used the issue of the universal validity claimed by aesthetic judgments to insist on a conceptual dimension to beauty and therefore to aesthetic experience, he does not actually argue that our response to concepts must be uniform, thus that the conceptual dimension of beauty is actually sufficient to guarantee universal validity in judgments about it. Stace illustrates his theory or argues for it with a variety of examples. To show how his theory works in the case of nature, he uses sublimity, which, contrary to Kant, he regards as a species of beauty: The perceptual fields of sublime objects give us a variety of empirical nonperceptual concepts – “the idea of the puniness of man in the facet of the overwhelming forces of nature. . . . Connected with this . . . the kindred ideas of the agelessness, the comparative eternity of these natural objects, in contrast to the brief span of human life . . . intellectual conceptions of its infinity, vastness, power, and eternity.”117 His idea is that even though, as Kant 113 114 115 116 117

Stace, Meaning of Beauty, pp. 44–5. Stace, Meaning of Beauty, pp. 47–8. Stace, Meaning of Beauty, pp. 49–50. Stace, Meaning of Beauty, p. 54. Stace, Meaning of Beauty, pp. 109–10.

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would have put it, there are no determinate rules in accordance with which perceptual objects exemplify such concepts, perceptual objects can nevertheless suggest them to us and suggest them to us in ways that seem intimately bound up with what is perceived, not merely reflectively or indirectly connected to them. “In the presence of the towering rock, of the raging sea, . . . we see with our physical eyes the infinite power of the universe and the impotence of man visibly there before us. And this actual vision of our intellectual thoughts yields us aesthetic pleasure.”118 Here is where Stace’s purported empiricism manifests itself: He does not think it incumbent upon him to explain how perceptual objects give us these ideas, although perhaps a psychologist could do that; the philosopher simply points out that they do and that this fact allows the requirements of aesthetic judgment to be satisfied. Stace goes on to argue that other forms of natural beauty fuse different ideas with their perceptual fields; for example, a landscape might impress us with peace, calm, and serenity through such perceptible features as “the silent sunlight, the windless air, the slow unhurried curling upward of the coils of blue smoke” from cottage chimneys, and so on.119 He then points out that particular aspects of perceptual fields that we might find in either nature or works of art can suggest meanings, for example, “beauty of shape seems to be explained chiefly as embodying in a perceptual field the cognate conceptions of order, law, and regularity . . . not the immediate mathematical law involved, but the concept of law in general.”120 Works of architecture, sculpture, or tragedy can express “Christian ideals,” “the religious conceptions of the Greeks,” or “the idea of Fate,”121 and music – here Wagner is Stace’s preferred example – can express the “most universal features” of life, such as “the essential sadness of all life” or “the enigma of life, its doubts, darknesses, and struggles.”122 The range of these empirical nonperceptual concepts that may be expressed by art is indefinitely large, as is the variety of ways in which perceptions may fuse with these ideas. And one implication of this is that Stace by no means restricts the content expressed by arts to emotions, thus distinguishing his theory from many of the others we have considered. Another difference between Stace’s theory and many of the other expression theories is that Stace insists that emotions often 118 119 120 121 122

Stace, Meaning of Beauty, p. 110. Stace, Meaning of Beauty, p. 115. Stace, Meaning of Beauty, pp. 119–20. Stace, Meaning of Art, pp. 139–40. Stace, Meaning of Beauty, p. 184.

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function not as the content of art or other kinds of beauty but as part of the perceptual field through which the content is expressed – that is why Stace insists that the perceptual should not be equated with the sensuous, but must include the internal as well as the external. Stace claims that the concepts expressed by beauty “are fused with a perceptual field, which may consist in emotions, or actions, or sensuous images.”123 “The result is that we feel, rather than think” the concepts. In lyrical poetry, for example, where “the emotions, ideas, and feelings expressed are not those of imaginary personages but those of the poet himself,” “here, as elsewhere, if the work of art is emotional, the emotion is part of the perceptual field and not of the intellectual content. For the poet himself his emotions are an immediate perceptual field seen in introspection. For us they are an inferred or communicated perceptual field. . . . They are impregnated with concepts which constitute the intellectual content of the poem.”124 Like lyrical poetry, music is also “an especially emotional art,” and likewise “the emotions it expresses are essentially intellectual emotions – that is to say, feelings or emotions impregnated with concepts . . . concepts fused with emotions and feelings.”125 Stace does not explain in any detail just how this fusion works, but perhaps we can understand it as a three- rather than two-stage phenomenon: Instead of external sensory properties such as shapes and combinations of colors immediately suggesting abstract ideas, they stimulate emotional responses that in turn suggest more abstract concepts in a way that seems to us fused or intimately connected. Stace uses his theory to address the traditional question about how we can possibly enjoy artistic representations of ugly things, or the more specific version of this problem in the form of the paradox of tragedy. The core of his answer is that beauty lies in the fusion of intellectual content and perceptual field, so that in principle any kind of content is compatible with beauty – in this regard, his theory is certainly similar to Croce’s equation of beauty with successful expression. And he insists that the variety of successful expression is far wider than the narrowly pretty, so successful expression cannot be reduced to what is beautiful in some sense so narrow that it makes the expression of unpleasant content paradoxical. But Stace also emphasizes that the content of art has and retains its own emotional associations or “feeling-value,” so that the 123 124 125

Stace, Meaning of Beauty, p. 169. Stace, Meaning of Beauty, p. 177. Stace, Meaning of Beauty, p. 181.

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overall “feeling-value” of a work of art and our response to it can be complex: Now when, in our æsthetic experience, a concept is fused with a perceptual field, it does not thereby lose its own peculiar feeling-value. Its feeling-value will, on the contrary, shine through the æsthetic experience and be felt by the beholder. If the original feeling-value is painful, the beholder will receive two opposite feeling-impressions. . . . This, I suggest, is the explanation of all those kinds of æsthetic experience in which we seem to take a pleasure in the painful. The terrible, the tragic, the awe-inspiring, some forms of the comic, the satirical, and, finally, the ugly, cease to be paradoxical if viewed in the light of this theory.126

By focusing less on emotion as the content of art and more on emotion as part of both the medium of art and the response to it, Stace puts himself in a better position to recognize the emotional complexity of our response to much art – or even to nature – than a simpler expression theory like Croce’s. Stace’s theory certainly remains within the cognitivist tradition, with emotions functioning as part of the machinery of cognition rather than as the primary object of aesthetic experience, and in spite of his explicit debt to Kant, he does not take up the idea of aesthetic experience as a form of free play – unlike so many others of his time, he does not explicitly criticize the aesthetics of play; rather he simply does not mention it. So in spite of the Kantian provenance of his theory he cannot be considered to be one of the modern aestheticians who resurrect the Kantian synthesis of the aesthetics of truth and the aesthetics of play. Nevertheless Stace’s form of aesthetic cognitivism is broader than many of the time, for example, the Neo-Kantian theories we earlier examined, precisely because he does not restrict the conceptual content of art to the single category of emotions, or any other single category.

5. Greene Theodore M. Greene (1897–1969) started his career as a Kant scholar, but neither Kant nor other historical figures have a strong presence in his chief work in aesthetics, The Arts and the Art of Criticism.127 Greene, the son of American missionaries, grew up in Istanbul and then attended Amherst College. After four years in the Punjab teaching high school, he 126 127

Stace, Meaning of Beauty, pp. 76–7. Theodore M. Greene, The Arts and the Art of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940).

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went to Edinburgh to do graduate work in philosophy under the great Kant scholar Norman Kemp Smith. Greene’s dissertation led to his translation of Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, with a lengthy introduction on the historical and religious context of Kant’s work.128 Greene was appointed a preceptor at Princeton before completing his Ph.D., no doubt on the recommendation of Kemp Smith, who had himself taught at Princeton before returning to Britain in the First World War, and rose to the rank of McCosh Professor of Philosophy before moving to Yale in 1946. At Princeton, of course, Greene was the colleague of Stace. At Yale, he founded the Directed Studies program, a broadbased introduction to the humanities that continues to this day. He left Yale in 1954 to become professor of Humanities at Scripps College in California, where he remained until retiring in 1966.129 Greene’s magnum opus in aesthetics, very much a work of the 1930s, reflects his broad interests in the humanities and the arts. Greene describes it as “a study of the work of art as an object of delight, a vehicle of communication, and, at least potentially, a record of significant insight” and as “concerned with those aspects of the art of criticism which lend themselves to philosophical analysis,” but presents it as a study “with copious illustration” of the “respective media,” the “several types of formal organization,” and the “expressive potentialities and limitations” of the six major arts of music, dance, architecture, painting, sculpture, and literature rather than as a purely abstract analysis of the fundamental principles of art and art criticism.130 However, a highly articulated analysis of art and of the reasons for our pleasure in it underlies Greene’s detailed studies of the major arts. Following Santayana (but mentioning him only in passing),131 Greene analyzes art along the three dimensions of matter, form, and expression, although he complicates Santayana’s scheme by recognizing “primary” and “secondary” versions of each of these three dimensions. He argues that we take pleasure in the matter of art, its form, and its expression of content, the last of which always includes an emotional aspect although in some arts it can include more. Greene thereby synthesizes the conception of art as the expression of emotion that as we have seen dominated the half-century preceding his 128

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130 131

Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (LaSalle: Open Court, 1934). For biographical information, see the memorial notice by Charles W. Hendel, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 44 (1970–1): 214–16. Greene, Arts, pp. vii–viii. Greene, Arts, pp. 100, 235.

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work with a version of the theory of “significant form” that had been promulgated as an alternative to this dominant view. He recognizes the sheer pleasure that we can take in both the matter and the form of art as well as the less immediate pleasure that we can take in the expression of emotional and other content. In spite of his early work on Kant, the one thing that he does not include in his synthesis is any analog of Kant’s conception of free play, or a recognition of pleasure in the sheer free play of imagination in art. Greene treats “aesthetic quality” as a broad category applying to anything that evokes a “re-creative response in the sensitive person.” The narrower category of “beauty” applies to those objects that evoke a favorable response to their formal organization. That category includes both natural and man-made beauty, which is in turn divided into the “artistically inexpressive” and “artistically expressive” or “artistic beauty,” the ultimate target of analysis in his theory.132 Artistically inexpressive beauty is, for example, the beauty of well-designed machines, “such as polished ball-bearings and aesthetically stream-lined automobiles,” which may “emphasize” their perceptual qualities or even “give aesthetic expression to the use for which” the object, for example, “the car was created”: “But the most that a machine can express is its immediate utilitarian function, whereas a work of art expresses the artist’s interpretation of a given subject-matter.”133 So artistic impression is complex for Greene: A work of art expresses a content, always but not always only an emotion, but also expresses the artist’s attitude about that content. This does not mean that a work of art simply gives vent to the artist’s own emotion, as, for example, Tolstoy may have held; as we will see, Greene offers a subtle account on which artists begin with their own experience of emotions but use all their skills and imagination to refine their own experience into an expression of their own understanding of shared human emotions. In this regard, Greene’s theory is similar to that which R.G. Collingwood reached in the third book of his Principles of Art two years before Greene’s work was published. The heart of Greene’s work is his explication of the three artistic categories of matter, form and content; the distinction between the primary and secondary senses of each of these; and the illustration of the various ways in which all six of the resulting elements are realized in the different major arts. (He acknowledges that moving pictures have already 132 133

Greene, Arts, pp. 5–6. Greene, Arts, pp. 11–12.

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become another major art by 1940 but chooses not to discuss them.) The three basic categories mean that “every work of art exists in some medium, possesses some form, and, if it has any artistic merit whatever, has some expressed content.” Greene is emphatic that these categories are not separately but jointly realized by concrete works of art: “These three essential aspects of the work of art are clearly distinguishable; but since they are so mutually dependent it will be well to define them in such a way as to show their relation to one another.” Thus: The “matter” of a work of art is that in it which has been expressively organized. The “form” of a work of art is the expressive organization of its matter. The “content” of a work of art is that which finds artistic expression through such formal organization of its matter.134

Artistic form, Greene continues, “is the peculiar locus of artistic quality, and the sine qua non of all artistic excellence,” but it is “never merely an end in itself”; rather “it is a means of expression,” which “in turn, must be the expression of something, however true or false, trivial or profound.”135 In this way Greene sublates any simple contrast between formalism and aestheticism, on the one hand, and the theory of expression, on the other: Form, which we can think of as being internal to the work of art, thus enjoyable for its own sake, is what is distinctive to art and what makes it beautiful, but the expression of content beyond the work itself is what makes art important and deepens the pleasure that we can take in form alone. But Greene’s real originality lies in his distinction between the primary and secondary senses of artistic matter, form, and expression. Greene defines the primary/secondary distinction first for the category of matter, along with a distinction between raw material and medium. “The primary raw material of any art is the sensuous (in the case of literature, the partly sensuous) material which, once it has been organized into a language or vehicle of artistic expression and communication, constitutes its primary artistic medium”; “the secondary raw material of any art is its potential subject-matter prior to all pre-artistic selection and appraisal; its secondary artistic medium is this same subject-matter after it has been scrutinized with an eye to its immediately availability for the art in question.”136 Primary raw material is the basic sensuous material for an art, and secondary raw material its potential content; secondary raw material 134 135 136

Greene, Arts, pp. 31–2. Greene, Arts, pp. 32–3. Greene, Arts, p. 39.

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is that same sensuous material insofar as it is part of an artistic system of organization and expression, and secondary content the potential content insofar as it has been recognized as suitable for artistic expression. For example, in music the primary raw material would simply be sound, the primary medium “musically related tones and rests which permit of formal organization into abstract musical patterns”; the secondary raw material would be “human emotion and conation” in general, but the secondary medium would be such human emotion and conation that turn out to be suitable for musical expression, given the nature of the musical medium, that is, the musical relations that are considered possible.137 Since primary and secondary media are essentially subsets of primary and secondary raw material, we can focus on the media. Similar distinctions are made for the other arts: In dance, the primary medium is “the human body in motion and rest” and the secondary medium, again, “human emotion and conation.”138 In architecture, the primary medium is “three-dimensional solids and voids,” its secondary medium the uses to which buildings can be put and which will be achieved through solids and voids.139 In painting and sculpture, the primary media are twodimensional surfaces and three-dimensional solids, respectively, while their secondary media are “all objects which might be regarded as potential representational subject-matter.” Finally, literature is more complex: Its primary medium is “words in meaningful relations,” but these have both “a sensuous aspect” that we can immediately enjoy as well as “ideational meanings” that “are in essence conceptual, but . . . may also, in addition, be imagistic, emotive, and conative”;140 the secondary medium of literature is all the “‘objects’ of one kind or another” to which the “referential meanings of words refer us.”141 In sum, the secondary media or the chief types of subject-matter available to the artist for artistic selection and representation are (i) physical objects and events, and their perceptual attributes; (ii) man’s social or communal needs and activities, religious, civic, domestic, and the like; (iii) man’s emotive-conative states; and (iv) the ideas, whether conceptual or linguistic, and whether religiously, socially, or introspectively oriented, in terms of which man interprets his experiences and the objects of his awareness.142

137 138 139 140 141 142

Greene, Arts, p. 35. Greene, Arts, p. 35. Greene, Arts, p. 36. Greene, Arts, p. 37. Greene, Arts, p. 38. Greene, Arts, p. 44.

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For Greene, art characteristically has a subject matter, and emotions are certainly prominent in the subject matter of arts, although they are not the sole subject matter of the arts as a group and only for some particular arts, such as instrumental music, are they the primary subject matter. The introduction of subject matter into the secondary media of the arts and especially the introduction of the emotions into that classification, however, raise the question of what is the difference between the matter of the arts, on the one hand, and their form and content, on the other, since selection, which sounds like a kind of form, has already entered into the distinction between primary material and secondary media, and content, which is what art would seem to express, has entered into the definition of secondary media. The difference between form and matter is relatively easy to explain. Form is “the artistically expressive organization” of the matter of a work of art “or, more accurately, of the medium in which it has its being,”143 even more precisely, the organization of the secondary raw material and secondary media, on which some selection has already occurred. Greene illustrates his idea of form with such examples as thematic unification, repetition, and variation in music; columniation and fenestration in architecture; and so on. He observes that “the distinctive form of a work of art is indeed an end in itself in the sense of being intrinsically satisfying,” and that “not only the creative artist himself but the sensitive artistic and literary critic and the enlightened lover of the fine arts and literature delight in sheer aesthetic form or beauty for its own sake.”144 This is his recognition of the kind of pleasure that had been made into the sole point of art by formalists such as Clive Bell “and, less narrowly, Roger Fry,” as Greene correctly notes.145 But he emphasizes that in the case of art not only do we add to our pleasure in form itself a “delight in . . . technical skill,” for “in art, as in any human endeavor, we cannot help admiring the mastery of a medium”;146 even more importantly, “artistic form differs from merely formal beauty in being not only a distinctive object of immediate and intrinsic aesthetic satisfaction, the artist’s vehicle for self-expression and significant communication. . . . Genuine art is both aesthetically satisfying and profoundly revealing.” This means that form is what takes us from the first of Greene’s categories, matter, to the third, the expression of content. And in this context Greene criticizes Croce for being “curiously 143 144 145 146

Greene, Arts, p. 123. Greene, Arts, p. 123. Greene, Arts, p. 123n. Greene, Arts, p. 124.

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indifferent to many essential features of the artistic medium and form,” in spite of “his eloquent insistence on the preeminent importance of expression in art.”147 But that only takes us back to the question of the difference between content as the secondary medium of art, part of its matter, and content as the third category, that is, that which is expressed by art. The answer to this question lies in Greene’s distinction between the material for the content of art, for example, human emotion, and the interpretation of that material by the artist, his or her distinctive take on that emotion; the latter is the third category, the content that is expressed by the work of art. Thus Greene writes that “the central thesis which I shall try to defend is that, in a work of art, (a) reality is (b) interpreted, and (c) expressed in a distinctive way”;148 thus that “a work of art may accordingly be re-defined as a distinctive expression, in a distinctive medium, and by means of a distinctive type of formal organization, of a distinctive type of man’s interpretation and of the real world to which this experience is oriented.”149 In particular: If the true artist seeks to express in his art an interpretation of some aspect of the real world of human experience, every genuine work of art, however slight and in whatever medium, must have some subject matter. It is not merely an aesthetically satisfying organization of sensuous particulars. The entire history of the fine arts and literature, from the earliest times on record down to the present, offers overwhelming evidence that art in the various media has arisen from the artist’s desire to express and communicate to his fellows some pervasive human emotion, some insight felt by him to have a wider relevancy, some interpretation of a reality other than the work of art itself in all its specificity.150

The key points that Greene makes in illustrating these general statements are that artists are “unusually sensitive to the specificity” of both their “physical environment” and the “objects of inner experience,”151 beginning necessarily with their own inner experience, and that they further treat their “subject-matter in a highly individualized manner.”152 But at the same time, on the basis of their own experience, they seek to express what is widely valid for other people: For example, “like

147 148 149 150 151 152

Greene, Arts, p. 125. Greene, Arts, p. 229. Greene, Arts, p. 231. Greene, Arts, p. 231. Greene, Arts, p. 252. Greene, Arts, p. 263.

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other men, the composer can achieve direct acquaintance with human emotion and conation only through immediate first-hand experience,” but “every artist must, if he is to speak for the man in men, be interested also in the more or less common characteristics of men and their environment. . . . Hence, though the composer must himself experience with poignant vividness the emotions and conative attitudes which he proposes to express . . . he must also manage to express what is universal in man’s emotive-conative experience.”153 And “it is imperative for us, as human beings, to communicate our experiences to others and to share in their experiences, and such inter-personal communication is, in its very essence, consciously and purposively expressive”154 – the successful artist has a personal manner of expression, but nevertheless succeeds in making it intelligible to others. The artist “selects from among his own experiences and those of his fellow men the experiences which seem to him to possess universal meaning and significance” and “realizes that if his art is to endure and to be intelligible to a wide and varied audience he must transcend, without neglecting, the merely particular and idiosyncratic.”155 Discovering how to do this clearly requires thought and reflection and is a large part of the intellectual process that transforms the matter for art, even the secondary medium that already includes emotions, into the content of expression. The artist “resorts to expression partly to clarify his own thinking, partly to share with other human beings his interpretative apprehensions,” and insofar as art aims at both self-clarification and communication, “it reflects, however indirectly,” the “conscious and normative processes” of the artist.156 In this account of expression, Greene emphasizes the “emotive” and “conative” aspects of experience, even though in his original description of artistic matter he argued that emotion and conation were the paradigmatic content of music and dance and that other arts had other or more content. Is there a contradiction here? There is not, because what Greene supposes is that at the level of expression, the artist expresses widely felt emotions about the first-order content of art, whether the latter is itself emotion or not. This is particularly clear in Greene’s account of emotions: Emotions are not the primary medium of architecture, certainly, which is solids and voids; nor is it the secondary medium or first-order content of architecture, which consists in the social functions – domestic, 153 154 155 156

Greene, Arts, pp. 58–9. Greene, Arts, p. 259. Greene, Arts, p. 253. Greene, Arts, p. 258.

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civil, religious – that are served by structures made of solids and voids. But the successful architect not only manages to express those in his buildings, but also, somehow, conveys how he and we feel about those functions. “Man’s need for protection and privacy, or for corporate religious worship, for example, is naturally accompanied by a variety of emotions and attitudes, and it is primarily these which successful architecture expresses via architectural form.”157 A Greek temple or Gothic cathedral does not just make it clear by its form that it is meant for worship of a god, and a god conceived within a certain intellectual framework, but also somehow manages to express how its builders and its patrons and its users feel about that god and their mode of worshiping him. There is a similar layer of emotion about the more immediate content in the works of the other arts as well. When he reaches his discussion of expression, Greene does align himself with Kant to a degree. He notes that Kant “so cogently argued” “that beauty, and beauty alone, is the proper object of ‘pure’ aesthetic taste,” but he also states that “Kant held no very high regard for mere formal beauty as such.” Rather, he “valued natural beauty chiefly as ‘the symbol of the morally good,’ and denied spiritual significance to art which merely satisfies formal aesthetic criteria.”158 So Greene takes Kant to agree with him in recognizing pleasure in the appreciation of sheer form, but in also recognizing that to be only one part of aesthetic experience, and by no means the most important or valuable; likewise Kant shares with Greene the recognition of content, perhaps literal in the case of art and symbolic in the case of nature (no doubt symbolic in some art as well), as another and no doubt more important part of aesthetic experience. What Greene does not say is that Kant certainly makes no place for the expression of emotion about the first-order content of art as itself an important part of art, nor for the experience of such emotion as an important part of the reception of art. But he does repeat here that “more recently we are indebted to Croce for a renewed insistence on the expressiveness of art,”159 and this may be a tacit admission that Kant had omitted this important dimension of art from his own theory. Whether or not Greene means to criticize Kant, his emphasis on the expression of emotion in art is certainly an important addition to Kant’s account of art and our experience of it. 157 158 159

Greene, Arts, p. 78. Greene, Arts, pp. 233–5. Greene, Arts, p. 235.

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But still, as I said earlier, there seems to be no place in Greene’s elaborate account of artistic creation and aesthetic experience for the free play of imagination, an omission that he shared with his Princeton colleague Stace. So even though both added important elements to Kant’s synthesis, they also omitted the key element of free play. Let us now turn from this restricted revival of Kantianism to a theory that explicitly rejects Kant’s account of aesthetic experience as free play at a superficial level but is more profoundly Kantian in its psychology than it admits, namely, John Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience.

8 Dewey

John Dewey (1859–1952) was the only one of the founding triumvirate of American pragmatists (the others being Charles Sanders Peirce and William James) to devote a book to aesthetics, and even then he came to the subject late in his career: Art as Experience was first presented in the lecture series named after William James at Harvard in 1931 and published as a book in 1934, when Dewey was already seventy-five years old, and has remained ever since one of the most widely read of Dewey’s numerous works and one of the most widely read works in the history of American aesthetics. At one point in the book, Dewey largely dissociates himself from what he himself calls the play theory of art, arguing that although “the truth in the play theory is its emphasis upon the unconstrained character of esthetic experience,” it remains locked within “its opposition of freedom and necessity, of spontaneity and order,” an opposition going “back to the same dualism between subject and object that infects the make-believe theory”1 or the “dream theory” of art – theories that art is the product of imagination unconstrained by any of the demands of ordinary life and its conditions. Throughout his career, but especially in his culminating philosophical works of the 1920s and early 1930s,2 Dewey aimed to undermine virtually all traditional philosophical dualisms such as those between subject and object, theory and practice, and for that matter work and play – the critique of the last distinction 1

2

John Dewey, Art as Experience, in Dewey, The Later Works, Volume 10: 1934, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, Textual Editor Harriet Furst Simon, with an Introduction by Abraham Kaplan (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), p. 284. These would include especially Experience and Nature, the first Paul Carus Lectures of the American Philosophical Association, second edition (LaSalle: Open Court, 1925, 1929) and The Quest for Certainty, Dewey’s Gifford Lectures (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929).

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being crucial to Dewey’s enormous influence as an educational theorist.3 So although he appreciated the emphasis on the spontaneity of the imagination in the play theory of art, he decried what he considered to be “its underlying note . . . the idea that esthetic experience is” primarily “a release and escape from the pressure of ‘reality’” and its “failure to recognize that esthetic experience involves a definite reconstruction of objective materials,” that is, the “artistic activity” that “is significantly called the work of art.”4 But in spite of this criticism of the play theory, like so many others still tacitly based on Spencer’s rather than Kant’s version of it, Dewey’s approach cannot be straightforwardly identified with the truth theory of art, or the cognitivist interpretation of aesthetic experience, because to do so would also presuppose a rigid dualism between truth and play theories of the kind that he himself rejects. Neither can Dewey’s theory be identified with a straightforward truth theory as an alternative to a theory of the emotional impact of art, because that too would presuppose a dualism that he rejects. Dewey certainly joins in the general tendency that we have seen in both Britain and America in the early decades of the twentieth century to conceive of the core of aesthetic experience as the expression of emotion as a form of cognition, but he also emphasizes the involvement of the imagination in aesthetic experience and the intrinsic pleasurability of such experience, typical features of the play theory. So although Dewey rejects the pure play theory of art as he understands it, his aesthetic theory as a whole can only be considered to be a synthesis of the play theory with the other two modern approaches to aesthetics within the framework of his own theory of experience, and a very influential synthesis at that – precisely what we should have expected from one of the chief antidualists and synthesizers in twentieth-century philosophy. Dewey, the son of pious and educated Congregationalists from Burlington, Vermont, attended the University of Vermont in that town, still largely dominated by “an awkward mixture of Kant’s transcendental idealism and Scottish ‘commonsense’ philosophy,”5 and then, after three years as a schoolteacher, commenced graduate school in philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University, only six years old when Dewey 3

4 5

Among Dewey’s most influential works on education were School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900) and Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916). Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 283–4. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), p. 50.

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began his studies in 1882 but at that time the most important center for doctoral training on the German model in the United States. His teachers there included the Hegelian G.S. Morris, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and Charles Sanders Peirce; both Hegelianism and psychology would be more influential in Dewey’s early work than Peirce’s pragmatism (Dewey’s early Hegelianism was also influenced by the work of the Oxford idealist T.H. Green),6 but ultimately the latter would be the most important influence on Dewey. After his studies at Hopkins, Dewey was appointed at the University of Michigan, to which Morris had moved, where he modified his early Hegelianism by teaching the work of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer and offered instruction in psychology. In 1894, after ten years at Michigan, he moved to the new University of Chicago, where he developed his own form of pragmatism; laid the foundations for some of his most important midcareer works, his Ethics and How We Think;7 applied “psychological and anthropological theory to education;”8 and created the famous Laboratory School of the university, a school in which to test his own pedagogical theories but also a key factor in the university’s recruitment of faculty with families for the next century. Now famous, but also squabbling with the university over his leadership of the School of Education and his wife’s role at the Laboratory School, Dewey moved in 1904 to the department of philosophy and psychology at Columbia University, where he would remain until his retirement until 1930 and for another ten years of full-time teaching after that. Dewey remained active as a public figure and liberal spokesman almost until his death a few months before his ninety-third birthday in 1952.9 6 7

8 9

See Ryan, Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, p. 76. John Dewey with J.H. Tufts, Ethics, first edition (New York: Henry Holt, 1908), and How We Think (New York: D.C. Heath, 1910). Ryan, Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, p. 119. For biographies of Dewey in addition to Ryan’s, see Richard J. Bernstein, John Dewey (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966); Sidney Hook, John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait, introduction by Richard Rorty (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995); Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey: A Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). For Dewey’s situation in American philosophy and pragmatism as a whole, see H.S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1968); Morton White, Science and Sentiment in America: Philosophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) and Pragmatism and the American Mind: Essays and Reviews in Philosophy and Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Russell B. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Strauss &

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1. Experience and Nature In this long career, Dewey did not explicitly address aesthetics until he included the chapter “Experience, Nature and Art” in the 1925 Carus Lectures Experience and Nature. He sums up the argument of this chapter in the preface to the 1929 second edition of this book: The highest because most complete incorporation of natural forces and operations in experience is found in art. Art is a process of production in which natural materials are reshaped in a projection toward consummatory fulfillment through regulation of trains of events that occur in a less regulated way on lower levels of nature. Art is “fine” in the degree in which ends, the final termini, of natural processes are dominant and conspicuously enjoyed. All art is instrumental in its use of techniques and tools. It is shown that normal artistic experience involves bringing to a better balance than is found elsewhere in either nature or experience the consummatory and instrumental phases of events. Art thus represents the culminating event of nature as well as the climax of experience.10

Several, although not all, of the characteristic features of Dewey’s aesthetics are suggested in this summary: Art offers the “consummatory fulfillment” or highest form of experience, and it is enjoyed as such a form of experience; although its aim is the production of this distinctive form of experience, not simply the production of physical objects or products, “its use of techniques and tools” is indispensable to its creation of experience; and both the production and the experience of art must be understood within the context of a general theory of nature, although,

10

Giroux, 2001). For general works on Dewey’s philosophy, see Morton G. White, The Origin of Dewey’s Instrumentalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); Ralph W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); J.E. Tiles, Dewey (London: Routledge, 1988); Richard M. Gale, John Dewey’s Quest for Unity: The Journey of a Promethean Mystic (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2010); and ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey, Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn, third edition, Library of Living Philosophers (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1989). For literature on Dewey’s aesthetics, see Philip M. Zeltner, John Dewey’s Aesthetic Philosophy (Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner, 1975); Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); Marie-Louise Raters-Mohr, Intensität und Widerstand: Metaphysik, Gesellschaftstheorie, und Ästhetik in John Deweys “Art as Experience” (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1994), and Raters, Kunst, Wahrheit und Gefühl, pp. 470–511; Philip Jackson, John Dewey and the Lessons of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism: Dewey,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, second edition (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 121–32; and Richard Eldridge, “Dewey’s Aesthetics,” The Cambridge Companion to John Dewey, ed. Molly Cochran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 242–64. Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. xix.

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in line with the prevailing conception of aesthetics since his early master Hegel redefined the meaning of the term, Dewey thinks of art rather than natural beauty as the primary subject of aesthetics and tends to use the experience of natural beauty only as a simple example of the more complex experience of art. Dewey’s fuller account of what he means by “consummatory fulfillment” or consummatory experience awaits Art as Experience, but the chapter on art in Experience and Nature offers an idea of what he means: Aesthetic experience is experience in which the complexities and tensions of experience are felt to be harmonized and resolved, a state that is enjoyable for its own sake rather than merely as part of the solution to some theoretical or practical problem beyond the experience itself. He writes: The doings and sufferings that form experience are, in the degree in which experience is intelligent or charged with meanings, a union of the precarious, novel, irregular with the settled, assured, and uniform – a union which also defines the artistic and the esthetic. For wherever there is art the contingent and the ongoing no longer work at cross purposes with the formal and recurrent but conmingle in harmony. And the distinguishing feature of conscious experience, of what for short is often called “consciousness,” is that in it the instrumental and the final, meanings that are immediately possessed, suffered, and enjoyed, come together in one. And all of these things are preëminently true of art. . . . Art is solvent union of the generic, recurrent, ordered, established phase of nature with its phase that is incomplete, going on, and hence still uncertain, contingent, novel, particular; or, as certain systems of esthetic theory have truly declared, though without empirical basis and import in their words, a union of necessity and freedom, a harmony of the many and one, a reconciliation of sensuous and ideal.11

A page later Dewey introduces the term “consummatory” to designate the overcoming of the distinctions between “means and consequence, process and product” that is implied by such experience.12 As Dewey himself makes clear, he intends his characterization of consummatory experience as the “solvent union . . . of necessity and freedom, a harmony of the many and one,” to be an empircally well-founded psychological description of the state of mind that earlier aestheticians had identified, although without the supposed benefit of modern psychology – Hutcheson’s description of the feeling of beauty as the response to the perception of uniformity amid variety is certainly one antecedent 11 12

Dewey, Experience and Nature, pp. 290–1. Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 293.

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for Dewey’s conception that leaps to mind. Hutcheson had argued that we enjoy the perception of uniformity amid variety in its own right, independent of the theoretical and practical advantages that a disposition in favor of uniformity amid variety no doubt has, and by so arguing he had at least prepared the way for the conception of aesthetic experience as an intrinsically satisfying play of our cognitive powers rather than as a state whose value lies in the access to some important truth that it affords; in spite of his criticism of the play theory of art in Art as Experience, then, by alluding to earlier theories of the Hutchesonian sort Dewey thus seems to align himself with that approach. At the same time, however, his phrase the “reconciliation of sensuous and ideal” is an unmistakable allusion to the Hegelian conception of beauty as the “pure appearance of the Idea to sense”13 and of art as “though sensuous, . . . essentially at the same time for spiritual apprehension,”14 and seems also to connect Dewey’s conception of consummatory experience to the cognitivist approach to aesthetics, on which aesthetic experience is valued because it offers especially direct access to truths beyond itself. Dewey only hints at the way in which he synthesizes these two approaches in Experience and Nature but will make his synthesis more clear in Art as Experience. There too the place of emotions in aesthetic experience will emerge more clearly. Before we turn to that work, however, we may note several further points in Dewey’s preparatory discussion of aesthetics in Experience and Nature. One point to note is that although Dewey focuses on art rather than nature as the object of aesthetic experience, he is emphatic that aesthetic experience itself must be understood as a natural phenomenon: Thus the issue involved in experience as art in its pregnant sense and in art as processes and materials of nature continued by direction into achieved and enjoyed meanings, sums up in itself all the issues which have been previously considered. Thought, intelligence, science is the intentional direction of natural events to meanings capable of immediate possession and enjoyment; this direction – which is operative art – is itself a natural event in which nature otherwise partial and incomplete comes fully to itself; so that objects of conscious experience when reflectively chosen, form the “end” of nature.15

Consummatory experience is itself the consummation or completion of a natural process. As will become more clear in Art as Experience, this

13

14 15

G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. I, p. 111. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 35. Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 290.

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premise has two important implications: First, aesthetic experience can only be understood in the context of a general theory of experience as a natural phenomenon; and, second, both the making and the appreciation of art must be understood as natural processes, involving interactions with the physical stuff of nature, matter in motion, and neither can be understood as if it were a purely mental rather than also physical event. This thought will be the basis for Dewey’s emphasis on the physical media of art and their role in the interpersonal communication of aesthetic experience in Art as Experience. Second, in this initial discussion of art, Dewey emphasizes that the search for unity or consummation in aesthetic experience is also a search for significance or “meaning.” This is a general characteristic of “all the intelligent activities of men”: “No matter whether expressed in science, fine arts, or social relationships,” these “have for their task the conversion of causal bonds, relations of successions, into a connection of means-consequence, into meanings.”16 Dewey does not explain what he means by “meaning” here, and when he does add that “to be conscious of meanings or to have an idea, marks a function, an enjoyed or suffered arrest of the flux of events,”17 this only raises the question of how he will address the apparent problem that equating meaning with function seems to undercut the claim that consummatory aesthetic experience overcomes the distinction between means and end, that “in art everything is common between means and ends”18 – a function seems to be a means toward an end, not the union of both. We will see that in Art as Experience Dewey may well try to avoid this problem by characterizing art as offering both consummatory experience and the expression of feeling and emotion, rather than consummatory experience and “meaning” in the functional sense invoked in the previous work. Finally, we may note that in Experience and Nature Dewey seeks to relate his own approach to aesthetics to the contemporary scene by invoking Clive Bell’s term “significant form,” but that at the same time he redefines this term to stress his own pragmatist, antidualist approach to aesthetics rather than Bell’s formalism, which might be thought of as a paradigm of a separatist rather than pluralistic approach to aesthetics. “Concerning ‘significant form’ as a definition of an esthetic object,” Dewey writes, unless the meaning of the term is so isolated as to be wholly occult, it denotes a selection, for the sake of emphasis, purity, subtlety, of those forms which 16 17 18

Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 299. Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 301. Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 299.

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give consummatory significance to every-day subject-matters of experience. “Forms” are not the peculiar property or creation of the esthetic and artistic; they are characters in virtue of which anything meets the requirements of an enjoyable perception. “Art” does not create the forms; it is their selection and organization in such ways as to enhance, prolong and purify the perceptual experience.19

While adopting Bell’s term, Dewey rejects the idea that aesthetic experience is a special emotion distinct from all our ordinary emotions in response to special forms, themselves distinct from the ordinary forms of objects involved in our everyday life; his view is rather that aesthetic experience is simply the heightening of ordinary experience, and that art facilitates such experience by its selective use of the forms of ordinary objects rather than by some mysterious creation of forms of its own. Again, only when it becomes clear that emotions are part of ordinary experience will the place of emotions in Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experience become more clear.

2. Art as Experience Let us now see how Dewey develops these themes in Art as Experience. The book can be read as gradually unfolding a definition of art that begins with a definition of aesthetic experience and then adds the further elements that distinguish art from other sources of aesthetic experience – for Dewey, art is no doubt the paradigmatic source of aesthetic experience, but it would belie his lifelong antidualism were he to hold that art is the exclusive source of aesthetic experience. As Dewey says, his “task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art” – or, as will eventually become clear, are communicated through works of art – “and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.”20 Accordingly, he begins the book with a characterization of everyday experience, the “clue” from which “we can discover how the work of art develops and accentuates what is characteristically valuable in things of everyday enjoyment.”21 The basis for Dewey’s theory of experience is that the human being is a living creature, for whom, as for every other living creature, “life goes on in an environment; not merely in it but because of it, through interaction with it . . . to which, in order 19 20 21

Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 317. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 9. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 17.

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to live, it must adjust itself, by accommodations and defense but also by conquest.”22 Dewey understands the organism’s relation to its environment as a constantly ebbing and flowing exchange of energy; in the case of the human organism, of course, this exchange is not just one of nutrients and wastes nor of sensory impressions and nervous responses, but also involves intellect, intentional action, and consciousness of this interchange at many levels. But there are moments of equilibrium in this exchange, and for conscious beings such as humans, moments of consciousness of equilibrium. In such moments, form and consciousness of form are created: Form is arrived at whenever a stable, even though moving, equilibrium is reached. Changes interlock and sustain one another. Wherever there is this coherence there is endurance. Order is not imposed from without but is made out of the relations of harmonious interactions that energies have to one another. Because it is active (not anything static because foreign to what goes on) order itself develops.23

Awareness of such moments in our own interaction with our environment, in the ebb and flow of experience in general, is what Dewey calls having “an experience,” his term in Art as Experience for what he had called in Experience and Nature “consummatory” experience. He describes such consciousness thus: Experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of live creature and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living. . . . Oftentimes, however, the experience had is inchoate. . . . In contrast with such experience, we have an experience when the material experience runs its course to fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency.24

An experience or a consummatory experience is the traditional idea of beauty as unity amid variety internalized, that is, transposed from the properties of objects to consciousness itself.

22 23 24

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 19. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 20. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 42.

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Dewey stresses that such moments of consciousness of equilibrium can and do happen anywhere in the human interaction with the natural and built-up environment, not just in the creation and reception of those refined activities and their products that we call art. Such moments occur “in the events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man, arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens: the sights that hold the crowd – the fire-engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous holes in the earth; the human-fly climbing the steeple-side; the men perched high in air on girders, throwing and catching red-hot bolts.”25 Art comes into being when such moments of equilibrium or consummatory experience are intentionally created: The existence of art . . . is proof that man uses the materials and energies of nature with intent to expand his own life, and that he does so in accord with the structure of his organism – brain, sense-organs, and muscular system. Art is the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning, the union of sense, need, impulse and action characteristic of the live creature. The intervention of consciousness adds regulation, power of selection, and redisposition.26

Dewey stresses that the intentional creation of possibilities for consummatory experience does not have to be the exclusive or primary intention in the creation of an artifact or performance for it to result from and produce such experience. “The intelligent mechanic engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his materials and tools with genuine affection, is artistically engaged”27 but, we at least assume, consciously or at least primarily intent on solving some practical problem, not on producing and communicating a consummatory experience for its own sake. Yet insofar as his work does capture such moments of experience and allows others to enjoy them as well, there is a genuinely aesthetic aspect to the work, and it makes perfectly good sense for that work to be made available to others with the primary intent of allowing them to enjoy the experience of those objects rather than using them for their originally intended purpose, economic, religious, or whatever it might have been. Thus, although “in their own time and place, such things” as “domestic utensils, furnishings of tent and house, rugs, mats, jars, pots, bows, spears,” “were enhancements of the processes of everyday life,” they were also 25 26 27

Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 10–11. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 31. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 11.

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“wrought with such delighted care that” it makes perfectly good sense “that today we hunt them out and give them places of honor in our art museums.” And it makes sense to call them works of art, too, because although they were not made solely or perhaps even consciously for the delectation of others, we cannot suppose that it is just accidental that we can enjoy them for the same reason – their capture and communication of consummatory experience – that we enjoy works of art; we cannot suppose them to be like snowflakes or corals, whose beauty is independent of any human intention, but we can only suppose their beauty to be the result of the aesthetic sensibility of their makers and the guidance of their production by the aesthetic sensibility of those makers as well as by the other, more practical considerations involved in that activity. “An angler may eat his catch without thereby losing the esthetic satisfaction he experienced in casting and playing. It is this degree of completeness of living in the experience of making and perceiving that makes the difference between what is fine or esthetic in art and what is not.”28 What is distinctive about fine art, however, is that in its case the artist is self-conscious of the consummatory character of his experience and is intentionally trying to capture that in his work or his performance. Fine art involves “the idea of art as a conscious idea – the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity.”29 Fine art is “prefigured in the very process of living,”30 in birds building nests and beavers building dams, but also in craftsmen makings rugs and jugs and ironworkers tossing hot rivets, but fine art emerges only when consummatory experience becomes self-conscious and the aim of intentional human activity (something that Dewey thinks happened fairly early in historical human experience, since he, in contrast to some others, thinks that “the variety and perfection of the arts in Greece led thinkers to frame a generalized conception of art).”31 So fine art involves intentionally seeking and having consummatory experience. But Dewey does not intend that to be a sufficient condition for the existence of fine art. For he now stresses, what was at best implicit 28 29 30 31

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 33. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 31. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 30. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 31. In 1951, Paul Oskar Kristeller would argue that a unified conception of the fine arts emerged only at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century; see Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951): 496–527 and 13 (1952): 17–46, reprinted in Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 163–227. For discussion of this claim, see the Introduction to Volume 1.

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in Experience and Nature, that art has an emotional dimension, indeed a twofold emotional dimension. Dewey emphasizes first that aesthetic experience “has a satisfying emotional quality because it possesses internal integration and fulfillment through ordered and organized movement.”32 It is insofar as this structure is immediately felt in an experience, Dewey states, that it is “esthetic.” It seems natural to assume that this satisfying emotional quality is simply pleasure in the fulfillment of the fundamental objective of the human being to find order and organization – equilibrium – in its experience, and Dewey seems to confirm this interpretation several pages later when he says that “the word ‘esthetic’ refers, as we have already noted, to experience as appreciative, perceiving, and enjoying.”33 Dewey stresses that this emotion is not distinct from the experience of equilibrium but is integral to it: “Experience is emotional but there are no separate things called emotions in it”;34 the emotional “esthetic quality . . . rounds out an experience into completeness and unity”35 rather than being separate but connected to it. Dewey adds that this emotional dimension of aesthetic experience is “significant,” seemingly an unmistakable allusion to Bell’s term “significant form,” and Dewey thus seems to be suggesting that Bell’s mysterious “aesthetic emotion” is nothing other than the pleasure that we naturally take in those organized, unified moments of our experience that stand out from the rest. But already in the passage just cited Dewey slides from speaking of a presumably single type of “esthetic quality” present in all aesthetic experiences to plural emotions as “qualities, when they are significant, of a complex experience that moves and changes,”36 and his further argument is that works of art are the expressions of specific emotions, such as joy or sorrow, fear, hate, and love,37 and thus the experience of works of art will always have a specific emotional character, the specific emotional response to the expression of a specific emotion, as well as the generic “esthetic quality” of the emotion of pleasure. “The esthetic portrayal of grief,” for example, “manifests the grief of a particular individual in connection with a particular event” and is not “generalized” in the manner of an “intellectual statement,” which “is valuable in the degree in which 32 33 34 35 36 37

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 45. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 53. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 48. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 48. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 48. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 73.

