Aesthetic Theory Across the Disciplines 1538176610, 9781538176610

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Aesthetic Theory Across the Disciplines

Global Aesthetic Research Series editor: Joseph J. Tanke, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Hawaii The Global Aesthetic Research series publishes cutting-edge research in the field of aesthetics. It contains books that explore the principles at work in our encounters with art and nature, that interrogate the foundations of artistic, literary and cultural criticism, and that articulate the theory of the discipline’s central concepts.

Titles in the Series Early Modern Aesthetics, J. Colin McQuillan Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century, Catherine M. Soussloff Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari, Edited by Constantin V. Boundas and Vana Tentokali Living Off Landscape: Or the Unthought-of in Reason, Francois Jullien, Translated by Pedro Rodriguez Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments, Emily Brady, Isis Brook, and Jonathan Prior Reviewing the Past: The Presence of Ruins, Zoltán Somhegyi François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought: A Critical Introduction, Arne De Boever Figural Space: Semiotics and the Aesthetic Imaginary, William D. Melaney Eroticizing Aesthetics: In the Real with Bataille and Lacan, Tim Themi Baumgarten’s Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, Edited by J. Colin McQuillan Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us, Edited by Bartholomew Ryan, Giovanbattista Tusa, and Antonio Cardiello Aesthetic Theory Across the Disciplines, Edited by Max Ryynänen and Zoltán Somhegyi

Aesthetic Theory Across the Disciplines Edited by Max Ryynänen and Zoltán Somhegyi

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-5381-7659-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5381-7661-0 (ebook) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Introduction: An Introduction to Aesthetics and Its Companions Max Ryynänen and Zoltán Somhegyi 1 Aesthetics and Evolutionary Theory Wendy Steiner

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2 Aesthetics and Environmental Humanities: The Fieldwork on Ourselves25 Mami Aota 3 Aesthetics and Architecture Tyrus Miller

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4 Aesthetics and Urban Studies Mateusz Salwa

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5 Aesthetics and Politics Karl Axelsson

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6 Aesthetics and Philosophy: From Baumgarten to Nietzsche Joseph Tanke

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7 Aesthetics and the Classical Tradition: Remarks on Baumgarten and Batteux Oiva Kuisma

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8 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies: On the Relationship between a Small Discipline and Her Bully Big Brother Max Ryynänen

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9 Aesthetics and Art History Zoltán Somhegyi

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10 An Exercise in Metamorphosis: Aesthetics of the Curatorial Jacob Lund

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11 Aesthetics and Art Education Paul Duncum

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12 Aesthetics and Musicology Lisa Giombini

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Index 205 About the Contributors

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Introduction An Introduction to Aesthetics and Its Companions Max Ryynänen and Zoltán Somhegyi

In Aesthetic Science Alexander Wragge-Morley shows how the pioneering work of the natural scientists of the seventeenth century Royal Society of London was not just actively visualised, but based essentially on aesthetic principles. Being one of many who viewed the universe a piece of design by God, Robert Boyle thought that ‘the experience of mechanical causation in the products of art could furnish the mind with a means to explain how natural things accomplished apparently similar forms of purposiveness’, and accentuated the role of bodily organs of sensation for ‘obtaining knowledge about the causes and purposes of natural phenomena’. Many natural ­scientists for example. Edward Lhwyd, merged also with the at the time growing ­discussions on ruins, and ‘read’ mountains and natural phenomena as objects, where traces of history could be seen – one key topic of discussion was Stonehenge. The interest in snowflakes produced artistic, speculative visual material (ink drawings) by Robert Hooke, who also considered them to be ruins – of once-perfect ice crystals. He studied the patterns and made his point partly by drawing. Aesthetics and artistry fuelled the intellectual and methodological expeditions into the fundamentals of science.1 In her groundbreaking work on human and animal relationships, Donna Haraway calls animals that live with us ‘companion species’.2 We live with the dog, and exchange knowledge, emotions, and warmth. We invest solidarity in it more than towards, for example, wild animals. Could one think of the role of aesthetics in other disciplines a bit in the same way? As a companion science it might not always be at the core of what natural sciences, literature studies, art history or curatorial studies are, but there is a constant exchange of ideas, perspectives, concepts, and other theoretical help offered 1

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by aesthetics. And it would be hard to say what these disciplines would be without aesthetics. Aesthetics is a bit of an underdog in all territories where its help is needed. Some even feel embarrassed by its use, feeling that it is somehow too ‘wingnut’ – as one scholar of cultural studies said, when she heard that an aesthetician was going to join a research project. There exists also a fear of aesthetics which has, according to Lisa Giombini (article in this book), divided philosophy of music and musicology in a not very productive manner, and cultural studies as a discipline has been waging wars against aesthetics for long without any substantial reason (see Ryynänen’s article, and also Somhegyi’s, in a way). Still, aesthetics is everywhere, and looking at science and scholarly work at large, it seems to be not just a discipline for generalists, which it definitely is, but also, maybe following its only relational autonomy as a ‘hobby’ of some in various disciplines, a sort of all-embracing framework, which can help to make sense of things holistically. Being known mainly for his work in aesthetics, Gianni Vattimo has called his philosophical hermeneutics something which the academic world needs, because in the contemporary global world we often enter a nearly schizophrenic situation with knowledge and understanding, and hermeneutics can offer a way to catch up with the whole, at the same time as there is no obsession to produce ‘objective’ facts in the discipline (i.e. continental aesthetics). Institutionally speaking, through their autonomy, literature, art history, natural sciences, technology, and art education have their own nests everywhere in the university world. Semiotics and cultural studies share the same destiny as aesthetics. Though one can in many places study semiotics and/or cultural studies, as one can study aesthetics, they are often not autonomic disciplines, and people working on are not often tagged with them in their work title. Aesthetics, though, has a longer history as a guest, partner in dialogue, and/ or companion in various ways in many other disciplines. Aesthetics is inherently a part of many scholarly traditions, and more than semiotics or cultural studies, we’d say. While the latter ones come with clear methodologies and external systems into other fields, the more delicate perspectives, conceptualisations and philosophical frameworks of aesthetics, which have often been a part of disciplines since their birth – think of art history, literature studies, or art education – is less possible to be considered to be just a ‘visitor’ in the host discipline. Also in film studies, from the birth of the discipline, the first theories of film were about it as a new art form (i.e. aesthetics). Aesthetics is inherently a part of many scholarly traditions. But of course, often it is called for help when, for example, urban scholars discuss urban experience, when mathematicians discuss what makes their discipline so fulfilling, and/or when evolutionary thinking drifts into the pairing of the primates (see Wendy