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it conducts the mind to many things all of the same kind,” like an “even pavement” that “transports us easily to many places.”38 In spite of the particularity of the emotion that is expressed in a work of art, however, Dewey stresses that the expression of emotion in a work of art is not the same as a simple “impulsion,” which is the mere “beginning” of a “complete experience”;39 rather, expression is the clarification of turbid emotion; our appetites know themselves when they are reflected in the mirror of art, and as they know themselves they are transfigured. Emotion that is distinctively esthetic then occurs. It is not a form of sentiment that exists independently from the outset. It is an emotion that is induced by material that is expressive, and because it is evoked by and attached to this material it consists of natural emotions that have been transformed.40

Here, anticipating Collingwood by four years, Dewey states that “distinctively esthetic” emotion is emotion that has been clarified by the creative activity of art and that can be experienced as such by the audience for art; this is a distinct claim from the claim that there is a single distinctive, “significant,” aesthetic emotion. Indeed, as Collingwood would also do, Dewey makes it clear that his theory that works of art involve the clarification of particular emotions is meant as a criticism of a theory like Bell’s that there is a single aesthetic emotion common to all works and experiences of art; on the page following the one just quoted, he continues: Esthetic emotion is thus something distinctive and yet not cut off by a chasm from other and natural emotional experiences, as some theories in contending for its existence have made it to be. One familiar with the literature on esthetics will be aware of a tendency to go to one extreme or the other. On the one hand it is assumed that there is in existence, at least in some gifted persons, an emotion that is aboriginally esthetic, and that artistic production and appreciation are the manifestations of this emotion. Such a conception is the inevitable logical counterpart of all attitudes that make art something esoteric and that relegate fine art to a realm separated by a gulf from everyday experiences. On the other hand, a reaction wholesome in intent against this view goes to the extreme of holding that there is no such thing as distinctively esthetic emotion. The emotion of affection that operates not through an overt act of caress but by searching out the observation or image of a soaring bird, the emotion of irritating energy 38 39 40

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 96. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 64. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 83.

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that does not destroy or injure but that puts objects in satisfying order, is not numerically identical with its original and natural estate. Yet it stands in genetic continuity with it.41

Dewey clearly means to reject Bell’s conception of a unique aesthetic emotion as extreme, and this rejection is part of his general campaign against a dualism that would separate fine art and the experience of it from the rest of our experience and its objects, from nature, from craft, from the attentive and skillful investigation and transformation of our environment in all sorts of ways. But does Dewey’s rejection of a distinctive aesthetic emotion undermine his own previous recognition of a distinctive, “significant” “esthetic quality” that is common to all aesthetic experiences? It need not, as long as we can recognize two emotional aspects to art and aesthetic experience: the expression of some particular emotion or other in a particular work and in the particular response to it, on the one hand, and the emotion of satisfaction that we take in all integrated and organized experiences, on the other hand. Dewey’s position is consistent if we take him to be saying that art is not just the product of consummatory experience in an artist that can stimulate such experience in an audience, but more specifically the expression of particular emotions in a way that stimulates a consummatory experience of those emotions, and that there is something distinctively pleasurable about that sort of consummatory experience. Here it is natural to ask what Dewey means by the “clarification of turbid emotion,” which he is holding out as the distinctively aesthetic element in both the creation and the reception of art. In fact, and in this too he anticipates Collingwood, he means nothing other than the integration of particular feelings into a coherent whole with other feelings and experiences, or the transformation of nonconsummatory experiences of emotion into consummatory experiences of them. He explains his initial contrast between mere impulsion and expression by writing that we must avoid the error – which has unfortunately invaded esthetic theory – of supposing that the mere giving way to an impulsion, native or habitual, constitutes expression. Such an act is expressive not in itself but only in reflective interpretation on the part of some observer – as the nurse may interpret a sneeze as the sign of an impending cold. As far as the fact itself is concerned, it is, if purely impulsive, just a boiling over. While there is no expression, unless there is urge from within outwards, the welling up must be clarified and ordered 41

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 84–5.

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by taking into itself the values of prior experiences before it can be an act of expression.42

The expression of emotion is the clarification of a raw or turbid impulsion, and that is accomplished by integrating that experience with those that have preceded and will follow from it in a coherent way – making a coherent narrative out of experience, so to speak. In Dewey’s scientific language, “The real work of art is the building up of an integral experience of organic and environmental conditions and energies”;43 in the more traditional language of criticism, “there is at least an element of truth in Wordsworth’s formula of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ . . . The determination of the mot juste, of the right incident in the right place, of exquisiteness of proportion, of the precise tone, hue, and shade that helps the whole while it defines a part, is accomplished by [the clarification of] emotion.”44 To clarify an impulsion or initially turbid emotion is to put it in the larger context of which it is a whole. In art and the experience of it, “the inhibition of original raw emotion is not a suppression of it; restraint is not, in art, identical with constraint.” Rather, the “impulsion is modified by collateral tendencies; the modification gives it added meaning – the meaning of the whole of which it is henceforth a constituent part.”45 Dewey continues: The expressiveness of the object of art is due to the fact that it presents a thorough and complete interpenetration of the materials of undergoing and of action, the latter including a reorganization of matter brought with us from past experience. For, in the interpenetration, the latter is material not added by way of external association nor yet by way of superimposition upon sense qualities. The expressiveness of the object is the report and celebration of the complete fusion of what we undergo and what our activity of attentive perception brings into what we receive by means of the senses.46 42 43 44

45 46

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 67. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 70. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 75. Wordsworth’s famous words occur in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads of 1802. The opening of Wordsworth’s full sentence – “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind” – might seem to contradict Dewey’s claim that the aesthetic expression of emotion is not simply the immediate outburst of an impulsion, but his subsequent reference to the “gradual production” of a poem corresponds more closely to what Dewey has in mind by the “building up of an integral experience.” Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 102–3. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 108.

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To clarify an emotion is thus not somehow to illuminate it more brightly by itself, nor to subsume it by itself under a general concept, nor to analyze it into further parts, but to make it part of a larger whole, thus to make it part of a consummatory experience. In a way, though, this process cannot be reversed, for Dewey does not want to divide the aesthetic experience into parts – the form and matter of the particular object or performance created by the artist and presented to the senses of the audience, the particular emotion expressed by the work and felt by the audience, and the pleasurable sense of wholeness or integration – but each of these is only an inseparable aspect of the experience as a whole. Even in the case where the emotion that is expressed is not one that in a nonaesthetic context would be pleasant to have or respond to, within an aesthetic experience it must both retain its own identity and yet be an aspect of an experience that is on the whole pleasurable. The work of art and the experience of it must both “report” its particular emotional charge and at the same time “celebrate” the “complete fusion” of that emotion with a larger domain of our experience. The first two characteristics of a work of art, then, are that it captures a consummatory experience had by its creator and stimulates such an experience in its audience and that it clarifies a specific emotion for both its artist and its audience, but the second of these characteristics is not independent of the first: what it is to clarify an emotion is to make it part of a consummatory experience. The third feature of art that Dewey stresses is that art does all of this through the use of some specific medium, thus that all art shares dependency upon a medium but different arts are differentiated by the specific potentials of their media for the integration and clarification of experience, especially its emotional dimension. Here Dewey is tacitly joining in the critique of Croce’s immateralism that we have seen was common to all aestheticians after Croce. This feature of Dewey’s account was in fact already present in the seminal chapter “Having an Experience” in which Art as Experience presented its version of the concept of consummatory experience. Here Dewey had written that art denotes a process of doing or making. This is as true of fine as of technological art. Art involves molding of clay, chipping of marble, casting of bronze, laying on of pigments, construction of buildings, singing of songs, playing of instruments, enacting rôles on the stage, going through rhythmic movements in the dance. Every art does something with some physical material, the body or something outside the body, with or without the use

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of intervening tools, and with a view to the production of something visible, audible, or tangible.47

In this chapter, Dewey was particularly concerned to argue that the production of art cannot be separated from “experience as appreciative, perceiving, and enjoying” the “consumer’s rather than the producer’s standpoint” that he takes to be properly designated by the term “esthetic,” because artists must be constantly gauging the responses their work would produce in an audience as they work: “The artist embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works.”48 Later in the work, Dewey argues that while it is the “common substance of the arts” that all of them can “reach out and seize any material that stirs [the creative imagination] so that the value of the material may be pressed out and become the matter of a new experience,”49 in other words, art in any medium can potentially express any aspect of human experience and emotion, of course “every work of art has a particular medium by which . . . the qualitative pervasive whole” that it aims to capture and express “is carried,”50 and it is by developing the special characteristics of their particular media that particular art forms achieve the concentration that is necessary for consummatory experience. “In art, the seeing or hearing that is dispersed and mixed in ordinary perceptions is concentrated until the peculiar office of the special medium operates with full energy.”51 Since the word “medium” means an “intermediary,” it is both a misleading and an insightful term for the physical dimension of art. It is misleading, because the physical dimension of art is not a “mere means,” something external to the process of artistic creation and the identity of the resultant work that could be thrown away after its job is done; rather, “even bricks and mortar become a part of the house they are employed to build,” not “mere means to its erection,” and “colors are the painting; tones are the music.”52 But it is also insightful, because the medium “is a go-between of artist and perceiver,”53 that which makes it possible for artists to communicate their experience to their audience and, for that matter. to adopt the standpoint of an audience themselves, which Dewey has argued is essential to the process of artistic creation. 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 53. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 55. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 193. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 199. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 201. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 201. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 204.

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Because media are physical, Dewey further argues, and space and time are the most fundamental characteristics of the physical, “space and time – or rather space-time – are found in the matter of every art product,” not as “the empty containers nor the formal relations that schools of philosophy have sometimes represented them to be,” but rather as something “substantial,” “properties of every kind of material employed in artistic expression and esthetic realization.”54 While the use of space and time thus constitutes part of the “common substance of the arts,” the variety of ways in which different arts exploit the expressive possibilities of space and/or time and that which can be found within them – color, mass, movement, sound, and so on – is what differentiates “the varied substance of the arts.” “Color does something characteristic in experience and sound something else; sounds of instruments something different from the sound of the human voice and so on,” and from these differences arise the different arts.55 Some of the differences among art forms that are grounded in differences among their media are fundamental: for example, the “broad distinction . . . between the arts that have the human-organisms, the mind-body, of the artist as their medium and those which depend to a much greater extent upon materials external to the body” thus differences between “dancing, spinning, yarn-spinning,” on the one hand, and painting or sculpture, on the other, can hardly be denied.56 But, as can be expected, Dewey stresses that the boundaries between the different arts should not be considered impermeable nor permanent: The exact limits of the efficacy of any medium cannot be determined by any à priori rule, and . . . every great initiator in art breaks down some barrier that had been previously been supposed to be inherent. If, moreover, we establish the discussion on the basis of media, we recognize that they form a continuum, a spectrum, and that while we may distinguish the arts as we distinguish the seven so-called primary colors, there is no attempt to tell exactly where one begins, and the other ends; and also that if we take one color out of its context, say a particular band of red, it is no longer the same color it was before.57

The implication of Dewey’s general theory of experience is that experience will present the human species with ever-changing situations; the implication of his theory that art expresses particularized emotions is 54 55 56 57

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 210. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 230. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 231. Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 230–1.

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that it will have to express emotions arising in ever-new situations; and the implication of these facts combined with the fact that art always needs physical media will be that it must make ever-new uses of physical media, employing existing media in new ways, combining them in new ways, or inventing new ones as needed and as possible. There can be useful contrasts among the arts at and through particular periods of history, but there can be no fixed system of the arts defining the different avenues for artistic expression throughout history. Although Dewey surprisingly offers fewer examples in his discussion of the “varied substance of the arts” than he does elsewhere in the book and makes no mention of such barrier-breaking phenomena as Duchamp’s ready-mades or early forms of performance art that already existed in his time, he would surely have been familiar with boundary-threatening media such as modernist collage from his familiarity with the collection of his friend Dr. Albert Barnes.58 Finally, Dewey stresses a fourth feature of art that is already implicit in his identification of expression and medium as essential elements of art but that merits further emphasis, namely, that art is a form of communication, and thus both the product of and a ground for human association. His chapter on the “varied substance of the arts” concludes with the statement that art is fine when it draws upon the material of other experiences and expresses their material in a medium which intensifies and clarifies its energy through the order that supervenes. The arts accomplish this result not by self-conscious intention but in the very operation of creating, by means of new objects, new modes of experience. Every art communicates because it expresses. It enables us to share vividly and deeply in meanings to which we had been dumb . . . Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated and singular; and part of the miracle it achieves is that, in being communicated, the conveyance of meaning gives body and definiteness to the experience of the one who utters as well as to that of those who listen.59 58

59

Dewey acknowledges his “greatest indebtedness to Dr. A.C. Barnes,” the patent-medicine millionaire who assembled the collection of post-Impressionist art mingled with Pennsylvania Dutch iron work, Native American artifacts, and occasional Old Masters that bears his name (long housed in Merion, Pennsylvania, now in Philadelphia), in the preface to Art as Experience, and the original edition of the work included plates of works from the Barnes collection, a unique exception to its long-standing practice of prohibiting reproduction of its holdings outside its own publications. For Barnes’s own account of his view of art, see Albert C. Barnes, The Art in Painting, third edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937). Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 248–9.

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“The only form of association that is truly human,” Dewey continues, “not a gregarious gathering for warmth and protection, or a mere device for efficiency in outer action, is the participation in meanings and goods that is effected by communication” – and “the expressions that constitute art are communication in its pure and undefiled form.” Or, as he says in a later chapter, “art is the most effective mode of communication that exists.”60 Dewey does not offer a general explanation of what makes art the purest and most effective form of human communication and therefore the foundation of “truly human” association, but perhaps we can infer that since art is the medium for the expression of the consummatory experience of human emotions, he must assume that the communication of emotions is the ultimate aim of human communication and the deepest foundation of human association, and that it is for that reason that art is the indispensable form of human communication. One specific form of aesthetic communication that Dewey does emphasize, however, is that between artist and audience. Understanding such communication is a challenge for Dewey – indeed, he discusses it in a chapter entitled “The Challenge to Philosophy” – because he stresses that the physical product of the activity of creating art – whether that is an object or an event – is not a mere means to an experience in the audience of that work, but more directly embodies the artist’s meaning than such a means-end relationship would suggest: The formed matter of esthetic experience directly expresses . . . the meanings that are imaginatively invoked; it does not, like the material brought into new relations in a machine, merely provide means by which purposes over and beyond the existence of the object may be executed. And yet the meanings imaginatively summoned, assembled, and integrated are embodied in material existence that here and now integrates with the self.

Yet the creation of a work of art, no matter how inextricably intertwined the mental and emotional processes of the artist and the resultant performance or object may be, is numerically distinct from the response of the audience, no matter how closely that may be intertwined with the artist’s work, so even if the creation of the object or event cannot be considered a mere means of communication for the artist, because it is an integral part of her own process of arriving at a consummatory experience, it would seem that it could still be considered as a means for the communication of the artist’s experience to the audience. Without directly rejecting the applicability of the means-end schema to the relation between 60

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 291.

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work and audience, Dewey tries to dispel any possible implication that the audience is merely the passive recipient of a message transmitted to it by the artist through the physical medium by stressing the audience’s own creative role in the experience of the work of art: The work of art is thus a challenge to the performance of a like act of evocation and organization, through imagination, on the part of the one who experiences it. It is not just a stimulus to and means of an overt course of action. This fact constitutes the uniqueness of esthetic experience.61

Here Dewey explicitly affirms the fundamental point that had been suggested by Kant and recognized by Dilthey: If the exercise of the imagination is essential to aesthetic experience, then the relation between artist and audience can never be understood on the model of a simple transmission of a message from artist to audience through an external medium; there must always be room for the exercise of imagination on the part of the audience as well as the artist, and the physical product of the artist’s work has to be understood on the model of a spur to the imaginative activity of the audience. No doubt a full model of this relationship would also have to include some criterion of relevance so that there can be a distinction between an imaginative but appropriate response to a work of art and a largely irrelevant train of imagination that is accidentally triggered by a work, but Dewey does not attempt to provide such a criterion. In fact, Dewey takes pains to distance his position from a Kantian or Neo-Kantian position, although his understanding of Kant is not very sympathetic. Indeed, Dewey attempts to distance his position from both the predominant approaches to aesthetics of the preceding centuries, the purely cognitivist approach – with which, surprisingly, he associates Kant – as well as the play theory of aesthetic experience. Dewey’s opposition to all the traditional distinctions of philosophy guarantees that his aesthetics must be pluralistic rather than reductive. Thus he stresses that in human experience in general “there are no intrinsic psychological divisions between the intellectual and the sensory aspects; the emotional and ideational; the imaginative and practical phases of human nature,”62 and therefore that in aesthetic experience in particular even what seems to be the inescapable distinction between subject and object is effaced: “For the uniquely distinguishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly

61 62

Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 277–8. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 252.

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the fact that no such distinction of self and object exists in it, since it is esthetic in the degree in which organism and environment coöperate to institute an experience in which the two are so fully integrated that each disappears.”63 The quality of integration in aesthetic experience overwhelms the awareness of distinction between self and object that might be patent in other forms of experience. Against this background, Dewey cannot accept the assimilation of aesthetic experience to any traditional model of cognition, or at least to any model of cognition that would assign cognition to anything less than the full engagement of all of our capacities. Thus, while he acknowledges that “attentive observation is certainly one essential factor in all genuine perception including the esthetic,”64 he would hardly allow that attentive observation alone is a satisfactory model of knowledge, and he emphatically rejects any reduction of aesthetic experience to the “bare act of contemplation” that he thinks is at the heart of Kant’s aesthetic theory. Dewey criticizes Kant for separating knowledge from conduct, referring the former to “one division of our nature, the faculty of understanding working in conjunction with sense-materials” and the latter to an entirely separate faculty of desire, in the case of prudential conduct the ordinary “desire which has pleasure for its object” and in the case of moral conduct to a supposedly higher faculty of desire constituted by “Pure Reason operating as a demand upon Pure Will.” Having so separated the faculties of cognition and action, Dewey thinks, Kant had no choice but to refer aesthetic experience to a faculty of judgment that is independent of both, a faculty “exercised in Contemplation,” with the “distinctively esthetic element” lying in “the pleasure which attends such Contemplation.” “Thus the psychological road was opened leading to the ivory tower of ‘Beauty’ remote from all desire, action, and stir of emotion,” Dewey continues, and Kant ended up with a “thoroughly anæmic conception of art,” which, having restricted the “emotional element of esthetic perception merely [to] the pleasure taken in the act of contemplation,” “carried to its logical conclusion . . . would exclude from esthetic perception most of the subjectmatter that is enjoyed in the case of architectural structures, the drama, and the novel, with all their attendant reverberations.”65 Dewey thinks of Kant as having reduced aesthetic experience to the simple act of contemplation, a sheer act of intuition, carried out by a pure faculty of judgment 63 64 65

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 254. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 257. Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 257–8.

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without cooperation with any of our other cognitive or practical abilities, and naturally convicts Kant of an impoverished conception of the emotional dimensions of aesthetic experience as a result. Here of course there is much to be said in defense of Dewey’s interpretation. Dewey also rejects the theory, which he does not explicitly associate with Kant, presumably having Spencer’s version in mind instead, that aesthetic experience is a form of play, although here his criticism is not quite so harsh. He takes the essence of the play theory of art to be an exhaustive contrast between play and work and thus infers that the “falsity” of the play theory “lies in its failure to recognize that esthetic experience involves a definite reconstruction of objective materials,” in other words, a significant element of work. But he finds “truth in the play theory of art” in “its emphasis upon the unconstrained character of esthetic experience.” The play theory begins with an overdrawn dualism, “its opposition of freedom and necessity, of spontaneity and order,” although “the very existence of a work of art is evidence that there is no such opposition between the spontaneity of the self and objective order in law”; yet the play theory is not wholly false, because “in art, the playful attitude becomes interest in the transformation of material to serve the interest of a developing experience.”66 The play theory thus captures an essential aspect of aesthetic experience, although it errs in equating aesthetic experience with that aspect alone. So Dewey criticizes Kant for restricting aesthetic experience to pure contemplation, itself not even a good model for cognition, and does not give him any credit for even the partial truth of the play theory of art. Yet Dewey’s characterization of aesthetic experience incorporates the key feature of the traditional theory of play, its emphasis on the cooperative activity of a multiplicity of our mental or even mental and physical powers. After his criticism of Kant’s supposed theory of aesthetic experience as pure contemplation, Dewey writes that “not absence of desire and thought but their thorough incorporation into perceptual experience characterizes esthetic experience, in its distinction from experiences that are especially ‘intellectual’ and ‘practical.’” In the experience of a work of art – he takes the example of reading a poem rather than that of writing one, thus the experience of aesthetic reception rather than production – thought is active but at the same time its demands are fully met. The rhythm of expectancy and satisfaction is so internally complete that the reader is 66

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 284.

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not aware of thought as a separate element, certainly not of it as a labor. The experience is marked by a greater inclusiveness of all psychological factors than occurs in ordinary experiences, not by reduction of them to a single response. . . . Perception that occurs for its own sake is full realization of all the elements of our psychological being.67

Further, while continuing to reject the conception of pure contemplation that he attributes to Kant, Dewey nevertheless appropriates the Kantian term “disinterestedness” to characterize his own conception of aesthetic experience: “Disinterestedness” cannot signify uninterestedness. But it may be used as a roundabout way to denote that no specialized interest holds sway. “Detachment” is a negative name for something extremely positive. There is no severance of self, no holding of it aloof, but fulness of participation. . . . Participation is so thoroughgoing that the work of art is detached or cut off from the kind of specialized desire that operates when we are moved to consume or appropriate a thing physically.68

Finally, Dewey writes that art has the faculty of enhancing and concentrating this union of quality and meaning in a way which vivifies both. Instead of canceling a separation between sense and meaning (asserted to be psychologically normal), it exemplifies in an accentuated and perfected manner the union characteristic of many other experiences through finding the exact qualitative media that fuse most completely with what is to be expressed. . . . But when the result is art, integration is always effected.69

In these statements, Dewey is close to Kant’s own key characterizations of aesthetic experience as a free play of our mental powers that does not isolate those powers from one another but rather integrates them with each other, although he is following in the path of Schiller and Schleiermacher in broadening the powers that cooperate with each other beyond Kant’s restriction of them to the higher powers of cognition to the full range of our cognitive, conative, and emotional powers, and even our physical powers in both the creation and reception of art. Dewey’s claim that in aesthetic experience mental faculties are not separated from one another but integrated with each other is reminiscent of Kant’s own characterization of aesthetic judgment as grounded in “a relation of the two faculties of cognition which constitutes the 67 68 69

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 258–9. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 262. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 264.

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subjective, merely sensitive condition of the objective use of the power of judgment in general (namely, the agreement of those two faculties with each other),”70 or “the facilitated play of both powers of the mind (imagination and understanding), enlivened through mutual agreement.”71 To be sure, Kant does not include the faculty of desire in his account of the players in the experience of the beautiful – that awaits his account of the experience of the sublime, which Dewey ignores even though he is himself emphatic, as we have seen, that aesthetic experience should not be reduced to the “ivory tower of ‘Beauty’” – but the gist of Kant’s account of either case of aesthetic experience is the spontaneous integration of mental powers that in other situations might be contrasted, and the sense of fulfillment that results from the integration of those powers rather than from the achievement of any extraneous goal – what Kant calls “the subjective purposiveness in the representation of an object without any” ulterior end or purpose.72 And as we saw, successors to Kant in the play tradition, that is, not the Spencerian narrow, physiological version of it, had already broadened Kant’s list of the faculties involved in aesthetic play. Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience as an integration of our activities in which our focus becomes this integration itself rather than any external interests that might be served by it is thus in the tradition of the theory of play as originally established by, say, Gerard, narrowed by Kant, but then broadened out again by the likes of Schiller, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey. In the end, though, it is not important whether Dewey failed to recognize the affinity of his own theory of aesthetic creation and experience to Kant’s theory of play or the more fully developed theory of some of Kant’s successors. What is important is rather that Dewey’s theory is one that integrates cognition, emotion, and at least some aspects of play. Dewey’s thesis that art involves the expression of emotion where that is in turn to be understood as the clarification of it gives his conception of art an indisputably cognitivist core – although he is emphatic that art is not in the scientific business of representing abstract ideas or general truths, his theory shares the view common to his time that art is a form of human self-knowledge, namely, knowledge of human emotions in all of their richness and particularity. But his account of what the clarification of emotion consists in, namely, the integration of particular impulsions 70 71 72

Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, section VIII, 20:223–4. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §9, 5:219. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §11, 5:221.

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into a coherent rhythm of experience that in its moment of equilibrium is enjoyed for its own sake without reference to further purposes, both breaks down the boundary between cognition and emotion and draws the central idea of the modern theory of aesthetic experience as a free play of our mental powers into the heart of his own theory of emotional cognition. After his discussion of the theory of play, Dewey states that “art is the fusion in one experience of the pressure upon the self of necessary conditions and the spontaneity and novelty of individuality,” and then, finally, adds a footnote praising Schiller’s idea in the Letters on Aesthetic Education that “play and art occupy an intermediate transitional place between the realms of necessary phenomena and transcendent freedom” as a “valiant attempt on the part of an artist to escape the rigid dualism of the Kantian philosophy, while remaining within its frame.”73 Schiller himself, however, understood that Kant had already started to overcome the dualism of knowledge and play in the third Critique and saw himself as refining rather than rejecting Kant’s aesthetic theory. By aligning his own theory with that of Schiller, Dewey is thus aligning it with the Kantian synthesis of the aesthetics of truth and play supplemented by a place for emotions in aesthetic experience, although of course he is right to suggest in his qualified endorsement of Schiller that his own version of this synthesis is offered within the framework of an empirical psychology and naturalistic philosophy rather than in a framework of transcendental psychology and philosophy.

73

Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 286.

9 The American Reception of Expression Theory II Cassirer and Langer

In this chapter, we will see how the focus on art’s expression of emotion that began with Croce was filtered through the Neo-Kantian epistemology and philosophy of language of Ernst Cassirer’s “philosophy of symbolic forms,” which in turn influenced the aesthetics of his first and perhaps still most important American follower, Susanne Langer. Nelson Goodman can also be considered among the heirs of Cassirer, although he brought other epistemological and logical traditions to bear on the philosophy of art as well. but it would be too much of a strain on chronology to consider Goodman in this chapter, and discussion of him will therefore await the final chapter of this part.

1. Cassirer It might seem surprising that the aesthetic theory of Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), generally considered the heir to Herman Cohen and the leading figure in the second generation of Marburg Neo-Kantianism, should be considered in the midst of this discussion of American aesthetics rather than in a chapter on German theories. But not only did Cassirer spend the last years of his life in America; his most extended statement on aesthetics was also written in America, and his most immediate influence in aesthetics was in America, particularly in the work of Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985). Only decades after his death was there renewed interest in his work in Germany, leading to critical editions of his published and unpublished works. The inexorably intertwined history of German philosophy and German politics in the first half of the twentieth century no doubt had a large role to play in the interrupted reception of Cassirer’s work in Germany. For Cassirer was the most prominent Jewish philosopher in Germany after his mentor 335

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Hermann Cohen, but unlike Cohen, he had the misfortune to live into the time of the Third Reich and World War II, which caused radical disruptions in his life and career. Cassirer was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Breslau, Silesia (after World War II Wrocław, Poland). He studied law, philosophy, literature, history, and art history at Berlin, Leipzig, and Heidelberg and took his doctorate at Marburg in 1899, with a dissertation on Descartes written under the direction of Cohen. This became the first part of the monumental work The Scientific Foundations of the System of Leibniz published in 1902.1 But only upon the publication of the first volume of his even more massive The Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophy and Science of Modern Times in 1906 did Cassirer earn even the unsalaried position of Privatdozent at the University of Berlin.2 Cassirer then had to wait thirteen more years before being appointed professor of philosophy at the newly founded university in Hamburg in 1919 (although during this period he did decline an offer from Harvard), even though the intervening years saw the publication of the second volume of The Problem of Knowledge; his key work in philosophy of science, Substance and Function;3 and, amid the turmoil of World War I, his defense of a liberal tradition in German thought from Leibniz to Wilhelm von Humboldt and Hegel, Freedom and Form: Studies in the History of the German Spirit.4 During his years as a Privatdozent Cassirer also edited an important edition of Kant, completed

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Ernst Cassirer, Leibniz’s System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (Marburg: Elvert, 1902), reprinted in Ernst Cassirer, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Birgit Recki, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998). After this early book, most of Cassirer’s works while he remained in Germany would be published by the firm of his cousin Bruno Cassirer (which was itself dissolved by the Nazis in 1936, although reestablished in Oxford in 1938). Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeiten, 3 vols. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1906, 1907, and 1920); reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 2–4 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1999–2000). These three volumes carried Cassirer’s narrative through the “post-Kantian systems” concluding with Hegel; a fourth volume, carrying his story from “the death of Hegel to the present,” was posthumously published in English in 1950: Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel, trans. William Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); it was published in German only seven years later (now included in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5). Ernst Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1910), reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6; translated as Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. William Curtis Swabey and Mary Collins Swabey (Chicago: Open Court, 1923). Ernst Cassirer, Freiheit und Form: Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1916); Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7.

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with his volume Kant’s Life and Thought.5 Cassirer’s first publications as professor at Hamburg were another volume of historical studies, Idea and Form: Goethe – Schiller – Hölderlin – Kleist;6 the work on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that was translated together with Substance and Function in 1923; and the small volume Language and Myth that would subsequently be translated into English by Susanne Langer.7 But the main publication of these years was Cassirer’s chief systematic work, the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.8 These were accompanied by three more important historical works, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy in 1927,9 The Platonic Renaissance in England in 1932,10 and The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, also in 1932.11 But the values of the Enlightenment that Cassirer espoused in this work were, of course, shortly to be suppressed by the Nazi takeover, and in 1933 Cassirer, who in 1929 had been the first Jew to be elected rector of a German university, was, like every other Jewish professor in Germany, stripped of his position, and like many other German Jews of means he quickly fled the country. No doubt Cassirer’s work was neglected in

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Ernst Cassirer, ed., Immanuel Kants Werke, 11 vols. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1912–18); vol. 11, Kants Leben und Lehre, translated as Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); German text reprinted as Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Ernst Cassirer, Idee und Gestalt: Goethe – Schiller – Hölderlin – Kleist (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921), reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Like Freiheit und Form, this volume has not been translated into English. Ernst Cassirer, Sprache und Mythos: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternamen, Studien der Bibliothek Warburgs, Band VI (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1925); Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946). Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen I–III (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1923–9); The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–7). Material for a proposed fourth volume was posthumously published as Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen, in Ernst Cassirer, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, Band 1, ed. John Michael Krois and Oswald Schwemmer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995), translated as The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Four, trans. John Michael Krois (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Ernst Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, Band X (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1927), reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1964). Ernst Cassirer, Die platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, Band 24 (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1924), reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14, The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1953). Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1932), reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951).

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Germany for decades because of his Judaism and his exile, although his reputation had already suffered from a famous confrontation with Martin Heidegger in 1929 in which Cassirer had defended his Neo-Kantian approach to Kant from Heidegger’s own phenomenological approach, which had been conceived as an attack upon Neo-Kantianism; Heidegger was widely judged to have bested Cassirer in this debate.12 From 1933 to 1935, Cassirer was a lecturer at Oxford, and then from 1935 until 1941 a professor at the university in Göterborg, Sweden. The main publication of Cassirer’s Swedish years was The Logic of the Humanities.13 In 1941, by then considering Sweden also unsafe, he immigrated to the United States, where, after failing to revive Harvard’s interest in him of thirty years earlier, he was first a visiting professor at Yale from 1941 until 1943 and then a lecturer at Columbia, where he suddenly died, one day after Franklin Roosevelt and a few weeks before the end of the war in Europe, on April 13, 1945. The major works of Cassirer’s American years were two books first published in English, an abridged presentation of his philosophy of symbolic forms under the title An Essay on Man (1944)14 and the posthumous The Myth of the State (1946),15 an attack upon political mythologies from Plato to Oswald Spengler.16

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Cassirer and Heidegger each gave three lectures at a widely attended special course in Davos, Switzerland, from March 17 to April 9, 1929. Heidegger’s lectures became the basis of his book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Cassirer’s lectures became the basis for his “Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik: Bemerkungen zu Martin Heidegger’s KantInterpretation,” Kant-Studien 36 (1931): 1–26, reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 17, pp. 221–50, and translated in, Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. Moltke S. Gram, (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), pp. 131–57. The debate is the focus of Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). Ernst Cassirer, Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften: Fünf Studien (Göterborg: Elanders, 1942); The Logic of the Humanities, trans. Clarence Smith Howe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960). Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944). Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946). For biography, see Heinz Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer – Von Marburg nach New York: Eine philosophische Biographie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), and Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). For surveys of Cassirer’s philosophy, see John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Andreas Graeser, Ernst Cassirer (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1994); Heinz Paetzold, Die Realität der symbolischen Formen: Die Kulturphilosophie Ernst Cassirers im Kontext (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994); Oswald Schwemmer, Ernst Cassirer: Ein Philosoph der europäischen Moderne (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997); Thora Ilin Bayer, Cassirer’s Metaphysics

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Cassirer frequently mentioned art along with language, myth, religion, and science as among the “symbolic forms” that human beings create in order to comprehend their world and their own existence, but he did not devote a volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to it – the three volumes of that work concern language, myth, and natural science – and provided a systematic exposition of his philosophy of art only in one chapter of his American Essay on Man. That chapter will thus be the primary source for our discussion of Cassirer’s view of art here. But Cassirer had often discussed earlier views of art in his many historical works, above all, in passages on Plato, Shaftesbury, Kant, and Goethe, and we can first look at some of those passages before turning to his systematic account of art. Cassirer’s fundamental idea was a generalization of Kant’s idea that space, time, and the categories are forms that the human mind originates and by means of which it organizes its transactions with external reality into a coherent representation of the world into the view that we organize our experience by means of a multiplicity of “symbolic forms” that are neither reducible to nor interchangeable with each other, thus all of which retain importance in a complete account of human experience. By his expression “symbolic form” Cassirer means to convey two points, which instantly make clear the fundamental difference between his philosophy and that of Heidegger. That the objects of knowledge are “forms” means that it is not being or beings as such that we know, but relations, laws, structures, or functions; in Cassirer’s words, “the object of knowledge can be defined only through the medium of a particular logical and conceptual structure.”17 That knowledge consists of “symbolic” forms is meant to convey that the structures or laws that we know are not simply lying out there in nature, waiting to be detected, but are invented and constructed by the human mind itself: “The naïve copy theory of knowledge is discredited,” and “the fundamental concepts

17

of Symbolic Forms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Guido Kreis, Cassirer und die Formen des Geistes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010; and the two collections, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, Library of Living Philosophers (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1949), and Kultur und Symbol: Ein Handbuch zur Philosophie Ernst Cassirers, ed. Hans Jörg Sandkühler and Detlev Paetzold (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2003). On Cassirer’s aesthetics, see Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard Pierce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), and Birgit Recki, “Die Fülle des Lebens: Ernst Cassirer als Ästhetiker,” in J. Früchtl and M. Moog-Grünewald, editors, Ästhetik in metaphysikkritischen Zeiten (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007), pp. 225–39. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I, p. 76.

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of each science, the instruments with which it propounds its questions and formulates its solutions, are regarded no longer as passive images of something given but as symbols created by the intellect itself.”18 Here the sense of Cassirer’s term “symbolic forms” is explained in reference to natural science – as he says, “Mathematicians and physicists were first to gain a clear awareness of this symbolic character of their basic implements”19 – but the organizing principle of his entire philosophical work is that myth, religion, art, and language in general are all also structures created by the human mind in order to cope with the complexity and the flux of human experience. And as Cassirer’s description of “copy theory” as “naïve” wherever it occurs might suggest, a central contention of his various discussions of art is an argument that the history of aesthetic theories from antiquity until the eighteenth century was marked by a gradual rejection of mimetic or copy theories of art in favor of a recognition that art is another one of the symbolic forms created by the human mind – in this case, of course, human imagination as well as intellect – to organize its own experience. Until he wrote the chapter on art in the Essay on Man, most of Cassirer’s discussion of aesthetic theory was historical; his argument that art is a symbolic form rather than an imitation of nature thus takes the form of a narrative (dispersed over various texts) in which Plato’s initial assumption that art traffics in mere images not much more valuable than reflections in a mirror is gradually replaced by the recognition that art creates symbolic forms that structure human experience as much as do the symbolic forms of religion, myth, and science, a narrative in which the heroes are neither Plato himself nor for that matter Kant but rather Neo-Platonists from Plotinus himself to Shaftesbury, Leibniz, and Goethe. We can pause over a few of his characteristic comments on such figures before turning to Cassirer’s more systematic account of art in the Essay on Man. One work indicative of Cassirer’s historiography of aesthetics is the 1924 essay “Eidos und Eidolon: Das Problem des Schönen und der Kunst in Platons Dialogen” (“Idea and Image: The Problem of the Beautiful and of Art in the Dialogues of Plato”), an essay originally delivered at the Warburg Library and accompanied with the famous essay “Idea” by Cassirer’s colleague and friend the art historian Erwin Panofsky.20 Early in this essay Cassirer proclaims that “it is not to assert 18 19 20

Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I, p. 75. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I, p. 75. Eidos und Eidolon was originally published, along with Panofksy’s Idea, in the Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, Band II (Leipzig: G.B. Teubner, 1924), pp. 1–27, and is reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 16, pp. 135–63, as well as in Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky,

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too much if one says that at bottom all systematic aesthetics that has heretofore emerged in the history of philosophy has been and remains Platonism,”21 but as emerges over the course of the essay this is true only if “Platonism” is understood as “Neo-Platonism,” that is, if works of art are not understood as mere images (eidolon) of ideas (eidos) that are real independently of all thought but are understood rather as exemplars of reality as itself emerging from thought, in the earliest phases of NeoPlatonism of course divine thought but eventually human thought. The influence of Platonism on the history of aesthetic thought is actually its stimulus to escape the spell of Plato: Wherever in the course of the centuries a theory of art and of the beautiful has been sought – there, as if under a coercion of thought, the view always returns to the concept and the term “Idea,” to the side of which, as if a belated sprout, there steps the concept of the ideal. . . . The series that leads from Plotinus to Augustine, from Augustine to Marsilio Ficino, from him to Winckelmann and Schelling, corresponds to the series of great artists, each of whom has sought and found his way to Plato on his own and yet as if under the spell of a continuing tradition. It is enough to mention the two names Michelangelo and Goethe in order to bring to consciousness the power and the multi-sidedness of this intellectual-historical nexus. . . . While art seeks to ground itself in Platonism, it also seeks to liberate itself from its spell.22

In particular, both subsequent art and its theory remain under the spell of the thought that art concerns ideas of universal validity rather than merely particular and local interest but seek to free themselves from the thought that such universal ideas are fixed and given, waiting to be discovered by an essentially passive process. Instead, both artists and theorists gradually realize that “Platonic” ideas are in fact their own creations. In the Republic and other Socratic dialogues, “the more he esteemed the idea of beauty, the deeper [for Plato] sank what now became for him the husk of imitative art,”23 but in the Timaeus, a work that was an inspiration for Neo-Platonism, “Plato himself discovered and practiced . . . a new art that was no longer merely imitative, but genuinely formative [gestaltend]: the art of mythical speech, which, as little as it raises a claim to absolute truth, is nevertheless not mere deception, but the true itself in the image [im Bilde] of the ‘probable.’”24 This in turn means that it was

21 22 23 24

Eidos und Eidolon/Idea, ed. John Michael Krois (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2008), pp. 7–50. I cite the latter edition. Cassirer, Eidos und Eidolon, p. 10. Cassirer, Eidos und Eidolon, pp. 10–12. Cassirer, Eidos und Eidolon, p. 36. Cassirer, Eidos und Eidolon, p. 39.

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gradually realized that “only in the image, only in the particular, sensory case [sinnlichen Einzelfall] can the nature of the universal and imageless be presented.”25 From Plato’s own original view that art is a mere and largely worthless mimesis, an image of an image of what is truly real, there gradually evolved the view that even in art what reigns is not mere μιμησις, but a genuinely generative function; it too is not to be grasped merely as copying [Nachbildung], but as a self-sufficient form of formative presentation [gestaltender Darstellung]. Plotinus took up this motif and wove it into his doctrine of the ‘intelligible beautiful.’ When Phidias created [a statue of] Zeus, he did not form it an accordance with some particular sensory model, but he gave him the form [Gestalt] that Zeus would have given himself had he decided to embody himself for our senses. In these sentences a new systematic valuation of art was announced within the history of Platonism itself.26

Of course Plotinus himself was primarily concerned with the emanation of form from the divine rather than the human mind, thus more interested in the form that (the Christian successor to) Zeus has given himself in all the rest of creation than in the forms for the comprehension of the divine that have emanated from the human mind, but his illustration of the first kind of emanation by the second eventually became the model for art and its theory: art is a way of giving form to ideas that cannot be passively copied by the senses. “Through its transmission from Augustine and Marcilio Ficino, from Giordano Bruno, from Shaftesbury and Winckelmann, this fundamental insight becomes more and more the common intellectual possession of modern times.”27 The contribution of Shaftesbury to the development of modern aesthetics is the central theme of Cassirer’s chapter “The Fundamental Problems of Aesthetics” in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, the 1932 book that concluded the period of Cassirer’s intensive preoccupation with Neo-Platonism, especially in its British form. The chapter begins with a conventional account of how the objectivist, rationalist aesthetics of such seventeenth-century theorists as René Le Bossu (1631–80) and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) were superseded by the subjectivist, empiricist, feeling-based aesthetics of Dominique Bouhours (1628–1702)28 and Jean-Baptise Du Bos,29 followed by later French 25 26 27 28

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Cassirer, Eidos und Eidolon, p. 40. Cassirer, Eidos und Eidolon, p. 43. Cassirer, Eidos und Eidolon, p. 44. His La Manière de bien penser sur les ouvrages d’esprit (1687) was translated “by a person of quality” as The Art of Criticism (London: Brown and Roper, 1705). See Book One, Ch. 1, this work.

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thinkers such as Denis Diderot and of course numerous British writers. For Boileau, for example, “the law governing art is not derived from and produced by the imagination; it is rather a purely objective law which the artist does not have to invent but only to discover in the nature of things. Boileau considers reason as the epitome of such objective laws, and in this sense he commands the poet to love reason.”30 For the emerging opposition, however, “taste is no longer classified with the logical processes of inference and conclusion but [is] placed on a par with the immediacy of the pure acts of perception – with seeing and hearing, tasting and smelling,”31 although without surrender of the claim of universal validity for judgments of taste. However, Cassirer did not regard the emergence of the subjectivist approach to taste as the main event of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Instead, the “intellectual impulse” toward a conception of the “real autonomy of the beautiful and self-sufficiency of imagination . . . existed neither in rationalistic nor in empirical aesthetics,” and “could come only from a thinker who neither attempted to analyze beauty theoretically and to reduce it to rules, nor to describe it psychologically and explain it genetically” – namely, Shaftesbury, whose “doctrine was destined to found the first really comprehensive and independent philosophy of the beautiful.”32 And in Cassirer’s view, Shaftesbury’s key thought was not simply that beauty, whether in nature or in its imitation in art, consists in order or harmony, whether apprehended by reason or sense, but rather that “all order and regularity, all unity and law, depend on one and the same original form, on one and the same whole, which is immediately present in man and every other creature.”33 Further, according to Cassirer, Shaftesbury held that “in the contemplation of the beautiful, man turns from the world of created things to the world of the creative process, from the universe as a receptacle of the objectively real to the operative forces which have shaped this universe and constitute its inner coherence,” and that “the difference between man and God disappears when we consider man not simply with respect to his 30 31

32 33

Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 285. Cassirer, Enlightenment, p. 304. Cassirer’s comparison of the immediacy of taste to tasting and smelling is misleading here, as proponents of the “subjectivist” approach to aesthetics uniformly associated genuine aesthetic response with sight and secondarily with sound but excluded smell, taste in the ordinary sense, and, until Herder, touch from the domain of the properly aesthetic. See, for example, Kames, Elements of Criticism, introduction (vol. I, pp. 11–12). Cassirer, Enlightenment, pp. 311–12. Cassirer, Enlightenment, pp. 314–15.

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original forming powers, not as something created, but as a creator.”34 Here Cassirer is alluding to Shaftesbury’s argument that the real object in our admiration of beauty is not so much the form of the beautiful object as the mind that forms such an object, the “mind alone which forms,” although his suggestion that in Shaftesbury’s view there is no essential difference between man and God as “forms that form” seems a willful misreading of Shaftesbury’s actual view that humans as the forming form behind the forms of beautiful works of art are themselves the product of “that third Order of Beauty, which forms not only such as we call mere Forms, but even the Forms which form.”35 Shaftesbury’s Neo-Platonism was by no means as thoroughly secularized as Cassirer’s twentieth-century version of it. Nevertheless, what is crucial for Cassirer is Shaftesbury’s recognition that “the nature and value of beauty do not lie in the mere emotional effect they produce on man, but in the fact that they reveal the realm of form,”36 and that in artistic creation human artists do not simply imitate forms found in nature but create forms for the expression of their own coherent conception of the order of nature. On Cassirer’s view, Shaftesbury decisively breaks with the mimetic conception of art, and with Plato’s original denigration of art as mere imitation, through his insight that the production of art creates rather than merely copying form – art “imitates not merely the product, but the act of producing, not that which has become, but the process of becoming.”37 To this insight, what Baumgarten, the founder of aesthetics as an academic subject, adds is chiefly the observation that the artist must employ both the “inferior” powers of sense as well as the “superior” power of reason in order “to comprehend phenomena in their totality and in their purely immanent mode of existence and to fuse them into one lucid picture.”38 This translates Shaftesbury’s insight into the language of academic philosophy but does not substantially alter it. Cassirer concludes the chapter on aesthetics in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment with a discussion of Lessing and thus either does not include Kant among the transformative aestheticians of the Enlightenment or does not count his transformative role in aesthetics as part of the Enlightenment. In his earlier discussion of Kant’s third Critique in his 34 35 36 37 38

Cassirer, Enlightenment, p. 316. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “The Moralists,” Part III, section ii, ed. Ayres, vol. II, p. 108. Cassirer, Enlightenment, p. 326. Cassirer, Enlightenment, p. 317. Cassirer, Enlightenment, pp. 348–9.

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1918 book on Kant he had ascribed to Kant the view that “the realm of art is a realm of pure forms, each of which is complete in itself and possesses its own individual center, while it simultaneously belongs together with other things in a peculiar unity of nature and effects,”39 but he had made no attempt to document his ascription of this view to Kant, and indeed it seems a somewhat implausible interpretation of anything Kant actually had to say about art. Perhaps for this reason, it is generally not Kant but rather Goethe whom Cassirer tends to join to Shaftesbury as the chief precursors of his own view of art as one of the basic symbolic forms. In an essay on Goethe’s play Pandora published shortly after Kant’s Life and Thought and then included in his 1921 collection Idee und Gestalt, Cassirer finds in Goethe “all the essential tendencies of Neo-Platonic metaphysics and aesthetics: the idea, which gives matter its form [Gestalt] and thereby communicates beauty to it, but which nonetheless, undiminished by this communication, as the Eternal-One, endures purely in itself, which never gives itself entirely over to multiplicity, and, when it does come forth in the manifold, still never loses itself in it.” Cassirer supports this interpretation of Goethe’s conception of art by quoting at length from an 1805 letter of Goethe to Carl Friedrich Zelter, in which he writes that the matter that is made into art “has the form that art imparts to it . . . not because the artist had eyes and hands,” thus not because the artist simply imitated forms already to be found in nature, “but because he was endowed with art.” Cassirer continues quoting Goethe to Zelter: “The arts do not imitate precisely what one sees with one’s eyes, but rather go back to that rational essence [jenes Vernünftige] of which nature consists and in accordance with which it acts. . . . So could Phidias form an image of [bilden] the god, although he imitated nothing that could be glimpsed by the senses, rather because he grasped in his own sense how Zeus himself would appear if he wished to encounter our eyes.”40 Cassirer goes on to quote some of Goethe’s verse from Pandora itself, “Uniquely enobles form the content / Lends it, lends itself the highest power / It appears to me in the form of youth, in that of woman” (“Und einzig veredelt die Form den Gehalt / Verleiht ihm, verleiht sich die höchste Gewalt / Mir erschein sie in Jugend-, in Frauen-Gestalt”), and then glosses this by saying that “‘Form’ here does not belong to a ‘super-celestial place,’ but comes forth in the middle of the dynamic of life, in the forming and reforming [Gestaltung 39 40

Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, p. 306. Cassirer, “Goethe’s ‘Pandora,’ ” from Idee und Gestalt, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, p. 249, quoting Goethe’s letter to Zelter of 1 September, 1805; the elision is Cassirer’s.

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und Umgestaltung] of nature. . . . It is not suppressed into a unity that disappears from outer and inner sense, but it descends into the stream and rhythm of becoming in order for us to veil and then unveil it.”41 Finally, Goethe inspires Cassirer to say once again that “it is not in the contemplation of form but in the creation of form that the true formative power of the human being proves itself.”42 These highlights from Cassirer’s works on the history of aesthetics make clear his commitment to the view that art, like other symbolic forms, creates forms for the comprehension of nature rather than copying forms from nature. But does he have anything more precise to say about what differentiates art as a symbolic form from other symbolic forms – what if anything in particular in nature is the paradigmatic content for art, and what distinguishes the forms that art creates from other symbolic forms? To answer these questions we must turn to Cassirer’s chief systematic rather than historical statement on aesthetics, the chapter on art in the late Essay on Man. Here we shall see that Cassirer’s view of art as a symbolic form is actually part of the mainstream of early twentieth-century aesthetics, according to which art chiefly creates forms for the expression of human feeling and emotion. Cassirer’s is thus another instance of the predominantly cognitivist approach to aesthetics, with human emotion rather than anything metaphysical having become the object of aesthetic knowledge. Cassirer’s statement that “art is, indeed, symbolism, but the symbolism of art must be understood in an immanent, not in a transcendent sense”43 is an expression of this approach, characteristic, as we saw in the previous volume, of Neo-Kantianism. As is the case in all of his more systematic rather than historical works, Cassirer’s exposition in the Essay on Man is still heavily laced with historical references. The chapter on art begins with another discussion of the gradual liberation of aesthetic theory from the model of imitation during the eighteenth century, but here Cassirer assigns an important role to Rousseau, who replaces the idea that art is mere imitation of nature with the view that it “is not a description or reproduction of the empirical world but an overflow of emotions and passions.” However, this position runs the risk that “art would remain reproductive; but, instead of being a reproduction of things, of physical objects, it would become a reproduction of our inner life, of our affections of emotions,” 41 42 43

Cassirer, “Goethe’s ‘Pandora,’” p. 251. Cassirer, “Goethe’s ‘Pandora,’” p. 257. Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. 157.

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and as a mere reproduction of those, of no more importance than a mere reproduction of physical objects. Once again, the decisive step is taken by Goethe (this time Shaftesbury is mentioned only at the end of the chapter),44 who accepts that art concerns our own emotions but also insists that it is “formative,” that it gives distinct or “characteristic” shape to that which in the ordinary flow of life does not have distinct shape. For Goethe, according to Cassirer, “it is not enough to lay stress upon the emotional side of the work of art. . . . Art is indeed expressive, but it cannot be expressive without being formative.” Moreover, in Cassirer’s view Goethe clearly recognizes that “this formative process is carried out in a certain sensuous medium. . . . ‘The demigod, creative in repose, gropes around him for matter into which to breathe his spirit’.”45 And Cassirer then uses Goethe to make the criticism of Croce that many others of the time, such as Samuel Alexander, Louis Arnaud Reid, and DeWitt Parker, had also made, namely, that in “Croce and his disciples and followers” – he explicitly names Collingwood on the next page46 – the “material factor” in art “is forgotten or minimized. Croce is interested only in the fact of expression, not in the mode.” For Cassirer, art as a symbolic form is the “embodiment” of meaning in a form created for communication.47 This is true even in the extreme case: “Even in lyrical poetry emotion is not the only and decisive feature,” rather a constructive, purposive process of the creation of a form for the communication of “intuition” or insight “is a prerequisite both of the production and of the contemplation of the work of art.”48 In other language that Cassirer deploys here, art always involves a “process of objectification” as well as the characteristically subjective moment of its content, namely, human emotion. “Like all the other symbolic forms,” Cassirer stresses, “art is not the mere reproduction of a ready-made, given reality. It is one of the ways leading to an objective view of things and of human life.”49 But this naturally raises the question, What is the difference between art and other 44 45

46 47 48 49

Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. 162. Cassirer, Essay on Man, pp. 140–1. Cassirer does not cite the location of the quotation from Goethe in this passage (“the demigod . . . his spirit”), but it is in fact the line omitted from the second paragraph in his quotation of an extended passage from Goethe’s famous 1773 essay on Gothic architecture, “Vom deutscher Baukunst,” on p. 140. See Goethe, Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, ed. Friedmar Apel (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), p. 116. Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. 142. Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. 141. Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. 142. Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. 143.

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symbolic forms, for example, the use of language for the expression of emotion in everyday life or perhaps in myth or religion? Cassirer’s answer to this question is that while all symbolic forms aim at “condensation and concentration,” other symbolic forms such as language and science “classify our sense perceptions and bring them under general notions and general rules in order to give them an objective meaning,” but “art may be described as a continuous process of concretion.” “Language and science are abbreviations of relation; art is an intensification of reality.”50 “Science means abstraction,”51 the subsumption of as many cases as possible under a single formula or law, but art aims at capturing individual emotions in all of their particularity or experiences of individual objects in all of their particularity, including the particularity of our emotional response to them. Thus Cassirer writes: The artist does not portray or copy a certain empirical object – a landscape with its hills and mountains, its brooks and rivers. What he gives us is the individual and momentary physiognomy of the landscape. He wishes to express the atmosphere of things, the play of light and shadow. A landscape is not “the same” in early twilight, in midday heat, or on a rainy and sunny day. Our aesthetic perception exhibits a much greater variety and belongs to a much more complex order than our ordinary sense perception. In sense perception we are content with apprehending the common and constant features of the objects of our surroundings. Aesthetic experience is incomparably richer. It is pregnant with infinite possibilities which remain unrealized in ordinary sense experience. In the work of the artist these possibilities become actualities; they are brought into the open and take on a definite shape. The revelation of this inexhaustibility of the aspects of things is one of the great privileges and one of the deepest charms of art.52

This passage stresses the infinite variability of the sensory experience of particular physical objects, but if it is not to be taken as a complete departure from what Cassirer has been saying in the previous pages, then his term “atmosphere” must be intended to include our emotional as well as our more purely sensory response to objects, and his claim must be that while science and other uses of language abstract as much as possible from both the infinite variability of the appearance of objects and especially the emotional “atmosphere” of our perception of them, art aims precisely at “embodying” or giving form to both of those aspects of human experience. (The concept of “atmosphere” has become central 50 51 52

Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. 143. Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. 144. Cassirer, Essay on Man, pp. 144–5.

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to the more recent aesthetic theory of the German philosopher Gernot Böhme).53 Although, as we have seen, Cassirer criticizes Collingwood as well as Croce for neglecting or even rejecting the indispensable material aspect of giving form to perception and emotion in art, he shares with Collingwood the rejection of Tolstoy’s conception of the aim of art as the communication of emotion by “infection” and the insistence instead that art yields the clarification of emotion, which we have also found in American writers including Dewey: “It is not the degree of infection but the degree of intensification and illumination which is the measure of the excellence of art.”54 He likewise shares Collingwood’s view that the illumination of emotion through art also affords liberation from domination by our own emotions: “What we leave behind when passing the threshold of art is the hard pressure, the compulsion of our emotions.” By giving shape to our emotions in art we also gain distance on them: The tragic poet is not the slave but the master of his emotions; and he is able to transfer this mastery to the spectators. Aesthetic freedom is not the absence of passions, not Stoic apathy, but just the contrary. It means that our emotional life acquires its greatest strength, and in this very strength it changes its form. For here we no longer live in the immediate reality of things but in a world of pure sensuous forms. In this world all our feelings undergo a sort of transubstantiation with respect to their essence and their character. The passions themselves are relieved of their material burden. We feel their form and their life but not their encumbrance. . . . To give aesthetic form to our passions is to transform them into a free and active state. In the work of the artist the power of passion itself has been made a formative power. If in real life we had to endure all those emotions through which we live in Sophocles’ Oedipus or in Shakespeare’s King Lear we should scarcely survive the shock and strain. But art turns all these pains and outrages, these cruelties and outrages, into a means of self-liberation, thus giving an inner freedom which cannot be attained in any other way.55

Cassirer’s claim that the liberation from domination by our own emotions that we gain by giving them shape in art is the only means to selfliberation is of course a very strong claim, stronger than the claim made by others who have argued for liberation from domination by our own 53

54 55

See Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000), and Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001), chs. III–IV. Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. 148. Cassirer, Essay on Man, pp. 148–9.

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emotions through aesthetic experience, for example, Schopenhauer, who had argued that art offers only momentary relief from our domination by the will and only asceticism a permanent relief. Cassirer’s strong claim is no doubt implausible. The view that illuminating our emotions by giving them shape in art is certainly one way to gain control over them and perhaps even a necessary condition for other ways of gaining more enduring control over them, would obviously be more plausible. That the creation and experience of art are means toward selfliberation from domination by shapeless and uncontrolled emotions is the chief addition that Cassirer is willing to make to an essentially cognitivist account of art – like most of the Neo-Kantians of the preceding generation and indeed, as we have seen, like most expression theorists of the first part of the twentieth century, Cassirer is hostile to the interpretation of aesthetic creation and experience as a form of play. While conceding that both art and play are sources of “completely disinterested” pleasure, “nonutilitarian and unrelated to any practical end,” he insists that art and play are crucially different because “play gives us illusive images” while “art gives us a new kind of truth – a truth not of empirical things but of pure forms.”56 Cassirer holds that there are “three different kinds of imagination: the power of invention, the power of personification, and the power to produce pure sensuous forms,” and that while the first two kinds of imagination are involved in the “play of a child,” only art involves “the power to produce pure sensuous forms.” “The child plays with things, the artist plays with forms, with lines and designs, rhythms and melodies. . . . The artist dissolves the hard stuff of things in the crucible of his imagination, and the result of this process is the discovery of a new world of poetical, musical, or plastic forms.”57 One might object here that children as well as adult artists use lines and designs, rhythms and melodies, but the reply to this objection would be that when they do, children are making art, even if childish art, not merely playing – we distinguish, after all, between art class and recess. Cassirer also stresses that while play may offer us (here surely including adults) “diversion and relaxation” or alternatively serve as a “propaedeutic” to serious adult activities, as when boys play war and little girls dress dolls, art is “neither diversion nor preparation.”58 Here Cassirer may have Groos as well as Spencer in mind. 56 57 58

Cassirer, Essay on Man, pp. 163–4. Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. 164. Cassirer, Essay on Man, pp. 164–5.

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Cassirer does emphasize that the theory of art as play that he rejects is that of “modern biological theories of art,” which he associates with Darwin and Spencer; he excepts Schiller’s theory of art from his objection. But that is because Schiller’s “is a transcendental and idealistic theory,” not a “biological and naturalistic” one, according to which the play in art is an expression of our intelligible freedom, not really the play of a child (or a cub) at all. In Cassirer’s view, Schiller could connect his metaphysical conception of art as play with the play of a child only because “in his mind the world of the child had undergone a process of idealization and sublimation.” Rather than taking Schiller’s theory of art to be a theory of play in any normal sense, Cassirer enlists Schiller as a precursor of the theory of art as symbolic form: “Schiller himself defines beauty as ‘living form.’ To him the awareness of living forms is the first and indispensable step which leads to the experience of freedom. Aesthetic contemplation or reflection, according to Schiller, is the first liberal attitude of man toward the universe,” but “it is precisely this ‘liberal,’ this conscious and reflective attitude which is lacking in a child’s play, and which marks the boundary line between play and art.”59 Cassirer’s rejection of the theory of art as play in favor of the conception of art as the paradigmatic means for the expression of truth about human emotions was nothing new or influential; as we have seen, by the time he wrote the Essay of Man, the rejection of the play theory was common to every leading aesthetician with the exception of DeWitt Parker. What was influential in Cassirer’s work was the characterization of art as concrete rather than abstract symbolism. This was the central idea in the aesthetic theory of Cassirer’s leading American proponent, Susanne Langer, and as we will see in the final chapter of this part, it can even be considered to be the central idea in the work of Nelson Goodman in the decade following that of Langer’s main work in aesthetics.

2. Langer Susanne Knauth was born in New York in 1895, the daughter of prosperous German immigrants, and spoke German at home. After private school, she graduated from Radcliffe College, then an “annex” of Harvard, in 1920, and after a year at the University of Vienna from 1921 to 1922, she earned her Ph.D. from Radcliffe under the direction of Alfred North Whitehead. (Harvard still did not grant the Ph.D. to 59

Cassirer, Essay on Man, p. 166.

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women.) In 1921 she had married the distinguished Harvard professor of modern European history William Langer, and, tethered to Harvard, she taught philosophy as a tutor at Radcliffe from 1927 to 1942. She was divorced from Langer in the latter year, although she retained his name, and was then free to teach elsewhere. After stints at the University of Delaware and Columbia University, she was professor of philosophy at Connecticut College (then for women only) from 1954 to 1961, and after becoming emerita remained there as research professor. She had numerous visiting appointments at other leading universities, including Northwestern, Michigan, and New York University. Whitehead wrote the preface for her first book, The Practice of Philosophy, in 1930, and influenced by her training she also published An Introduction to Symbolic Logic in 1937. But by the time she published what quickly became and has remained her best known book, Philosophy in a New Key,60 in 1942, she had fallen under the influence of Cassirer, whose 1924 monograph Sprache and Mythos, a condensation of the first two volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, she translated.61 However, Langer continued to admire Whitehead and dedicated Philosophy in a New Key to him. This book contained two chapters on art, one, “The Significance of Music,” focused on the art form that was always central to Langer’s aesthetic thought, the other more general. A decade later, in 1953, she dedicated her main work in aesthetics, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key, to the memory of Cassirer; this work extends the theory of art as expression that Langer had originally developed for music to all of the arts.62 Langer’s other works in aesthetics were Problems of Art: Ten Lectures, published in 1957,63 and in 1958 an anthology of sources, Reflections on Art, that very much reflected her own interests in aesthetic theory.64 The last years of her life were devoted to the huge work Mind,65 60

61

62

63

64

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Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942); cited here from the third edition (1957). Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946). Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953). Susanne K. Langer, Problems of Art: Ten Lectures (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957). Susanne K. Langer, Reflections on Art: A Source Book of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958; reprinted New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967–1982).

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whose psychological and physiological approach to the nature of human thought and feeling was no longer of interest to the mainstream of American “analytical” philosophers when the influences of logical positivism, Wittgenstein, and ordinary language philosophy were at their peak nor to American “continental” philosophers when the influence of Heidegger was at its peak. This work thus did not enjoy the wide attention of Langer’s earlier work. Our discussion here will be confined to Langer’s chief work in aesthetics, the two relevant chapters of Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form.66 For Langer, the “new key” to philosophy was that all of our forms of representation, even sense data themselves, our most immediate sensory representations of objects, “are primarily symbols”67 that require interpretation rather than wearing their meaning on their face and needing no interpretation at all. She argues that this position is forced upon us by modern science, in which observation has become almost entirely indirect; and readings take the place of genuine witness. The sense-data on which the propositions of modern science rest are, for the most part, little photographic spots and blurs, or inky curved lines on paper. These data are empirical enough, but of course they are not themselves the phenomena in question. . . . Instead of watching the process that interests us . . . we really see only the fluctuations of a tiny arrow, the trailing path of a stylus, or the appearance of a speck of light, and calculate to the “facts” of our science.68

But if science, the “mirror of nature,” is itself a system of symbols for making calculations about reality rather than any sort of straightforward copy of reality, all the more so are our other forms of “conception and expression” also symbolic, and it is “the power of using symbols” rather than “higher sensitivity . . . longer memory or even quicker association” that “sets man so far above other animals that he can regard them as 66

67 68

A monograph on Langer is Robert E. Innis, Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). Articles on Langer’s aesthetics include Ernest Nagel, review of Philosophy in a New Key, Journal of Philosophy 40 (1943): 323–9; Kingsley B. Price, “Is a Work of Art a Symbol?” Journal of Philosophy 50 (1953): 484– 503, and “Philosophy in a New Key: An Interpretation,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 1 (1993): 34–43 (see also articles by M.J. Reichling and Bennett Reimer in this issue); Forest Hansen, “Langer’s Expressive Form: An Interpretation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 27 (1968): 165–70; Timothy Binkley, “Langer’s Logical and Ontological Modes,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28 (1970): 455–64; and L.-O. Ahlberg, “Susanne Langer on Representation and Emotion in Music,” British Journal of Aesthetics 34 (1994): 69–80. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 21. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 20.

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denizens of a lower world.”69 Art too must therefore be approached as a form of making and using symbols. Like Cassirer and so many others of the period, Langer is quick to argue that the fact that art consists in creating symbols rather than copying nature does not make it unserious, in particular does not reduce it to the level of mere play. She associates the theory of art as play with “genetic psychology,” according to which art is “a luxury product of the mind.” She argues against the equation of art with play by appeal to the value we place on art, clearly greater than any value we place on play or mere toys for play: “It is only in careless speech that we denote music or tragedy as our ‘hobby’; we do not really class them with tennis or bridge. We condemn as barbarous people who destroy works of art, even under stress of war. . . . Why should the world wail over the loss of a play product, and look with its old callousness on the destruction of so much that dire labor has produced?”70 Unlike Cassirer, Langer does not have the piety toward the heroes of classical German culture that would lead her to make an exception for Schiller from this condemnation of the theory of art and aesthetic experience as play. But this detail aside, the central thought of Langer’s approach to art is clearly shared with Cassirer (since Philosophy in a New Key was published in 1942 and the Essay on Man only in 1944, but then again Langer clearly knew Cassirer’s earlier work, it is hard to say who might have influenced whom here): Art is a form of symbolic expression, but particularly for the expression of that which cannot adequately be expressed by other forms of thought and communication because it is too particular, too concrete, and therefore too complex to be captured by any other, more abstract kind of symbol. Because of the concrete and therefore inexhaustible character of what art symbolizes, Langer calls the symbols of art “unconsummated”71 and for this reason distances herself from Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experience as “consummatory” – although since for Dewey consummatory moments of experience were certainly not intended to put a stop to the flow of experience, it is not clear that the distance between Langer and Dewey was as great as she thought. Langer first worked out her theory of art as concrete and therefore unconsummated symbol for the case of music in Philosophy in a New Key, so let us consider her approach to music before we see how she 69 70 71

Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 26. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 37. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 240–1.

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attempted to generalize it to the other arts in Feeling and Form. Langer begins her chapter “On Significance in Music” by subscribing to the “strong tendency today to treat art as a significant phenomenon rather than as a pleasurable experience, a gratification of the senses.” She associates this claim with Clive Bell’s term “significant form,” but unlike Bell, who considered “significant form” the explanation of beauty, Langer claims that the tendency to emphasize significance rather than pleasure “is probably due to the free use of dissonance and so-called ‘ugliness’ by our leading artists in all fields – in literature, music, and the plastic arts.”72 Langer’s statement has to be interpreted with care, for she will not deny that significant form is sensuous, only that our pleasure in it is itself immediate and sensuous (as, for example, Hutcheson had argued two centuries earlier) – “great art is not a direct sensuous pleasure.”73 But she need not argue that the experience of art is not in fact pleasurable, only that our pleasure in it is like our pleasure in cognition, namely, a pleasure in understanding the meaning of the sensuous form that a work of art presents to us, although she does not make explicit that her theory allows this perfectly sensible position. Langer next emphasizes that “expressive forms” in art (she introduces this phrase in quotation marks) “do not convey propositions, as literal symbols do,”74 but neither do they convey “deeper” or hidden significance, as they are supposed to do by, for example, psychoanalytic theories of art – since any work of art might have that kind of meaning, and of course all sorts of nonartistic utterances or behavior can also be interpreted psychoanalytically, such meaning could not identify what is distinctive to art nor explain the difference between good and bad art,75 both goals at which Langer’s own theory, this criticism explains, does aim.76 The meaning of art is thus, as “every artist knows,” not any “hidden content” of works of art but “the perfection of form,” and the “meaning of art,” although not immediate pleasure in sensuous qualities, nevertheless “belongs to the sensuous percept itself apart from what it ostensibly represents.” Since (most) music is not representational, Langer concludes that the character of “purely artistic meaning should be most accessible” to aesthetic theory through the analysis of our experience of “musical works.”77 72 73 74 75 76

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Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 204–5. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 205; Langer’s emphasis. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 206. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 207. For a recent attack on “deep interpretation” of art and other forms of expression, see Laurent Stern, Interpretive Reasoning (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 208–9.

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Turning specifically to the case of music, then, Langer argues that our experience of music obviously has some connection to emotion, but that what is important is not simply the emotions music might stir in its listeners78 nor the emotion of the musician (composer or performer) “pouring out the real feelings of his heart.”79 Although it cannot be denied that either musician or audience might “use music to work off our subjective experiences and restore our personal balance . . . this is not its primary function.”80 Rather, if music has any significance, it is semantic, not symptomatic. Its “meaning” is evidently not that of a stimulus to evoke emotions, nor that of a signal to announce them; if it has an emotional content, it “has” it in the same sense that language “has” its conceptual content – symbolically. It is not usually derived from affects nor intended for them; but we may say, with certain reservations, that it is about them. Music is not the cause or cure of feelings, but their logical expression; though even in this capacity it has its special ways of functioning, that make it incommensurable with language, and even with presentational symbols like images, gestures, and rites.81

Music is “semantic” or “symbolic” in that it is “about” emotions or feelings, “an impersonal, negotiable, real semantic, a symbolism with a content of ideas, instead of an overt sign of somebody’s emotional condition.”82 But it is “incommensurable” with language – here Langer would have done better to say that music or its distinctive effective is different from the ordinary use of language, because of course much music does use words and the ordinary meaning of its words must be part of the significance of such music or at the very least compatible with it – because the way in which music symbolizes feelings is quite different from the way in which ordinary language symbolizes its contents, including feelings, which after all can also be the content of the ordinary use of language. Music has no “vocabulary” in which tokens of repeatable types of symbols signify tokens of repeatable types of content in a wide range of different statements on different occasions. “To call the tones of a scale its ‘words,’ harmony its ‘grammar,’ and thematic development its ‘syntax,’ is a useless allegory, for tones lack the very thing that distinguishes a word from a mere vocable: fixed connotation, or ‘dictionary meaning.’”83 The features of music that do have a determinate representation 78 79 80 81 82 83

Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 212–13. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 214. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 217. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 218. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 219. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 228–9.

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in a system of musical notation like the modern Western system, such as notes (A, B, etc.), and times (quarter-notes, half-notes, etc.), do not have any fixed emotional reference. “Logically, music has not the characteristic properties of a language – separable terms with fixed connotations, and syntactical rules for deriving complex connotations without any loss to the constituent elements.”84 But precisely because musical elements do not have fixed connotations, “music articulates forms which language cannot set forth”:85 Music does not name emotions, but it “can reveal the nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language cannot approach.”86 Because musical elements are not tokens of types that connote determinate but therefore necessarily also abstract or simplified contents, particular musical compositions or their parts can connote particular emotions in all their concrete, complex, and unnamable particularity. On Langer’s account, music is clearly what Cassirer called a concrete rather than abstract symbolic form. But just how can a particular piece of music be about a particular emotion when there are no conventional or “dictionary” meanings for specific musical elements, no specific simple connotations out of which determinate complex connotations could be compounded in accordance with fixed syntactical rules? A century before Langer, Eduard Hanslick had argued that “no instrumental composition can describe the ideas of love, wrath, or fear, since there is no causal nexus between these ideas and certain compositions of sound,” nothing determinate enough to associate one particular feature of the music with one kind of emotion rather than another. But Hanslick had allowed that motion is an “element which music has in common with our emotions and which, with creative power, it contrives to exhibit an endless variety of forms and contrasts,”87 so that even though we cannot say that some piece of music specifically represents or expresses a type of emotion such as love, wrath, or fear, we can say that both a certain piece of music and a certain emotion rise, crest, fade with a certain degree of intensity and speed, and so on, and thus use the same terms that we would use to describe the motion of our emotions to describe the music, or vice versa. With this concession, Langer argues, Hanslick “did not realize how much he had granted”; he had “insisted that music could mean nothing” because “he considered nothing but conventional denotation as ‘meaning,’” conventional 84 85 86 87

Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 232. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 233. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 235. Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, pp. 24–5.

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denotation being the way in which the spoken or written English word “anger” (and the spoken and written German word Wut, and so on) designates the phenomenon of anger itself. Langer agrees that “what music can actually reflect is only the morphology of feeling”88 but does not think that this is a trivial concession; for her it is what is essential to the significance of music, and what allows music to represent the vast array of human emotions, which goes far beyond the general types of emotions named and namable in any ordinary language, in all of their complexity. It is also what makes any particular piece of music “inexhaustible”: Just as in any particular occurrence of emotion there is an indescribable amount of nuance not captured by the general name by which we denote it, so a piece of music that captures a particular emotion by means of its parallel morphology is also inexhaustible. “Its message is not an immutable abstraction, a bare, unambiguous, fixed concept, as a lesson in the higher mathematics of feeling should be. It is always new, no matter how well or how long we have known it, or it loses its meaning; it is not transparent but iridescent. Its values crowd each other, its symbols are inexhaustible.”89 The inexhaustibility of works of art is a common idea, but Langer gives it a particular sense by deriving it from a work of art’s morphological resemblance to a concrete instance of emotion, which like anything completely concrete is never exhaustively captured by any general concept. The contrast between the determinacy of the meaning of a conventional symbol that stands for a token or an abstraction and the inexhaustibility of a musical symbol is also what Langer means by calling the symbols of music “unconsummated.”90 Having rejected the identification of art with play early in Philosophy in a New Key, as we previously saw, Langer nevertheless also characterizes the absence of conventional meanings in music as freedom from fixed meanings: Music has all the earmarks of a true symbolism, except one: the existence of an assigned connotation. It is a form that is capable of connotation, and the meanings to which it is amenable are articulations of emotive, vital, sentient experience. But its import is never fixed. In music we work essentially with free forms, following inherent psychological laws of “rightness,” and take interest in possible articulations suggested entirely by the musical material.91 88 89 90 91

Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 238. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 239. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 240–1. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 240.

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Music, Langer says, is “unconventionalized, unverbalized freedom of thought,” and even a “transient play of contents.”92 So although she starts by distancing her view of music as a form of symbolism and thus of cognition from the nineteenth-century physiological theory of play, by the end of her discussion of music she is willing to recognize an element of mental play in it, presumably in both its composition and its reception. More important even than her use of the word “play” is her characterization of music as an expression of freedom of thought, since in the classical theories of aesthetic experience of art as a form of play from Addison to Kant and Schiller it was always our satisfaction in the free use of our mental powers, cognitive only in the case of Kant but both cognitive and emotional in the case of other proponents of this approach to aesthetics, that was the ultimate source of aesthetic pleasure. Starting from her use of concrete symbolism to explicate the kind of cognition that is involved in art, Langer ends up by connecting her version of the theory of art as a symbolic form, which already connects the cognitive and emotional approaches to art, with the other great tradition of modern aesthetics, the theory of aesthetic experience as a kind of play. In the second of the chapters on art in Philosophy in a New Key, “The Genesis of Artistic Import,” Langer explains how music arises from the expressive potential of ordinary speech. All the “sounds which meet our alert and retentive ear in the course of the day’s work . . . are intrinsically expressive,” she argues: “They have not only associative value, but value as rhythms and intervals, exhibiting stress and release, progression, rise or fall, motion, limit, rest”; in other words, they have the morphology of emotion itself, and “it is in this musical capacity that they enter into art, not in their original capacity of signs, self-expressions, religious symbols,” and the like.93 Langer then argues that the other arts express emotions in the same way that music does and similarly arise from the inherent expressive potential of other forms of ordinary expression and activity: “I strongly suspect, though I am not ready to assert it dogmatically, that the import of artistic expression is broadly the same in all arts as it is in music – the verbally ineffable, yet not inexpressible law of vital experience, the pattern of affective and sentient being.” This, Langer holds, is the real meaning of the claim that significant form is the essence of all art, and what is distinctive about music is only that it reveals this fact 92 93

Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 243. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 248.

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about art and our experience of it with particular salience because it (or at least absolute music, music without words) is so obviously unlike ordinary language and must therefore mean something quite different and mean it quite differently than ordinary language. Langer observes that this “is presumably what Walter Pater meant by his much-debated dictum, ‘All art aspires to the condition of music,’”94 although on her account other arts do not merely aspire to the condition of music: They realize it, even though they may not make their special character as concrete rather than abstract symbolic forms to the analyst as obvious as music does. In Feeling and Form Langer provides an extended argument for what was only her suspicion in Philosophy in a New Key that all arts are concrete symbolic forms. The key thought in this argument is that what happens in (absolute) music automatically – namely, that by the very absence of conventional content or denotation our attention is necessarily directed toward the sensuous form of the music itself and from there to the morphological relation between this particular form and some particular human emotion – happens in the other arts by devices of abstraction and illusion that direct us away from the conceptual content or practical significance that the works of art in these cases do actually have and toward their sensuous surfaces, which then, as in the case of music, again have morphological relations to particular human emotions. Langer begins her argument with a restatement of her thesis about music, amplified with an even greater statement than in her earlier work of the dynamical features that may be found in both music and emotion and that make it possible for the former to symbolize the latter: The tonal structures we call “music” bear a close logical similarity to the forms of human feeling – forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses – not joy or sorrow perhaps, but the poignancy of either and both – the greatness and brevity and eternal passing of everything vitally felt. Such is the pattern, or logical form, of sentience; and the pattern of music is that same form worked out in pure, measured sound and silence. Music is a tonal analogue of emotive life. Such formal analogy, or congruence of logical structures, is the prime requisite for the relation between a symbol and whatever it is to mean.95

94 95

Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 257. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 27.

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She admits that it might be confusing to speak of the musical signification of emotion as “meaning” because that inevitably suggests abstract, definable connotation. She even concedes that the designation of musical symbols in Philosophy in a New Key as “unconsummated” symbols might have been less than clear; perhaps, she says, it would be better to say simply that “music has import, and this import is the pattern of sentience – the pattern of life itself, as it is felt and directly known. Let us therefore call the significance of music its ‘vital import’ instead of ‘meaning.’”96 But this terminological modification is not the raison d’etre for a new book; the challenge for the Feeling and Form is rather to argue for the generalization of Langer’s account of music to the other arts, to show that all “art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.”97 The key to this argument is the concept of “semblance” that Langer now adopts from one of the undisputed heroes of the German aesthetic tradition, namely, Schiller: Schiller was the first thinker who saw what really makes “Schein,” or semblance, important for art: the fact that it liberates perception – and with it, the power of conception – from all practical purposes, and lets the mind dwell on the sheer appearance of things. The function of artistic illusion is not “make-believe,” as many philosophers and psychologists assume, but the very opposite, disengagement from belief – the contemplation of sensory qualities without their usual meanings of “Here’s that chair,” “That’s my telephone,” . . . etc. The knowledge that what is before us has no practical significance in the world is what enables us to give attention to its appearance as such.98

Langer calls the drawing of our attention away from conventional meanings and practical uses “semblance,” the creation of an “image” or an “illusion” even when that usage sounds somewhat strange, as in the cases of buildings, pots, or textiles whose decorative surfaces draw us away from thought about the uses of such objects to the forms of their decoration themselves: How can a work of art that does not represent anything – a building, a pot, a patterned textile – be called an image? It becomes an image when it presents itself purely to our vision, i.e., as a sheer visual form instead of a locally and practically related object. If we receive it as a completely visual thing, we abstract its appearance from its material existence.99 96 97 98 99

Langer, Feeling and Form, pp. 31–2. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 40. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 49. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 47.

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Thus what is essential to art is not the content of an illusion it might create, thus its representational content, but the fact that its form draws us away from thoughts of its content or use to its immediate, sensory character – “The semblance of a thing, thus thrown into relief, is its direct aesthetic quality.”100 Here Langer’s view verges on that of David Prall. But Langer’s view is not that once we have experienced an object as a sensory image rather than as part of some conceptual and/or practical nexus, we have arrived at aesthetic experience; her view is rather that the way in which the sensory character of a work of art frees us from any ordinary conceptual and practical significance the object might otherwise be thought to have freed us to put it to another use, namely, the symbolization of human feeling: “In art forms are abstracted only to be made clearly apparent, and are freedom from their common uses only to be put to new uses: to act as symbols, to become expressive of human feeling.”101 Abstraction (from ordinary significance) is not an end in itself, but rather a means to making form available for the symbolization of feeling. Yet forms are either empty abstractions, or they do have a content, and artistic forms have a very special one, namely their import. They are logically expressive, or significant, forms. They are symbols for the articulation of feeling, and convey the elusive yet familiar pattern of sentience. And as essentially symbolic forms they lie in a different dimension from physical objects as such. They belong to the same category as language, though their logical form is a different one, and as myth and dream, though their function is not the same.102

By means of abstraction, then, or their redirection of our attention from ordinary and practical meanings to their sensuous forms, objects in any medium, not just musical works, may become symbols for the articulation and thus illumination of our feelings. Langer lavishes four further chapters of Feeling and Form on explaining how music achieves its symbolization of our emotions, but that is not the challenge for her thesis, since both the abstraction inherent in (absolute) music and the isomorphism between the motion of music and the motion of emotion are already evident. Her challenge is rather to explain how her theory of abstraction for the sake of symbolizing emotion works in other arts – in the plastic arts of painting and sculpture, where works

100 101 102

Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 50. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 51. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 52.

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of art so clearly often do have representational content beyond their own sensuous form; in dance, where the actual gestures of real human bodies seem to be the material of the art; and in various forms of literature, whose works of course use, indeed typically consist entirely of, words that have conventional connotations and denotations and whose own sensuous qualities typically play little role in their significance. Langer’s claim that abstraction is crucial to all plastic art does not mean that only nonrepresentational or (as in the original name of New York’s Guggenheim Museum) “nonobjective” painting or sculpture is successful art. Rather, what Langer claims is that in all visual arts, including pottery and architecture as well as painting and sculpture, what is crucial is the creation of a “virtual space,” whether that virtual space is created with recognizable representations of ordinary objects or with figures or motifs that have become almost or entirely nonrepresentational, like patterns in Oriental rugs that may have become only vaguely recognizable as floral or animal in origin or that may have become abstracted past all such recognition. And what is a virtual space? It is nothing but a space that has become organized in such a way as to suggest the motions and rhythms of our own experience. “The space in which we live and act is not what is treated in art at all.”103 Rather, what plastic art creates, whether it does so by recognizable representations of objects or by abstract patterns, is “individual forms in visible relation to one another . . . virtual proportions, connections, and focal points . . . volumes, distances, planes of vision and the space between them”104 that can symbolize the relations of moments of sentient and emotional experience. It is by means of the creation of virtual space that the visual arts can attain the “condition of music,” namely, the creation of “living form”: “Living form” is the most indubitable product of all good art, be it painting, architecture, or pottery. Such form is “living” in the same way that a border or spiral is intrinsically “growing”: that is, it expresses life – feeling, growth, movement, emotion, and everything that characterizes vital existence. This expression, moreover, is not symbolization in the usual sense of conventional or assigned meaning, but a presentation of a highly articulated form wherein the beholder recognizes, without conscious comparison and judgment but rather by direct recognition, the forms of human feeling: emotions, moods, even sensations in their characteristic passage.105

103 104 105

Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 72. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 76. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 82.

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Langer understands even architecture, where one might have thought that recognition of utility should play a significant if not necessarily dominant role in our experience, in terms of the creation of virtual experience for the symbolization of emotion; she quotes not from a Bauhaus manifesto, but from Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture (1923), although one must think of these words as describing Corbusier’s own architectural practice not in his villas of the 1920s as “machines for living” but in a work like his chapel at Ronchamp of 1950–4: “Architecture . . . should use those elements which are capable of affecting our senses . . . in such a way that the sight of them affects us immediately by their delicacy or their brutality, their riot or their serenity, their indifference or their interest; those elements are plastic elements, forms which our eyes can see and our minds can measure.”106 In the case of dance, the view that Langer wants to oppose is that in watching the dancers we are seeing ordinary human beings expressing their actual emotions by their gestures and responding to their self-expression; rather, what we respond to is the dance created by the gestures of the dancers, which is of course a form that can symbolize the form of human emotions: “In watching a collective dance – say an artistically successful ballet – one does not see people running around; one sees the dance driving this way, drawn that way, gathering here, spreading there – fleeing, resting, rising and so forth,”107 and those motions are symbols of the motions of human emotion. Finally, works of literature too create virtual worlds that symbolize the life of emotions, although of course in the case of literature the material for the creation of virtual space or a virtual world is not gesture but words. The virtual world in which poetic events develop is always peculiar to the work: it is the particular illusion of life those events create, as the virtual space of a picture is the particular space of the forms in it. To be imaginatively coherent, the “world” of a poem must be made out of events that are in the imaginative mode. . . . For the primary illusion of literature, the semblance of life, is abstracted from immediate, personal life, as the primary illusions of the other arts – virtual space, time, and power – are images of perceived space, vital time, felt power.108

106

107 108

Langer, Feeling and Form, pp. 96–7, quoting from Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), Towards a New Architecture (New York: Payson & Clarke, 1927), p. 16. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 175. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 217.

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Of course literature cannot achieve its effect if its words are regarded as purely graphic or acoustic patterns, in the way in which patterns in a carpet can be appreciated as abstract designs without any recognition of their floral origins – that would reduce literature to gibberish. But the reference of the words to actual objects or events can be forgotten so that they can create “virtual events”: “Virtual events are the basic abstraction of literature, by means of which the illusion of life is made and sustained and given specific, articulate forms. One small event may fill a whole poem, unfolding its details in the simplified, isolating framework of a purely poetic reality.”109 In our ordinary use of words, we rush beyond the words to the objects and events they denote and our practical concerns about those things; in the literary use of words, we can linger over the words and the virtual worlds they create so we can notice the parallels between the relations and rhythms of such worlds and the relations and rhythms of our emotions. Even when a poem or other work of literature refers to emotions by ordinary linguistic means, what it is about is not the emotions it refers to in that way but the emotion that it symbolizes by its whole character: “To create the poetic primary illusion, hold the reader to it, and develop the image of reality so it has emotional significance above the suggested emotions which are elements in it, is the purpose of every word a poet writes.”110 Langer develops this view of literature in great detail through an extended discussion of the “Great Dramatic Forms”; we will not follow her through that discussion, as the character of her account of how the other arts achieve the condition of music as the symbolism of emotion should now be clear. We can conclude that Langer offered one of the most detailed accounts of the expression theory of art, as that version of the cognitive theory of art in which our own feelings become the object of artistic knowledge, to be found in the first half of the twentieth century. We might also conclude that she offered the final statement of this theory, since in the same year that Feeling and Form appeared, 1953, another work appeared that would radically change the direction of AngloAmerican aesthetic theory, namely, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. But before we can turn to the impact of Wittgenstein on aesthetics in the second half of the twentieth century, we must consider several more important aestheticians of the 1950s, namely, D.W. 109 110

Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 217. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 245.

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Gotshalk, Arnold Isenberg, and especially Monroe Beardsley, who was influenced more by Dewey than by the expressivist tradition summed up by Langer, and then one major aesthetician of the 1960s who was not influenced by the Wittgensteinian movement but may instead be considered as the legitimate heir to Cassirer and Langer, namely, Nelson Goodman.

10 After Dewey and Cassirer

There were three great influences on aesthetic theory in the Englishspeaking world in the 1950s and the next several decades. Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experience as consummatory experience and the theory of art as symbolism associated in the previous section with Cassirer and Langer but also explored by other thinkers from Charles Sanders Pierce to Charles S. Morris were both especially influential in the United States; the influence of the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein was pronounced in both the United States and Great Britain, to the point of largely effacing the previous traditions in aesthetics. The influence of Wittgenstein will be the subject of the next part; the last chapter of this part will discuss first the influence of the Deweyan conception of aesthetic experience, accompanied with some continuing influence from Santayana, and then the influence of the conception of art as a form of symbolism. Of course, none of the philosophers interesting enough to be discussed here was an epigone whose thought simply restated that of a single master.

1. Gotshalk The first of the three philosophers to be discussed here, Dilman Walter Gotshalk (1901–73), should not be too closely associated with Dewey; in some ways, the structure of his theory more closely resembles that of Santayana, whom he cited more often in his chief work in aesthetics Art and the Social Order 1 (1947) than any other philosopher besides Kant 1

D[ilman] W[alter] Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), second and revised edition (New York: Dover Publications, 1962). The second edition will be cited here.

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and Croce, although he cites the latter chiefly to criticize him. But his explication of aesthetic experience as paying special attention to perception but involving all of our cognitive capacities in “one of the great immediate and self-rewarding goods available to human energy”2 while also fulfilling numerous external and social aims is hardly alien to the spirit of Dewey’s aesthetics. The style of Gotshalk’s work is certainly different from that of Dewey’s: Where Dewey delighted in rejecting dualisms of any sort, Gotshalk was a more traditional academic philosopher who multiplied distinctions whenever he could. But he used the distinctions that he drew to present a complex account of artistic creation, aesthetic experience, and the work of art that mediates between the two, an account that joins together what much of previous aesthetic theory had rent asunder, especially formalism, on the one hand, and expression, on the other. For Gotshalk, material, form, and expression are all nonexclusive, equally important, and mutually enriching aspects of art and the creation and experience of it. Gotshalk should be remembered as one of the twentieth-century aestheticians who tried to recreate in his own terms Kant’s synthesis of the truth and play theories of aesthetics and to go beyond Kant in adding the expression of emotion as well as ideas to this synthesis. Gotshalk did not study at institutions associated with Dewey. A native of Trenton, New Jersey, he graduated from Princeton in 1922, before the arrival of Stace or Greene, although he would later cite Greene’s The Arts and the Art of Criticism favorably in his own work; his main teachers seem to have been the individualistic philosopher and indeed critic of pragmatism Warner Fite and the classicist Lane Cooper. Gotshalk spent two years teaching high school English before starting graduate school in philosophy at Cornell and was widely read in literature and poetry. His studies at Cornell included seminars on Kant’s first and third critiques and on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; his historical erudition is evident in Art and the Social Order even though the book is not a work on the history of aesthetics. Gotshalk’s dissertation at Cornell was “The Problem of Mind and Objects in the Philosophies of Samuel Alexander and Ernst Cassirer,” work that clearly put him in contact with two figures whom we have seen to be of great importance in aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth century. Gotshalk taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from the completion of his degree at Cornell in 1927 until his retirement due to ill health in 1965. He published seven 2

Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 202.

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books besides Art and the Social Order, the most important of which were his systematic exposition of his metaphysics, Structure and Reality (1937), and his work in ethics, Patterns of Good and Evil.3 That Gotshalk’s original work was in metaphysics is reflected in the highly structured manner in which he presents his aesthetic theory. Gotshalk commences with the definition that “fine art is the creation of objects for aesthetic experience.” He declares this to be a “relational” definition implying “the triadic pattern of creation-object-apprehension” and contrasts it to the “usual procedure” of “recent speculation,” which has been “to select some element within the triadic pattern and to offer it as embodying the distinctive meaning of art.” In other words, Gotshalk opposes reductionist approaches that focus exclusively on one of the three poles of artistic creation, works of art themselves, or the reception of art: Thus he takes the theory of play to have focused exclusively on the “creative process,” the theories of significant form and of art as expression to have focused solely on the “public object, the work of art,” and psychological theories such as the theory of aesthetic experience as “escape” to have focused just on the “apprehending process.” “In contrast, the relational theory cuts below this surface variety and seeks to restudy the artistic transaction in light of the underlying unity that makes this variety relevant and important.”4 In other words, Gotshalk intends his theory of art to be a synthesis that finds a germ of truth in many preceding theories but combines them rather than claiming exclusivity for one. In particular, as we will see, Gotshalk finds that the free engagement of all the capacities of both artist and audience with both the materials and the form of works of art as well as with both the ideas and the emotions expressed by them is the core of the aesthetic “transaction,” but that both the cognition of truth and the experience of individual emotion as well as social values are also important parts of this transaction. Gotshalk’s theory thus clearly includes both elements of the Kantian synthesis in aesthetics, the synthesis of the theory of the free play of mental powers with the theory of art as a form of cognition, while also recognizing the importance of emotions as both part of the content and part of the experience of art. Gotshalk’s inclusive rather than exclusive 3

4

D.W. Gotshalk, Structure and Reality: A Study of First Principles (New York: Dial Press, 1937), and Patterns of Good and Evil: A Value Analysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963). The biographical data offered here are from the memorial minute by his Illinois colleague Max H. Fisch in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 46 (1972–3): 180–1. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, pp. xiv–xv.

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theory thus represents one of the moments of comprehensiveness in the modern history of aesthetics. The division of Art and the Social Order into three parts does not, however, neatly mirror Gotshalk’s division of the aesthetic transaction into the three moments of creative process, public object, and apprehending process, although the more complex actual organization of the book may well reflect his fundamental view that each of those moments interpenetrates the others. Instead of being divided into three parts basically on artist, object, and audience, the book has three parts on “The Basic Processes,” “The Public Object,” and “Implications.” The first of these begins with the chapter “The Aesthetic Experience,” what is the foundation for Gotshalk’s account of both artistic creation and its reception; then the chapter “Fine Art,” which distinguishes fine art from other forms of human creation, above all science, which involve many of the same elements as art but for different purposes; and only then concludes with the chapter “The Creative Process.” The second part begins with three chapters that follow Santayana in distinguishing “The Materials of the Work of Art,” “Form,” and “Expression” but concludes with the chapter “The Functions of the Work of Art,” which continues the discussion of the reception of art that has already begun with the initial discussion of aesthetic experience. The third part, “Implications,” presupposes that basic account of aesthetic experience and takes up the issues of “Art Criticism” as a means for the mediation of aesthetic experience and then “Art and Social Life” and “Art and Social Living,” in which Gotshalk discusses the instrumental or external as well as immediate benefits or values of art and the creation and experience of it in human life. Gotshalk’s foundational definition of aesthetic experience is that it “is simply intrinsic perception, or attention to an object or a field preeminently for the apprehension of the full intrinsic perceptual being and value of the object or field” – what he calls a few lines later “wholehearted attention.” This might seem to be narrow and to threaten the breadth of his synthesis, but Gotshalk actually understands “being and value” very broadly: Almost anything can be part of the content of art and of our experience of it as long as it can be presented through perception and we can focus on the perception of it and enjoy that for its own sake. This becomes clear as soon as Gotshalk illustrates his initial definition: Objects of intrinsic perception can include “a timbre, a texture, a brilliant flash of pink in the sky,” but also, upon arriving at a park at the edge of a city, “the great space, the pattern of trees and paths and low hills, the leisurely movement of the people, the clear air, the light-

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blue sky,” all of which may present “a marvelous picture of sumptuous peace.” “Whole-hearted attention to this vast panorama pre-eminently for the sake of the apprehension of what it offers to perception” takes in all of this – “the colors, the easy movements, the loose rhythms, the spatial sweep, the light, the air, above all, the sumptuous peace,” in “a large-scale instance of aesthetic experience.”5 This list includes examples of all three of the Santayanan elements that Gotshalk will distinguish in his subsequent account of the work of art as public object: Colors, movements, and light, although here perceived in nature, are instances of the materials that can be used in art, sweep and rhythm aspects of form, and peace, an emotional state or an idea, perhaps both, that can be expressed in art. So by intrinsic perception Gotshalk certainly does not mean sensing in the narrowest possible sense. Rather, “in aesthetic experience the great concern is to let all that is present in the object appear to the self in the fullest and most vivid manner,”6 where “the self” concerned can be artist as well as audience. Deploying his inclusive rather than restrictive approach to aesthetic theory right from the outset of his work, Gotshalk argues that the traditional conception of aesthetic disinterestedness, in his view recognized by Aristotle and Aquinas as well as by Kant, as well as Edward Bullough’s more recent idea of “psychical distance” suggest but overstate his own conception of aesthetic experience as intrinsic perception: Their “emphasis . . . upon putting at a distance nonaesthetic interests is certainly correct,” but in his view, “an experience of a phenomenon is aesthetic . . . not by virtue of the inhibition of all action and the consequent separation of the active actual self from the phenomenon, for this often does not take place, but by virtue of the control and subordination of action to the amplification of intrinsic perception, which actually does take place.”7 The distinction between ordinary and aesthetic perception is not absolute, but more a matter of direction or priority: Although as Gotshalk will later argue there are many practical consequences and benefits of aesthetic experience, what is primary in aesthetic experience and its value is wholehearted attention to the object, and perception is not constrained by overriding practical concerns. Likewise, Gotshalk explains the difference between art and science, or aesthetic experience and cognition, without exaggerating it. “Both activities employ perception,” but whereas 5 6 7

Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 3. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 15. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, pp. 5–6.

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in science perception is only the means to knowledge – “grounded and tested information” – in aesthetic experience “the perception is the end,” yet at the same time “aesthetic experience employs knowledge, sometimes large stores of it, to light up points within the perceptual field and to help establish a full and amplified perception of all that is perceptible there.”8 Certainly in many cases of representational art, one may need relevant knowledge of nature, human nature, or human history to perceive everything that is actually put before one in a work of art, and of course the artist may need much knowledge of fact, not just knowledge of her medium and techniques, to put the object she intends to be perceived before her audience. So there is a cognitive element in art and the creation and experience of it, but Gotshalk criticizes one-sidedly “cognitive theories of aesthetic experience,” which he attributes to “such diverse thinkers as Bergson,9 Croce, Roger Fry, D.W. Prall, S.C. Pepper,10 T.M. Greene . . . among others” as “unwittingly jeopardiz[ing] the status of art and the aesthetic response as major modes of human activity” by setting “art and aesthetic experience in manifest rivalry with science” through ascribing “to art, aesthetic experience, and science the same generic aim,”11 namely, the acquisition of knowledge. This criticism may not seem fair to some of the authors mentioned, but Gotshalk’s point is clear enough: In aesthetic experience, enjoyment of the perception of what is before one (in all its richness) is the aim, and knowledge of general or factual truths only a possible means to that, whereas in science, knowledge of truths, even about the nature of perception and its objects, is the aim, and enjoyment of that perhaps only incidental. Yet, as Gotshalk has stressed, knowledge can certainly be a means to and perhaps even part of “intrinsic perception.” Gotshalk’s interpretation of the difference between intrinsic perception and both practical interest and scientific knowledge as a matter of emphasis rather than a rigid separation might be taken as evidence of the inescapable influence of Dewey on his thought, even though he mentions Dewey but once in his work.12 As he adds detail to and then sums 8 9

10

11 12

Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 7. Henri Bergson (1859–1941), French philosopher, remembered especially for Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), and Creative Evolution (1907). Stephen C. Pepper (1891–1972), American philosopher, whose works in aesthetics included Aesthetic Quality: A Contextualistic Theory of Beauty (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), The Basis of Criticism in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945), and Principles of Art Appreciation (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949). Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 8. See Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, pp. 214–15.

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up his account of aesthetic experience, the influence of Kant becomes clear as well. Gotshalk adds detail to his account of aesthetic experience as intrinsic perception by saying that all perception involves the three elements of “sensation, or awareness of objects in their sensory features: their colors, pitches, timbres, textures,” and so on, but also intuition, although “in the Kantian, not the Crocean, sense, primarily the awareness of objects in their spatial and temporal order and arrangement”; and finally “intellect,” the “interpretation both of the type of the object being perceived and of the type of its detail.”13 He next adds that “ordinary alert perception usually contains” in addition to these three factors “feeling and imagination,” where by the former he means that we usually perceive objects with some affect or emotion – for example, upon entering a room we may immediately perceive the location of some objects as annoying or pleasing – and by the latter he means that we immediately find objects suggestive of more than we directly perceive: “By ‘imagination’ is here meant the ability to connect the absent with the present or, more precisely, the ability to apprehend as if present in an object for perception something only suggested but not literally present.”14 Thus intrinsic perception cannot be equated with direct perception. Gotshalk then argues that while feeling and imagination “operate very considerably in all alert everyday perception,” in “aesthetic experience, feeling and imagination are freed from the narrowness of a specific practical connection and are more ample and more fertile, as, indeed, all the perceptive powers are.” The role of imagination in alert aesthetic perception is to give the fullest possible body to the suggestions of the object so that these suggestions are as apparent and as vivid for perception as are the actualities of the object themselves. Taking advantage of this operation of imagination in aesthetic perception, works of fine art are able to condense great ranges of experience within a small range of actuality, making available by vivid suggestion an infinite detail of qualities and relations, events and things, within the comparatively tiny span of a canvas or statue, a musical or poetical composition, a dance or a building. Imagination with feeling is indeed very active all through alert aesthetic perception of works of fine art.15

In this account of the role of feeling and imagination in aesthetic perception, Gotshalk presents the imagination in particular as being free from 13 14 15

Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, pp. 17–18. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 18. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 19.

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the ordinary constraints of practical life. But as he concludes his opening chapter on aesthetic experience, he presents aesthetic experience as an experience to which freedom and the feeling of it are central, as experience of freedom itself. Here the Kantian conception of aesthetic experience as a free play of our powers that produces a pleasurable feeling of life itself is recalled, although Gotshalk’s list of the powers involved is more extensive than Kant’s: In summing up this analysis of perception, we may say that . . . sensation, intuition, feeling, imagination and intellect, impulse, purpose, conation, desire, aim, preference and interest operate, not to mention neural, muscular, glandular, and other physiological factors, as well as the background of memory and knowledge, of character and personality. Thus it would be no exaggeration to say that alert perception brings into action, in one form or another, the total being of the percipient, except that in all alert perception, save the aesthetic . . . perception usually is sharply curtailed in the interest of some ulterior end. In aesthetic perception alone no such restriction prevails, the governing purpose or end being simply the perception itself. In consequence, the sensory, intuitive, imaginative, emotional, and intellectual generators, variously muffled in nonaesthetic perception; the telic and physiological factors; and the backgrounds of memory, knowledge, personality and character are opened up and allowed a new freedom. They become free to attain their own ends, to develop themselves as fully as possible on the level of perception, in terms of the opportunities for intrinsic perception offered by the object.16

The aesthetic experience “engages the whole self on the level of perception, all of the typical powers and resources of body and mind; and at its best . . . it engages this self in a way to bring these powers and resources into free and full-orbed and intrinsically rewarding activity.”17 Gotshalk takes up the Kantian imagery of our enjoyment of the free activity of our powers for its own sake (although he avoids the use of the term “play” perhaps because of the narrow connotation it had taken on in so much aesthetic theory since Spencer), but he also goes beyond Kant in including our emotional and conative powers as well as more purely cognitive ones in this free activity and in emphasizing the bodily as well as mental character of such activity. Both of these are without doubt important additions to Kant’s original conception of aesthetic experience. Although the foundation of Gotshalk’s theory is his conception of aesthetic experience, the most detailed part of his exposition is his account of the “public object” or work of art rather than his account of the creative 16 17

Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 23. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 25.

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process, that is, the experience of producing art, or his account of the apprehending process, that is, the experience of receiving it. This might seem puzzling, but since on his view aesthetic experience is intrinsic perception and perception always has an object, it is actually not surprising: His point is precisely that both artistic creation and the appreciation of art are intimate transactions with objects and thus best described with as rich a description of the objects of aesthetic perception as possible. Not surprisingly, a polemic with Croce, who had minimized the centrality of the public work of art, is prominent in Gotshalk’s account of the creative process.18 In his second chapter, “Fine Art,” Gotshalk criticizes the tendency of all the standard accounts of fine art to focus on a single feature of art. First he criticizes the traditional theory that art is the imitation of nature on the ground that nature is only “a dictionary of terms and suggestions which serve as a point of departure for . . . the artist,” whose aim is “not to copy but to augment the aesthetic wealth of nature.”19 On this basis he rejects the underlying assumption of Plato’s polemic against art in the Republic, which assumes that the aim of art is to imitate objective reality but that it does not do it very well, not only because it is a poor imitation of nature, but because nature itself is a poor imitation of what is ultimately real, namely, the Forms or Ideas. Gotshalk then turns to the “four main types of theories of art” in recent aesthetics, what he calls the “genetic, formal, expressionist, and functional” theories. Genetic and functional theories are the theories that the “motive and function of art [are] to give playful scope to energies not used up or required in the struggle for existence [and] to make available a realm of illusions with which one can deceive one’s self consciously for the sake of the pleasure and the sense of the freedom and power obtainable by such conscious self-deception.”20 Gotshalk’s account of the play theory of art here reveals that like so many in the first half of the twentieth century he has Spencer’s biological theory of art as play in mind and thus explains why he did not use the term “play” in the exposition of his own account of aesthetic experience in spite of its clearly Kantian cast. Gotshalk’s account 18

19 20

Somewhat more surprisingly, Gotshalk mentions Collingwood only once, in passing, and then only Collingwood’s article “Plato’s Philosophy of Art,” Mind 34 (1925): 154–72; see Art and the Social Order, p. 35n. Thus Gotshalk neither addresses the Crocean character of the first book of Collingwood’s Principles of Art nor benefits from Collingwood’s own revision of Croce’s subjectivism in the third book of his Principles. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, pp. 34–5. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 35.

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of the functional theory of art suggests that he has a Freudian model in mind. Gotshalk then briefly characterizes recent form and expression theories of art: Fine art is the construction of significant form; fine art is the creation of plastic form; fine art is the delineation of characteristic form; fine art is the achievement of organic form. . . . Fine art is the objectification of pleasure; fine art is the expression of feelings; fine art is the expression of personality; fine art is the expression of a vital insight into reality; fine art is the portrayal of unadorned facts; fine art is the expression of the psychological milieu.21

The problem with all of these theories is not that each fails to contain a grain of truth, but rather that each is presented as if it were the whole truth about art. For Gotshalk, by contrast, “a work of art might be described as a four-dimensional object”; “it possesses a material in terms of which it is generated, a form, an expression, and multiple functions,”22 and thus each of these theories is a partial account of art, “fragments, varying in size, of a more comprehensive theory,”23 although none sufficiently emphasizes that all of these features arise from the perception of the artist and his aim to produce an object for the intrinsic perception of an audience. On his account, fine art “is the shaping of a four-dimensional object – material and form, expression and function – in the direction of intrinsic perceptual interest.”24 This conclusion leads to Gotshalk’s polemic with Croce, whose prominence in Gotshalk’s work demonstrates his continuing influence nearly half a century after the publication of his chief work. Gotshalk recognizes that Croce’s theory is also a synthesis – the term that Gotshalk himself uses to characterize it – but argues that Croce’s synthesis is still too narrow. Croce’s conception of “intuition” is a synthesis: “Intuition is feeling given form . . . an equilibrium of expressive and formal factors.”25 But Croce’s conception of expression supposes that art gives expression only to “passions” and thus “shows itself to be merely one more specimen of romanticism”; on his account “fine art is completely independent of collaboration from the physical world,” and he “isolates fine art within the subject,” making it “essentially independent of the utilitarian,

21 22 23 24 25

Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 39. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 38. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 39. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 40. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 41.

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moral, social, and even intellectual sides of the spirit.” “The philosophy of Croce . . . conceives fine art as properly existing in a moral and social vacuum.”26 “Croce’s isolationism” is in pointed contrast to Gotshalk’s own account that just because works of fine art feed intrinsic perception, even the “purest” works or those most bare of moral and social content, such as the most abstract painting and sculpture and music, engage a vast complex of powers, such as sensation, intuition, feeling, imagination, intellect, impulse, and conation, and lead out, by the system of values imbedded in them, the interests of the percipient, exerting a suasion positive or negative, gentle or violent, over the interests and the . . . values of this percipient. But the powers of a person, especially his feelings and imagination and, no less, his interests and . . . values, are the basis of his social outlook, of his vision of what is fine in human life and character and conduct; and this vision in varying degrees leaves its mark upon his moral and social actions. Thus the immediate aim of fine art is to feed intrinsic perception, but its actual consequence is to influence the capacities and resources of a person which are determinants of social behavior.27

Here, although Gotshalk has only commenced his discussion of artistic production, he presents the gist of his theory of aesthetic reception, that the experience of art both has the immediate pleasure of intrinsic perception and is also potentially instrumental for a wide range of individual and social benefits. Gotshalk continues his polemic with Croce in his next chapter, “The Creative Process.” Here his central point is that “the peculiarity of the artist is an extraordinarily keen interest in, and power to assimilate phases of, the perceptual world – sounds, colors, lines, motions, the perceptible oddities of people – together with the capacity to create diverse perceptual systems which extend his original interest and power and satisfy in a superior way the deeply innate craving for novel and internally complete intrinsic perceptions.”28 This account of the artist’s sensitivity to the physical and social world with all of its layers of meaning is in contrast to Croce’s reduction of “the creative process of the artist to the mere subjective reintegration of symbols.”29 In particular, Gotshalk stresses that the artist not only pays attention to the world as his object, but that “from

26 27 28 29

Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 42. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, pp. 44–5. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 55. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 55.

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the earliest days the artist . . . is trained in the handling of physical tools and in the mastering of physical medium.” As a consequence, his creative visions are habitually taken as ideas for the manipulation of his physical tools and medium. They are visions of new combinations in which to connect pigments, tones, masses, bodily movements – literal physical public materials. They are plans for physical actions, agenda for “objective” products, not finalities. In most cases it is utterly false to the psychology and sociology of creation to describe the premanual visionary processes as terminals of the creative act.30

Thus, “on the whole, Croce’s view of artistic creation seems unrealistic in its omission of physical, psychological, and social factors.”31 In Croce’s defense, we might recall that his account of the content of intuition was not quite as narrow as Gotshalk has suggested, for it included the perception of the physical world as well as of the emotional overtones of that world. But otherwise Gotshalk’s criticism seems just. It also expresses the main points of Gotshalk’s entire theory. As far as the artist is concerned, what is essential cannot be reduced to the artist’s idea, to which any physical realization is entirely secondary, because the artist’s idea is precisely an idea about how to give form to any of a wide range of feelings and ideas in a physical medium in order to make them available to others for intrinsic perception. As Gotshalk will go on to demonstrate in detail and we must omit here, the artist uses both physical materials and the forms they can be given to express both emotions and ideas, and each of these aspects of art interacts with the others in ways that are essential to art. Thus none of these aspects can be privileged over the others; for example, we might think that the artist picks both materials and forms in order to express previously chosen feelings or ideas, but by contrast “the quasi-creative fecundity in the very material itself, its ability to suggest novel formal and expressive aesthetic qualities, is a fact familiar to all sensitive and mature artists.”32 The production of art involves both a “subjective phase,” the “imaginative reintegration of symbols,” and an “objective phase,” the “management of a public material by technique” and thus might be described as “a twofold ideality seeking realization through a twofold actuality within the conditions and possibilities of a physicosocial environment.” “The idealities are the personally expressive dream and the end for which it is dreamed. . . . The 30 31 32

Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 56. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 57. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 74.

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actualities are reintegration of the symbols through which the idealities are realized, so far as they can be subjectively, and the environmental material technically handled.” Then there results from this complex collaboration a unitary public object with four major aspects: a material aspect derived from the physical material technically handled, a formal aspect derived from the reintegration as finally embodied, an expressive aspect derived basically from the value system underlying the reintegration, and a functional aspect derived from the purposes and ends which the material system is successfully shaped to serve.33

Further, both the artist and the audience can enjoy art in a multiplicity of ways, both for intrinsic perception in its own right and for many other reasons. Thus, Both as an activity and as a product, fine art at its best is, indeed, one of the great immediate and self-rewarding goods available to human energy, bringing the self directly and completely to fulfillment on a certain level of its being and forming a spiritual good in the sense of something unquestionably good simply for what there is in the “spirit” of the experience of it.34

As Gotshalk also says, the intrinsic values of art are “among the peak values occurring” in society, and the artistic achievements of a society are “a symbol of the worth of the life that went on within it.”35 But the arts “are also social forces with consequences that appear and have a social effect after the great immediate good they offer has been consumed.”36 The experience of art offers both “specific” and “broad contributions.” The specific contributions include the illumination of “human characters, actions, and ideals” as well as “the endless variety of specific feelings.”37 The broad contributions include “the development of certain capacities in individuals, and the fostering and maturity of personality,” and the cultivation of “innumerable other valuable qualities – vitality, originality, spontaneity, humaneness of outlook, creativity, independence, increased freedom from possessiveness”;38 “second, fine art can cultivate a sense of human worth and dignity”; and “third, fine art can suggest a generalized model for human living in all its forms.”39 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, pp. 82–3. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 202. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 203. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 204. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 210. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 212. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 214.

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To conclude this phase of his argument, Gotshalk quotes with approval from Santayana’s Reason in Art: “In the best works of art one catches a glimpse of a total perfection; and captivation and impregnation by it may, as Santayana says, ‘refine the mind and make it familiar with perfection. By analogy an ideal form comes to be conceived and desiderated in other regions, where it is not produced so readily, and the music heard, as the Pythagoreans hoped, makes the soul also musical.’”40 Indeed, so hopeful was Gotshalk about the moral and social benefits as well as the immediate enjoyment of art that, writing immediately after World War II but obviously still thinking of some of the great art produced in the Soviet Union before the worst of the Stalin years, in his final chapter he thinks of Russia as a place where the stirring of such benefits may be observed – although he cautions that “how far Russia after World War II will continue from these beginnings toward a fuller realization of the conditions of great art as we have described them, especially toward greater freedom for the individual artist, remains to be seen,” and then in a footnote, presumably added in the 1962 edition of his book, he observes that “in the postwar years, judging from present information, Russia seems as a matter of fact to have seriously compromised the promise of the 1920’s and 1930’s, and to have strengthened immeasurably the elements in Soviet culture that are inhibitory to the possibilities of great art.”41 In a brief postscript, also from 1962, Gotshalk even added that in the United States as well as in Russia “the prospects of these possibilities has been considerably dimmed by a rather intense and in a few cases pathological recurrence of some of the leading traits of the arts prior to 1929,” which have made “the horseplay of Dada” appear “bland compared with the rather grim anti-art of some recent work.”42 So Gotshalk hardly supposed that the beneficial instrumental effects of art are guaranteed, or even that all art actually delivers on its promise of immediately valuable intrinsic perception. Nevertheless, he did not give up hope and concluded that the tendency to abstraction in the arts may be a sign of more than a kind of inner or outer emptiness. It may also be read as an effort to rid the art work of the provincial and particular, and to develop what meaning can be given at present to the world-wide and universal. In this sense, some of the new art may be a harbinger of important things to come.43 40 41 42 43

Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 215, quoting from Santayana, Reason in Art, p. 53. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 238 and 238n. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 247. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 248.

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Gotshalk’s aesthetic theory was reminiscent of the Enlightenment not just in its recreation and expansion of the Kantian synthesis in its analysis of aesthetic experience; even in the face of disappointment it also kept alive the moral and social optimism of the Enlightenment as well as of John Dewey.

2. Isenberg Another important aesthetician of the postwar period who was influenced by both the leading figures of the Enlightenment and John Dewey was Arnold Isenberg (1911–65). Isenberg was a gifted philosopher whose contributions to aesthetics were curtailed by ill health in his last fifteen years of life and then by a premature death in a fire in his apartment, and who in any case might not have theorized on as broad a scale as Gotshalk, but who left behind an influential attack on formalism and several important articles on the nature of aesthetic discourse. A voracious reader, he received a rigorous education at the Boston Latin School and then received his bachelor’s and doctor’s degree at Harvard, where David Prall was among his teachers. After teaching at Harvard and Cornell for several years, he taught at Queens College in New York, Stanford University, and finally Michigan State University, where he worked from 1962 until his death. He published a number of well-regarded papers in ethics and moral psychology, but his influence was greatest in aesthetics, where he was influenced by Dewey as well as by his own teacher Prall.44 Isenberg conceived of aesthetic experience as contemplative rather than cognitive and thus opposed his own approach to aesthetics to that which he correctly saw as arising from Aristotle’s response to Plato: The critics of Plato from Aristotle down have been busy inventing queer kinds of truth to ascribe to the arts in order to defend them against Plato’s charge. But Plato cannot be refuted on his own ground. If factual or moral truth is the standard, some very great works will have to be condemned. At the very least we shall be faced with the issue, explicitly underwritten by Plato’s critics, whether to sacrifice the impartiality and catholicity of our taste or the integrity of our scientific and moral judgment. Yet Plato, when 44

Isenberg’s papers were published posthumously in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism: Selected Essays of Arnold Isenberg, ed. William Callaghan, Leigh Cauman, Carl Hempel, Sidney Morgenbesser, Mary Mothersill, Ernest Nagel, and Theodore Norman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). My biographical information is from Callaghan’s “Recollections” in this volume as well as from the American Philosophical Association memorial minute by George C. Koerner, in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 38 (1964–5): 96–7.

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he assumes that the arts evoke responses antagonistic to those approved by reason, assumes that they evoke responses of essentially the same kind, leading ultimately toward practical decision; and it is at this point that his aesthetic philosophy is vulnerable.45

Isenberg opposes to Plato’s assumption that the experience of art is a form of cognition that ought to have a beneficial effect on conduct (but does not because it is not very good cognition) the idea that aesthetic “appreciation is an activity that runs its course within the psychological framework,”46 specifically that the activity of aesthetic experience is “contemplative feeling-response”47 to the presentation of an object in experience or imagination. His view that aesthetic experience is contemplation of the presentation of an object in perception or imagination – he referred to his position as a “presentational aesthetic”48 – can no doubt be associated with Prall, but Isenberg also states that “contemplative activity is a form of consummatory response,”49 an unmistakably Deweyan statement, and the central arguments of Isenberg’s work – that the difference between our experience of artistic form or design, on the one hand, and our experience of artistic content or subject matter, on the other, is not absolute but more a matter of degree, that the difference between arts that seem capable of expressing ideas and those like instrumental music that might not seem capable of expressing content is again not rigid but a matter of degree, and that critics can use language to “get us to see,” to afford “new perceptions and with them new values,” but can never formulate any “law of art appreciation”50 – are all strongly in the spirit of Dewey’s “revolt against dualism.” Isenberg’s rejection of any rigid separation between form and content or ideas is the continuing theme of several papers from throughout the decade of his chief contribution to aesthetics, from “Perception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art,” published in 1941; through “Music and

45

46

47

48

49

50

Isenberg, “The Aesthetic Function of Language,” Journal of Philosophy 46 (1949): 5–20, reprinted in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, pp. 70–86, at p. 85. Isenberg, “Perception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art,” Journal of Philosophy 41 (1944): 561–75, reprinted in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, pp. 36–52, at p. 37. Isenberg, “The Aesthetic Function of Language,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 78. Isenberg, “Perception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 38. Isenberg, “The Aesthetic Function of Language,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 77. Isenberg, “Critical Communication,” Philosophical Review 58 (1949): 330–44, reprinted in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, pp. 156–71, at pp. 164, 167, 169.

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Ideas,” delivered orally in 1951; to “Formalism,” read to the American Society for Aesthetics in 1955.51 “Perception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art” announces Isenberg’s project of a “presentational aesthetic” that would “identify the aesthetic with the immediate without submitting to the reduction of formalism.”52 The gist of Isenberg’s position is that we do not immediately respond to the properties of what we perceive or imagine in works of art as those might be described in purely geometrical or other analogous terms, but that we equally immediately respond to aspects of objects as they would be described in fuller physical or even emotional descriptions. For example, we experience and “believe that we can pronounce” leaves in a picture “sere or fragile with a certainty equal to that with which we can say that they are yellow or symmetrical,”53 where “sere” and fragile” are clearly terms that do not just describe physical conditions or dispositions – dry or easily breakable – but also have distinct emotional overtones. To be sure, “when we speak of emaciated or swollen bodies, gnarled or pudgy fingers, foliage, the bark of trees, we are talking about areas, colors, and lines,” and a “countenance is pale or florid, grim or gaunt, according to the relationship of colors, the arrangement of planes,” but our experience of, say, the grimness or gauntness of a countenance is just as immediate as and inseparable from our experience of its color and shape, and insofar as our descriptions of aesthetic objects are meant to capture our experience of them, the emotional qualities are just as genuine properties of the objects as the more purely perceptual ones. Thus “the terminology of formalism represents simply another selection from the sensory language, convenient perhaps for further specification,” but does “not represent a distinct set of aesthetic attributes, to be set off as the ‘design’ from the ‘material’ values of the subject matter.” From the point of view of our own experience, “the movement which engages the Three Graces in the Primavera is a linear rhythm” but “it is also a ‘lovely gesture of concord.’”54 But since being a gesture of concord, for example, is the sort of thing we might comfortably describe as the content of a work of art, this means that the distinction between form and content is not absolute; rather 51 52

53

54

The last two papers were published only posthumously. Isenberg, “Perception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 38. “Perception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 38. “Perception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, pp. 45–6.

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“‘content,’ according to our definition, refers to certain general or class characteristics of the form”:55 No doubt different combinations of colors and shapes in different contexts can strike us as gestures of concord, and therefore this “content” can be understood as a (very indeterminate) class of forms, but our experience of a painting as showing a gesture of concord can be just as immediate or in Isenberg’s word “sensory” as our experience of it as displaying a certain shape or color. One argument by which Isenberg supports his position in this early paper points toward his later view of “critical communication.” Perhaps a proponent of formalism would be tempted to defend his position by arguing that the description of a work of art in formal terms is more determinate than one that uses terms more closely connected to content, and that such greater determinacy implies that our experience of form is more immediate than our experience of content, but Isenberg rejects such a claim. It is still necessary to look at the picture – we could not construct it from the description. Language does not communicate the determinate – “color pattern” and “curves” get us hardly closer to the actual form than “female figure,” “table,” and “skirt.” In the presence of the picture certain geometrical designations (as for that matter certain figurative comparisons – “flamelike,” “gem-like,” “serpentine,” and so on) may assist our vision to grasp the unique design where an inventory of subject matter would leave it fixed on the general type of object or situation56 –

but the more purely geometrical designations do not necessarily get us closer to the experience of the picture itself, and the other sorts of physical and emotional qualities may be just as prominent in our immediate or sensory experience or contemplation of the object as the “formal” qualities those designations indeterminately describe. Another argument that Isenberg rejects is that “recognizability” can provide any criterion for a distinction between form and content or subject matter; form is more immediately recognizable than content, because recognizability is a matter of familiarity, which is itself variable and a matter of degree. A form may be entitled a “subject” if it bears a resemblance, in specific respects, to certain natural forms. “Form” refers to what is in the picture,

55

56

“Perception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 47. “Perception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 45.

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and “subject matter” to a resemblance borne by this form to some aspect of the real environment. “Representations” are works containing forms which are in certain respects like the forms of nature.57

But what we experience as resembling something else depends on our degree of familiarity with both the manner of representation and the object represented, and thus the distinction between form, on the one hand, and subject, on the other, and with them the relation of representation itself, will be relative to the experience of an individual or group audience for a work, not a rigid distinction. To be sure, Isenberg does not deny that it ever makes sense to draw a distinction between form and content, or to consider some features of a work of art external rather than internal to it. For example, our confidence that a painting is a portrait of Erasmus rather than some other sixteenth-century worthy is something that “would be subject to impairment – for example, by documentary evidence, which might show that the portrait was spurious,” and therefore that our judgment that the painting represents Erasmus is in some way indirect or inferential, but this does not imply that “we must ignore” or regard as external “what indubitably is in the picture, an aspect of its form – the human countenance with its moral expression, its smile, the light in the eye.”58 Isenberg’s position is that the light in the eye and even the moral expression are just as much in the painting as the shape of the face or the color of the hair, because our experience of the former is just as immediate as our experience of the latter. This is what Isenberg means by a “presentational” aesthetic, namely, that aesthetic qualities are those that immediately present themselves to us in perception (as in the case of works of visual art) or imagination (as in the case of literature). Isenberg does not offer much explanation of what he means by his use of the Deweyan expression “consummatory response” in his slightly later paper “The Aesthetic Function of Language,” but he seems to mean by this expression much the same thing, namely, that much of our sense of the meaning of a work is contained or completed in our sensory experience of the object: “That a certain shape in a painting by Winslow Homer has the meaning ‘storm’ is the occurrence of a feeling-response appropriate to the contemplation of a storm” as part of our complete experience of the painting, not any sort of subsequent

57

58

“Perception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, pp. 41–2. “Perception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 40.

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inference from our experience. To be sure, our “consummatory feelingresponse is modified by associative connections established in the course of past experience and reactivated by the present stimulus;”59 that is, the meanings of works of art are not in any sense innate, independent of our past experience, but nevertheless at the moment of any particular experience of a work its “meaning” is just as immediate to us as its “form” is. In “Music and Ideas” Isenberg argues for a continuum of form and meaning in the case of music, even though that can seem the most formalistic of arts. Isenberg writes that a single chord played on the piano does not exactly hale the soul out of your body; but it has a definite tone of feeling. A small finger exercise contains some of the simpler elements of musical appeal. Few persons have ever been tempted to ascribe to these experiences a literary or philosophical content. But the great masterpieces do not have a different kind of value: they have only different and greater values.60

We describe passages or works of music with a range of terms. Shakespeare spoke of “music with its silver sound.” But color is only one neighboring field of sensation. Music can also be sweet or bitter. Why “sweet,” and why are there “sour” notes? Why “funereal” or “morbid,” “gay,” “solemn,” “melancholy,” or “portentous”? These terms do not come from tonal experience; but they seem to fit and belong there once they have been applied. How should that be so unless there were in the music some intimation of the things these terms originally named or described? If we can scarcely speak of music without ranging beyond the language of tone, must there not be an expression of something other than tone?61

What Isenberg means by his claim that the qualities named by these sorts of adjectives are “in the music” is that our experience of the emotional qualities of music is as immediate as our experience of anything else about it. That we may have to resort to figurative language to express this fact about our experience does not mean that there is anything indirect or external about the emotional meaning of music; a great deal of our language about anything is figurative or metaphorical rather than literal. “‘High tones’ and ‘low tones’ may be figurative” while “to speak of fast music and slow music is to speak quite literally,”62 but that does 59

60 61 62

Isenberg, “The Aesthetic Function of Language,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 77. Isenberg, “Music and Ideas,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 8. “Music and Ideas,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 9. “Music and Ideas,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 11.

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not imply that our experience of anything other than the speed or other purely formal properties of music is not immediate, because there is a great deal of our immediate experience that we can describe only with figurative language. As in the case of the identity of the subject of a portrait, there can nevertheless be ideas associated with our experience of music that should be regarded as external to the music, “not in the music.”63 Some of the meanings associated with late nineteenth-century program music, for example (Isenberg instances Tchaikovsky), might be regarded as suggested to the “analogical imagination” because they are “somehow like the music,” but not experienced as in it the way emotional qualities like bitter or melancholy may be. In light of Isenberg’s argument that resemblance is a matter of familiarity, which is in turn a matter of degree, however, it should be considered that the distinction between “like” and “in” is not rigid but variable, and that what might in one context be a matter for only the “analogical imitation” might in another seem more a matter of immediate perception or experience. As in the case of pictorial meaning, there would seem to be a continuum of immediacy in musical meaning. Isenberg’s conception of the logic of criticism or “critical communication” is based on his recognition of the inevitable indeterminacy of any language, whether supposedly figurative or supposedly literal, relative to the repleteness of immediate experience. He states his allegiance to the idea that the critical evaluation of works of art cannot take the form of the deduction of a work’s merit from any determinate rule by mentioning some of his most immediate predecessors, although he could just as well have gone back to Hume and Kant: The more radical arguments against critical standards are spread out in the pages of Croce, Dewey, Richards, and Prall, and the great romantic critics before them. They need not be repeated here. In one way or another they all attempt to expose the absurdity of presuming to judge a work of art, the very excuse for whose existence lies in its difference from everything that has gone before, by its degree of resemblance to something that has gone before; and on close inspection they create at least a very strong doubt as to whether a standard of success or failure in art is either necessary or possible.

“But it seems to me that they fail to provide a positive interpretation of criticism,” Isenberg continues,64 and his own goal is to provide an 63 64

“Music and Ideas,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 13. Isenberg, “Critical Communication,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, p. 161.

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account of what critical discourse can accomplish if it cannot provide rules from which the merits of works can be deduced, that is, rules that specify that if a work of art has some particular features, then it must have some specific merit. His answer to this is that the language that a critic has to use is always general and indeterminate, like the expression “a wavelike contour,” but that by using such language the critic can direct our attention to the object before us, in all its particularity, and induce us to “complete” our own experience of the object – another hint of Dewey’s conception of “consummatory experience.” He writes that “the critic, besides imparting to us the idea of a wavelike contour, gives us directions for perceiving and does this by means of the idea he imparts to us, which narrows down the field of possible visible orientations and guides us in the discrimination of details, the organization of parts, the grouping of discrete objects into parts,” and so on. This somehow induces a experience on the part of the critic’s audience in which “the critic’s meaning is ‘filled in,’ ‘rounded out,’ or ‘completed’ by the act of perception, which is performed not to judge the truth of his description but, in a certain sense, to understand it.” When this happens, criticism brings about “communication at the level of the senses”: That is, it induces “a sameness of vision, of experienced content. If this is accomplished, it may or may not be followed by agreement, or what is called ‘communion’ – a community of feeling which expresses itself in identical value judgments.”65 In this last remark, Isenberg is distinguishing between “sameness of vision” and the expression of that sameness in “identical value judgments,” although we might well think that the fact each recipient of a piece of criticism has to fill in or complete his or her own experience of a work of art from the necessarily incomplete description of the work the critic can offer would mean that the “experienced content” in all who experience the work in the light of the same criticism might not achieve “sameness of vision.” That is, the possible gap would seem to lie between experienced content and sameness of vision, not between sameness of vision and its explicit expression in the audience’s own value judgments. But it is not obvious that this would be a fundamental objection to Isenberg’s conception of criticism, since he does not offer any account of why it should be important for criticism to yield sameness of vision in the first place. What is important is that he conceives of criticism as an aid to its recipients’ own experience of art, a form of discourse that can only be an aid because it is inevitably 65

“Critical Communication,” Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, pp. 162–3.

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less determinate than experience itself but nevertheless can be an aid because there is not an insuperable divide between experience and meaning; rather meaning can point us to experience and vice versa.

3. Beardsley Both Isenberg’s attack upon the distinction between form and content and his model of criticism are based on his “presentational aesthetics” or his conception of the immediacy of aesthetic experience, which is very much in the spirit of Dewey. But Isenberg never wrote more than the brief articles that were collected after his death; it was left to his contemporary Monroe C. Beardsley (1915–1985) to develop a far more extensive body of work organized around a Deweyan conception of aesthetic experience, the core of which is his 1958 book Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism.66 Beardsley was generous in his acknowledgment of the influence of Dewey, although also careful to point out differences between his own approach to aesthetics and that of Dewey: In particular, while acknowledging the influence of Dewey on his own conception of aesthetic experience, he noted that he was more amenable to some of the traditional dualisms of aesthetics than was Dewey, and thus what he took from Dewey was by no means the same as what Isenberg did. Thus he wrote that Dewey’s Art as Experience points “toward important aspects of aesthetic experience” but that “Dewey’s abhorrence of dualisms has, in my opinion, led him to try to erase too many indispensable distinctions, which I have been at pains to establish”; yet in the end “his book is full of interesting and important ideas.”67 But like Isenberg, Beardsley reflected the linguistic orientation of Anglo-American philosophy after World War II in presenting his theory of aesthetic experience as the foundation for a theory of critical discourse. This is reflected in the subtitle of his chief work, as well as in the title of his last systematic work in aesthetics, The Possibility of Criticism of 1970.68 However, Beardsley notes the influence of Kant on the title of this work – he has in mind Kant’s claim 66

67 68

Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958); revised edition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981). The 1981 revised edition added a detailed “Postscript” (pp. xvii–lxiv), in which Beardsley commented on many of the issues that had been raised about his work since its original edition, but otherwise reproduced the original edition unchanged, so page references to the body of the work are the same for both editions. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 554. Monroe C. Beardsley, The Possibility of Criticism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970).

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that every philosophical question can be formulated as an inquiry into the possibility of a specific form of synthetic a priori judgment,69 although he abjures the ambition of exhibiting “any new a priori endowments of the understanding – much less a Transcendental Deduction”70 – and there are indeed Kantian and more generally eighteenth-century echoes in Beardsley’s conceptions of both aesthetic experience and the logic of art criticism. Further, although Beardsley’s emphasis in his central work was certainly on the idea of aesthetic experience as an inherently gratifying form of mental activity, he also recognized throughout his career that at least some kinds of art, particularly literature, also contribute to knowledge, in particular self-knowledge of our emotions and motivations, and in this way he left room for the cognitivist approach to aesthetics, particularly in the form it had taken in the theories of expression that dominated the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century in Germany, Italy, Britain, and the United States. Beardsley must thus be regarded as one of those who carried on the Kantian tradition of synthesizing two traditions of modern aesthetics, while treating emotions primarily as an object of aesthetic cognition rather than experience. Monroe Beardsley was a native of Connecticut who earned his A.B. and Ph.D. from Yale University (1936 and 1939). He was an instructor at Yale from 1940 to 1944, taught at Mt. Holyoke College from 1944 to 1946, and was then an assistant professor at Yale in 1946–7 before being appointed at Swarthmore College, where he rose from assistant to full professor. After twenty-two years at Swarthmore, he moved in 1969 to Temple University, where he became the center of an unusual departmental focus on aesthetics that continued long past his own retirement from full-time teaching after several strokes in 1981 and his death in 1985. Beardsley was a prolific author and editor. In addition to the two systematic works already mentioned, his work in aesthetics included a history of the field, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present published in 1966,71 and more than seventy articles, twenty of which were collected in The Aesthetic Point of View published in 1982.72 But Beardsley’s work was not limited to aesthetics; he also published four volumes on what he called 69 70 71

72

See, for example, Critique of Pure Reason, B 19. Beardsley, Possibility of Criticism, p. 9. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (New York: Macmillan, 1966). Monroe C. Beardsley, The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays, ed. Michael J. Wreen and Donald M. Callen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

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“practical logic,”73 and with his wife Elizabeth Lane Beardsley edited an eighteen-volume series, Foundations of Philosophy, which included introductions to their special areas of philosophy by many of the most important philosophers of the period, including W.V.O. Quine on logic, C.G. Hempel on philosophy of science, William Alston on philosophy of language, William Frankena on ethics, and many more. With his characteristic generosity, Beardsley did not reserve the volume on aesthetics in this series for himself but invited another philosopher with a different approach, Virgil Aldrich, to write it.74 Nor were Beardsley’s interests and activities confined to academic philosophy: He had a passionate concern for social justice (part of the motivation for his move from Swarthmore College to the more socioeconomically accessible Temple University in 1969) and served for three years in the tense period of the late 1960s as the president of the Greater Philadelphia Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.75 Beardsley’s early connection with Yale was the basis for his earliest contributions to aesthetics, “The Intentional Fallacy” of 1946 and “The Affective Fallacy” of 1949,76 two articles coauthored with the Yale literary scholar W.K. Wimsatt that immediately achieved wide renown. These articles jointly provided a manifesto for the American movement known as the “New Criticism,” which wanted to focus attention on literary works of art themselves as “verbal icons,” to use the term that Wimsatt chose for a later collection of his own papers plus these two, and away from the emphasis on the biography of authors that the New Critics saw as the focus of older Romantic criticism as well as on the arousal of emotions 73

74 75

76

Practical Logic (1950); Thinking Straight (1950); Philosophical Thinking, with Elizabeth Lane Beardsley (1955); and Writing with Reason: Logic for Composition (1976). Virgil C. Aldrich, Philosophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963). My biographical data on Beardsley are from the Memorial Minute by David Welker in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 59 (1985–6): 283–4. Essays on Beardsley’s work may be found in ed. Essays on Aesthetics: Perspectives on the Work of Monroe C. Beardsley, John Fisher (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), and, Text, Literature, and Aesthetics: In Honor of Monroe C. Beardsley, ed. Lars Aagaard-Mogensen and Luk De Vos (Würzburg: Köigshausen & Neumann; Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986). W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M.C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 468–88; W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M.C. Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 57 (1949): 31–55. “The Intentional Fallacy” was quickly and widely reprinted in textbook anthologies of articles in aesthetics – the bibliography of Beardsley’s work in aesthetics in The Aesthetic Point of View lists twelve reprintings as of 1982, as well as translations into Spanish, Polish, German, and Finnish as of that date – and both were reprinted in Wimsatt’s collection of his own essays, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954). I cite the original editions in Sewanee Review in what follows.

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in the audience for literature emphasized by, for example, Tolstoy. The philosopher Beardsley was called in to provide rigorous argumentation for the focus on the literary work itself rather than either its origins in the artist or its effect on the audience. The program was succinctly stated in the first paragraph of “The Affective Fallacy,” with an appeal to the authority of philosophy: The Intentional Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins, a special case of what is known to philosophers as the Genetic Fallacy. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism. The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does), a special case of epistemological skepticism, though usually advanced as if it had far stronger claims than the overall forms of skepticism. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. The outcome of either Fallacy, the Intentional or the Affective, is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.77

We should take a moment to consider the arguments of these two papers, but before doing so should also note that while Beardsley never surrendered the distinction between the investigation of the causal history of a work of art and the appreciation and criticism of the work itself that is at the heart of “The Intentional Fallacy,” his later position in aesthetics emphasizes the interconnection between aesthetic experience and the object as experienced and thus certainly relaxes the rigid separation between the work of art and its effects on its audience that is advocated in “The Affective Fallacy.” The argument of “The Intentional Fallacy” is cast as an argument about the evaluation of poetry. It is aimed in the first instance against a Romantic conception that an author’s success in realizing his intention for a work of art (specifically, a poem) is a condition of its value, thus that the evaluation of the poem depends upon the possibility of knowledge of the author’s intention that is independent of the poem.78 Their response to this is basically that while information about an author’s intention and other aspects of his state of mind may be of interest for a causal explanation of the creation of a poem, as far as a judgment of value is concerned 77 78

Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Affective Fallacy,” p. 31. See especially “Intentional Fallacy,” p. 473, where Wimsatt and Beardsley mention the critic Joel Spingarn as one holding that success in realizing the artist’s intention is the source of value and the philosopher Bernard Bosanquet as holding that by contrast insincerity is the source of ugliness.

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the only relevant evidence is the poem itself. We do not need to look beyond the poem to determine what the poet was trying to do, “for if the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do,” and if the poet did not succeed in doing what he intended, then, while “the critic must go outside the poem – for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem,” that is not necessary for the evaluation of the poem, only for the causal explanation of why it misfired. As far as evaluation is concerned, “judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work”;79 that is, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And insofar as poetry does rely on allusions that can be understood only with independent knowledge of the intentions of the author that are not directly manifest in the poem itself, as in the highly allusive poetry of T.S. Eliot, that is a defect in such poetry.80 This straightforward argument – or perhaps just assertion – is not accompanied with much of a theory of what a poem or more generally a work of art is. Wimsatt and Beardsley remark that “poetry is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once,”81 and further that “the poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge.”82 The emphasis on the publicity of language as the medium of poetry is a rejection of the Crocean conception of the work of art as essentially a private object in the mind of the artist and only accidentally an object in a publicly accessible medium83 – an ontology of art that would entail the intentionalist fallacy, since it would for all practical purposes make the true work of art identical to the author’s intention for it. The authors also reject Croce’s notion of art as intuition, that is, an immediate, purely sensory form of cognition rather than cognition mediated by concepts. But they accept a cognitivist approach to art in general: The poem is not only a public object, but also “about the human being,” itself “an object of public knowledge.” Poetry and perhaps other arts no doubt differ from other forms of cognition about the human being in being “a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once” – a definition that sounds as if it could have been drawn out of the work of Alexander Baumgarten two centuries earlier – but Wimsatt and 79 80

81 82 83

Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Intentional Fallacy,” p. 469. Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Intentional Fallacy,” pp. 482–7. This argument was presumably contributed by Wimsatt rather than Beardsley. Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Intentional Fallacy,” p. 469. Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Intentional Fallacy,” p. 470. For the reference to Croce, see “Intentional Fallacy,” p. 472.

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Beardsley offer no explication of what this condition might add to the cognitive aspect of the poem; the emphasis remains on the poem as a form of cognition about human beings. “The Affective Fallacy” provides a few more hints about what the “feat of style” of poetry might be but primarily offers more clarification about what sort of knowledge of human beings poetry has to offer, namely, knowledge of human emotions. Thus, in this article Wimsatt and Beardsley join the mainstream of cognitivist aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth century; their position is indeed close to that of Collingwood, although they do not invoke his name. They begin by arguing against the philosopher Charles Leslie Stevenson84 and semanticists such as S.I. Hayakawa that poetic language is “emotive” language that expresses, in the sense of simply manifesting, the emotional state of the speaker, in part on the ground that ordinary expressions of emotion are extremely vague and that any determinate expression of emotion would be dependent upon determinate “descriptive meaning” or descriptive language in a poem itself.85 They argue that the emotional responses of audiences to works of art are likewise too variable to constitute the meaning of particular works.86 And not only is the range of affective responses to any work of art too wide and thus too vague to be the content of criticism; it would also be available to the “objective critic” only in the laboratory, not in the poem itself,87 which, as “The Intentional Fallacy” had already argued, is the proper object of criticism (thus an “objective critic” is one who focuses his own work on the object). Rather, what is of interest to the critic, thus the proper object of aesthetic attention, is neither the emotion (whatever it is) that may have led to an artist’s production of a work nor the emotions (whatever they are) that it may produce in its audiences, but the “subtle quality of patterned emotions” in the work itself.88 A poem is a “pattern of emotive knowledge,”89 in particular “a discourse about both emotions and objects, or about the emotive quality of objects,” in which the emotions correlative to the objects of poetry become part of the matter dealt with – not communicated to the reader like an infection or disease, 84

85 86 87 88 89

Charles Leslie Stevenson (1908–79), professor at Yale then University of Michigan, best known for Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944). Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Affective Fallacy,” pp. 33–5. Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Affective Fallacy,” pp. 37–40. Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Affective Fallacy,” p. 45. Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Affective Fallacy,” p. 46. Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Affective Fallacy,” p. 48.

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not inflicted mechanically like a bullet or a knife wound, not administered like a poison, not simply expressed as by expletives or grimaces or rhythms, but presented in their objects and contemplated as a pattern of knowledge. Poetry is a way of fixing emotions or make them more permanently perceptible when objects have undergone a functional change from culture to culture, or when as simple facts of history they have lost emotive value with loss of immediacy. Though the reasons for emotion in poetry may not be so simple as Ruskin’s “noble grounds for the noble emotions,” yet a great deal of constancy for poetic objects of emotion – if we will look for constancy – may be traced through the drift of human history.90

In spite of their reference to Ruskin here, the authors do not mention that in The Seven Lamps of Architecture Ruskin himself had argued that other arts, such as architecture itself, could also present the emotive qualities of objects through the passage of time: This was Ruskin’s point in his chapter “The Lamp of Memory.”91 While clearly rejecting the Tolstoyan position that the aim of poetry is simply communicating emotion and instead clarifying that human emotion is the subject matter of poetry, although typically presented in the form of the description of objects with their emotive qualities or evocations, “The Affective Fallacy” still does not say much about what is meant by a poetic “pattern” of emotions, or what it is to fix emotions in a pattern, nor much about what the distinctively aesthetic experience of a work of art such as a poem is if it is not simply an emotional reaction to the poem. This task was left for Beardsley to tackle in his systematic work in aesthetics. And it is when he took up this task in his magnum opus that his thought took a distinctly Deweyan turn, with an argument that it is a distinctive kind of experience of objects that is essential to the aesthetic, accompanied with the view that only some arts offer cognition as well as qualities that induce this specific form of experience. Here Beardsley approaches a Kantian synthesis by taking the position that a distinctive form of experience and activity is characteristic of all art but that some art may have genuine cognitive content as well. The main emphasis in Beardsley’s Aesthetics is certainly on the character of aesthetic experience and the qualities of objects to which such experience is a response, and thus the main thrust of the book is certainly on that side of the tradition rather than the other. But Beardsley accommodates the linguistic emphasis of philosophy in the 1950s as 90 91

Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Affective Fallacy,” p. 52. See John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Dent Everyman’s Library, 1907), for example, pp. 190–1.

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well as the origins of his own aesthetic theory in his collaboration with the literary scholar Wimsatt by presenting his theory of aesthetic experience as the foundation of a theory of art criticism. Beardsley begins the book by defining aesthetics as the philosophy of criticism, “a distinctive philosophical inquiry . . . concerned with the nature and basis of criticism,” “questions about the meaning and truth of critical statements.” He emphasizes that aesthetics is not concerned with psychological questions about the nature of the creative process itself, but also asserts that “when we consider the logic of evaluation, we are led to ask about the nature of aesthetic experience, and this is a psychological question.”92 In Beardsley’s view, inquiry into the logic of critical discourse is not self-contained, not a form of linguistic analysis instead of psychological inquiry; rather, the character of critical discourse is determined by the character of aesthetic experience itself because that is what criticism is ultimately about, and investigation into aesthetic experience is inescapably psychological. Thus, although Beardsley’s starting point shares the emphasis on the analysis of language characteristic of AngloAmerican philosophy in the 1950s and through the remainder of the period in which he wrote, in his view the foundation for any conclusions about the nature of critical discourse must be a psychological theory of aesthetic experience itself. This conception of method of aesthetics reflects the influence on Beardsley of Dewey and beyond him of the eighteenth-century approach to aesthetics. Here one might also recall Ethel Puffer’s 1905 account of the relation between philosophy and psychology in aesthetics.93 It might be immediately asked how Beardsley’s emphasis on aesthetic experience in Aesthetics squares with his earlier insistence, with Wimsatt, that the proper subject of criticism is the work of art itself, neither the intention of the artist considered apart from the work it produces nor the effect of the work of art on its audience in contrast to the work itself. Beardsley is at pains through Aesthetics to reconcile its theory with his earlier position. On the one hand, his definition of a work of art itself is thoroughly intentional – “works of art are the products of deliberate human activity, sometimes long and arduous . . . things intended by someone”94 – but what they are intended to produce is an aesthetic experience

92 93

94

Beardsley, Aesthetics, pp. 6–7. It was indeed an endnote in Beardsley (Aesthetics, pp. 552–3, note 28-B) that led me to the work of Puffer. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 19.

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in an audience, and the artist’s intention is relevant to criticism only as the cause, when successful, of an object that can produce such an experience. On the other hand, not every aspect of an audience’s reaction to a work of art is part of aesthetic experience. “Not everything that happens to you while you are standing in front of [an] El Greco can be counted as part of your [aesthetic] experience of it. If you hear a cough, or the giggling of a troop of children, these do not belong to the El Greco presentation.”95 But beyond this, not any appeal to the reaction of an audience to a work is part of genuine criticism; the mere statement that an object “gives pleasure,” “is interesting,” “is exciting, moving, stirring, rousing,” or “has a powerful emotional impact” does not by itself amount to genuine criticism; for that “we are constrained . . . to ask what kind of pleasure it gives, and how that pleasure . . . differs from other pleasures and gets its peculiar quality precisely from those differences.” A merely “affective statement tells us the effect of the work, but it does not single out those features of the work on which the effect depends,” for example, “what is pleasure-giving about” some particular work of “music that is absent from other music.”96 What genuine criticism does is to identify those qualities of objects that produce those qualities of experience that are found uniquely enjoyable, moving, and so on, in the overall experience of works of art. There are two aspects to Beardsley’s theory of the aesthetic qualities that produce aesthetic experience. Like Croce and Collingwood as well as Dewey and so many others before him, he is insistent that the aesthetic object is not simply the physical object or event produced by the artist, but does not infer from this that the object is instead the artist’s intention or any other thought in the mind of the artist.97 Instead, the proper object of aesthetic experience is the “perceptual object” rather than its “physical basis,” where “a perceptual object is an object some of whose qualities, at least, are open to direct sensory awareness,”98 or the “phenomenal” object, the object as perceived and experienced rather than as it would be described by a physicist, manufacturer, or conservator. For example, “when a critic . . . says that Titian’s later paintings have a strong atmospheric quality and vividness of color, he is talking about aesthetic objects. But when he says that Titian used a dark reddish underpainting over the whole canvas, and

95 96 97 98

Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 47. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 461. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 19. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 31.

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added transparent glazes to the painting after he laid down the pigment, he is talking about physical objects.”99 In the first case, the critic is talking about the object as it is experienced by an audience; in the second case, he is talking about a means to the production of that experience. The perceptual or phenomenal object, the object as it is experienced, can also be distinguished from other aspects of the experience of the object – the giggling of the troop of children and the like – and even from the affect – for example, pleasure – that the phenomenal object produces. In this way, the genuine work of art, the perceptual object, can be distinguished from both the artist’s intention and the physical object the artist may produce, on the one hand, and various aspects of the affective experience of audiences, on the other, and thus the focus of Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s distinction of the proper object of criticism from both artist’s intention and the audience’s response can be maintained without identifying that object with the mere physical basis of art in a way that had been uniformly proscribed by earlier twentieth-century aesthetics. But the more important part of Beardsley’s theory is surely his characterization of aesthetic experience and of the qualities of objects that can produce such experience and are therefore properly called aesthetic qualities. Beardsley offered succinct characterization of his conception of aesthetic experience in Aesthetics and then again twenty-four years later in a paper written for his late collection The Aesthetic Point of View. In the earlier work, he characterizes aesthetic experience by means of four points on which he thinks “nearly everyone will agree.” According to this account, “first, an aesthetic experience is one in which attention is firmly fixed on heterogeneous but interrelated components of a phenomenally objective field – visual or auditory patterns, or the characters and events in literature,” the latter being what we experience in response to the physical objects of literature, the written or spoken words. “Second, it is an experience of some intensity. . . . Aesthetic objects give us a concentration of experience” by inviting “us to do what we would seldom do in ordinary life – pay attention only to what we are seeing or hearing, and ignore everything else.” Third, “it is an experience that hangs together, or is coherent, to an unusually high degree . . . an orderly accumulation of energy toward a climax.” “Fourth, it is an experience that is unusually complete in itself. The impulses and expectations aroused by elements within the experience” – here Beardsley means the perceptual experience of the object that leads to appropriate affects toward 99

Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 33.

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it – “are felt to be counterbalanced or resolved by other elements within the experience, so that some degree of equilibrium or finality is achieved and enjoyed.”100 Beardsley then concludes that “because of the highly concentrated, or localized, attention characteristic of aesthetic experience, it tends to mark itself out from the general stream of experience, and stand in memory as a single experience.”101 The last remark makes the Deweyan provenance of Beardsley’s theory of aesthetic experience evident, even though in Aesthetics Beardsley reserves acknowledgment of Dewey’s influence to his endnotes.102 In his late paper “Experience Regained,” Beardsley explicitly acknowledges “Dewey’s inspiring ideas” and in response to criticism of the idea of aesthetic experience expounded in Aesthetics says that “I don’t fully understand how anyone could deny that there are clear and exemplary cases of such experience, described in Dewey’s words (at least as supplemented and qualified by mine!).” He restates his earlier position that “aesthetic experience – one of Dewey’s most insistent and eloquently made points – have an unusually high degree of unity in the dimension of completeness,” but then introduces a broader characterization of aesthetic “enjoyment,” “satisfaction,” and “pleasure” in order “to introduce a broader concept of the aesthetic in experience, while reserving the term ‘aesthetic experience,’ as a count noun, for rather special occasions.”103 Here Beardsley also acknowledges the eighteenth-century character of his general theory that an analysis of critical discourse must rest upon a psychological account of aesthetic experience: “Here I believed myself to have a good deal of support from a number of eighteenth-century thinkers, especially in Great Britain.”104 He then goes on to offer “a set of five criteria of the aesthetic character of experience” that adds his to original account of aesthetic experience an account of the effect of such experience on the broader psychology of those who enjoy such experience. The five criteria are as follows: 1. Object directedness. A willingly accepted guidance over the succession of one’s mental states by phenomenally objective properties (qualities and relations) of a perceptual or intentional field on which attention is fixed with a feeling that things are working or have worked themselves out fittingly. 100 101 102 103 104

Beardsley, Aesthetics, pp. 527–8. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 528. See Beardsley, Aesthetics, pp. 554–5, notes 28-B and 28-C. Beardsley, “Aesthetic Experience,” Aesthetic Point of View, pp. 286–7. Beardsley, “Aesthetic Experience,” Aesthetic Point of View, p. 287.

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2. Felt freedom. A sense of release from the dominance of some antecedent concerns about past and future, a relaxation and sense of harmony with what is presented or semantically invoked by it or implicitly promised by it, so that what comes has the air of having been freely chosen. 3. Detached affect. A sense that the objects in which interest is concentrated are set a little at a distance emotionally – a certain detachment of affect, so that even when we are confronted with dark and terrible things, and feel them sharply, they do not oppress but make us aware of our power to rise above them. 4. Active discovery. A sense of actively exercising constructive powers of the mind, of being challenged by a variety of potentially conflicting stimuli to try to make them cohere; a keyed-up state amounting to exhilaration in seeing connections between percepts and between meanings. . . . 5. Wholeness. A sense of integration as a person, of being restored to wholeness from distracting and disruptive influences . . . and a corresponding contentment, even through disturbing feelings, that involves self-acceptance and self-expansion.105 In this list, the first criterion (object directedness) and its explication capture much of the thrust of the four items on Beardsley’s original list, guidance over a phenomenally objective field leading to a sense of fittingness comprising the fixation of attention on a heterogeneous phenomenal field in an intense, coherent, and complete way; coherence is also mentioned in the explication of the new list’s fourth criterion (active discovery), while the closely related idea of harmony is introduced into the explication of the second criterion (felt freedom). But the wholeness that is explicitly mentioned as the fifth of Beardsley’s new criteria is not identical to the completeness that stood in the fourth place on the earlier list; rather, it seems to be more a welcome general effect on the psyche of the observer of the completeness found in the aesthetic object or even in the experience in the “count noun” sense of that object itself. Here one cannot but think of Schiller among eighteenth-century thinkers as an ancestor of Beardsley’s view. Beardsley’s mention of the “active discovery” leading to the sense of coherence in an aesthetic experience and its object inexorably evokes Dewey but also makes one think of the emphasis in Kant but also British thinkers such as Kames and Gerard on 105

Beardsley, “Aesthetic Experience,” Aesthetic Point of View, pp. 288–9.

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aesthetic experience as a form of pleasurable mental activity. Beardsley’s reference to “felt freedom” also inevitably suggests Kant as well as Schiller, and in particular Beardsley’s suggestion that the work of art seems as if it was freely chosen by the one who experiences it (rather than by the artist) is reminiscent of Kant’s characterization of the experience of beauty as an experience of free play on the part of the subject (which is what in turn allowed the beautiful to be a symbol of the morally good for Kant, although Beardsley does not invoke that connection). Beardsley’s explication of “detached affect” as a sense of “rising above” dark and terrible things in turn seems to be structured in analogy with Kant’s explanation of the feeling of the sublime, but Beardsley’s remarks about “felt freedom” and “detached affect” also suggest Schopenhauer’s idea that aesthetic experience induces a feeling of release from our ordinary concerns altogether, as well as Edward Bullough’s more modest appropriation of that as the idea of distance from practical concerns that allows us to enjoy the phenomenal and emotional qualities and meanings of aesthetic objects. Beardsley’s final account of the criteria of the aesthetic character of experience thus seems to synthesize a good deal of the previous history of aesthetics, culminating in but by no means limited to Dewey. What is not present in this synthesis, however, is any idea of works of art as actual vehicles of cognition; thus this account of the criteria of the aesthetic character of experience does not yet amount to a synthesis of a Kant-inspired theory of free activity with cognitivist aesthetics. We will see shortly that Beardsley does take a further step toward cognitivism, but first we must complete our account of Beardsley’s theory of criticism. The next aspect of his theory to be considered is his correlation of the aspects of aesthetic experience that he has identified with aesthetic qualities of (phenomenal) objects. Beardsley introduces his theory of aesthetic qualities early in his book, under the rubric of “categories of critical analysis.”106 Phenomenal objects or objects as perceived, like the physical objects that are their basis, are complexes of elements. The elements are whatever are distinguished by our discriminations in experience, such as our distinctions “between a pink part and a blue part, or between a part in the key of D minor and a part in the key of F; . . . whatever we find between such points of distinction is a proper part of the whole.” “An absolutely homogeneous part” of a perceptual object is one in which we discriminate no further parts and is called an “element.” Elements have what Beardsley calls “local qualities,” such as “darkness,” 106

Beardsley, Aesthetics, ch. II, pp. 75–113.

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“shape,” being pink, being blue, and so on. Properties or characteristics that belong to complexes but not to any of their parts are what Beardsley calls “regional qualities.”107 Examples of regional qualities are various: Melody is a regional quality because it is a property of a group of notes but not of the individual notes that are its elements; emotional qualities of a phenomenal object can also be regional qualities, when they are qualities of the whole but not of particular parts – a melody can be sad without any of its individual notes being sad. “Eternal calm and stillness,” likewise, can be regional qualities of a painting, since they are qualities of the whole work although it would make no sense to predicate them of any of the individually discriminable colors, shapes, regions of the canvas, or even represented figures in the painting by themselves. Beardsley’s view is then that aesthetic experience is a response to the perceived unity and complexity of the elements in a work of art and their ordinary relations as well as to the intensity of regional qualities in the work, particularly what he calls “human regional qualities,” or emotional qualities that are inevitably characterized in the terms in which we characterize the regional qualities of human beings themselves, such as being vital, forceful, graceful, and so on. It is notable that Beardsley treats the emotions as regional qualities of aesthetic objects rather than as responses to such objects. Beardsley infers that the unity, complexity, and intensity of local and regional qualities are the primary sources of aesthetic experience by appeal to common critical language, or the kinds of reasons that are typically offered for the merit (or demerit) of works of art and the pleasurability (or not) of the experience of them. Thus he writes: I think that when we take a wide survey of critical reasons, we can find room for most of them, with very little trouble, in three main groups. First, there are reasons that seem to bear upon the degree of unity or disunity of the work: . . . it is well organized (or disorganized). . . . it is formally perfect (or imperfect). . . . it has (or lacks) in inner logic of structure and style. Second, there are those reasons that seem to bear upon the degree of complexity or simplicity of the work: . . . it is developed on a large scale. . . . it is rich in contrasts (or lacks variety and is repetitious). . . . it is subtle and imaginative (or crude).

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Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 83.

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Third, there are those reasons that seem to bear upon the intensity or lack of intensity of human regional qualities in the work: . . . it is full of vitality (or insipid). . . . it is forceful and vivid (or weak and pale). . . . it is beautiful (or ugly). . . . it is tender, ironic, tragic, graceful, delicate, richly comic.108

Beardsley’s theory of criticism is then that unity, complexity, and intensity function as three “general canons”109 under which the more particular things that we say in commendation or criticism of particular works can be subsumed: “On very broad and basic levels, when we consider the General Canons, there are widely accepted standards, to which we can relate, as subordinate conditions, a large variety of more specific standards. For example, we can find room under unity for the neoclassic canons, taken as empirical generalizations, and under complexity for psychological subtlety. Therefore, the General Canons have a public and stable character to which appeal can be made.”110 Beardsley’s description of the neoclassical canons (unity of time, place, action) as “empirical generalizations” reflects his view that criticism offers “elliptical inductions,” more precisely that they are inferences that typically rest on unstated generalizations from experience. Thus, while a critical argument might typically have the form “This aesthetic object has such-and-such a degree of unity. Therefore, this aesthetic object is good,” an argument of such a form actually rests on the unstated premise that “such-and-such a degree of unity has a tendency to make an aesthetic object good,” that is, to make it enjoyable for us.111 Thus he makes no claim that it is some sort of necessary truth that could be known a priori that unity, complexity, and intensity of regional qualities trigger enjoyable aesthetic experience and thus make works of art good; rather, that those generic properties and what particular degrees of them do so is something known empirically, from observation of human experience, for example, from examination of what successful art criticism has actually been like over the centuries. Of course Beardsley recognizes that the empirical character of his theory opens it up to the objection of relativism,112 that is, that there are no shared canons of aesthetic quality but that aesthetic judgments always express 108 109 110 111 112

Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 462. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 466. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 486. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 472. Beardsley, Aesthetics, pp. 478–83.

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only the preferences of those who make them, but he argues that the variability of taste is not as great as is often assumed, in particular that people can often distinguish between variability in their personal preferences and actual variability in critical judgment,113 and moreover that “individual tastes can be changed, that it is possible to increase subtlety of discrimination and range of enjoyment and complexity of understanding by appropriate training.”114 This last remark is a highly compressed argument: What Beardsley seems to mean is that the initial variability in the perception of unity, complexity, and intensity by different people can be overcome or significantly reduced by appropriate training and education, that such education increases the potential for enjoyment of works of art among those who undergo it, and that the empirical generalizations that unity, complexity, and intensity are the sources of pleasure in aesthetic experience and thus aesthetic value are therefore genuine canons, that is, norms – people ought to develop their capacity for experiencing unity, complexity, and intensity because they will thereby increase their capacity for the enjoyment of works of art. Beardsley’s inclusion of beauty as an example of intensity, along with vitality, forcefulness, irony, the tragic and the comic, and others, should also be noted: Beardsley does not offer unity, complexity, and intensity as criteria for beauty, but as criteria for the more general category of “aesthetic value,”115 of which beauty is only one instance. Beardsley does agree with what he calls the “Beauty Theory” that “beauty is a regional quality of perceptual objects” and “beauty is intrinsically valuable.” But he does not accept that “‘aesthetic value’ means ‘value that an object has on account of its beauty’”:116 “Even if there is such a quality as beauty, and even if its presence confers aesthetic value upon an object,” which Beardsley hardly sees any reason to deny, “it cannot . . . be considered the only ground of aesthetic value. If the word ‘beauty’ has any clear and restricted meaning, it does not apply, I suppose, to Oedipus Rex, to The Magic Mountain, to King Lear, to parts of Bartok’s piano concertos, to some paintings of Rubens and Tintoretto, much less the Grunewald Crucifixion. . . . These works may be powerful, grand, terrible, yes – but not beautiful.” Here indeed Beardsley reveals the deep historical roots of his theory, otherwise suppressed in the text of Aesthetics and relegated to its endnotes: “Indeed, we might resuscitate a rather old view, now 113 114 115 116

Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 484. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 488. Beardsley, Aesthetics, ch. XI, pp. 500–56. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 507.

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in disfavor, that there is a family of distinct value-making qualities: the beautiful, the sublime, the graceful, the tragic, the comic, and perhaps others.” Beardsley adds that “there seems no way of demonstrating that any particular list of qualities is an exhaustive inventory of those that are aesthetically valuable” and raises the possibility that “any positive, distinct, intense human regional quality” might end up counting as an aesthetic quality.117 But he does not withdraw his claim that intensity of any human regional quality is potentially an aesthetic quality; nor should he, because he has not claimed that intensity of human regional quality alone is a sufficient condition for aesthetic experience and aesthetic value, nor the intentional production of such a quality alone a sufficient condition for the production of a work of art. His theory is rather that intensity of regional qualities along with a high degree of unity and complexity trigger enjoyable aesthetic experience, and that the intentional production of an object manifesting such a complex of qualities is the production of a work of art. Thus any intense emotional or other regional quality might be a proper object of aesthetic experience and a proper part of art, but this does not make the categories of aesthetic experience and art completely indeterminate and meaningless; it is only when such regional qualities can be pleasingly combined with unity and complexity in the work of art and the experience of it that the criteria of the aesthetic are satisfied. Beardsley’s critique of the “Beauty Theory” is accompanied with a similar critique of the “Intellectualist Theory” that “it is not the elements, internal relations, and other regional qualities of the object alone that are the conditions of its being beautiful” – or aesthetic more generally – “but its embodiment, or showing forth, of some conceptual or cognitive content.” Beardsley says that “intellectualists . . . have encountered great difficulties in trying to say . . . exactly what intellectual content it is that a Haydn quartet, a pitcher of Swedish glass, the famous lines of Juliet to Romeo, or a Moorish interior by Matisse, embodies, and how it is embodied,” and it seems clear that in some of these cases, such as a pitcher of Swedish glass, he means to suggest that the idea that the object embodies any intellectual content at all is far-fetched, although in others, such as the lines of Juliet spoken to Romeo, surely there must be intellectual content, even if it is too indeterminate or manifold to be pinned down by any simple paraphrase, thus difficult to say exactly what and how it is embodied. But just as Beardsley has hardly meant to deny that beauty 117

Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 509.

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is often a genuine aesthetic merit of works of art, only that it is always required in art, so he likewise hardly means to deny that intellectual content is sometimes a genuine merit of art, only that it is always necessary for art. Like beauty, intellectual content can be an aesthetic quality when it is a regional quality of a work that, along with unity and complexity, triggers aesthetic experience. Back in his account “Reasons and Judgments,” Beardsley does not deny that the attribution of “cognitive value” to works of art in statements completed with such predicates as “it is profound,” “it has something important to say,” “it conveys a significant view of life,” or “it gives insight into a universal human problem” is an appropriate form of praise for such works.118 He does argue that paintings, for example, do not assert propositions, but rather show objects in certain ways; thus he rejects statements like “The painting states (contains the proposition) that the President is sheeplike” but allows the possibility of statements like “The painting shows (represents, depicts) the President as sheeplike.”119 However, he remains suspicious of views that works of art such as paintings either “reveal” genuine universal truths or offer “intuitions” of particular truths.120 When it comes to literature, to be sure, “we are already in the realm of language, of indicative moods and declarative sentences,” and there is certainly “not one word in poetry or fiction that does not, or could not, appear in some other discourse in which it would clearly be used to tell us something about the world.”121 Beardsley argues that literary works should be thought of as uttering rather than asserting propositions that can be true or false, thus cognitions: A work of literature “contains predications, the contemplation, and even the testing, of which can be shared by different readers, and the writer too. But it is not a ‘message,’ and not in the ordinary sense a ‘communication,’ since it is not an assertion and therefore claims to convey no information.” But the mere fact that a work utters propositions without asserting them would not make it a work of art nor the experience of it aesthetic, of course; it might just make it pointless. The positive part of Beardsley’s theory is rather that in (successful) works of literature intellectual content, like beauty or other regional qualities, is woven into a more complex set of aesthetic qualities and thus becomes part of the object for genuinely aesthetic experience: 118 119 120 121

Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 456. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 375. Beardsley, Aesthetics, ch. VIII, pp. 379–91. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 400.

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What makes literature literature, in part, must be some withdrawal from the world about it, an unusual degree of self-containedness and self-sufficiency that makes it capable of being contemplated with satisfaction in itself. And the secret of this detachment seems to lie in its capacity to play with, and to swallow up in its designs, all the vast array of human experiences, including beliefs, without that personal allegiance and behavioral commitment to them that constitutes assertion in the fullest sense.122

Works of literature that suggest ideas and beliefs to us – and presumably any other kinds of art that can manage to do this, whether works that include literature, such as operas, or works that do not, for example, historical paintings – are not aesthetic objects (or, more precisely, present phenomenal aesthetic objects to us in imagination) because they refrain from actually asserting propositions; rather, they are aesthetic objects and works of art because they induce us to play with their ideas in a complex, self-contained, self-sufficient, satisfying way – in other words, they produce an aesthetic experience that includes ideas and beliefs among the elements in response to which we experience unity, complexity, and intensity. And, perhaps uniquely in Aesthetics, Beardsley uses unmistakably Kantian language in describing our experience of literature as playing with “all the vast array of human experiences, including beliefs, without . . . personal allegiance and behavioral commitment”: Here he characterizes the experience of literature as disinterested free play of our cognitive powers. By this means Beardsley suggests that our experience of at least some art can be understood only by a synthesis of the truth theory and the play theory of aesthetic experience and in this way rejoins what so many aestheticians after Kant had sundered. Beardsley had begun his career by conceiving of poems as vehicles of cognition, specifically the cognition of human emotion, so perhaps it was only to be expected that in his mature theory he should at least make room for a cognitive dimension within his broader account of aesthetic experience. In later years, Beardsley stressed the cognitive aspect of art even more. One important statement on this subject is his 1966 essay “The Humanities and Human Understanding,” presented at a conference on the humanities that was part of the centennial celebration of the University of Kentucky.123 Beardsley began his discussion by 122 123

Beardsley, Aesthetics, pp. 436–7. Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Humanities and Human Understanding,” in The Humanities and the Understanding of Reality, ed. Thomas B. Stroup (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966), pp. 1–31. The other contributors to the symposium and volume were the literary critics Northrop Frye and Frank Kermode and the Louisville Courier-

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excepting philosophy from the question about the cognitive value of the humanities, since “the problems that philosophers are concerned about arise just as pressingly and pervasively out of the assumptions and results of scientific inquiry, whether into man or nature, as out of the work of historians and literary critics,” and thus philosophy “is no more affiliated with the humanities than it is with the social or natural sciences.”124 He then confines his question to the question of what contribution if any works of literature can make to human knowledge. He assumes that if literature provides any knowledge at all, “it is most likely to be about a certain part of reality, namely man himself. For man is what literature is always about, whatever else it may touch upon.”125 But he immediately rejects any idea that literature ordinarily provides any actual knowledge about particular persons or events, since the objects and events presented in literature are ordinarily fictional rather than real. This leaves open the possibility that works of literature can convey knowledge of general truths (as Aristotle had held at the outset of the millennia-old discussion of the value of art), but Beardsley argues that any “general truth” suggested by a work of literature “is subject to test by observations of real people; therefore it is empirical and provisional; therefore, whatever may be the case with [for example] the novelist himself, this truth cannot be said to be known intuitively by the reader through his act of reading.”126 However, he takes away from this discussion the thought that literature can suggest possibilities for human self-understanding. He discusses this idea by first considering the use of literary works by Freud and other psychologists. He argues that although literary texts might present examples of the mechanisms of interest to such psychologists with greater clarity than is usually encountered in real life, from an epistemological point of view they cannot count as confirmations of psychological theories – because once again literature presents only fictional persons – but only as illustrations of such theories. However, “if a fictional case can serve as illustration of a theory, then it might have been capable of suggesting the theory in the first place”;127 while literature can play no role in the confirmation of scientific knowledge, it can play a role in the discovery of such knowledge. Beyond suggesting testable theories

124 125 126 127

Journal publisher Barry Bingham, a leading figure in the American newspaper industry at that time. Beardsley, “Humanities,” p. 12. Beardsley, “Humanities,” p. 14. Beardsley, “Humanities,” p. 16. Beardsley, “Humanities,” pp. 18–19.

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for scientific disciplines, literature can more generally make suggestions about how we might act and especially how we might feel in all sorts of situations. But the scope of the “we” here needs to be determined precisely. Certainly “no novel can really give me evidence for a prediction about my own behavior”128 or what I would feel should certain situations described in a work of literature actually arise in my own life – this is again the point that fictions cannot offer evidence about reality that has already been made. More importantly, however, “it seems plain that whatever we discover about ourselves with the help of fiction, there is much more that we discover about others”; fiction “gives us a widened sense of the possibilities – the potential range of humanity.” Literature, by giving us concrete cases of understanding (fictitious) behavior, increases enormously our repertoire of explanatory concepts, so to speak – the concepts of possible mental processes that we carry about with us in our daily encounters with one another. We acquire greater skill in explaining to ourselves why people (including ourselves) do the things that they do.129

But beyond just offering us possible explanations of human conduct, whether our own or that of others, literature offers the experience of human experiences and feelings beyond what we have each ourselves experienced, or perhaps it offers us possibilities of explanation by offering us possibilities of feelings and thus motives that we have not ourselves experienced: In this way, I believe, fiction helps to dispel that blindness to what is in one another’s hearts of which William James wrote, that callousness and narrowness (especially with those from a strange land or another race) that comes from incapacity to imagine mental states other than those we are familiar with: impulses more generous than our own, hurts we have never suffered, terrors that have no parallel in our own protected lives.130

Again, none of this can count as genuine knowledge unless it can be empirically confirmed by experience or observations beyond the literary work itself, but of course there is nothing to bar the possibility of such confirmation. Thus Beardsley’s position in this essay from 1966 goes beyond the conclusion of his discussion of truth in literature from 1958 and perhaps achieves an even fuller synthesis of the traditions of aesthetic experience as knowledge and as play than he had achieved there: 128 129 130

Beardsley, “Humanities,” p. 25. Beardsley, “Humanities,” pp. 25–6. Beardsley, “Humanities,” p. 27.

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Not only can art offer us ideas and beliefs with which we can play; it can also offer us potential knowledge, although it is not itself in the business of providing the actual confirmation of knowledge. In his lecture, Beardsley confines his suggestion that art can suggest possibilities that might become knowledge – a position reminiscent of that taken by Collingwood in Speculum Mentis forty years earlier – to the case of narrative literature, which for the twentieth-century reader of course typically takes the form of the novel, but that throughout history has also had other forms, such as epic poetry and drama. This restriction is due to the fact that he has posed his question by asking whether literature can provide actual explanations of human behavior, and human behavior is the subject of narrative; feelings have entered into his account only as possible explanations of behavior. But in his original papers with Wimsatt two decades earlier, Beardsley had focused on the case of poetry, particularly lyric poetry, which has human feelings rather than human actions as its subject. There is nothing in the present account that prevents it from applying to the case of lyric poetry as well: Literature can present possibilities of human feeling although not genuine knowledge about how oneself or anyone else actually has felt or would feel in certain situations, quite apart from whether such feelings would also be motivations for actions. Indeed, there is no reason why other, nonliterary arts, such as some forms of music or painting, might not also present possibilities of human feeling even if it would seem implausible to claim that they could suggest possible explanations of human action. If this generalization is allowed, then Beardsley’s position would become similar to that of leading proponents of the theory that art in general offers possible knowledge of human emotions, such as Collingwood in The Principles of Art. But while Beardsley would thus have succeeded in combining a cognitivist approach to aesthetics with the Deweyan and Kantian theory of aesthetic experience prominent in his Aesthetics by making the presentation of emotions in all the ways characteristic of aesthetic objects a central part of this theory, his emphasis remains entirely on the presentation rather than the audience’s experience of any emotions in response to aesthetic objects. Beardsley’s theory of aesthetic experience (if not his synthesis of the aesthetics of truth with the aesthetics of play) was intensively discussed for a period but was shortly to be eclipsed by the different issues that will be the focus of our next part. Before we turn to that, however, we must discuss the work of Nelson Goodman, who maintained the focus on the

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nature of artistic symbolism we found in the earlier work of Cassirer and Langer and thus continued a basically cognitivist approach to aesthetics without as much emphasis on other aspects of aesthetic experience as we have found in Gotshalk, Beardsley, or the pluralists of the preceding generation of American aestheticians.

4. Goodman Nelson Goodman (1906–98) was one of the most important philosophers in America in the second half of the twentieth century, not just one of the most important aestheticians of this period; indeed, in the long run his contributions to theoretical philosophy in general may well be judged more important than his contributions to aesthetics. But for a number of years, particularly those years from the publication of his core work in aesthetics, Languages of Art, in 1968 to the appearance of Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace in 1981, Goodman’s theory of artistic symbolism was one of the leading topics in American aesthetics, and no history of aesthetics in the second half of the twentieth century would be complete without an examination of Goodman’s work. In particular, Goodman’s work was the most prominent version of a purely cognitivist approach to aesthetics in this period and thus can be considered in contrast to Beardsley’s incorporation of a cognitivist approach into aesthetics into the framework of his more Kantian and Deweyan theory of aesthetic experience. Goodman was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, and attended his local college, that is, Harvard. He earned his A.B. in 1928, studying among others with Clarence Irving Lewis (1882–1964), whose synthesis of Kantianism and pragmatism in Mind and the World Order was composed in those years and published in 1929,131 and stayed at Harvard to start graduate school in philosophy immediately thereafter. However, he did not receive his Ph.D. until 1941, according to some accounts because anti-Semitism blocked him from a graduate fellowship.132 During these years, he was a director of an art gallery in Boston, where he started his own lifelong activity as an art collector, and he also met his wife, 131

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Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929). On Lewis, see Murray G. Murphey, C.I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). See Bruce Kuklick, Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 75.

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the painter Katherine Sturgis. After service as an army psychologist during World War II, he taught one year at Tufts University and was then appointed at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1946 to 1964. He then taught at Brandeis University before finally returning in 1968 to Harvard, where he continued to teach until he became emeritus in 1977. During his first five years at Harvard, he was also the director of Project Zero, a multidisciplinary research project on art education housed in the Harvard School of Education.133 At least in his later years, Goodman was a formidable and remote figure, renowned for his fierce arguments and equally fierce wit, but he had a number of important influential and loyal students, including the philosopher of science Richard Rudner, the philosopher of science and education Israel Scheffler, the philosopher of mathematics Geoffrey Hellman, and his frequent collaborator in his later years, Catherine Z. Elgin, who also succeeded Scheffler at the Harvard School of Education.134 Goodman’s 1941 dissertation “A Study of Qualities” led to his first book, The Structure of Appearance, first published in 1951.135 This was followed in 1954 by Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.136 Goodman’s major work in aesthetics, Languages of Art, appeared in 1968, just as he began his tenure 133

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A description of Project Zero and Goodman’s work for it may be found in Howard Gardner, “Project Zero: Nelson Goodman’s Legacy in Arts Education,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (2000): 245–9. In addition to numerous books of her own and one coauthored with Goodman, Elgin edited a four-volume collection of previously published papers on Goodman, The Philosophy of Nelson Goodman (New York: Garland, 1997). Volume 3 in this series is Nelson Goodman’s Philosophy of Art. For biography, see Catherine Z. Elgin, Israel Scheffler, and Robert Schwartz, “Nelson Goodman, 1906–1998,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 75 (1999): 206–8. For surveys of Goodman’s philosophy, see Daniel Cohnitz and Marcus Rossberg, Nelson Goodman (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), which also has a brief biography, and Dena Shottenkirk, Nominalism and Its Aftermath: The Philosophy of Nelson Goodman (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009). Monographs on Goodman’s aesthetics include Christel Fricke, Zeichenprozeß und ästhetische Erfahrung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001), and Jacques Morisot, Le Philosophie de l’Art de Nelson Goodman (Nîmes: Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 1996). For essays on Goodman’s work, see Logic and Art: Essays in Honor of Nelson Goodman, ed. Richard S. Rudner and Israel Scheffler (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), and Jenefer Robinson et. al., “Symposium: The Legacy of Nelson Goodman,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (2000): 213–49. See also Jenefer Robinson, “Goodman,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, second edition (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 185–98. Nelson Goodman, The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), third edition, with introduction by Geoffrey Hellman (Dordrecht: D. Reidel,1977). Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (London: Athlone Press, 1954), fourth edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

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at Harvard,137 and a fourth major work, Ways of Worldmaking, which, appeared ten years later, contained his important essay “When is Art?”138 Goodman published three further volumes of his papers between 1972 and 1988.139 The two main works in theoretical philosophy that preceded Languages of Art argued for theses that would be central to Goodman’s approach to aesthetics. In The Structure of Appearance, Goodman developed an epistemology inspired by Rudolf Carnap’s famous The Logical Structure of the World140 of 1928 as well as by the work of his own teacher, Lewis. In his work, Carnap had shown how to construct a world of objects on the basis of remembered resemblances among experiences using standard logic including set theory; in The Structure of Appearance, Goodman offered an alternative method of construction of objects, taking qualities as primitives and using instead of set theory “mereology,” a logic he had invented in graduate school with Henry S. Leonard that accepts only parts and wholes composed of them, no higher-order objects such as sets of sets,141 so that different objects may be constructed out of different but sometimes overlapping groups of qualities as parts. The crucial point for Goodman’s later work is that the basic and primary form of cognition is the construction of objects by the classification of qualities into various objects; classification of objects and the denotation of objects thus classified by associated “labels” will turn out to be the basic form of cognitive activity recognized in Goodman’s aesthetics as well. In Fact, Fiction, and Forecast Goodman introduced the “new riddle of induction.” The old riddle of induction – Hume’s – was that no amount of observed regularity among states or relations among states of objects entails the repetition of such regularity among unobserved objects – in particular, no amount of past regularity entails future regularity – because 137

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Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Publishing Co., 1968). Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978); “When Is Art?” was originally published in The Arts and Cognition, ed. D. Perkins and B. Leondar (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Nelson Goodman, Problems and Projects (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972); Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); and, with Catherine Z. Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences (London: Routledge, 1988). Rudolf Carnap, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (Berlin: Weltkreis Verlag, 1928); The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy, trans. Rolf A. George (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967). Goodman and Leonard had worked out mereology by 1930; it was independently and subsequently invented by the Polish logician Stanisław Leśniewski; see Cohnitz and Rossberg, Nelson Goodman, pp. 22–3.

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such an entailment depends on a premise that unobserved cases must resemble observed cases – in particular, that future cases must resemble past cases – that is itself neither self-evidently true nor deducible from past cases without begging the question. Goodman’s new riddle is that it seems as if the project of induction fails even before we try “projecting” past regularities into the future because it is indeterminate what regularities we have already observed: That is, there are innumerable ways to classify what it is we have observed. Goodman illustrates this puzzle with his famous predicate “grue,” defined as meaning green if observed before some time t but blue if not observed before t; if we are situated in time before t, then it seems as if we have no way of telling whether the green-looking objects or states of objects that we have observed are actually green or grue, and thus even if we could be certain that the future will resemble the past, we would have no way of telling whether the observations after t that would be consistent with our previous experience would be such objects appearing green or appearing blue. Goodman’s own response to this puzzle was the pragmatist response – here is where the continuing influence of Lewis on his work enters in – that the projection of predicates is based on their “entrenchment” or our habituation to them, where the underlying assumption is that there is no reason for us not to project what seem to be the simplest classifications we have used in the past into the future unless, of course, there is some specific reason not to do that.142 Whether this is an adequate solution to the new riddle of induction has been intensively debated; our concern here will be only the use that Goodman makes of the idea of entrenchment within aesthetics. Let us now turn to Languages of Art. Goodman commences this work, which began life as a series of John Locke lectures at Oxford University, with the bland remark that “though this book deals with some problems pertaining to the arts, its scope does not coincide very closely with what is ordinarily taken to be the field of aesthetics.” His objective, Goodman says, is not a traditional aesthetic theory, but “an approach to a theory of symbols,” for which “problems concerning the arts are points of departure rather than of convergence.”143 The full implications of these opening remarks become apparent only in the final chapter of the book, when Goodman rejects a “persistent tradition” that “pictures the aesthetic attitude as passive contemplation of the immediately given . . . 142 143

See Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, pp. 92–8. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. xi.

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directed to no practical end” other than “immediate pleasure,”144 in favor of an account of “aesthetic experience” as “dynamic rather than static,” involving “making delicate discriminations and discerning subtle relationships, identifying symbol systems and characters145 within these systems and what these characters denote and exemplify, interpreting works and reorganizing the world in terms of works and works in terms of the world.”146 For Goodman, aesthetic experience is the intertwined cognitive activity of sorting works into symbols within symbol systems and sorting out the objects of the world into things symbolized – in other words, classifying both works and objects in the world. We shall return to the question whether Goodman needs to contrast this cognitive account of aesthetic experience to an account of aesthetic experience as immediately pleasurable, but before we can raise that question, we must ask what Goodman means by his claim that aesthetic experience involves determining what works “denote” and “exemplify,” and why he thinks that the activities of identifying symbol systems and characters with them should qualify as an account of aesthetic experience. Goodman says that his book has an intricate structure composed of “two routes of investigation, one beginning in the first chapter and the other in the third, [which] merge only in the last” (sixth) chapter.147 The first two chapters of the book offer his accounts of denotation and exemplification in art; the third through fifth chapters describe the characteristics of different kinds of symbol systems; and the final chapter (supplemented by the subsequent chapter “When Is Art?” from Ways of Worldmaking) then explains what makes artistic denotation and exemplification specifically aesthetic in terms of the characteristics of one kind of symbol system. So let us now consider these stages of Goodman’s argument. The first stage is Goodman’s treatment of representation. Writing in the 1960s, he recognized that “whether a picture ought to be a representation or not” was a currently bitterly contested question in the practice of art and criticism, but supposes nevertheless that “the nature of representation wants early study in any philosophical examination of the ways symbols function in and out of the arts.”148 Goodman quickly dispatches 144 145

146 147 148

Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 241–2. By “characters” Goodman does not mean persona in narratives, but rather particular symbols within symbol systems, such as letters within a particular alphabet. The first cognitive task in the aesthetic experience of an object is to determine what character in what symbol system the object presents. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 241. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. xii. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 3.

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any thought that resemblance between a representation and what it represents is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for representation on grounds some of which were already well known in the eighteenth century, for example, to Adam Smith,149 and others of which had recently been emphasized by the art historian Ernst Gombrich:150 One twin resembles but does not ordinarily represent the other, and even when a picture does resemble what it represents, the latter resembles but does not represent the former, and further there are many ways in which a picture does not resemble what it represents very much and resembles other pictures that it does not represent much more than it resembles what it represents.151 Instead, Goodman maintains, the plain fact is that a picture, to represent an object, must be a symbol for it, stand for it, refer to it; and that no degree of resemblance is sufficient to establish the requisite relationship of reference. Nor is resemblance necessary for reference; almost anything may stand for almost anything else. A picture that represents – like a passage that describes – an object refers to and, more particularly, denotes it. Denotation is the core of representation and is independent of resemblance.152

Goodman adds in a note that “anything that a picture represents” may be called an object and suggests that pretty much anything may be represented. But what is equally true is that for him pretty much any sort of thing may denote anything: Not only is resemblance not required for denotation, but there is no other constraint that can be placed a priori on what can represent what and how it can represent. It all depends on what symbol systems for denotation are invented and become used and accepted – in other words, on what methods of denotation become entrenched. Denotation does not depend on anything we might consider a natural relation, like resemblance, but on what symbol systems are constructed and entrenched. Goodman’s separation of symbol systems from any supposedly natural relation of resemblance is also, of course, reminiscent of Cassirer’s conception of symbolic forms. Goodman does not emphasize the connection between symbolization and entrenchment immediately, but it emerges in his discussion of linear perspective. He praises Gombrich for having amassed “overwhelming 149

150 151 152

See “Of the Nature of That Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts,” in Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W.P.D. Wightman and J.C. Bryce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 176–213, at pp. 176–86. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion; Goodman cites Gombrich at Languages of Art, p. 7n. Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 4–5. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 5.

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evidence to show how the way we see and depict depends upon and varies with experience, practice, interests, and attitudes” but criticizes Gombrich for having made one exception to this generalization, namely, for having held that perspective is a uniquely natural way of representing three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional surfaces, thus “that the art of perspective aims at a correct equation.”153 Goodman argues that the rules of projection do not in fact correspond to the geometry of light rays traveling from objects to the eye; if they did, then not only would parallel lines (like railroad tracks) in a depicted horizontal plane be depicted as converging in the distance, but so would vertical lines (like the telephone poles alongside the tracks) be depicted as converging. But that would not look right to us; it would look weird.154 Instead, the rules of perspective, just like other methods of symbolization, are simply what have become entrenched and familiar to us. Symbolization in general “depends upon countless and variable factors, not least among them the particular habits of seeing and representing that are engrained in the viewers,” and thus “pictures in perspective, like any others, have to be read; and the ability to read has to be acquired.”155 Perspective is not a “natural” system of depiction; like the very different conventions for representing shape, size, and location that have evolved in “Oriental painting,” it is one symbol system that has become entrenched in one population at one time, though of course it can spread to other populations at other times (or could have been independently invented and accepted in other populations). More generally, not only perspective but any purported “realism is relative, determined by the system of representation standard for a given culture or person at a given time.”156 “Realism is a matter not of any constant or absolute relationship between a picture and its object but of a relationship between the system of representation employed in the picture and the standard system”; “the literal or realistic or naturalistic system of representation is simply the customary one,” and “realistic representation, in brief, depends not on imitation or illusion or information but upon inculcation.”157 Although no a priori constraint such as “naturalness” can be placed on symbol systems, thus no a priori constraints can be placed on what might become entrenched as a system of artistic representation, nevertheless 153 154 155 156 157

Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 10. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 16. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 14. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 37. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 38.

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not every kind of denotation or reference to objects within a symbol system is art. Using pins on a map to denote troop formations does not make them into art; nor is the map into which the pins are pushed necessarily an artistic representation of the battlefield (though it might be); for that matter, using Rembrandt paintings taken down from the walls of a museum commandeered for battle headquarters to denote troop formations would not be using them as art, and likewise “a Rembrandt painting may cease to function as a work of art when used to replace a broken window or as a blanket”158 (although if the person using the Rembrandt to replace the broken window also actively explores what and how the painting denotes, then the painting may be used as both a replacement window and a work of art). So something needs to be said about the difference between artistic and nonartistic symbol systems. But Goodman defers that discussion until after his exploration of the varieties of symbol systems in the second part of Languages of Art. Instead, the issue he takes up in the remainder of his first chapter is what we should say about representations (in fact, typically artistic representations) that cannot denote anything because what they seem to represent does not exist at all and never has or will – pictures of fictional types such as centaurs and unicorns, or of fictional individuals such as Pickwick or Pegasus.159 Goodman argues that such pictures or descriptions are indeed not labels that denote anything, but are instead themselves denoted by labels, “unbreakable one-place predicates” by which we group pictures into “unicorn-pictures, Pickwick-pictures, winged-horsepictures, etc., just as pieces of furniture are sorted into desks, tables, chairs, etc.”160 Here Goodman’s underlying identification of cognition with classification rises to the surface, as does his assumption that there is no a priori constraint on what sort of things it might interest us to group together as well as no a priori constraint on how we can do that. If a practice of making and grouping together winged-horse-pictures or Santa-Claus-pictures has arisen in our culture, well and good. Before turning to his exploration of the varieties of symbol systems in the second part of Languages of Art and thus laying the ground for his account of the difference between nonartistic and artistic representation, Goodman takes up a second classical theme of aesthetics, one that we have seen to be particularly prominent throughout the first 158 159 160

Goodman, “When Is Art?” Ways of Worldmaking, p. 67. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 21. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 24.

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part of the twentieth century, namely, expression. Without mentioning Beardsley (although he did refer to him elsewhere as “the dean of American aesthetics”),161 Goodman begins his discussion of expression by tacitly repeating Beardsley’s critiques of the intentional and affective fallacies: He first rejects the idea that a work of art’s expression of an emotion is necessarily the effect of an emotion in its artist as its cause – “A painter or composer does not have to have the emotions he expresses in his work” – and he then rejects the idea that “what is expressed is, rather, the feeling or emotion excited in the viewer,” for example, “that a picture expresses sadness by making the gallery-goer a bit sad, and a tragedy expresses grief by reducing the spectator to actual or virtual tears.” Goodman briefly argues for the second claim by reiterating a point already made by eighteenth-century writers such as Mendelssohn and Kames, namely, that “whatever emotion may be excited is seldom the one expressed”; for example, “a face expressing agony inspires pity rather than pain.”162 Instead, Goodman offers a cognitive analysis of expression. He first analyzes “exemplification” as an object’s denotation of a property that it itself possesses, as, for example, a fabric swatch exemplifies the fiber content, color, pattern, and texture of the larger run of which it is a sample (but not the size or shape of the latter) in virtue of both having and referring to those properties.163 He then analyzes expression as metaphorical exemplification, or metaphorical or “figurative”164 possession plus reference. Thus a sad painting is one that is metaphorically sad and refers to sadness. In the case of ordinary exemplification, Goodman states that “if possession is intrinsic, reference is not; and just which properties of a symbol are exemplified depends upon what particular system of symbolization is in effect.”165 That is, while a tailor’s swatch has what color, texture, and so on, it has independently of any symbol system and thus independently of any convention (although of course our classification of and names for colors are not independent of cultural conventions), it only refers to anything within a symbol system, and symbol systems always depend upon cultural conventions and sometimes even personal intentions, as Goodman illustrates with an amusing story of misunderstanding between an upholsterer and his client as to 161

162 163 164 165

Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters, p. 85. This occurs in a reply to a paper by Beardsley. “Languages of Art and Art Criticism,” Erkenntnis 12 (1978): 95–118. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 47. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 53. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 51. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 53.

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whether she wanted her fabric not only in the same color but also the same size as his sample.166 In expression as metaphorical possession plus denotation, however, symbol systems and their characteristics are clearly involved in possession as well as denotation. Goodman defines metaphor as “a matter of teaching an old word new tricks . . . an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting,” in other, less metaphorical words, as the “application of a label to an object that defies an explicit or tacit prior denial of that label to the object. . . . Application of a term is metaphorical only if it is to some extent contraindicated” – although of course the contraindicated application must be accepted, not simply rejected as it would be in the case of a labeling regarded as false. “Metaphor requires attraction as well as resistance – indeed, an attraction that overcomes resistance.”167 This is all to say that a metaphorical description or labeling is one that seems to its audience to break with past conventions for the use of a label and yet somehow to be right, to capture some sort of affinity between the objects literally denoted by that label and the object metaphorically denoted by it. The sense of departure from the past cannot be equated with mere novelty, since some metaphors always retain their freshness, but some metaphors can become so familiar that they become part of the literal use of their terms. How it is with the description “sad painting” may be debatable: On the one hand, “sad” may always seem to refer primarily to the affective state of a sentient being, so there may always seem to be something nonstandard in labeling something nonsentient such as a painting “sad”; yet the description of paintings as “sad” may be so common that it may seem as if nonsentient beings such as paintings as well as sentient beings such as people and pets are part of the literal extension of “sad.” Be this as it may, the point remains that the metaphorical use of labels to assert possession as well as the interpretation of the denotation of the labeled objects take place only within symbol systems that are themselves subject to the vagaries of invention and entrenchment. Whether it sounds right to call a painting “sad” and whether it seems right to take it as also referring to sadness are thus a matter of what practices of description and interpretation have become entrenched in a culture or population – and there is not much more that can be said about expression. In particular, given all the different ways in which practices of labeling and interpretation 166 167

Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, pp. 63–4. Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 69–70.

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can become entrenched, there is obviously no ground for insisting that a work of art can express an emotion only if the artist and/or the audience has that emotion. Goodman notes that one and the same medium and perhaps even work of art may both represent and express, that is, denote objects other than itself as well as properties that it itself possesses: Some elements of the dance are primarily denotative, versions of the descriptive gestures of daily life (e.g., bowings, beckonings) or of ritual (e.g., signs of benediction, Hindu hand-postures). But other movements, especially in the modern dance, primarily exemplify rather than denote. What they exemplify, however, are not standard or familiar activities, but rather rhythms and dynamic shapes. The exemplified patterns and properties may reorganize experience, relating actions not usually associated or distinguishing others not usually differentiated, thus enriching allusion or sharpening discrimination.168

Goodman’s introduction of the concept of the metaphorical into his account of expression may suggest that expression is already a specifically aesthetic concept, but metaphors are surely used outside the arts, and we are still awaiting Goodman’s account of what makes a symbol system specifically aesthetic, thus its use artistic. The last sentence of this quotation hints at his account of what is specifically aesthetic, but in order to understand its implication we must now turn to the second part of Languages of Art, Goodman’s exploration of the variety of symbol systems. The core of the second part of Languages of Art is a distinction between “notational” and nonnotational symbol systems, with the argument that artistic symbol systems are typically nonnotational and that the characteristic features of aesthetic experience are associated with the nonnotational character of artistic symbol systems. The ultimate purport of the argument may be initially obscured by the fact that Goodman uses musical scores as a paradigmatic example of notational symbol systems, but that does not imply that musical works themselves are notational. Notational symbol systems are composed of characters that are classes of character-indifferent marks that are disjoint and finitely differentiated; that is, every “atomic” inscription or inscription at the most basic level of marks in such a system belongs to one and only one character, and there are no marks in such a system that do not belong to one determinate character – such systems are not “syntactically dense,” with potentially 168

Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 64–5.

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significant marks possible between any two significant marks.169 These two syntactical requirements for a notational system are joined by three semantic requirements. “The first semantic requirement upon notational systems is that they be unambiguous”; that is, that no character in the system may “give conflicting decisions concerning whether some object complies with it.”170 The second semantic requirement is that “the compliance-classes” of characters in a notational system “must be disjoint” or nonoverlapping, which is the inverse of the requirement that characters be nonambiguous: That requires that no character designate two different kinds of objects that comply with it, while the requirement of disjointness means that one kind of object cannot comply with two different characters within the symbol system.171 Finally, a notational system must provide semantic as well as syntactic finite differentiation; that is, not only must there be no further significant symbols between any two neighboring basic symbols in the system, but there must also not be any further relevant objects between the objects designated by neighboring basic symbols in the system.172 Musical scores, or at least certain aspects of musical scores for certain instruments, satisfy these conditions: What counts as an inscription of a particular note is determinate; the marks permitted as notes are finitely differentiated, with no further significant marks permitted between the basic marks of the system; each mark picks out one note to be sounded on the instrument and no sound is picked out by more than one mark, and there are a finite number of notes on the instrument corresponding to the finite number of marks included in the symbol system. Scores for instruments other than the piano may not satisfy all the semantic conditions, since there may be a range of permissible frequencies for some characters and there may be some overlap between them. And even on a piano score, not every marking satisfies the conditions of a notational system: Indications like forte and fortissimo are not disjoint or finitely differentiated.173 But that is part of what makes piano music art, for it is characteristic of art that its symbols are not notational, even if there can be notations for works of art. Goodman illustrates this point in his final chapter with a contrast between a work of visual art and a visually identical graph or diagram. “Compare a momentary electrocardiogram with a Hokusai drawing of 169 170 171 172 173

Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 132–6, p. 141. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 148. Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 149–52. Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 152–3. Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 184–5.

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Mt. Fujiyama. The black wiggly lines on white backgrounds may be exactly the same in the two cases.”174 A graph like an electrocardiogram is not a notational system in all respects, since it is semantically dense rather than finitely differentiated; nevertheless, “the constitutive aspects of the diagrammatic as compared with the pictorial character are expressly and narrowly restricted.” In the case of the cardiogram, the only relevant features of the diagram are the ordinate and abscissa of each of the points the center of the line passes through. The thickness of the line, its color and intensity, the absolute size of the diagram, etc., do not matter… For the sketch, this is not true. Any thickening or thinning of the line, its color, its contrast with the background, its size, even the qualities of the paper – none of these is ruled out, none can be ignored. . . . the symbols in the pictorial scheme are relatively replete.175

In even the simplest sketch, as opposed to the most complex diagram, any variation in the mark is potentially syntactically and semantically significant. This observation leads Goodman toward the conclusion that although there may not be a “crisp criterion” for the aesthetic, there are nevertheless “symptoms” of the aesthetic, where “a symptom is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for, but merely tends in conjunction with other such symptoms to be present in, aesthetic experience.” In Languages of Art, Goodman lists four such symptoms: “Three symptoms of the aesthetic may be syntactic density, semantic density, and syntatic repleteness,”176 and “the fourth and final symptom of the aesthetic is the feature that distinguishes exemplificational from denotational systems and that combines with density to distinguish showing from saying.”177 “Density, repleteness, and exemplificationality, then, are earmarks of the aesthetic.”178 In “When Is Art?” Goodman adds to these four “symptoms” a fifth, namely, “multiple and complex reference, where a symbol performs several integrated and interacting referential functions, some direct and some mediated through other symbols.”179 This might sound like another way of stating that violation of the notational conditions 174

175 176 177 178 179

Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 229. Here Goodman uses the “method of indiscernibles” that Arthur Danto had introduced several years earlier in his famous article “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–84, although since Goodman had first given Languages of Art as lectures in 1962, his use of the method may have predated Danto’s. Danto will be discussed in the next part. Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 229–30. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 252. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 253. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 254. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, p. 68.

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of nonambiguity and disjointness is a mark of the aesthetic, but the suggestion that in works of art symbols often interact, that is, modify each others’ meaning, and are sometimes layered, ultimately referring to objects only through each other, goes beyond this point. Goodman introduces the symptom of “exemplificationality” and thus the claim that works of art are typically expressive, even more typically expressive of emotion, without much comment. We certainly would not expect any a priori argument for this point from him, and perhaps he means to rely on an unstated empirical, inductive argument, that is, the obvious fact that a great deal of art over the ages and in many cultures is experienced as emotionally expressive. Goodman does take the inclusion of exemplification among the symptoms of the aesthetic to return to the question of the role of the emotions in the experience of art, which he had broached in the second chapter of Languages of Art with his own version of Beardsley’s rejection of the intentional and affective fallacies. Goodman argues that the dense and replete syntactic and semantic character of art calls for the active rather than passive, cognitive rather than merely “brainless affective response”180 to art that “involves making delicate discriminations and discerning subtle relationships, identifying symbol systems and characters within these systems and what these characters denote and exemplify, interpreting works and reorganizing the world in terms of works and works in terms of the world”181 – it is the fact that works of art typically differ from other kinds of symbols in their density and repleteness that calls forth such open-ended intellectual activity. Such investigation of works of art and of the world through works of art surely differs from a merely emotional reaction to such works in an audience as well as from any emotion in their artists that may have been associated with their creation. Nevertheless Goodman adds that “in aesthetic experience the emotions function cognitively. The work of art is apprehended through the feelings as well as through the senses.” Indeed, he continues, feelings engendered by works of art are not “used exclusively for exploring the emotional content of a work. To some extent, we may feel how a painting looks as we may see how it feels. . . . Emotion in aesthetic experience is a means of discerning what properties a work has and expresses.”182 Goodman hardly means to deny that artists have feelings in creating works of art or that performers have feelings in 180 181 182

Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 248. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 241. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 248.

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performing them or that audiences have feelings in experiencing them. What he does mean (beyond the obvious point earlier made that neither artists nor audiences need have the same feelings that works express) is that experiencing such feelings is not the point of art; the point is rather using such feelings to understand both the works and the world, that is, in Goodman’s approach to knowledge, to increase the fullness and complexity of our classification of both works and world. This may seem a radical departure from the earlier twentieth-century view, so prominent in Collingwood, for example, that the purpose of art is to provide us with knowledge of our emotions; Goodman’s picture seems rather to be that the purpose of art is to provide us with knowledge through our emotions. But Goodman’s general characterization of the cognitive character of aesthetic experience makes it clear that through it we gain knowledge not only of works of art but also of the world they symbolize, and surely our own emotions are part of that world. Our emotions must thus be part of the object of the knowledge that we gain through art as well as part of the means to such knowledge, and Goodman’s account of the relation between art and the emotions cannot be so distant from the mainstream twentieth-century form of aesthetic cognitivism as his iconoclastic language and distinctive approach through the technicalities of his theory of symbol systems might make it seem. When he admits in the preface to Languages of Art, “I am by no means unaware of the contributions to symbol theory of such philosophers as Peirce, Cassirer, Morris, and Langer,”183 he may be acknowledging not only technical affinity between his work and that of semioticians such as Charles Sanders Peirce and Charles Morris but also some more substantive affinity between his theory of art as cognition of the emotions and the work of Cassirer and Langer as well as the unmentioned Collingwood. On another issue, however, Goodman seems determined to distance himself from the grand tradition of modern aesthetics: He wants to play down the traditional characterization of aesthetic experience as a form of pleasure. As we have already seen, his assertion of the cognitive character of aesthetic experience is presented as an alternative to the “attempts . . . often made to distinguish the aesthetic in terms of immediate pleasure.”184 Goodman argues against any assumption that the aesthetic is uniquely “directed to no practical end” and therefore must uniquely be 183 184

Goodman, Languages of Art, p. xii. Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 241–2.

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directed toward the production of pleasure that plenty of science too is not directed toward any practical end; without mentioning his name, he rejects Santayana’s theory that the aesthetic is “pleasure ‘objectified’” on the ground that many works of art express feelings other than pleasure, such as sadness, thus that expressing pleasure cannot be anything like a symptom of the aesthetic, and he objects, again without mentioning his name, to Beardsley’s later tendency to take “satisfaction” rather than “pleasure” as the goal of aesthetic experience.185 Goodman’s argument against Santayana’s position is not compelling, because Goodman himself has made the point that the emotional response to a work of art may not be the same as the emotion expressed by the work of art;186 there is thus no reason for him to bar the possibility that our response to a work that expresses sadness or any other emotion other than pleasure might itself be pleasurable in some important way. And while Goodman’s other arguments are enough to establish that their production of pleasure cannot be a sufficient condition for the status of works of art, his own model of symptoms rather than necessary and sufficient conditions for the aesthetic should surely allow for the possibility that the production of pleasure might be a typical symptom of art. In any case, Goodman does finally admit some characteristic role for pleasure in aesthetic experience. In the penultimate section of Languages of Art, “The Question of Merit,” he rejects instrumental accounts of the value of art. He dismisses theories (like the late nineteenth-century theory of play) that “the exercise of the symbolizing faculties beyond immediate need has the more remote practical purposes of developing our abilities and techniques to cope with future contingencies”; that “symbolization is an irrepressible propensity of man, that he goes on symbolizing beyond immediate necessity just for the joy of it”; and that “art depends upon and helps sustain society” by developing the human capacity for communcation.187 He insists that in our creation and reception of art “the drive is curiosity and the aim enlightenment. . . . The primary purpose is cognition in and for itself.” Yet he also allows that “what delights is discovery,” that there is pleasure that depends upon cognition in and for itself.188 In other words, although to be sure this does not distinguish aesthetic cognition from scientific cognition, pleasure cannot be separated from aesthetic experience as cognitive activity. Even if the pleasure of 185 186 187 188

Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 242–4. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 47. Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 256–7. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 258.

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aesthetic experience is not distinctive enough for it to count as an additional criterion or symptom of the aesthetic in Goodman’s special sense, on his account it must be a symptom of the aesthetic in the ordinary sense of “symptom,” that is, a common or even constant concomitant of the underlying condition of aesthetic experience. Thus Goodman cannot deny the pleasurability of aesthetic experience on his own cognitivist account of it. Nevertheless, his claim that “what delights is discovery” is still restrictive: On his account it is the successful use of our cognitive capacities for the purpose of cognition that pleases in aesthetic experience, not just the activity of those capacities without regard for their ordinary goal. When we experience the rhythmic motions of dance, for example, it is in order to discover and ultimately classify their denotative and expressive meaning. That is pleasurable, but Goodman leaves no room for the idea that the exercise of our cognitive faculties on rhythmic motions or other artistic media can be pleasurable even if there is no aim at “enlightenment.” In other words, there is no room in Goodman’s account of aesthetic experience for the idea of the free play of our cognitive powers as a fundamental source of pleasure. Goodman cannot be regarded as a synthesizer of the multiple traditions of modern aesthetics; he remains firmly ensconced within the cognitivist tradition alone. While Goodman had been developing his general theory of knowledge in the 1950s and his cognitivist aesthetics in the 1960s, another equally reductive but noncognitivist approach to aesthetics was also making its mark. This was the approach to aesthetics inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, which did not so much reduce permissible approaches to aesthetic experience but rather reduced permissible questions for the discipline of aesthetics, in part by suggesting, at least to some, that the nature of aesthetic experience was not a respectable topic for philosophy at all. In the next part, we shall see how Wittgenstein’s work initially had a constraining influence on aesthetics, but ultimately, especially in the hands of Richard Wollheim and Stanley Cavell, led to a more comprehensive approach, one that in their different ways restored the threefold synthesis that had been attained a few times before in the modern history of aesthetics.

Part Four

WITTGENSTEIN AND AFTER Anglo-American Aesthetics in the Second Part of the Twentieth Century

T

he publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in 1953, two years after his death, was an epochal event in the history of philosophy, first in Britain and America but ultimately in other areas such as Germany as well. Wittgenstein turned much philosophy away from the study of highly formalized discourses such as those of mathematics and physics, an orientation that was to some extent due to Wittgenstein’s own earlier Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1919, toward the analysis of the conditions for the meaningful use of language in a much broader range of human discourses and activities; ultimately the new approach, captured by the slogan “meaning is use,” expressing the emphasis on the manifold ways language is used rather than on a single metaphysical model of the relation between word and object, was brought back to the case of mathematics itself, as in Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, also published posthumously in 1956. Of course, Wittgenstein was not alone in inaugurating what was somewhat misleadingly called “ordinary language” philosophy – misleadingly, because at least in Wittgenstein’s case, his method relied more on the invention of model “language games” to bring out general points than on the description of actual natural languages – and the Oxford philosophers Gilbert Ryle (1900–76) and John Langshaw Austin (1911–60) also made indispensable contributions to the new movement. Some of the aestheticians to be discussed in this part, such as Frank Sibley and Stanley Cavell, certainly took some of their inspiration from these two philosophers, respectively, as well as from Wittgenstein himself. But not only was Wittgenstein the only one of the three leaders of ordinary-language philosophy who explicitly discussed aesthetics at even moderate length, in the work published in 1967 as Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (a work based on 429

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classes Wittgenstein had given back in 1938, as previously mentioned); it was Wittgenstein whose more general philosophy had the most profound impact on the development of aesthetics in both Britain and the United States beginning in the 1950s. So this part will begin with a chapter on Wittgenstein, focusing on those aspects of his philosophy that turned out to be most significant for the subsequent history of aesthetics. Wittgenstein’s initial impact was to narrow the range of questions in aesthetics thought to be suitable for philosophical discussion; that in turn had the effect of consigning many of the British and American theories we have discussed in the preceding three parts of this volume to the dustbin of history, from which I have attempted here to retrieve them. This was not because Wittgenstein personally adopted or encouraged the adoption of just one among the three approaches to aesthetics that were synthesized by the most comprehensive theories, for example, a purely cognitivist approach to aesthetics. It was because Wittgenstein was at least initially understood to have shown that it is impossible to talk meaningfully about inner experience, and thus the concept of aesthetic experience, which had been taken to be the basic concept for aesthetics since the eighteenth century, suddenly seemed to be ineligible for serious philosophy at all. Instead, Wittgenstein was taken to require redirecting philosophical attention to outwardly or publicly accessible behavior, including discourse, and this impression was certainly reinforced by the influence of Ryle if not by Austin. The permissible questions for aesthetics were thus reduced to questions about the logic of aesthetic discourse and art practices, ultimately leading to the “institutional theory of art,” which attempted to reduce all questions in the field of aesthetics to questions about the public practices of persons composing the “art world,” itself a publicly accessible institution. The second chapter of this part will focus on what is here called the “first wave” of the influence of Wittgenstein, starting with John Passmore, Paul Ziff, Morritz Weitz, William Kennick, and several others, and will then turn to what are commonly lumped together as the “institutional theories of art” of George Dickie and Arthur C. Danto – although it will be argued here that the theories of the last two are quite different, and that it may ultimately be misleading to call Danto’s theory an institutional theory at all. However, in what will here be called the “second wave” of the influence of Wittgenstein, a much broader range of questions was opened for discussion, and ultimately versions of what has been called throughout this work the threefold synthesis of the aesthetics of truth, feeling, and play

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were reestablished. This was partly because the philosophers to be discussed in the final chapter of this part – the Briton Frank Sibley; Richard Wollheim, who spent the first half of his career in England but the second half in the United States; and the American Stanley Cavell – were influenced as much by Wittgenstein’s exploration of psychology in Part II of his Philosophical Investigations as by his exploration of language in Part I, and partly because each of these philosophers was open to a wider range of influences than Wittgenstein alone. Sibley was influenced not only by Ryle but also by the classical figures of eighteenth-century British aesthetics such as Hume, Wollheim was influenced by Freud as much as by Wittgenstein, and Cavell, while deeply influenced by Wittgenstein, was also influenced by Austin, by Heidegger, by Emerson, and through Emerson by the idealist tradition in aesthetics beginning with Kant. So all of these figures combined the contemporary concern with the possibility of communication with more traditional conceptions of experience itself and were thus inevitably led back to some of the insights of more traditional aesthetics.

11 Wittgenstein

1. Wittgenstein and the

TRACTATUS

As were many other areas of Anglo-American philosophy, the field of aesthetics was transformed by the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), although in this case the magnitude of Wittgenstein’s influence was far out of proportion to the few words he himself devoted to the field in both the two books that were published at his own instigation and the vast body of writings published after his death. Wittgenstein’s first book, the 1919 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus1 (as it has always been known in English, although it does not bear that pretentious Latin title in German, in which it is called simply a “LogicalPhilosophical Treatise”), strongly influenced the logical positivism of the 1920s Vienna Circle, through which it in turn led several prominent British and American philosophers in the 1930s to argue that aesthetic judgments, like ethical judgments, are not verifiable judgments at all, but purely expressions of personal emotion or preference. This position, as we have already seen, did not constrain the aesthetic theorizing that continued in Britain through the 1930s and in the United States through the 1940s and even beyond in the case of such aestheticians as Langer, Beardsley, and Goodman. Wittgenstein’s second book, however, the 1953 Philosophical Investigations published after his death but largely in the form in which he intended to publish it,2 radically transformed

1

2

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, Annalen der Naturphilosophie 14 (1921), Hefte 3–4; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden with an introduction by Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922); trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961). The newest edition of this work, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, revised fourth edition, ed. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S.

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the practice of aesthetics, indeed leading some of those most influenced by Wittgenstein to bemoan “The Dreariness of Aesthetics”3 and others to ask “Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?”4 The immediate effect of the Investigations was to undermine the focus of aesthetics in the first half of the century on the phenomenon of aesthetic experience, the common denominator in cognitivist, play, and expressionist theories and their syntheses, and to redirect debate to the single question of whether there can be a definition of art that dominated so much aesthetic theory from the 1960s to the 1980s. However, we will see that the most innovative thinkers influenced by Wittgenstein, such as Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Wollheim, managed to incorporate Wittgensteinian influences into the mainstream of traditional aesthetic thought without simply damming up that stream. Wittgenstein’s great-grandfather had been the land agent of a princely German family, but the family into which Ludwig was born in 1889 was a Viennese family of tremendous wealth and culture – the great violinist Joseph Joachim was a cousin of his grandmother and Johannes Brahms gave piano lessons to her children. After a start as an itinerant violinist in New York, his father, Karl, ultimately dominated the Austro-Hungarian steel industry and had the prescience to transfer almost all his money to U.S. stocks after 1898, thus preserving the family fortune through the post–World War I inflation; his brother Paul was a famous piano soloist even after losing his right arm in the Great War; and his sisters were patrons of artists such as Gustav Klimt.5 Ludwig, the youngest of eight children and raised under a relaxed regime after two older brothers committed suicide, showed mechanical as well as musical interests and was sent to a Realschule, or technical institute, in Linz from 1903 to 1906. (Adolf Hitler was also a student there until he was expelled for poor grades in 1905). As a student his interests already ran toward the works of philosophical scientists such as Heinrich Hertz and Ludwig Boltzmann.6 He then spent two years studying mechanical engineering

3 4

5

6

Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), in addition to other, lesser changes, presents what had been called “Part II” in the three previous editions as a separate “Philosophy of Psychology – a Fragment” (pp. 182–244). John Passmore, “The Dreariness of Aesthetics,” Mind 60 (1951): 318–35. William E. Kennick, “Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?” Mind 67 (1958): 317–34. The standard account of Wittgenstein’s life is Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), from which these details are taken (see pp. 4–7). Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 26.

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at the Technische Hochschule (now Universität) in Berlin,7 after which he went to the University of Manchester in England to study aeronautical engineering. While at Manchester, he tried to design an early form of jet engine and successfully patented a propeller design,8 but he also encountered Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics (1903), which was to change his life. On completing his work at Manchester in 1911, he went to see the mathematician-philosopher Gottlob Frege in Jena, who recommended that Wittgenstein study with Russell at Cambridge.9 Wittgenstein took Frege’s advice and after an informal semester at Cambridge was admitted to Trinity College in 1912.10 He would stay there until he moved to Norway for a year of solitary philosophical work in 1913 and then enlisted in the Austrian army upon the outbreak of the war in August 1914.11 While in the army, Wittgenstein began working on what would become the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he wrote while in an artillery regiment on the Russian front and then on the Italian front, finishing it while on leave during the summer of 1918,12 although its publication was delayed by the year he spent as a prisoner of war in Italy, until August 1919.13 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 27. Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 34. Monk, Wittgenstein, pp. 36–9. Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 42. Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 112. Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 154. For more on Wittgenstein’s milieu, see Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), and Alexander Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). For a minuscule sample of the vast literature on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, see David Pears, Ludwig Wittgenstein (New York: Viking Press, 1970); P.M.S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973); Robert J. Fogelin, Wittgenstein (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); John Koethe, The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Marie McGinn, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (London: Routledge, 1997); Meredith Williams, Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning: Toward a Social Conception of Mind (London: Routledge, 1999) and Blind Obedience: Paradox and Learning in the Later Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2010); Michael N. Forster, Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Robert J. Fogelin, Taking Wittgenstein at His Word: A Textual Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). For Wittgenstein’s own aesthetics and his influence on aesthetics, see Richard Allen and Malcom Turvey, Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2001); The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London: Routledge, 2004); and Wittgenstein, Aesthetics and Philosophy ed. Peter B. Lewis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). For a collection of essays on Wittgenstein’s concept of “seeing-as,” which I will argue in Chapter 13 was important for the “second wave” of Wittgenstein’s influence on aesthetics, see William Day and Victor J. Krebs, Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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The Tractatus is a work of immense subtlety and difficulty – Wittgenstein complained that even Russell never properly understood it – but its central ideas are that the logical structure of language and of the world must mirror each other, and that whatever cannot be said within the logical structure of language cannot be said at all. Since the fundamental form of propositions in logic is indicative or descriptive, Wittgenstein held that the “sense of the world” or “value” must “lie outside the world”: “In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen; in it no value exists”;14 since ethics concerns values, he inferred that “it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.”15 And in this regard he held that “ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.”16 Now, Wittgenstein went on to say that although “there are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words,” they nevertheless “make themselves manifest ”; “they are what is mystical”;17 and one might have thought that this could provide the basis for a theory of the importance of art: Art, certainly nonverbal art, but perhaps even poetry and other forms of literature, might be thought to be just the sort of thing that presents ideas or makes them manifest without literally describing or asserting them – that is, of course, what the cognitivist approach to aesthetics had been claiming since antiquity – and in view of the close connection that Wittgenstein postulated between aesthetics and ethics, art might seem to be just the medium needed to make ethical ideas manifest without asserting propositions about them. This was not the inference that was drawn from Wittgenstein’s work, however. None of the Vienna Circle logical positivists influenced by Wittgenstein himself, notably Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and Otto Neurath, wrote anything about aesthetics at all. The Englishman Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–89), whose youthful Language, Truth, and Logic introduced logical positivism to the English-speaking world in 1936, explicitly applied the logical positivist perspective to ethics and aesthetics.18 Ayer held that only assertions verifiable by the methods of mathematics and natural science had objective meaning, and that since ethical assertions cannot be verified by such methods, they are merely “emotive,” “used 14 15 16 17 18

Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.41, p. 145. Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.42, p. 145. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.421, p. 147. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.522, p. 151; Wittgenstein’s emphasis. For discussion of Ayer’s position in aesthetics, see one of the very few works to discuss Anglo-American aesthetics after Wittgenstein as a distinctive historical movement, although only up to the date of its publication, namely, Karlheinz Lüdeking, Analytische Philosophie der Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum Verlag, 1988), pp. 148–51.

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to express feelings about certain objects but not to make any assertion about them,19 while “ethical concepts are pseudo-concepts and therefore unanalyzable.”20 Ayer held that the use of ethical concepts and the practice of making ethical assertions could be studied by scientists, namely, psychologists – “The further task of describing the different feelings that the different ethical terms are used to express, and the different reactions that they customarily provoke, is a task for the psychologist”21 – but he held that there was no place for philosophical analysis of ethical concepts or principles. And then he applied the same results to the case of aesthetics: Our conclusions about the nature of ethics apply to æsthetics also. Æsthetic terms are used in exactly the same way as ethical terms. Such æsthetic words as “beautiful” and “hideous” are employed, as ethical words are employed, not to make statements of fact, but simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain response. It follows, as in ethics, that there is no sense in attributing objective validity to æsthetic judgments, and no possibility of arguing about questions of value in æsthetics, but only about questions of fact. A scientific treatment of æsthetics would show us what in general were the causes of æsthetic feeling, why various societies produced and admired the works of art they did, why taste varies as it does within a given society, and so forth. And these are ordinary psychological or sociological questions. They have, of course, little or nothing to do with æsthetic criticism as we understand it.22

In Ayer’s view, the traditional conception of aesthetic discourse as the meaningful assertion of objective statements of value with internal standards or criteria that could be analyzed by a philosophical discipline of aesthetics was a mistake, and aesthetic discourse could only be studied, so to speak, from the outside by scientific observers, like any other form of noncognitive human behavior. In his view of ethical concepts and assertions, Ayer was followed by the American philosopher Charles Leslie Stevenson (1908–79), who also held that “ethical issues involve personal and social decisions about what is to be approved, and that these decisions, though they vitally depend upon knowledge, do not themselves constitute knowledge,” although those decisions themselves can be studied by empirical science.23 Indeed, Stevenson developed a 19

20 21 22 23

Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Gollantz, 1936), second edition (London: Gollantz, 1946), p. 108. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, p. 112. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, p. 112. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, p. 113. Stevenson, Ethics and Language, p. vii.

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much more detailed empirical science of moral language than Ayer had, introducing the famous concept of “persuasive” rather than analytical definitions. Although Stevenson did not make an explicit comparison between his approach to ethics and an approach to aesthetics in Ethics and Language, he did apply his empirical and descriptive approach to language to questions of “Interpretation and Evaluation in Aesthetics”24 and to the question “What Is a Poem?”25 Whatever Wittgenstein himself might have meant by his gnomic remarks about ethics and aesthetics in the Tractatus, he was not impressed by Ayer’s claim that there could be a psychological science about aesthetic preferences. In a brief course of four lectures on aesthetics that he gave to a handful of students in Cambridge in 1938 (although it was only published posthumously in 1967), Wittgenstein said that the idea “that aesthetics is a branch of psychology,” that “once we are more advanced, everything – all the mysteries of Art – will be understood by psychological experiments,” is “exceedingly stupid”26 and “very funny indeed.”27 Wittgenstein’s harsh judgment of the application of experimental psychology to aesthetics might be taken to refer to the experiments of such psychologists as Helmholtz and Fechner, which could only test for preferences between isolated factors such as shapes and which for that reason had already been soundly criticized by Wilhelm Dilthey and many others, but it would hardly be unnatural if in 1938 he particularly had in mind Ayer’s confident although unillustrated and unsupported assertion (Ayer made no reference to any actual psychological aesthetics such as the work of Fechner) just two years earlier. (Wittgenstein always adopted the pose of reading little by other philosophers, but it is hard to imagine that Ayer’s popular book had escaped his notice.) In view of Wittgenstein’s earlier allusion to the “mystical” in the Tractatus, one might also think that what motivated his dismissal of psychological aesthetics in the Lectures was that it failed to give any hint of the way in which works of art might make ideas manifest without asserting propositions, although this is not what Wittgenstein seems to have had in mind at this point; instead, his view seemed to be that there is something philosophical and 24

25 26

27

Charles L. Stevenson, “Interpretation and Evaluation in Aesthetics,” in Philosophical Analysis, ed. Max Black, editor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950), pp. 341–83. Charles L. Stevenson, “On ‘What Is a Poem?’” Philosophical Review 66 (1957): 329–62. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, compiled from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees, and James Taylor, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 17. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, p. 19.

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not merely psychological to be said about aesthetic judgment. But let us return to what that is after some discussion of Wittgenstein’s main published work, the Philosophical Investigations, which appeared long before the Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics even if most of the work on it must have taken place after Wittgenstein gave those lectures. After publishing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had not returned to academic philosophy, but had remained in Austria, first working as a kindergarten teacher and then spending several years on the design of a house for his wealthy sister Margarethe Stonborough (by this time Ludwig had given away most of his own money). Only in 1929 did he return to Cambridge, where G.E. Moore was able to secure him a doctoral degree on the basis of the Tractatus and eventually a professorial appointment. From then until shortly before his death, Wittgenstein lectured regularly (although once again his career was interrupted by a world war, during which he remained in Britain but worked as a hospital orderly). During this time, Wittgenstein lectured and worked on the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and what we now call philosophy of mind. His work from the 1930s is memorialized in the texts known as The Blue and Brown Books, course notes from 1933 to 1935 that were once again published only posthumously although in this case Wittgenstein had allowed them to be circulated at the time of the original courses in mimeographed copies,28 and a large manuscript, Philosophical Grammar, published only in 1974, which discussed “The Proposition, and Its Sense,” and then “Logic and Mathematics.”29 But Wittgenstein’s chief work of these years, described in a preface that he composed for it in 1945 as the “precipitate of philosophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen years,” thus from the time of his return to Cambridge in 1929, is the eponymous Philosophical Investigations. This is the work that was the chief vehicle of Wittgenstein’s influence on AngloAmerican philosophy throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and especially on aesthetics, on which the further stream of posthumous publications beginning with Zettel 30 (“notecards”) in 1967 and On Certainty 31 in 1969 28

29

30

31

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations,” Generally Known as the Blue and Brown Books, with Preface by “R.R.” (Rush Rhees) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967). Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969).

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had little impact. So let us now see what were the major ideas of the Philosophical Investigations that were so important for aesthetics.

2. The Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein’s first move in the Investigations is to repudiate the view that all language works in accordance with a single model, in particular the idea of his own Tractatus that all language works by mirroring the logical structure of reality. Instead, Wittgenstein presents the picture of language as comprising multiple “language-games.” This idea has two parts. The first is the idea that a use of language is a form of activity, what Wittgenstein subsequently calls a “form of life,” in which certain objects, marks or sounds, are used in certain ways to accomplish certain ends; a language-game is a “whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven.”32 This idea is also connected to Wittgenstein’s famous statement “For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’ – though not for all – this word can be explained in this way: The meaning of a word is its use in the language”;33 the point is that meaning does not consist in some simple relation between a linguistic item such as a word or a sentence and an object or state of affairs, but in the way that linguistic items are used by human beings in particular circumstances to effect particular goals, such as persuading another person to believe something or to do something.34 Second, by the idea of language-games Wittgenstein meant to convey that there is no single model of speech as part of an activity to achieve some goal that fits all uses of language, rather that uses of language, like games – board games, games of chance, sports, and so on – are parts of an only loosely organized whole, with overlapping common features but no necessary and sufficient conditions for memberships, features of the kind that Wittgenstein called “family resemblances.” Wittgenstein also used the images of the control handles in a locomotive or the tools in a box to make this point: 32 33 34

Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part I, §7, p. 8. Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part I, §43, p. 25. Thus Wittgenstein’s idea prepared the way for J.L. Austin’s theory of the illocutionary and perlocutionary use of language in How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1962), his William James Lectures from 1955, and Paul Grice’s theory of meaning according to which the role of language is to induce a hearer to understand that a speaker intends the hearer to understand the speaker to believe something, and to form his own belief accordingly; this was the view that Grice developed in his own William James Lectures of 1967, “Logic and Conversation,” in his Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), Part I.

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These, like various uses of language, may all look “more or less alike” at a certain level of superficiality, but they work in different ways to bring about different results.35 Wittgenstein draws the two points together in one passage where he first says that “the word ‘language-game’ is used here to emphasize the fact the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life”; then asks us to “consider the variety of languagegames in the following examples, and in others” and goes on to give a list of such activities as “Giving orders, and acting on them – Describing an object by its appearance, or by its measurements – Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) – . . . . Making up a story; and reading one – Acting in a play,” and more; and then contrasts this model of language as a loosely connected group of activities to his own earlier theory by stating that “it is interesting to compare the diversity of the tools of language and of the ways they are used, the diversity of kinds of words and sentences, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (This includes the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)”36 This view of language-games as having “no one thing in common in virtue of which we use the same word for all – but . . . many different kinds of affinity between them”37 was to be tremendously influential in the debate about the possibility of a definition of art that was to take place in the decades following the publication of the Investigations, indeed influential even on philosophers who were not otherwise deeply influenced by Wittgenstein, such as Nelson Goodman, as we previously saw.38 A second theme that was to be influential was (what was at least perceived by many readers as) an attack upon the idea of inner experience, a fortiori inner experience that could be the object of description, analysis, or explanation in a discipline such as aesthetics. In the course of a central discussion extending from §142 to §325, or for more than fifty pages, Wittgenstein argues that understanding, for example, understanding the meaning of a word or the correct application of a mathematical rule, is not a matter of being in a certain state of mind or having a certain image or idea of meaning before the mind, but of acting in a certain way, namely, speaking, writing, asserting, or denying as part of a practice of so doing shared among an appropriate group.39 “That’s why ‘following 35 36 37 38

39

Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part I, §§12 and 14, p. 10. Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part I, §23, p. 15. Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part I, §65, p. 35. See Goodman, Languages of Art, ch. 6, section V, “Symptoms of the Aesthetic,” pp. 252–5. For a clear account of Wittgenstein’s conception of rule following, see Fogelin, Taking Wittgenstein at His Word.

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a rule’ is a practice,”40 and why “what we call ‘following a rule’” is “not something that it would be possible for only one person, once in a lifetime, to do”;41 this “rule-following” argument42 is part of the larger argument that also includes what would come to be called Wittgenstein’s “private language” argument, the larger argument that having a language is just not the kind of thing one person can do, because a language is a shared system of practices, with shared standards of correctness that can be appealed to for the justification of moves made within that language but themselves have no justification except that they are part of a shared practice. This is the context for Wittgenstein’s famous remark “Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do”43 – the point is actually that I reach a certain point where all I can say is that this is what we do, or that this is what I do because this is what we do. But my immediate point is that it is in the course of this long discussion that Wittgenstein says such things as “Just for once, don’t think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all. . . . Instead, ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we say ‘Now I know how to go on’? . . . In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes) which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a process.”44 Or even more famously, Well, everyone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! – Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle.” No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. . . . The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty.45

Wittgenstein’s argument is that something private or internal to a speaker cannot determine the meaning of concepts or rules, because those are standards for the correctness of a practice; thus they must be social and interpersonally accessible. For purposes of setting standards for a practice, anything entirely internal would be irrelevant. Mental events 40 41 42

43 44 45

Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part I, §202, p. 87. Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part I, §199, p. 87. See Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, ed. Steven Holtzmann and Christopher Leich (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), and Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part I, §217, p. 91. Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part I, §154, pp. 66–7. Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part I, §293, p. 106.

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or processes thus cannot constitute meaning. Now, as our penultimate quotation made clear, Wittgenstein did not actually deny that there are mental processes or experiential states associated with understanding; he even continued that passage by allowing that “a pain’s increasing or decreasing, listening to a tune or a sentence,” might be “mental processes.”46 But he did mean to imply that such mental processes could not be meaningful or have the kind of meaning that permits of linguistic analysis of its content as opposed to psychological explanation of its occurrence. And since, as we have previously seen, he was hostile to the project of psychological aesthetics, he could not have meant his allowance that, for example, listening to a tune is a mental process to be a foundation for a theory of aesthetic experience. And in any case, quite apart from the complexity of its context, Wittgenstein’s remark that there might not even be a beetle in everyone’s box was widely taken as an attack on the very idea of experience as a meaningful subject for philosophical investigation, as opposed to external, observable behavior. Wittgenstein’s remarks were thus widely taken to undermine the entire modern conception of the discipline of aesthetics as the search for a theory of aesthetic experience. Wittgenstein’s broader discussion of rule-following as a matter of conforming to social practices for which at some point no further justifications and thus no further rules can be given was also widely used as a model for judgments of taste. In this case, it was at least eventually recognized that Wittgenstein’s approach did not require the rejection of all previous aesthetic theory, but that it had been anticipated, at least for the case of judgments of taste, by traditional aesthetics, especially in the persons of Hume and Kant. Wittgenstein’s account of rule-following can thus be given at least some credit for the tremendous revival of interest in the aesthetics of Hume and Kant among scholars starting in the 1970s and continuing to the present. We will return to that point later. For now, I want to emphasize a third issue on which the Investigations was deeply influential, Wittgenstein’s conception of “seeing as.” In Part II of the Investigations, now labeled a “fragment” on “philosophy of psychology,” Wittgenstein launched a discussion of the word “see,”47 or, more precisely, of seeing, in particular of seeing “aspects.” Using the example of a line drawing, taken from the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow 46 47

Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part I, §154, p. 67. Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part II, section xi, §111, p. 203.

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(1863–1944),48 that can be seen as a crude drawing of the head of either a duck or a rabbit, Wittgenstein argued that one or the other aspect of this figure could “light up,”49 and that what this consists in is the picture being thought of in a certain way as it is seen. Wittgenstein’s point was simply that there can be no separation in such an experience between a purely visual aspect and a purely conceptual or intellectual aspect; rather, since the exclamation [“A rabbit!” or “A duck!”] is the description of a perception, one can also call it the expression of thought. – Someone who looks at an object need not think of it; but whoever has the visual experience expressed by the exclamation is also thinking of what he sees. And that’s why the lighting up of an aspect seems half visual experience, half thought.50

Here Wittgenstein’s point was clearly not to deny that there is such a thing as an inner experience in seeing or other perception, but only to deny a rigid separation between that experience and thought – and thus, given the social nature of classification, also to deny a rigid separation between the private and the public. Wittgenstein’s conception of seeing aspects as part perception, part thought was to be deeply influential on a number of aestheticians who did recognize the viability of the conception of aesthetic experience and attempted to characterize it, such as Richard Wollheim and Roger Scruton, and in this case Wittgenstein’s influence was not completely to undermine a traditional approach to aesthetics, but rather to license a return to the earlier tradition of theorizing about expression and “embodied meaning” that would otherwise have been barred by the antitheoretical implications drawn from other aspects of his work.

3. The Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics Let us now turn briefly to Wittgenstein’s own comments about aesthetics in the Lectures and Conversations. The four lectures on aesthetics in this volume were given to a small group of students at Cambridge in 1938, whose notes formed the basis for the posthumous publication. The notes begin with the bold statement “The subject (Aesthetics) is very big and entirely 48 49 50

J. Jastrow, Fact and Fable in Psychology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900). Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part II, section xi, §118, p. 204. Wittgenstein, Investigations, Part II, section xi, §§139–40, p. 207.

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misunderstood as far as I can see.”51 Thus Wittgenstein dispatches several centuries of intensive theorizing, very little of which, apart perhaps from the work of Schopenhauer, he may ever have read.52 The reason for Wittgenstein’s skepticism about the entire discipline seems to be his assumption that aesthetics is centrally focused on the beautiful, either an attempted analysis of the concept or an attempted explanation of the phenomenon, to which his response is that “in real life, when aesthetic judgements are made, aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful,’ ‘fine,’ etc., play hardly any role at all.”53 Wittgenstein’s assumption was implausible: As we have seen, from the outset of its modern history the discipline of aesthetics always recognized aesthetic qualities other than the beautiful, such as the sublime, and in particular British aesthetics in the 1920s and 1930s, which might have been supposed to provide the context for Wittgenstein’s remarks, was generally focused on the concept of expression rather than beauty.54 Nevertheless, the points that Wittgenstein goes on to make were to prove influential. After introducing the analogy of language to a variety of different tools that he would later use in the Investigations – I have often compared language to a tool chest, containing a hammer, chisel, matches, nails, screws, glue. It is not . . . chance that all these things have been put together – but there are important differences between the different tools – they are used in a family of ways – though nothing could be more different than glue and a chisel. There is constant surprise at the new tricks language plays on us when we get into a new field.55 –

Wittgenstein states that “words such as ‘lovely’ are first used as interjections”;56 that is, global terms of praise such as “lovely” and “beautiful” are just used to express approbation – as the emotivists such as Ayer and Stevenson held – but also to prepare the way to drawing the attention of an auditor or audience to particular parts or aspects of works of art. The crucial point, for Wittgenstein, is that such general expressions of approbation are typically followed by further remarks that focus on 51 52

53 54

55 56

Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §1, p. 1. In general, Wittgenstein is thought to have read little of the history of philosophy. The influence of Schopenhauer on his conception of the mystical and that which lies outside the bounds of what can be said, however, is widely attested; see, for example, Monk, Wittgenstein, pp. 18–19. Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §8, p. 3. To be sure, Croce had identified these two concepts, but few had accepted this identification. Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §4, p. 1. Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §9, p. 3.

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particular features of objects: “You say: ‘Look at this transition,’ or ‘The passage here is incoherent.’ Or you say, in a poetical criticism, ‘His use of images is precise.’ The words you use are more akin to ‘right’ and ‘correct’ (as these words are used in ordinary speech) than to ‘beautiful’ and ‘lovely.’”57 Wittgenstein then continues that the use of words like “right” and “correct” is not completely rule driven; these terms are rather expressions of educated preferences that others can come to share with due attention to the objects. Wittgenstein does not deny that there are any rules for the creation or appreciation of art at all; he admits that If I hadn’t learned the rules, I wouldn’t be able to make the aesthetic judgement. In learning the rules you get a more and more refined judgement. Learning the rules actually changes your judgement. (Although if you haven’t learnt Harmony and haven’t a good ear, you may nevertheless detect any disharmony in a sequence of chords.)58

His point is rather that even though such rules may be able to be formulated, their own force is ultimately grounded only in the preferences and selections of people who have been educated and become refined in a particular practice, for which no further reason can be given. His treatment of the role of rules in aesthetic judgment is thus part and parcel of his more general treatment of rule following, in which, as we saw, he argued that only social practice provides the foundation for the interpretation of rules. Wittgenstein illustrates his conception of aesthetic judgment by comparing it to judgments of fashion. What does a person who knows a good suit say when trying on a suit at the tailor’s? “That’s the right length,” “That’s too short,” “That’s too narrow.” Words of approval play no rôle, although he will look pleased when the coat suits him. Instead of “That’s too short” I might say “Look!” or instead of “Right” I might say “Leave it as it is.” A good cutter may not use any words at all, but just make a chalk mark and later alter it. How do I show my approval of a suit? Chiefly by wearing it often, liking it when it is seen, etc.59 You should regard the rules laid down for the measurement of a coat as an expression of what certain people want.60

Wittgenstein is making several points about aesthetic judgment here. As the last sentence suggests, aesthetic judgments are ultimately grounded 57 58 59 60

Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §8, p. 3. Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §15, p. 5. Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §13, p. 5. Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §16, p. 5.

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in the preferences of certain groups of people, for which no further explanation or justification can be given. Second, aesthetic discourse does not take the form of reason giving or making inferences from rules, even when rules of thumb for successful work in a medium or genre can be formulated, but rather serves to focus attention on features of objects that may then be found satisfying or illuminating or not, as the case may be. This view would not have been alien to Hume or Kant, and as we saw in the previous part, something similar was also held by more recent aestheticians such as Arnold Isenberg, who argued for it well before these lectures of Wittgenstein became known. But the prestige of Wittgenstein and his incorporation of this view of aesthetic judgment into his more general model of rule following would give it great influence in the years following the publication of his lectures. Wittgenstein also infers from his characterization of aesthetic judgments as ultimately simply the expressions of the preferences and actions (of creation and selection) of groups of persons that such judgments are relative, that is, valid at particular places and times but not for all times and places. He states the premise of this inference at the end of his first lecture: In order to get clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living. We think we have to talk about aesthetic judgments like “This is beautiful,” but we find that if we have to talk about aesthetic judgments we don’t find these words at all, but a word used something like a gesture, accompanying a complicated activity,61

or “The judgment is a gesture accompanying a vast structure of actions not expressed by one judgment.”62 This sums up what Wittgenstein had argued throughout the lectures but provides the basis for a specifically historical conception of aesthetic judgment: The words we call expressions of aesthetic judgments play a very complicated rôle, but a very definite rôle, in what we call a culture of a period. To describe their use or to describe what we mean by a cultured taste, you have to describe a culture. What we now call a cultured taste perhaps didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. An entirely different game is played in different ages.63 What belongs to a language game is a whole culture. In describing musical taste you have to describe whether children give concerts, whether women 61 62

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Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §35, p. 11. Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §35 note 2, p. 11. My change from the English to the American spelling of “judgment” follows the published text. Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §25, p. 8.

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do or whether men only give them, etc., etc. In aristocratic circles in Vienna people had [such and such] a taste, then it came into bourgeois circles and women joined choirs, etc. This is an example of tradition in taste.64 Suppose Lewy65 has what is called a cultured taste in painting. This is something entirely different to what was called a cultured taste in the fifteenth century. An entirely different game was played. He does something entirely different with it to what a man did then.66

Although we all know that paintings made in fifteenth-century Italy or France look very different from those that were made in Britain in the 1930s, and that many paintings made in the former place and time had a devotional or liturgical role that few from the latter place and time had, Wittgenstein makes no attempt to prove his broad claim that what a twentieth-century man does with paintings is “entirely different” from what a fifteenth-century man would have done with them. But of course he does not have to prove anything quite as broad as that; all that follows from his underlying account of the social basis of aesthetic preferences and practices is that they may vary from culture to culture. Thus assertions of universal validity for one’s own aesthetic preferences or those of one’s own culture will typically be misguided, even though we have a tendency to ascribe such validity to our own preferences – a point subtly suggested by the bracketed phrase in the second paragraph just quoted (the brackets are in the text), which hints at the way people often confuse “such and such a taste,” that is, the taste of their own culture, with good taste tout court. The cultural relativism of aesthetic preferences and judgments that Wittgenstein makes explicit toward the end of his first lecture might be a reason for his rejection of the idea of a psychological science of aesthetics in the second and third lectures, although Wittgenstein does not make this inference explicit. Instead, his main argument in these lectures is that an experimental science such as psychology looks for causal connections, but that in making aesthetic judgments we are not making causal assertions, not talking about the causes or “mechanisms” of our responses,67 but are instead simply pointing to the aspects of objects we 64 65

66 67

Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §26, p. 8. Casimir Lewy (1919–91), one of the students present at the lectures, who subsequently earned his Ph.D. under G.E. Moore and then taught at the University of Liverpool before returning to Cambridge as a Fellow of Trinity College. He did not go on to publish in aesthetics, or indeed to publish very much at all, although his own students included such subsequently prominent philosophers as Ian Hacking and Simon Blackburn. Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture I, §29, p. 9. See Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture II, §§11–25, pp. 13–15.

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like or dislike so that others may see whether they share our preferences or not – once again he uses the comparison with judgments about tailoring.68 In the third lecture, Wittgenstein supports this approach by appealing to the difference between causes and motives, or causes and reasons, another deeply influential distinction that he emphasized in his more general work. He writes: The sort of explanation one is looking for when one is puzzled by an aesthetic impression is not a causal explanation, not one corroborated by experience or by statistics as to how people react. . . . This is not what one means or what one is driving at by an investigation into aesthetics.69 This is connected with the difference between cause and motive. In a lawcourt you are asked the motive of your action and you are supposed to know it. Unless you lie you are supposed to be able to tell the motive of your action. You are not supposed to know the laws by which your body and mind are governed.70

Wittgenstein assumes that a psychological science of aesthetics would be possible only if individuals making causal judgments themselves made them in a scientific way, performing inductions on their own experience and making causal judgments about the relations between objects and their preferences on the basis of those inductions. This may well be an implausible assumption; science may be able to study successfully the nonscientific behavior of people. But Wittgenstein’s suspicion of a psychological approach to aesthetics might still be supported by his analysis of the limited role of rules in aesthetic judgment and the historically relative character of aesthetic preferences. In any case, both of those positions were to be deeply influential in aesthetics in the years following the publication of the Philosophical Investigations and then the Lectures and Conversations.

68 69 70

Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture II, §§5, 6, 8, pp. 12–13. Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture III, §11, p. 21. Wittgenstein, Lectures, Lecture III, §12, p. 21.

12 The First Wave

Wittgenstein’s Investigations and then the Lectures had an immediate impact in the United States, Britain, and Commonwealth countries under British intellectual influence such as New Zealand; in the British sphere, the way for the influence of Wittgenstein’s published works had already been prepared by his personal teaching and by the emergence of the “ordinary language” movement at Oxford, led by such figures as Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin, while in the United States it had also been prepared by Americans who had studied with Wittgenstein in Cambridge, such as Norman Malcolm (1911–94) at Cornell. Here Wittgenstein’s influence will be presented as occurring in three stages. In the first stage, Wittgenstein’s replacement of definitions with “family resemblances,” his rejection of broad terms of aesthetic evaluation such as “beautiful” in favor of more particular predicates or judgments of rightness not using special aesthetic terms at all, and his apparent insistence that there can be no public discourse about private experiences led to a broad attack upon traditional aesthetic theories. Wittgenstein’s own critiques of traditional aesthetic theorizing also coincided with the increasing impact of avant-garde twentieth-century art on professional philosophers. This first stage of Wittgensteinianism in aesthetics can be regarded as having culminated in the approaches to the definition of art taken by Arthur Danto in his seminal paper “The Artworld”1 of 1964 and his 1981 book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace2 and by George Dickie in his articles from the 1960s and his 1974 book Art and

1 2

Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–84. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).

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the Aesthetic.3 Wittgenstein’s conception of “seeing as” in the second part of the Philosophical Investigations may be regarded as having stimulated a second, more positive stage of Wittgensteinianism in aesthetics, focused on the role of imagination in aesthetic creation and experience, exemplified by the work of Richard Wollheim, commencing with his Art and Its Objects4 in 1968 and continuing throughout his later books on mind and emotion,5 and Roger Scruton, particularly in his first book, Art and Imagination,6 from 1974. Finally, the work of Stanley Cavell, from the essays collected in Must We Mean What We Say?7 in 1969, through his three books on film beginning with The World Viewed in 1971;8 his philosophical magnum opus The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy9 of 1979; and finally to his synthesis of his lifelong approach to both philosophy and film in Cities of Words10 in 2004, demonstrates the influence of Wittgenstein not on a concept of art or aesthetic experience but rather on a conception of human life, especially human knowledge of self and others but also a conception of human freedom, as expressed in art as well as in philosophy.

1. From Passmore to Mandelbaum The present chapter will recount the first stage of Wittgenstein’s influence. We may begin with the 1951 paper “The Dreariness of Aesthetics”

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George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974). Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); second edition with six supplementary essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Richard Wollheim, On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures (London: Allen Lane, 1973); The Thread of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); The Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and On the Emotions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (London: Methuen, 1974). Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969); updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking Press, 1971); enlarged edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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by John A. Passmore (1914–2004),11 an Australian who studied at Sydney and the University of London and taught at the University of Otago in New Zealand (where he was when this article was published) before taking up a position at the Australian National University. Passmore wrote books on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British philosophers Ralph Cudworth, David Hume, and Joseph Priestly; is best remembered for his monumental history of philosophy from John Stuart Mill to the 1950s, A Hundred Years of Philosophy;12 but also wrote a later book on aesthetics, Serious Art.13 Passmore’s article began as a response to an article by John Wisdom (1904–93), a member of Wittgenstein’s circle in Cambridge, who had speculated on the reasons for the supposed dullness of aesthetics in a 1948 symposium.14 Passmore agreed with Wisdom that much of traditional aesthetics was dull, primarily because “often enough, the aesthetician wants to retain ‘mystery,’ rather than to dispel it, to conceal his subject rather than to reveal it,” thus wants to use aesthetics as “a spring-board to transcendental metaphysics,”15 a complaint that as we have seen had been voiced decades earlier by such aestheticians as Wilhelm Dilthey and George Santayana. In particular, Passmore asserted, “Woolliness of this sort seems to have a natural habitat in certain fields: in education, in sociology, in metaphysics, as well as in aesthetics,” and typically arises “out of the attempt to impose a spurious unity on things, the spuriousness being reflected in the emptiness of the formulae in which that unity is described.”16 In more detail, Passmore argued against E.F. Carritt that there cannot be an informative account of “aesthetic experience” without an informative account of “aesthetic properties,”17 and then argued that there is no informative account of aesthetic properties that can be found in all arts18 – “beauty” is not such a property;19 nor is Croce’s conception of expression of human feeling.20 To be sure, in the antitheoretical spirit of first-wave Wittgensteinianism,

11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

J.A. Passmore, “The Dreariness of Aesthetics,” Mind, New Series 60 (1951): 318–35. John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1957). John Passmore, Serious Art (London: Duckworth, and LaSalle: Open Court, 1991). D.M. Mackinnon, H.A. Hodges, and John Wisdom, “Things and Persons,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XXII (1948): 179–215; Wisdom’s contribution is at pp. 202–15. Passmore, “Dreariness of Aesthetics,” p. 324. Passmore, “Dreariness of Aesthetics,” p. 325. Passmore, “Dreariness of Aesthetics,” pp. 329–30. Passmore, “Dreariness of Aesthetics,” pp. 334–5. Passmore, “Dreariness of Aesthetics,” p. 331. Passmore, “Dreariness of Aesthetics,” pp. 333–4.

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Passmore conceded that “there is no way of proving that good works of art have no distinctive properties in common (properties, that is, which are not to be found also in bad works of art or in whatever is well done, whether a work of art or not)”;21 one could only look at all the attempts to specify such properties that had been made and observe their failure. Such a procedure was nevertheless sufficient to persuade Passmore that “the dullness of aesthetics arises from the attempt to construct a subject where there isn’t one”22 and to call instead for “an intensive special study of the separate arts, carried out with no undue respect for anyone’s ‘aesthetic experiences,’ but much respect for real differences between the works of art themselves. In this sense – art for art’s sake!”;23 that is, Passmore argued that there is no such thing as philosophical aesthetics, only the study of particular arts. But he did not explain whether there was anything distinctively philosophical about such studies, that is, whether they could or should be carried on by professional philosophers at all, or only by art historians and critics, musicologists, and so on. It was thus not clear whether his argument was a brief for the reform of philosophical aesthetics or for its abolition altogether. But what was clear was Passmore’s hostility to the idea of aesthetic experience and to any possibility for generalization about aesthetic properties or art as a single concept. A more refined account of the character of attempts at generalization in aesthetic theory was offered two years later by the American artist as well as philosopher Paul Ziff (1920–2003), who received both a B.F.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell (where the Wittgensteinian Norman Malcolm set the tone for the department), in his article “The Task of Defining a Work of Art.”24 Ziff takes the task of defining the notion of a work of art as “one of the foremost problems of aesthetics.”25 He says that “there are and can be no clear-cut cases of works of art in quite the same sense as there can be such clear-cut cases of tables, chairs, and so forth,” because there are so many uses of the phrase “work of art” while there are far fewer uses of the latter sorts of phrases, and especially because the uses of “work of art” include “laudatory or eulogistic” ones as well as purely descriptive ones.26 21 22 23 24

25 26

Passmore, “Dreariness of Aesthetics,” p. 334. Passmore, “Dreariness of Aesthetics,” p. 331. Passmore, “Dreariness of Aesthetics,” p. 335. Paul Ziff, “The Task of Defining a Work of Art,” Philosophical Review 62 (1953): 58–78. Ziff’s contribution is discussed in Lüdeking, Analytische Philosophie der Kunst, pp. 67–9. Ziff, “Defining a Work of Art,” p. 58. Ziff, “Task of Defining,” p. 59.

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Nevertheless, he supposes that there will be widespread agreement that a specific object, such as Nicolas Poussin’s painting The Rape of the Sabine Women,27 is a work of art, and that there are a variety of indisputable things that can be said about it, such as that “the painter intended it to be displayed in a place where it could be looked at and appreciated, where it could be contemplated and admired,”28 that will generally be accepted as intimately connected with its status as a work of art, and features of the object itself, such as its “expressive, significant, and symbolic aspects,” that will be the object of “contemplating, studying, and observing this Poussin painting.”29 He then maintains that such properties will constitute a set of sufficient conditions but not necessary and sufficient conditions for something’s being a work of art,30 and further that objects that have properties similar to the properties of characteristic or undisputed cases of works of art will also count as works of art, although “no rule can be given to determine what is or is not a sufficient degree of similarity to warrant such a claim.”31 Further, Ziff also denies that there is a common set of properties that defines a general concept of work of art applicable to works in different media, even with the caveat that any such properties would be indeterminate in the way just stated – “Finally, neither a poem, nor a novel, nor a musical composition can be said to be a work of art in the same sense of the phrase in which a painting or a statue or a vase can be said to be a work of art”32 – even though one might have thought that such an abstract property as having been intended to be contemplated and admired might be just the sort of property that could apply across otherwise deep differences among media. Ziff’s view is thus that there can be clear-cut cases of poems, novels, paintings, and so on, and thus sets of characteristics sufficient to define what it is to be a poem, a novel, or a painting, but no set of characteristics common to all works of art and thus sufficient to define what it is to be a work of art in general. Ziff supposes that critics will use the general phrase “work of art” in their discussions and disputes, but that they will in fact be using it in a sense relativized to the particular medium they are discussing (painting, novels, and so on), not in some 27

28 29 30 31 32

There is a 1634–5 version of this painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a 1637–8 version at the Louvre. Ziff, “Task of Defining,” p. 60. Ziff, “Task of Defining,” p. 61. Ziff, “Task of Defining,” pp. 62–4. Ziff, “Task of Defining,” p. 65. Ziff, “Task of Defining,” p. 66.

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completely general sense. In all of this, Ziff is making Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblances” more precise. Further, Ziff supposes that uses of the phrase “work of art” are relativized to social and historical contexts as well as to media, and that what is expected of works of art (in particular media) inevitably varies over time and place: “The social consequences and implications of something’s being considered a work of art have varied in time, and no doubt they will continue to do so.”33 And this means that when critics dispute whether some innovative object is really a work of art at all, as they often do, they are really arguing over whether a changed conception of the social role and function of some particular kind of work of art ought to be accepted, not over the properties of the object itself. This is inevitable, because “art neither repeats itself nor stands still; it cannot if it is to remain art.” Thus, Ziff infers, when a definition of a work of art is offered, typically in the context of a dispute about some new kind of work in a particular medium, “an aesthetician is describing one, perhaps new, use of the phrase ‘work of art,’ which he either implicitly or explicitly claims to be the most reasonable use of the phrase in the light of the characteristic social consequences and implications of something’s being considered a work of art, and on the basis of what the functions, purposes, and aims are or ought to be in our society,”34 that is, in our society now. So Ziff’s conclusion is that even though there can be no conclusive definition of the concept of a work of art valid for all media, all places, and all times, the practice of offering general definitions of art is not idle; such definitions are ways of staking out positions in debates over whether or not new developments in artistic practices, functions, and roles are reasonable or valuable. This conception of the role of general definitions of art was seconded by three prominent papers published between 1956 and 1958, none of whose authors cited Ziff’s papers but two of whom explicitly acknowledged the influence of Wittgenstein and the third of whom appealed to a “view of the function and method of philosophy . . . now so well known, and so widely accepted in England to-day, that here . . . only the briefest outline is necessary,” the view that the meaning of “some highly abstract words (or formulae or concepts) is to be ‘shown’ or ‘displayed’ simply by a consideration of how it and its derivatives are used in a range of familiar contexts . . . the answer is always already there in the words as properly 33 34

Ziff, “Task of Defining,” p. 72. Ziff, “Task of Defining,” p. 77.

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used,”35 a description that unmistakably amalgamates Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning as use with the practices of Oxford ordinary language philosophy. These papers were “Art as an Essentially Contested Concept” by the British philosopher Walter Bryce Gallie (1912–98), professor of logic and metaphysics at Queen’s College, Belfast, when he published this paper, and later professor of political science at Cambridge; “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics”36 by the American Morris Weitz (1916–81), professor of philosophy successively at Vassar College, the Ohio State University, and Brandeis University; and then “Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?”37 by William E. Kennick (1923–2009), longtime professor of philosophy at Amherst College. Gallie’s paper on art as an essentially contested concept was an application of a more general approach to “Essentially Contested Concepts” that he took in a paper of that name also published in 1956;38 among his other works were papers on the philosophy of history, culminating in his book Philosophy and Historical Understanding39 in 1964, and works on international relations, war, and nuclear deterrence, which explain his move from a chair in philosophy to one in political science.40 Gallie begins his article with a discussion of papers by Margaret Macdonald, Stuart Hampshire, John Passmore, and others including Gallie himself collected in William Elton’s 1954 anthology Aesthetics and Language,41 a manifesto of the Wittgensteinian movement in aesthetics. Gallie reports that “Mr. Elton’s writers are at one in rejecting that kind of definition or over-all ‘theory’ of art which, traditionally, philosophical aestheticians have sought to provide,”42 and astutely observes that this apparently novel position actually reiterates and reinforces “the old truth that, 35

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W.B. Gallie, “Art as an Essentially Contested Concept,” Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1956): 97–114, at p. 98. Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15 (1956): 27–35. W.E. Kennick, “Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?” Mind, New Series 62 (1958): 317–34, reprinted in Cyril Barrett, S.J., Collected Papers on Aesthetics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), pp. 1–21. W.B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956): 167–98. W.B. Gallie, Philosophy and Historical Understanding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964). W.B. Gallie, Philosophers of Peace and War: Kant, Clausewitz, Marx, Engels and Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); How to Think about Nuclear Weapons (Swansea: University College of Swansea, 1983); Understanding War: An Essay on the Nuclear Age (London: Routledge, 1991). Aesthetics and Language ed., William Elton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954). Gallie, “Art,” p. 98.

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since every work of art is prized for its own unique self, there can be no general rules or recipes for the creation and appreciation of works of art.”43 He actually criticizes the claim “that the word ‘art’ expresses at most a fact of family resemblance,” which he had himself accepted in his own contribution to the Elton volume,44 on the ground that “until it is worked out in detail I cannot see that it provides any grounds for rejecting the view that certain highly general features may in conjunction be found necessary and peculiar to the . . . object[s] or performance[s] that are commonly regarded as works of art.”45 But his central thesis in the paper, which he also develops by way of a criticism of the 1955 book Aesthetics and Criticism46 by Harold Osborne (1905–87), is that “the four or five most important classic theories or definitions of art” should be regarded “as highly abstract – and often quite implausibly over-generalized – attempts to make certain current preferences in criticism conform to the framework of particular philosophical systems.”47 This might seem entirely negative, claiming that such definitions have nothing to recommend them to anybody except those who are already committed to some grand metaphysical scheme and want to incorporate art into it, akin to the criticisms of metaphysical definitions of art by Dilthey, Santayana, or Passmore. But Gallie’s point, like Ziff’s, is that even though each such metaphysical definition, “in respect of its exclusive claims to define or clarify the concept of Art, is utterly unacceptable,” nevertheless “each in its own highly abstract way gave expression to powerful and justifiable movements in the preceding (or in [e.g.] Tolstoy’s case the succeeding) history of the Arts and of art-criticism.”48 In other words, although such definitions taken out of context are unsustainable, in the historical contexts within which they are actually offered they are intelligible and even useful moves in debates over innovations in art. And Gallie’s claim is then “that this situation should neither surprise nor shock us; that, the arts being the kinds of activity that they are – ever expanding, ever reviving and advancing values inherited from a long and complex tradition – the character which I have ascribed to the concept of art is exactly

43 44

45 46

47 48

Gallie, “Art,” p. 99. W.B. Gallie, “The Function of Philosophical Aesthetics,” in Aesthetics and Language, pp. 13–35. Gallie, “Art,” p. 101. Harold Osborne, Aesthetics and Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955). Lüdeking devotes a chapter to Osborne in Analytische Philosophie der Kunst, pp. 11–49. Gallie, “Art,” p. 110. Gallie, “Art,” p. 112.

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what we should expect.”49 Because it is the nature of art always to change and develop to reflect or to promote changing social circumstances, it is inevitable that the concept of it should also always be changing, and since the value of changes in art itself will inevitably be contested, so will the concept of it: This is what Gallie means by claiming that the concept of art is essentially contested. One could well argue that it is either the changing nature of the knowledge conveyed by art or the intrinsically free play of the imagination in art, or both, that underlie the ever changing and contested nature of art and thus the essentially contested character of the concept of art, thereby assimilating Gallie’s position to two of the traditional, pre-Wittgensteinian approaches to art that we have been considering throughout this work, but Gallie’s own concession to traditional aesthetics does not go quite this far. Morris Weitz’s famous account of the concept of art as an “open concept” that resists definition for that reason is based on the same underlying assumption that art is essentially creative, which one might have thought could furnish at least part of a normal definition of it.50 Weitz argues that each of the “more famous extant aesthetic theories,” among which he numbers Bell and Fry’s “Formalism,” Tolstoy’s “Emotionalism,” Croce’s “Intuitionism,” the “Voluntarism” he assigns to DeWitt Parker, and “Organicism,” which he had himself defended six years earlier in his own Philosophy of the Arts,51 “purports to be a complete statement about the defining features of art and yet each of them leaves out something which the others take to be central.”52 This might not seem obviously true of Weitz’s own early organicism, which states that “every work of art . . . is an organic complex, presented in a sensuous medium, which complex is composed of elements, their expressive characteristics and the relations obtaining among them,”53 where an organic complex in turn is one in which “every element, every characteristic, every relation, even that of mere serial order, makes a difference to every other.”54 Weitz had argued that the virtue of this definition is that it makes it clear that form and matter are inseparably intertwined in art,55 and that the subject

49 50

51 52 53 54 55

Gallie, “Art,” p. 114. Weitz is discussed in Lüdeking, Analytische Philosophie der Kunst, pp. 54–67, 69–81, and Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 4–22. Morris Weitz, Philosophy of the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950). Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” pp. 28–30. Weitz, Philosophy of the Arts, p. 44. Weitz, Philosophy of the Arts, p. 52. Weitz, Philosophy of the Arts, p. 48.

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of art in turn “includes the spiritual and the dramatic values of the work of art,”56 and these claims might seem to mean that the organicist theory of art differs from other theories precisely in taking them all up in its own embrace, thus leaving out nothing that any other theory had regarded as central. And indeed Weitz’s subsequent objection to his own organicist theory is actually that it is too general, applying “to any causal unity in the natural world as well as to art.”57 That criticism might be disputed, on one hand, because there seem to be unities in nonorganic nature (e.g., rocks) that do not satisfy the organicist definition, and, on the other hand, because the inclusion of “expressive characteristics” and “spiritual and dramatic values” among artistic organic unities might be enough to differentiate them from other kinds of organic unities, such as at least most organisms in the ordinary sense. But whether Weitz’s criticism of his own previous theory is justified or not, his point in the “Role of Theory” does not depend upon the simple claim that it is incomplete. He says rather: But all these criticisms of traditional aesthetic theories – that they are circular, incomplete, untestable, pseudo-factual, disguised proposals to change the meanings of concepts – have been made before. My intention is to go beyond these to make a much more fundamental criticism, namely, that aesthetic theory is a logically vain attempt to define what cannot be defined, to state the necessary and sufficient properties, to conceive the concept of art as closed when its very use reveals and demands its openness.58

Weitz’s choice of the word “use” in this quotation reveals the Wittgensteinian provenance of the argument he is about to make, and he goes on to make Wittgenstein’s influence explicit. “If I may paraphrase Wittgenstein,” he says, “we must not ask, What is the nature of any philosophical x?, or even, according to the semanticist, What does ‘x’ mean? . . . but rather, What is the use or employment of ‘x’? What does ‘x’ do in the language?” Thus, he claims, “in aesthetics, our first problem is the elucidation of the actual employment of the concept of art . . . including a description of the conditions under which we correctly use it.” He then acknowledges that “my model in this type of logical description or philosophy derives from Wittgenstein” and specifically appeals to Wittgenstein’s argument that a concept like that of “games” can be explicated only by “‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and 56 57 58

Weitz, Philosophy of the Arts, p. 50. Weitz, “Role of Theory,” p. 29. Weitz, “Role of Theory,” p. 30.

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crisscrossing,’ such that we can say of games that they form a family with family resemblances and no common trait.”59 But instead of just offering the same sort of phenomenological description of different arts and works of art that Wittgenstein had offered of some games, Weitz offers an explanation of the fact that the resemblances among arts and works of art are only family resemblances that also seems to make tacit reference to the analysis that Ziff had offered three years earlier: The problem of the nature of art is like that of the nature of games, at least in these respects: If we actually look and see what it is that we call “art,” we will find no common properties – only strands of similarities. . . . But the basic resemblance between these concepts is their open texture. In elucidating them, certain (paradigm) cases can be given, about which there can be no question as to their being correctly described as “art” or “game,” but no exhaustive set of cases can be given. I can list some cases and some conditions under which I can apply correctly the concept of art but I cannot list all of them, for the all-important reason that unforeseeable or novel conditions are always forthcoming or envisageable.60

But again, like Gallie, Weitz does not infer that the creativity that ensures that novel conditions may always be forthcoming in art might be the start of a definition of art, one that would in fact link it to the traditional notion of the free play of the imagination; instead he takes it to be an insuperable obstacle to any such definition. In Weitz’s view, “the very expansive, adventurous character of art, its ever-present changes and novel creations,” instead of being part of a definition of art, “makes it logically impossible to ensure any set of defining properties.”61 In spite of the impossibility of a precise definition of art, Weitz actually thinks that “the elucidation of the descriptive use of ‘Art’ creates little difficulty”62; in actual discourse there tends to be little disagreement whether an object is a work of art or not (Weitz wrote this forty years after Duchamp introduced his “ready-mades,” but several years before the explosion of conceptual art, video art, performance art, and so on, really put the traditional categories of art to the test). In Weitz’s view, problems arise in real-life discourse about art when statements that are really meant as evaluations or “honorific definitions” are “incorrectly accepted as real definitions,”63 that is, where something that makes a particular 59 60 61 62 63

Weitz, “Role of Theory,” pp. 30–1. Weitz, “Role of Theory,” p. 31. Weitz, “Role of Theory,” p. 32. Weitz, “Role of Theory,” p. 34. Weitz, “Role of Theory,” p. 35.

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work or type of art particularly valuable, such as its especially successful use of form or of expression, is mistakenly considered to be the necessary and sufficient condition of being art at all, what makes that work or type of work art rather than what makes it good art. But the other side of this coin is that aesthetic theories focusing on some particularly successful feature of some particular art, as long as they are not mistaken for real definitions of art as such, can be used to highlight a dimension that is particularly well exploited in some art, especially in some new art, or to argue that new art ought to explore or exploit that potential source of aesthetic value. Thus while a theory like Bell’s that “‘art is significant form’ cannot be accepted as a true, real definition of art,” the role of such a theory in fact “is not to define anything but to use the definitional form, almost epigrammatically, to pin-point a crucial recommendation to turn our attention once again to the plastic elements in painting”64 and, presumably, away from some other dimension, such as cognitive or expressive content, that for whatever reason currently is or should be of lesser interest. Two years later, William E. Kennick made virtually the same point, with one addition.65 Like Weitz, Kennick refers explicitly to Wittgenstein,66 as well as to Friedrich Waismann (1896–1959), a Vienna Circle philosopher strongly influenced by Wittgenstein, to make the points that aesthetics can “have nothing to do with any ‘common nature’ or ‘common denominator’ of all works of art” and instead has “merely to do with the rules that govern the actual and commonly accepted usage of the word ‘art.’”67 Like Weitz, he asserts that what we will find when we look at the actual usage of expressions like “art” and “work of art” is only “what, to torture a phrase of Wittgenstein’s, we can call ‘family resemblances.’”68 Further like Weitz, Kennick goes on to argue that “philosophical mistakes are rarely howlers; they have a point,” and that the point of otherwise apparently “mystifying” definitions like “Art is Significant Form” is to draw attention to some particularly valuable aspect of art that has recently been or needs to be reemphasized.

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Weitz, “Role of Theory,” p. 35. Kennick is discussed in Lüdeking, Analytische Philosophie der Kunst, pp. 81–91. W.E. Kennick, “Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?” cited from Barrett, Collected Papers on Aesthetics, p. 8. Kennick, “A Mistake?,” p. 6. Kennick, “A Mistake?,” p. 8. He does not explain in what way Wittgenstein’s conception has to be tortured to fit the case of art.

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Bell had seen the paintings of Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso, and he was quick to see that the subject-matter was not of prime importance to them, that the value of the paintings did not rest on realism or sentimental associations. It rested on what? Well “significant form”; lines and colours and patterns and harmonies that stir apart from associations evoked by subjectmatter. He found also that he could look at other paintings, older paintings, paintings by the Venetian and Dutch masters, for example, and at vases and carpets and sculptures in the same way he looked at Cezanne. He found such looking rewarding, exciting. . . . What was more natural, then, that he should announce his discovery by saying that “Art is Significant Form”? He had discovered something for himself. Not the essence of Art, as the philosophers would have it, although he thought this was what he found, but a new way of looking at pictures. He wanted to share his discovery with others and reform English taste.69

Traditional theories of art, in other words, should be understood not as descriptive or real definitions but as honorific or persuasive definitions. Thus far, Kennick argues the same as Weitz, although perhaps more elegantly. What he then adds is the assertion that aestheticians make a second mistake, in addition to supposing that art has some determinate essence, namely, assuming that “responsible criticism is impossible without standards or criteria universally applicable to all works of art,” a mistake that, like Gallie, he finds particularly prominent in Harold Osborne’s 1955 Aesthetics and Criticism.70 Kennick’s claim – and in this he too suggests a position already taken by Ziff, though once again Ziff is not mentioned – is that aesthetic evaluation is not based on universal standards or criteria valid for all arts at all places and times, but rather that “different reasons are persuasive at different times and in different contexts. The same explanation is operative: the needs and interests that art gratifies are different from time to time and, to a lesser extent perhaps, from person to person. But as the needs and interests vary, so also will the criteria and weight we place on them.” But Kennick does not see this as a problem, for the simple reason that he sees no reason why we should either expect or demand agreement in judgments of taste over wide or perhaps even not so wide spans of space or time: “This is a vicious relativism only to those who are morally disposed to insist on the uniformity of taste,”71 which he is not. Once again, however, Kennick does not 69 70

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Kennick, “A Mistake?,” p. 10. Kennick, “A Mistake?,” p. 11. Osborne is discussed in Lüdeking, Analytische Philosophie der Kunst, pp. 11–49. Kennick, “A Mistake?,” p. 20.

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consider the possibility that constant change in both the production and the reception of art might be a feature so essential to it that it could be at least the start of a definition of art emphasizing its intimate connection to the free play of imagination. An important critique of the arguments of Ziff, Weitz, and Kennick was offered by the American philosopher Maurice Mandelbaum (1908–87) in the 1965 article “Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts.”72 Mandelbaum, a Yale Ph.D. who taught at Swarthmore, Dartmouth, and Johns Hopkins, worked in many areas of philosophy, primarily both the philosophy of history73 and the history of philosophy,74 but published little other than the article “Family Resemblances” in aesthetics. This article, however, was seminal. Mandelbaum first argued against Wittgenstein himself that “the literal, root notion of a family resemblance includes . . . genetic connection, no less than it includes the existence of noticeable physiognomic resemblances”; the reduction of family membership to the “strands of similarities” among directly perceptible properties of the members overlooks the fact that there are non– directly perceptible connections such as “common ancestry,” genetic, and legal relations that are not among “directly exhibited characteristics” and may indeed ground the latter. For example, in the case of games, apart from all the many superficial similarities and differences that we directly observe, the underlying common “potentiality of a game to be of absorbing non-practical interest to either participants or spectators”75 may be what makes them all games. Mandelbaum infers from this observation that “one cannot assume that if there is any one characteristic common to all works of art it must consist in some specific, directly exhibited feature.” Instead, “such a characteristic might be a relational characteristic,” something that “might, for example, only be apprehended if one were to consider specific art objects as having been created by someone for

72

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Maurice Mandelbaum, “Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts,” American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1965): 219–28. Mandelbaum’s chief works in this field were The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism (New York: Liverwright, 1938), and The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Mandelbaum’s chief works in this area were Philosophy, Science, and Sense Perception: Historical and Critical Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), focusing on seventeenth-century philosophy, and his monumental history of nineteenth-century philosophy, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Mandelbaum, “Family Resemblances,” p. 221.

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some actual or possible audience.”76 In a stroke, Mandelbaum undercuts the whole family-resemblance argument against the possibility of a definition of art by pointing out that its proponents may simply have been looking for a defining property of the wrong kind at the wrong level, looking for some directly perceptible property common to all works of art when they should have been looking for some non–directly perceptible, relational property, such as having been intentionally created for certain purposes.77 And in fact, traditional definitions of art such as Kant’s fit Mandelbaum’s model rather than the model assumed by the Wittgensteinians. Mandelbaum next turns his suggestion against Ziff and argues that Ziff had actually furnished materials for a definition of art in terms of a non–directly perceptible relational property in spite of himself. On the basis of a careful examination of Ziff’s elucidation of characteristic properties for painting from the paradigm case of Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women,78 Mandelbaum argues that “Ziff’s characterization of the Poussin painting contains an implicit theory of the nature of a work of art,” according to which its goodness and indeed its status as a work of art “depend upon its possession of certain objective qualities, that these qualities are (in part at least) elements in its formal structure, and that the artist intended that we should perceive these qualities in contemplating and studying the painting.” Mandelbaum continues that “Ziff’s description of the Poussin painting was not actually confined to noting the specific qualities which were characteristic of the pictorial surface of that painting,” but “included references to the relations between these qualities and the aim of Poussin, and references to the ways in which a painting having such qualities is to be contemplated by others.” Had Ziff focused on “these relationships between object, artist, and contemplator” that his own description of a paradigm example of a work of art had brought out, Mandelbaum argues, “he might have found that, contrary to his inclinations, he was well advanced toward putting forth explicit generalizations concerning the arts.”79 Finally, Mandelbaum turns to Weitz and argues that it does not follow from the fact that “new art forms have developed in the past, and . . . any art form . . . may undergo radical transformations from generation to generation” that the concept of 76 77 78 79

Mandelbaum, “Family Resemblances,” p. 222. See Davies, Definitions of Art, pp. 20–1. Mandelbaum, “Family Resemblances,” pp. 223–5. Mandelbaum, “Family Resemblances,” p. 225.

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art itself changes: “In other words, Professor Weitz has not shown that every novelty in the instances to which we apply a term involves a stretching of the term’s connotation.” Weitz “failed to establish this thesis since he offered no arguments to prove that new sorts of instantiation of a previously defined concept will necessarily involve us in changing the definition of that concept.”80 Mandelbaum observes that a concept can be extended in quite radical ways without changing the meaning (“connotation”) of the concept at all, as long as that meaning is understood in suitably abstract, relational terms: For example, the invention of the camera may drastically change the possibilities of artistic representation, but if what made painting art was properly understood to be something abstract about the intentions and functions involved in its production and reception and not anything directly and superficially observable about it, there is no “reason to suppose that such a definition would have proved an obstacle to viewing photography or the movies as constituting new art forms.”81 Mandelbaum does not go so far as to say that creativity and therefore change might actually be properties essential to and at least partially definitive of art, but creativity is certainly a relational rather than directly perceptible property, so his approach leaves room for that recognition.

2. Danto to Dickie Danto Mandelbaum’s recognition that the possibility of a definition of art in abstract and relational terms had not been precluded by the Wittgensteinians’ failure to find directly perceptible properties common to all art was to be exploited by the two major proposals for a definition of art to be advanced in the years following his paper, those of George Dickie and Arthur C. Danto. Danto (1924–2013), had started his postwar studies at Wayne State University in Detroit with the aim of becoming an artist, and later in his career would serve as the art critic of the weekly political magazine the Nation for more than twenty years, but in 1948 he went to study philosophy at Columbia University, where he would earn his Ph.D. in 1952 and spend his entire teaching career. His earliest published work was in philosophy of science, and during the

80 81

Mandelbaum, “Family Resemblances,” p. 226. Mandelbaum, “Family Resemblances,” p. 226.

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1960s he was engaged primarily on a trio of works, Analytical Philosophy of Action (1968), Analytical Philosophy of History (1968), and Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge (1973),82 rather than with aesthetics. Prolific and wide-ranging, Danto also published books on Nietzsche (1965) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1975) during this stage of his career.83 Danto entered the history of aesthetics, however, with his publication of his paper “The Artworld” in October, 1964, to be delivered at the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association two months later, thus several months before the publication of Mandelbaum’s paper “Family Resemblances” in 1965.84 Danto has always described the inspiration for this paper and indeed his turn to philosophy of art as his visit to an exhibition of work by Andy Warhol at the Stable Gallery in New York in April of that year,85 although the conceptual framework for his approach to art was surely rooted in his systematic philosophy of the 1960s, in which he argued that a physical object or event, such as raising an arm, always has its meaning only in a social and historical context unrolling and thus revealing the full meaning of the event over time – only in an evolving historical context does raising an arm and pulling a trigger, for example, become first the assassination of an archduke, then the casus belli of World War I, the start of a three-decade period of war and economic upheaval that ended only in 1945, the beginning of the end of an empire the effects of whose dissolution were still being felt in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and so on. The work by Warhol that so struck Danto in April 1964 consisted of stacks of plywood boxes painted to resemble the cardboard shipping cartons of Brillo scouring pads (and several other brands of everyday groceries) and stacked in pyramids the way they might have been stacked, in those days, to make displays at the end of grocery store aisles. After discussing 82

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Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), and Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Viking, 1975). Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–84. For literature on Danto, see the two collections, Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); and Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto, ed. Daniel Herwitz and Michael Kelly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Michael Kelly, Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 140–83. See Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p. vi; and most recently, Arthur C. Danto, Andy Warhol (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), p. xiii. Danto also refers to this exhibit in almost all of his books between these two.

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several cases of imaginary works of art in which the physical works would be perceptually indiscernible from one another even though the works had different titles and meanings, Danto turned to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes as cases in which works of art and everyday, non-art objects are perceptually indiscernible from one another and asked what makes the works of art into art if it is not something perceptually discernible in them. Actually, as Danto noted in his original article, Warhol’s Brillo Boxes were not in fact perceptually indiscernible from ordinary Brillo packing boxes, Warhol’s boxes being made of plywood and silk-screened by hand while the ordinary ones were made of corrugated cardboard and printed by machine; and as he noted later, the ordinary Brillo boxes had been quite elegantly designed by an artist, Steve Harvey, who was by no means an unaccomplished Abstract Expressionist painter in his own right.86 But the point is that none of these facts, perceptible as they or their consequences might be, makes a difference to the status of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes as art and ordinary Brillo boxes as non-art: Ordinary Brillo shipping boxes could easily have been made of silk-screened plywood and Warhol’s out of machine-printed cardboard, or the design of the realworld shipping boxes could have been bland or ugly rather than elegant and vibrant as Harvey’s design actually was, and yet the ordinary shipping boxes would still just have been ordinary boxes and only Warhol’s boxes works of art: “In fact the Brillo people might, at some slight increase in cost, make their boxes out of plywood without these becoming artworks, and Warhol might make his out of cardboard without their ceasing to be art.”87 The point remains that what makes Warhol’s boxes art does not lie in any discernible difference between them and the real Brillo boxes, thus in anything perceptible,88 and so Danto reaches from his example the same conclusion that Mandelbaum was to reach by reflection on the arguments of Weitz and the others, namely, that if there is to be a

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Arthur C. Danto, “Art and Meaning,” in The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), pp. xxiv–xxvi, and The Abuse of Beauty (LaSalle: Open Court, 2003), pp. 4–6. Here Danto makes the point that Harvey’s design for the Brillo boxes was much more glamorous than the design of the other commercial packing boxes that Warhol also replicated, and that even though this copied beauty was not what made Warhol’s Brillo Boxes into art, since his copies of the plainer Kellogg’s cereal cartons were also art, it was certainly “that brilliant design, so urgent and contemporary, that caught my eye” (Abuse, p. 4). Danto, “Artworld,” p. 580. See also “The Art World Revisited: Comedies of Similarity,” in Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), pp. 33–53, at p. 36.

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definition of art, it cannot be based on perceptible qualities of works of art but on abstract relationships – and therefore the absence of perceptible qualities common to all art does not preclude the possibility of such a definition. Danto then simply said that what makes the difference between a work of art and an ordinary object is a “certain theory of art”: What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification). Of course, without the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art, and in order to see it as part of the art world, one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting. It could not have been art fifty years ago. But then there could not have been, everything being equal, flight insurance in the Middle Ages, or Etruscan typewriter erasers. The world has to be ready for certain things, the art world no less than the real one. It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the art world, and art, possible.89

The provenance of Danto’s argument in his general theory of action and history is evident in this passage: Without the proper context, a physical object cannot have a particular meaning; for example, even if a physical object looking much like a mid-twentieth-century typewriter eraser had by some freak accident been produced in ancient Etruria, it could not have been a typewriter eraser, for the simple reason that there were no typewriters then and thus no typing mistakes to be erased (and, evidence of the rapidity of some historical change, it is barely conceivable that a typewriter eraser could be produced now, three decades and more into the age of personal computing and printing). But Danto says nothing about what an artistic theory itself is, other than to suggest that such theories can rapidly change, thus that there can be artistic theories at one point, say 1960s New York, that no one could have imagined or held even fifty years earlier. Likewise Danto does not say what an art world is, other than to suggest that it is the theoretical or conceptual space into which an ordinary physical object can be relocated by a suitable artistic theory. Thus it seems that the mystery of how a reproduction of an ordinary shipping box can become a work of art is not solved by saying that it is made into a work of art by being made under the aegis of an appropriate theory of art, but only pushed back one level, since there is no apparent account of what makes a theory an artistic theory or theory of art. It looks as if a general theory of art is needed to enfranchise 89

Danto, “Artworld,” p. 581.

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particular theories of art before they can transform particular physical objects or events into artworks.

Dickie This was the puzzle that George Dickie, born in 1926 and thus two years younger than Danto, thought he could solve with what he called the “Institutional Theory of Art.”90 Dickie, a Floridian who earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, and taught at Washington State University and the University of Houston before spending most of his career at the University of Illinois at Chicago, had already launched a Wittgensteinian attack on ideas of a specific aesthetic experience and specifically aesthetically attitude before the publication of Danto’s 1964 paper and Mandelbaum’s 1965 paper, although when he combined his attack on traditional conceptions of aesthetic experience with a response to the Wittgensteinian attack on the possibility of a definition of art in his 1974 book Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, he would credit those two papers as the chief influence on his own theory.91 In his 1961 paper “Bullough and the Concept of Psychical Distance,” Dickie defended Bullough’s account of psychical distance from several attacks that it offered merely a negative criterion of the aesthetic by arguing that for Bullough “distance is one of the criteria of esthetic value – intrinsic interest is another.”92 However, he did not appeal to Bullough’s 1907 lectures “The Modern Conception of Æsthetics” to flesh out the positive idea of the “intrinsic interest” of art or aesthetic experience in general that Bullough might have had in mind (as was done in the discussion of Bullough in the present work). Instead, in the article “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude” published in January 1964, thus months before Danto’s article was published and a year before Mandelbaum’s article, Dickie turned on Bullough’s notion of psychical distance as well as more recent versions of “aesthetic attitude” theory offered by Jerome Stolnitz93 (at the University 90

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Dickie’s work is discussed in Lüdeking, Analytische Philosophie der Kunst, pp. 165–84; Davies, Definitions of Art, pp. 78–114; and in the papers in Institutions of Art: Reconsiderations of George Dickie’s Philosophy, ed. Robert J. Yanal (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). Davies’s bibliography gives numerous further references to articles discussing Dickie’s “institutional theory” of art. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 23–4, 28. George Dickie, “Bullough and the Concept of Psychical Distance,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 22 (1961): 233–8, at p. 236. See especially Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism: A Critical Introduction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960).

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of Rochester) and Vincent Tomas94 (at Brown University) to argue that properly “distanced” or “disinterested” attention to a work of art is nothing other than undistracted attention to it, while improperly “distanced” or “interested” attention to a work of art is nothing other than distracted or insufficient attention to it. “In general,” Dickie concluded, “disinterestedness” or “intransitiveness” cannot properly be used to refer to a special kind of attention. “Disinterestedness” is a term which is used to make clear that an action has certain kinds of motives. Hence, we speak of disinterested findings (of boards of inquiry), disinterested verdicts (of judges and juries), and so on. Attending to an object, of course, has its motives but the attending itself is not interested or disinterested according to whether its motives are of the kind which motivate interested or disinterested action (as findings and verdicts might), although the attending may be more or less close.95

Thus, whereas the aesthetic attitude theorists had held that a personal connection to a work, such as its portrayal of one’s own relative, or the “interested” motives of a critic or producer who has to review or finance a play, are incompatible with a purely aesthetic response to a work of art or performance, Dickie argued that such connections or motives might or might not distract one from paying full attention to a work, but that there is no necessary connection between having any such interest and being distracted from proper attention to the work: “The critic differs from other percipients only in his motives and intentions and not in the way in which he attends to a work of art”96 – and indeed, the successful critic had better pay full and careful attention to the object of his criticism. Of course, as Dickie would later point out in his book, there is a difference between (properly) attending to the play being performed on a stage before you and (improperly) attending to the back of the head of the spectator in the seat in front of you,97 or (properly) attending to the image, colors, and movement visible on the face of a painting and (improperly) attending to the chemical composition of the pigments, the date of the painting (which might be exhibited on the label pasted on the museum wall beside the painting), or the color of the back of the 94

95

96 97

See especially Vincent Tomas, “Aesthetic Vision,” Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 52–67. Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,” American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964): 56–65, at p. 60. Dickie, “Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,” p. 62. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, pp. 84, 151.

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painting.98 So even if there is no need for a special concept of aesthetic experience or aesthetic attitude, only the concept of full and proper attention, there is need for a definition of an artwork or properly aesthetic aspects of art in order to distinguish between relevant attention to a work of art, or attention to the aesthetic object in the work of art, and irrelevant attention to its back, its machinery, its date of composition, its cost, and so on. It is for this purpose that Dickie introduces his “institutional analysis” of the concepts of art and aesthetic object. Dickie begins the argument of Art and the Aesthetic by explicitly referring to the fact that “in the mid-1950s, several philosophers, inspired by Wittgenstein’s talk about concepts, began arguing that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for art.”99 The best known of these attempts, he says, is that of Weitz in “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,”100 and he then cites Mandelbaum’s objection that Weitz’s argument concerns only “‘exhibited characteristics and . . . has failed to take account of the nonexhibited, relational aspect of . . . art.”101 His own project is then to propose a definition of art following Mandelbaum’s clue that “feature(s) common to all works of art may perhaps be discovered that will be a basis for the definition of ‘art,’ if the nonexhibited features of art are attended to.”102 Dickie then starts his argument by distinguishing among three senses of the term “work of art”: “the primary or classificatory sense, the secondary or derivative, and the evaluative.”103 The primary sense is that in which we contrast a work of art to something that is not art, thus the sense that Danto was attempting to define in “The Artworld”; the evaluative, the sense in which we mean to say that something is an especially good or valuable work of art; and the derivative, the sense in which we say of something that is clearly not a work of art, such as a piece of driftwood found on a beach, that it has something of the quality of a work of art in the evaluative sense, for example, that it is beautiful.104 Dickie’s tripartite distinction of senses of “art” is thus Ziff’s bipartite distinction between the descriptive and laudatory senses, with the addition of the derivative sense; by recognizing the derivative sense of the phrase, in particular, Dickie undercuts the temptation to 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, pp. 153–5. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 19. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 21. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 23. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 24. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 25. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 24.

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think that the concept in its primary, descriptive sense can be applied to something that is not an artifact, the product of intentional human production, and thus concludes that “artifactuality is a necessary condition (call it the genus) of the primary sense of art.” As he says, “This fact, however, does not seem very surprising and would not even be very interesting except that Weitz and others have denied it.”105 The burden of the definition thus falls on one or more additional necessary conditions that, together with the condition of the artifactuality, will be sufficient to define the concept of a work of art. Here is where Dickie introduces Danto’s idea of the “art world” into his argument, although instead of using this term to refer to the theory or conceptual space into which an object is placed to transform it into a work of art, Dickie states that he will use Danto’s term “to refer to the broad social institution in which works of art have their place.”106 His idea is that the art world in the institutional or we might say sociological sense consists of a variety of systems such as theaters, galleries, museums, and all the different institutions connected with them, such as schools, publications, and so on, that are “frameworks” “for the presenting of particular works of art,” and his expectation is that if “we step back and view the works in their institutional setting, we will be able to see the essential properties they share.”107 This leads to Dickie’s definition that “a work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld),”108 and to his later definition of “aesthetic object” as the set of aspects of an object upon which this status of candidate for appreciation is conferred. In keeping with his previous attack upon the myth of the aesthetic attitude, which is reiterated in the middle chapters of Art and the Aesthetic,109 Dickie makes it clear the notion of appreciation included in this definition is not a conception of any special kind of aesthetic appreciation: “All that is meant by ‘appreciation’ in the definition is something like ‘in experiencing the qualities of a thing one finds them worthy or valuable,’ and this meaning applies quite generally both inside and outside the domain of art . . . the only sense in which there

105 106 107 108 109

Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 27. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 27. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 31. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 34. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, chs. 4–6, pp. 90–146.

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is a difference between the appreciation of art and the appreciation of nonart is that the appreciations have different objects.” Thus, “the institutional structure in which the art object is embedded, not different kinds of appreciation, makes the difference between the appreciation of art and the appreciation of non-art.”110 But of course since the point of Dickie’s definition is to define the concept of a work of art, thus the difference between art and non-art, this distinction cannot be presupposed in order to give a relational definition of a distinctive kind of aesthetic appreciation; rather, it must be the rest of the definition, namely, the idea of a person or persons conferring the status of candidate for appreciation on an object in behalf of the art world, that does the work of distinguishing between art and non-art. Dickie similarly makes clear that there is no antecedent definition of “aesthetic object” that could define the concept of a work of art independently of the concept of the art world and its conferral of candidacy for appreciation: The “main thesis” of his “institutional analysis of the notion of aesthetic object” is that “the aspects of a work of art which belong to the aesthetic object of that work are determined by the conventions governing the presentation of the work”111 in and by the art world or one of its systems or organs. Neither “aesthetic appreciation” nor “aesthetic object” can be defined independently of the concept of the art world, so the burden of Dickie’s definition falls entirely on that concept. An early objection to Dickie’s definition by Ted Cohen argued that not everything offered as a work of art, for instance, something like Marcel Duchamp’s famous Fountain, the signed urinal he submitted to a show of modern art in 1916 but that was rejected in spite of the fact that he was himself one of the jurors, can be appreciated, and therefore the possibility of appreciation cannot be a necessary condition of art.112 Dickie agreed with Cohen that the gesture of submitting Fountain to an exhibition could be appreciated but also insisted that the “gleaming white surface” and “pleasing oval shape” of the urinal itself could also be appreciated (not a particularly plausible claim, for unlike the jazzy original of Warhol’s Brillo Box, the urinal that Duchamp chose, perhaps intentionally, is a particularly ugly product of early twentiethcentury industrial design, not an example of sleek, late twentieth- or early twenty-first-century German or Japanese toilet design). But in any 110 111 112

Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, pp. 40–1. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 147. Ted Cohen, “The Possibility of Art: Remarks on a Proposal by Dickie,” Philosophical Review 82 (1973): 69–82.

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case, Dickie argued, his definition requires only “that every work of art must have some minimal potential value or worthiness,” and the difference between the classificatory sense of “work of art” that he is defining and the evaluative sense is precisely that only the latter requires that “the object it is predicated of [be] deemed to be of substantial, actual value.”113 This was the wrong answer for him to give: He should have argued that all that is required for something to be a work of art is that it be offered as a candidate for appreciation by some agent acting on behalf of the art world, not that the object have any potential for being appreciated independently of that act in behalf of the art world. But once again that would have put all the burden of his definition on the concept of the art world and the idea of an agent acting on its behalf, and that drew the main criticisms of Dickie’s definition. Dickie himself summed up the potential objections: “The institutional theory of art may sound like saying, ‘A work of art is an object of which someone has said, “I christen this object a work of art,” ’ ”114 a summary that really includes two objections, namely, that the concept of the art world is so loosely defined that anything might count as part of it, and that the concept of acting on behalf of or as an agent for the art world is so loosely defined that anyone might claim to be acting on behalf of the art world pretty much at any time and with regard to any sort of object or performance – as of course many self-proclaimed or recognized artists in recent decades have. Dickie conceded that the institutions of the art world and conditions for membership therein as well as conditions for acting on behalf of the art world or one of its institutions are not typically as well defined as, say, the conditions for being licensed as a justice of the peace and performing a valid wedding ceremony. He nevertheless insisted that even though “conferring the status of art has as its background the Byzantine complexity of the art world,”115 the concepts of the art world and of acting on its behalf are sufficiently well defined to make his overall definition informative. But is this so? To be sure, all moderately prosperous and well-educated people in a developed country know what art schools, art museums, art galleries, orchestras, opera houses, subscription series, and so on are – but could they know this without knowing what art is? Isn’t the concept of the artworld dependent on the concept of art, rather than vice versa? 113 114 115

Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, pp. 42–3. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 49. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 49.

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Dickie attempted to answer the specific objection that the creation of art is not analogous to the conferral of status by an agent of a welldefined institution as well as the more general objection that the institutional theory of art is circular, that is, dependent on a tacit antecedent definition of art, in a second book, The Art Circle, published in 1984.116 This work begins with an acknowledgment that he and Danto had previously meant two “very different things” by the term “art world,” Danto meaning by that a “linguistic” or “semantic dimension required for being a work of art,”117 in short, a theory of art or conceptual space within which an object can be a work of art, while Dickie meant an institutional context for the creation and reception of art. However, as Dickie proceeds to the two main objectives of his new work, namely substituting the concept of the creation of an artifact against the background of the art world for the previous concept of conferring the status of candidate for appreciation – thus shifting emphasis from the potential reception of works of art to the production of such works – and then developing the concept of the art world sufficiently to preclude the charge that it is viciously circular or overtly dependent on an antecedent concept of art, he makes it clear that the art world is effective in the creation of a work of art through the artist’s conscious or unconscious conception of art. Since Danto’s artwork-enfranchising theories clearly do not come out of nowhere, but emerge from specific art-historical contexts, it is not clear that there really is a great difference between them on this point. As Dickie points out, however, in Danto’s work after his original essay “The Artworld” he did insist that artworks always have a semantic dimension in a more specific sense, namely, that they are supposedly always about something, always have some content, and that is not any part of Dickie’s theory, original or revised. As we will see when we turn to Danto’s later work, Dickie is certainly right about this addition to Danto’s original theory. In any case, the main points of The Art Circle are not the polemic with Danto but the replacement of the concept of conferral of status with the concept of artifactuality and the clarification of the concept of the art world in the hope of avoiding the charge of vicious circularity. Dickie argues first that a work of art is not created simply by calling something

116

117

George Dickie, The Art Circle: A Theory of Art (New York: Haven, 1984; reprinted Evanston: Chicago Spectrum Press, 1997). Dickie, Art Circle, p. 10.

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a “work of art” or, as he argues in a polemic with Timothy Binkley,118 just by pointing to or “specifying” something in (as Danto would say) the real world as a work of art,119 as some self-designated “conceptual artists” had attempted to do. Instead, he argues, “it is the work done in creating an object against the background of the artworld which establishes that object as a work of art.”120 A work of art is not just declared, but is made or “achieved” by in some way transforming something that counts as a medium of art, undergoing “change at the hands of an agent,” although what counts as a permissible medium of art and as permissible modifications of that medium for making works of art is what is determined by an institutional background. And at some points in art history the institutional background may allow quite liberal conceptions of permissible media and their transformations. Thus, while it is conceptually impossible simply to confer artifactuality without actually effecting some change in a medium, at some points in the history of art simply “picking up and hanging and similar actions are ways of achieving (not conferring) artifactuality,” so a piece of driftwood can still be made into a piece of art by being put on display. To be sure, “it is not just the motion of lifting and affixing or the like which makes something an artifact, it is lifting and affixing or the like plus something else,”121 namely, an art-historical, institutional context that allows an artifact to be made in this way: Now suppose a piece of driftwood is picked up by someone who is familiar with the world of art and taken home and hung on a wall, unaltered, with the intention to display its characteristics as the characteristics of a painting are displayed. The driftwood is being used as an artistic medium and being displayed within the context of the artworld, and it thereby becomes part of a more complex object. The complex object – the driftwood-usedas-an-artistic-medium – is an artifact of an artworld system. If a piece of driftwood were picked up and hung on a wall without any artistic context and just to get it out of the way (the wall being a convenient place to put it), there would be no reason to think an artifact had been made; the driftwood would not have become part of a more complex object.122

At many periods in art history, the permissible media have been things like pigments, marble, tones, and so on, and the permissible transformations 118

119 120 121 122

See Timothy Binkley, “Deciding about Art,” in Culture and Art, ed. Lars AgaardMogensen (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1976). Dickie, Art Circle, pp. 57–62. Dickie, Art Circle, p. 12. Dickie, Art Circle, p. 44. Dickie, Art Circle, pp. 45–6.

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have been fairly laborious processes like painting, carving, arranging according to the rules of counterpoint, and so on, but this is just contingent; all that is necessary for a medium and a method of transforming it to be conditions of making artworks is that they be accepted by the art world. And thus driftwood and urinals can become media for making artifacts without painting or carving, simply by displaying, submitting, and so on. (As Dickie points out, that Duchamp’s urinal was already an artifact, manufactured by artisanal or mass production, is irrelevant to its status as art; it is Duchamp’s own further act of signing and submitting the urinal, minimal as that was, that made it into a work of art: “Fountain is thus a double artifact: it is an artifact of the artworld which is made from an artifact of the plumbing trade. Such a double artifact is not of course at all unusual: a painting is made of pigments which in turn are manufactured.”123 Here Dickie is tacitly rejecting Collingwood’s claim that such double artifactuality is characteristic only of craft, not art.) But all this means that the concept of artifactuality used in Dickie’s new conception of art is not independent of the concept of the art world, but is completely dependent upon it: The art world or its agent does not simply declare a particular object an artwork, but it does declare what kinds of artifacts can be artworks. So now we must turn to Dickie’s attempt to refine the concept of the art world in order to prevent vicious circularity. Dickie now argues that “wherever art is created there is an artist who does it, but an artist also creates for a public of some sort,”124 so the art world comprises two essentially distinct although related elements, artists and audiences (and by implication all the means of getting artworks from artists to audiences). People occupying both of these roles must have an appropriate background; thus, artists must have “experienced examples of art knowing that they are art,” had “training in artistic techniques” and “a background knowledge of art, and the like,” but “the members of a public are” also such “because they know how to fulfill a role.” “Being a member of a public requires knowledge and understanding similar in many respects to that required of an artist,” for example to be a playwright or actor but also “to be a member of the public of stage plays one must have a knowledge of what it is for someone to act a part, and so on.”125 The conditions for being either an artist or a member of the public for art can in fact be analogously divided in two. “The role of 123 124 125

Dickie, Art Circle, p. 46. Dickie, Art Circle, p. 65. Dickie, Art Circle, pp. 65–6.

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the artist has two central aspects. First, there is the general aspect which is characteristic of all artists, namely, the awareness that what is created for presentation is art. Second, there is the wide variety of art techniques, of which the ability to use one in some degree, enables one to create art of a particular kind.” Analogously, “the role of a member of a public also has two central aspects. First, there is the general aspect which is characteristic of all members of art publics, namely the awareness that what is presented to them is art. The second aspect of the role of a member of a public is the wide variety of abilities and sensitivities which enable one to perceive and understand the particular kind of art with which one is presented.”126 This division leads Dickie to a final series of definitions: I) An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the making of a work of art. II) A work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public. III) A public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to understand an object which is presented to them. IV) The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems. V) An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public.127 So the definition of “art world” is dependent on the definition of “art world systems,” and that is in turn dependent on the definitions of “artist” and “art world public.” But as definitions I and III as well as the preceding discussion make clear, individuals can be admitted into the domain of artists and public only in virtue of their understanding of or possession of a concept of art, or at least their understanding of particular arts. So once again the question arises whether Dickie’s institutional definition of art is not viciously circular, dependent at least in its application upon an antecedent conception or conceptions of art. Dickie raises this objection himself and responds that his definition is circular but not viciously so, rather that it has the merit of all philosophical definitions, which is only “to make clear to us in a self-conscious and explicit way what we already in some sense know.” His view is that philosophical definitions “cannot inform us of something we are really ignorant” of, but rather that they clarify the relations we already associate 126 127

Dickie, Art Circle, p. 72. Dickie, Art Circle, pp. 80–2.

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with the concept being defined, and that this is precisely what his five definitions of artist, artwork, public, artworld, and artworld system do – “each of the structural intersections of the framework requires definition,”128 and they get it through these definitions. These definitions would not and could not make the concept of a work of art intelligible to someone arriving from Mars who had no comprehension of art at all, but rather “reveal, by eliminating distracting detail, . . . that art-making involves an intricate, co-relative structure.”129 And the real benefit of such an analysis, Dickie argues, is that it reveals that “the roles of artist and public and the structure of things are . . . conceived of as things which persist through time and have a history. In short, the definitions characterize an ongoing cultural enterprise.”130 This in turn allows Dickie to affirm the truth that Weitz and Kennick but also Danto had recognized, namely, that art is constantly evolving, without drawing the conclusion that art therefore cannot be defined. And the institutional definition of art not only allows for the historical evolution of art; it also allows a nonrestrictive conception of the aims of art in a way that no definition of art by a particular conception of aesthetic experience or aesthetic attitude could do: “The institutional theory of art . . . places virtually no restrictions on what art may do, it seeks only to catch its essential nature. The institutional nature of art does not present art from serving moral, political, romantic, expressive, aesthetic, or a host of other needs.”131 In other words, the institutional theory of art can actually comprise all previous theories of art: The institutional theory easily accommodates the representative, expressive, symbolic, formal, and such properties of art, but it rejects them as defining characteristics. There is nothing about the institutional theory of art which inhibits or restricts art in any way. Art has been the bearer of a myriad of things, ranging from those of the greatest importance to the trivial. The institutional theory allows the freedom for art which Weitz quite correctly is so anxious to preserve in his attack on traditional theories of art. There is a sense in which the institutional theory absorbs all of the earlier theories, each of which has caught a glimpse of something that art can do.132

At least in principle, Dickie’s institutional theory should count as one that synthesizes the several different objectives recognized by previous 128 129 130 131 132

Dickie, Art Circle, p. 79. Dickie, Art Circle, p. 82. Dickie, Art Circle, p. 81. Dickie, Art Circle, p. 86. Dickie, Art Circle, p. 110.

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aesthetic theory, although Dickie makes no attempt to illustrate this synthesis in detail. And his theory would certainly imply that no particular work of art has to convey knowledge, initiate a free play of our mental powers, or have emotional impact, let alone accomplish all three of these goals; all of these goals would be possible goals for art, but whether any particular work of art did, does, or should aim at any or all of these objectives, or have entirely different goals, would depend upon its historical situation, the understanding of and expectations for art held by its artist and its originally intended audience. In spite of the virtues that he claims for it, Dickie’s institutional analysis of the concept of art still appears to be viciously circular. After all, it could be objected, many sorts of things and practices can be representational, expressive, symbolic, formal, and so on, without being art – one still wants to ask what makes the intentions of artists and the expectations of public specifically artistic and aesthetic? Artists and audiences have all kinds of ambitions and expectations; what is the difference between those that are relevant to art and those that are not? Only that some of the aims of artists and expectations of audiences are tied to what has previously been considered artistic, while others are not; Dickie’s institutional theory is in the end a version of what others such as Kendall Walton, his student Jerrold Levinson, and Dickie’s own student Noël Carroll have offered as “historical” definitions of art.133 Historical definitions of art define artworks at any given stage in history as what has emerged from the previous history of art, but always seem to presuppose that there is some way of distinguishing what were art practices and institutions at the relevant previous stage from what were not. Of course, that the term “art” or one of its cognates was applied to some objects and practices at the previous stage and not to others would be one way of doing this, but a way that 133

Kendall Walton, Review of Art and the Aesthetic, Philosophical Review 86 (1977): 97–101; Jerrold Levinson, “Defining Art Historically,” British Journal of Aesthetics 19 (1979): 232– 50, reprinted in his Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 3–25; Noël Carroll, “Identifying Art,” in Robert Yanal, editor, Institutions of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. 3–38, reprinted in Carroll’s Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 75–100, and “Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 313–26, reprinted in Beyond Aesthetics, pp. 100–118. For discussions of Levinson’s and Carroll’s theories, see Davies, Definitions of Art, pp. 158–80. Going to extremes, Paul Crowther has argued that institutional and historical definitions of art are exclusionary, recognizing as art only what fits into the tradition of cultures that have an explicit concept of art. See Crowther, Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 1.

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would rest on that previous stage’s own definition or conception of art, and would thus seem circular; alternatively, we might claim that people at that previous stage were making and experiencing art even if they did not themselves have a concept or art or understand themselves to be making art, but then our claim would rest on our own conception of art, not on one derived from the previous history, and again the definition would seem circular. Dickie tries to explain the emergence of art as a specialized domain of human practice from other practices that were not art: Art may have emerged (and no doubt did emerge) in an evolutionary way out of the techniques originally associated with religious, magical, or other activities. In the beginning these techniques would have been no doubt minimal and their products (diagrams, chants, and the like) crude and in themselves uninteresting. With the passage of time the techniques would have become more polished and specialists have come to exist and their products would have come to have characteristics of some interest (to their creators and others) over and above the interest they had as elements in the religious or whatever other kind of activity in which they were embedded. At about this point it becomes meaningful to say that primitive art had begun to exist, although the people who had the art might not yet have had a word for its art.134

No doubt something like this is the way in which many arts emerged, although perhaps Dickie’s emphasis on the religious and the magical is one-sided, since arts also emerged from practical activities such as making pots and shelters, and Dickie’s assumption that the earliest art would be crude and uninteresting certainly seems to be belied by the famous Paleolithic cave paintings of France and Spain (although the latest research suggests that those may themselves have been late products of a long evolution). But if the arts emerged before anyone had the concept of art, then it would seem that we can call the primitive arts “art” only on the basis of our own concept of art; yet if our concept of art is only that of something that has emerged in some way from something previously called “art,” then it looks as if we are trapped in a circle after all. It might well seem instead as if we classify as art both what was classified by its original producers as art and what was not conceived of by its producers as art on the basis of our conception of their common goals and even experiences of what they were making, regardless of what they called it; in other words, it seems as if our definition of art must be dependent upon some conception of the goals and accomplishments of art, 134

Dickie, Art Circle, p. 56.

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whether that be the production of some specialized aesthetic experience or a disjunctive or conjunctive conception of the conveyance of certain kinds of truth in certain ways, the stimulation of free play of mental powers, or the creation of a certain kind of emotional impact. In the end, it seems that our identification of the art world must be dependent upon a conception of the aims and accomplishments of art, not vice versa.

3. Back to Danto Arthur Danto’s initial definition of artworks in terms of theories of art would seem to be open to the same sort of objection: We cannot identify what counts as a particular art theory unless we already have a general conception of art and its possible aims. Danto’s argument in his chef d’oeuvre, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, initially seems to be open to this objection, for it begins by reiterating the argument of “The Artworld” that the difference between works of art and “mere real things” is entirely a matter of the theoretical context of the former, what might seem to be “just a matter of . . . conventions,” from which it would in turn follow “that whatever convention allows to be an artwork is an artwork.”135 But Danto objects to Dickie’s institutional theory, even though he recognizes it as inspired by his own position in “The Artworld,” that it makes the declaration of objects as art arbitrary because it does not require that the citizens of the art world have an agreed-upon definition of art, which is precisely what he proposes to provide in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Danto holds that “Dickie’s theory implies a kind of empowering elite and is a distant relative of the Non-Cognitive Theory of moral language.”136 That is, art is just what privileged members of the art world say is art, and they do not have to have any particular reasons for their declarations. However, his own view is that “what gives any art world its authority can hardly be answered without a more cognitivist definition than Dickie’s,”137 and he accordingly defines the art world as a body of members who can “participate in what we might call the discourse of reasons” about art,138 as “a loose affiliation of individuals who know enough by way of theory and history that they are able to practice . . . ‘inferential criticism,’”139 that is, ground their judgments about what is art (and what 135 136 137 138 139

Danto, Transfiguration, p. 31. Danto, “Art World Revisited,” in Beyond the Brillo Box, p. 38. Danto, Abuse, p. 24. Danto, “Art World Revisited,” in Beyond the Brillo Box, p. 40. Danto, “Art World Revisited,” in Beyond the Brillo Box, p. 42.

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that art is) on reasons, or as “the discourse of reasons institutionalized,” so that “to be a member of the art world is, accordingly, to have learned what it means to participate in the discourse of reasons” about art “for one’s culture.”140 Now, in the later essay just quoted, Danto stresses the historical situation of theories of art – “inferential art criticism” comprises “historical explanations of works of art”141 – and this could make it seem as if his own position is still thoroughly relativistic, that art may not be just what some powerful individuals say is art but could still be just what the prevailing theory of a culture says is art. But Danto’s theory is more complex than that: His position is rather that there are two levels of art theory, a general definition of art that has been valid at all times and places whether people knew it or not, and then particular theories about how the art made at particular times and places satisfies that general theory; members of the art world are then people, whether artists or others, who at some level understand both the general theory of art and the more particular theories under which works can be made that satisfy that general theory, and who can make, interpret, evaluate, and enjoy works of art in light of that knowledge. The aim of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is to give the general, timeless definition of art, while much of Danto’s subsequent writing is focused on the particular theories of art that mediate between the general theory and the actual production and reception of art; this work thus constitutes what Danto calls a philosophy of art history. Danto explicitly characterizes his effort to provide a general definition of art that has not been invalidated by the artistic upheavals of the twentieth century (he focuses almost entirely on upheavals in the visual arts) but that can explain those upheavals as a conclusion of the dialectic begun by Wittgenstein; what he does not say is that the definition of art with which he ends up is in fact quite traditional. Danto’s relation to Wittgenstein is complex. On the one hand, he argues against the Wittgensteinian idea that we cannot have and do not need a general definition of art and that instead we recognize works of art as such by means of an interconnected set of family resemblances. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, he argues against Weitz and Kennick by expanding upon Mandelbaum’s objection to the family resemblance theory that family resemblances are in fact explained by underlying 140 141

Danto, “Art World Revisited,” in Beyond the Brillo Box, p. 46. Danto, “Art World Revisited,” in Beyond the Brillo Box, p. 42.

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“common genetic affiliations” that we should and can discover in the case of art;142 he explicitly agrees with Mandelbaum that as “we widen our scope to properties that do not [meet the eye], we may find an astonishing homogeneity in the class of objects heretofore regarded under Wittgensteinian perspectives as a mere family of heterogenes.”143 In subsequent works, he stresses that the Wittgensteinian antitheory attitude was in fact a form of conservatism, a position that seemed to make sense when art was relatively stable and there were not such great artistic upheavals that only a sound definition could ground the discrimination between art and non-art (or when such upheavals were not taken seriously). Thus Danto writes in The Abuse of Beauty: When I began to think through the project of framing a definition of art, the philosophy of art was dominated by two main theses: that no such definition was possible, and that no such definition was needed. The latter was largely a Wittgensteinian response to the former. But as so often with Wittgenstein, his position presupposed a stability in the set of things called by a given term – in this instance “work of art” – so the speakers of the language can be expected in general to recognize instances of art works for the most part. The former position, meanwhile, was based on the immense pluralism that was beginning to prevail in art: so many things became possible as works of art that no definition seemed any longer possible.

However, the conservatism of the Wittgensteinian was beginning to be threatened almost at the moment it was enunciated. What we now know is that only when the radical pluralism was registered in consciousness was a definition finally possible. It must consist in properties which must always be present, however various the class of artworks turns out to be. . . . Only when pluralism itself becomes established is it finally possible to do the philosophy of art in a transhistorical way. So one can aim at last at a timeless philosophy of art only at a moment like the present one.144

In other words, the very pluralism of artistic projects and styles characteristic of twentieth-century arts, especially the visual arts, seems to make a single, timelessly valid definition of art impossible, but it is precisely what requires such a definition of us. Yet in spite of the failure of Wittgenstein himself and his immediate followers to recognize this, it is another thought of Wittgenstein that shows the way forward. This is 142 143 144

Danto, Transfiguration, p. 59. Danto, Transfiguration, p. 62. Danto, Abuse, pp. xix–xx.

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the thought that Wittgenstein developed in the “field of action theory” and that Danto developed in his own Analytical Philosophy of History and Analytical Philosophy of Action, namely, that a physical object or event, such as the raising of an arm, does not have its specific meaning by itself, but only in a context of intention and interpretation, which itself takes place against a background of possibilities for intention and interpretation constituted by a social and historical context: “It has proved instructive to ask, in the manner of Wittgenstein, what it is that is left over when, from the fact that your raise your arm, you subtract the fact that your arm goes up.” Already in Analytical Philosophy of Action Danto had illustrated this point with an example from the world of art, which he then quotes in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: In Giotto’s immortal frescoes in the Arena (or Scrovegni) Chapel in Padua, Italy, there is a band of six panels in each of which “the dominating Christ-figure is shown with a raised arm,” but “this invariant disposition of his arm notwithstanding, a different kind of action is performed by means of it from scene to scene, and we must read the identity of the action from the context of its execution” – in one scene, the raised arm is an admonition, in another a blessing, and so on.145 Danto also acknowledged the influence of Wittgenstein on this issue in a later essay, “Art after the End of Art,” where he states, “I am a follower of Wittgenstein on the matter of iterated utterances, for he held that the meaning of a sentence very often is a function of the role it plays in what he termed a language game, so the same sentence expresses a different sense on different occasions of its utterance.”146 The point of this for the case of art itself is that what makes something both a work of art and the specific work of art that it is cannot be discerned from mere perception of that object itself, as the meaning of a raised arm cannot be discerned from mere perception of the raised arm by itself, but lies both in a general theory of art and in a specific theory about how this particular object fulfills the demands of this general theory – a pair of theories both the artist and his audience must at some level understand. This is what makes Danto’s theory of the art world a cognitivist theory of art in contrast to Dickie’s noncognitivist institutional theory (or at least his noncognitivist initial version of it): To recognize an object as a work of art and as the particular work of art that it is, one has to know both theories. 145 146

Danto, Transfiguration, p. 4. Danto, “Art after the End of Art,” in Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), pp. 321–33, at p. 322.

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As we will now see, Danto’s theory is not just doubly but even triply cognitivist: Recognizing something as a work of art and as the specific work that it is requires not just a general definition of art and a theory as to how this particular artwork (this painting, this urinal, this strange assemblage of trash or crushed auto parts) could satisfy that general definition, but also an interpretation of what precisely this particular work means. For the general theory that Danto proposes in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is that a work of art is always about something, always has a meaning or “semantic” component, but that since many things have meanings that are not works of art – for example, raised arms in a classroom rather than paintings of raised arms, or newspaper reports of crimes rather than crime novels or television shows (even though the latter are often in some way based on the former, “ripped from the headlines”) – works of art must have something more than mere “aboutness” or “representationality.”147 This something more cannot be a specific kind of content (as Aristotle might have thought with his claim that poetry represents universals while history represents mere particulars), for “unless we wished to claim that artworks have some special content, or some special kind of content, which sets them off from other representations altogether, the appeal to content would get us nowhere.”148 The difference lies rather in the fact that “works of art, in categorical contrast with mere representations, use the means of representation in a way that is not exhaustively specified when one has exhaustively specified what is being represented”; a work of art “expresses something about” its content in a way that “transcends semantic considerations (considerations of Sinn and Bedeutung),”149 sense and reference or intension and extension, something that Danto likes to characterize by the third term used by the logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), namely, Farbung or “coloration.”150 Danto further spells out this complement to mere representationality that is necessary for something with meaning to count as art in terms of “rhetoric, style, and expression.” By “expression” he means that a work of art “makes a point about how [its] content is presented,”151 or that “it is as if a work of art were like an externalization of the artist’s consciousness, as if we could see his

147 148 149 150 151

Danto, Transfiguration, p. 139. Danto, Transfiguration, p. 143. Danto, Transfiguration, pp. 147–8. Danto, Transfiguration, p. 163. Danto, Transfigurat