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Steiner’s article in this book). It is a part of constellations which are considered to be cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary, and/or multidisciplinary. In her ‘Advancing the Social Sciences through the Interdisciplinary Enterprise’ (1990)3, Marilyn Stember presents a heuretical taxonomy for the disciplinary lost. ‘Intradisciplinary’ refers to work within a single discipline. ‘Cross-disciplinary’ notes an interest to look at other disciplines. ‘Multidisciplinary’ refers to, for example, scholars with different backgrounds working together (or someone with two backgrounds using both). ‘Interdisciplinary’ is about integrating knowledge and methods from different disciplines, aiming at a synthesis of approaches. And, last but not least, ‘transdisciplinary’ shows one more step towards ‘full’ integration, according to Stember. The variety of classifications of scholarly work aims to bring clarity to the profession of the scholar that has been severely challenged during late 1900s, and even more in the early 2000s. It is, though, not often that clear what can be meant with these compartments. It might be worth to look at aesthetics with the help of them – making some sketchy openings on what the situation has meant for us, who have been working with it, and so help us to take a look at individual cases of aesthetics and other disciplines. ‘Intradisciplinary’ could institutionally point to scholars working only inside of the debates of aesthetics, for example philosophers discussing Jerome Stolnitz’s idea of ‘aesthetic attitude’ and taking account of, for example, British eighteenth-century theories of taste (e.g. Shaftesbury) – and, why not Dewey, or even Heidegger’s critique of aesthetics (and aesthetic experience), but not going astray with taking a look on, for example, John Urry’s (sociologist) ‘tourist gaze’ or experience theories in psychology. Methodologically speaking ‘intradisciplinary’ could, though, point to work inside of a territory of, for example, only analytic aesthetics (and analytic philosophy, on which’ paradigms aesthetics in this tradition totally leans). The distance between the schools of aesthetics is sometimes quite harsh. To some extent, as aesthetics is mainly situated in philosophy, intradisciplinary problems can arise in the field of more broadly philosophy (see Joseph Tanke’s article in this book). ‘Cross-disciplinary’ could in connection to aesthetics point to, for example, the way art educators have followed what is discussed in aesthetics, and there has been an active relationship to aesthetics all the way. ‘Multidisciplinary’ could point to situations when aestheticians or the expertise of aesthetics, take part in mashing up the already mentioned institutional and/ or methodological approaches. One can think about a case, where scholars in aesthetics are taking part in a project on evolution (evolutionary aesthetics) together with biologists. The case with ‘interdisciplinarity’ and ‘transdisciplinarity’ is of course the most complex, methodologically speaking, but for sure theories of aesthetics have become integral agents in theory formation in, for example, cognitive sciences (the use of Kant and Kantianism).

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Aesthetics is anyway institutionally weak. Many of its scholars work in the fields and departments of philosophy, art history and literature, for example (we, the editors, work, institutionally speaking in visual culture and art history). It is also inherently, methodologically a cluster of very different approaches, where being inside of one discourse does not make it automatically possible to read other approaches, like already mentioned. This complicated split does not help aesthetics to form institutional identity. After a basic education in analytic philosophy, one really has to start studying French philosophy for quite a while until one is able to catch what Jean-Luc Nancy says. Still, when aesthetics clashes with traditional major disciplines like art history, literature and/or art education, one defining feature is always present. A higher level of reflection – this is what we call philosophy – meets applied thinking and studies of material(s). This moment is what makes, for example, the work of Noël Carroll crucial for film studies and it is the reason for the importance of Sartre’s writings for literature. Aesthetics bridges, clashes and provokes thinking. Even more, as aesthetics is often a parasite, a side-kick, and/or a ‘hyacinth discipline’ (that is left out in the cold to die, when there are budget cuts; this term is German and used sometimes to describe, for example, the role of gender studies), its engagement with other disciplines might offer us a key for understanding what aesthetics itself is. Outside of the exegetics of major thinkers and debates that have stayed inside of its walls, the essence of aesthetics is very centrally its role inbetween. Its methodologies, canon and concepts work often together with other, institutionally more central disciplines, and aesthetics is doomed, maybe also in a fruitful way, to be a liminal scholarly territory, liminal for countless other disciplines, where scholars still often respect highly the work done in aesthetics – while it, at the same time, has fermented its importance all over the academic world, nearly paradoxically, thinking about its often ‘site-specific’ marginality. A systematic look at the role of aesthetics in other disciplines might help us to both understand better aesthetics and the disciplines in question. It might also help us to understand academic work all and all. Aesthetics is not the only discipline which is all around the place. Mathematics is all over the place too, from economy to physics, just to give one other example. Looking at other disciplines, as already expressed above, scholars and students in them use aesthetics in their work, many of them so much, that in the end they can be viewed as aestheticians – whether they desire this or not – but most of them are that at least to the extent, that one can say that they have some expertise in aesthetics. Why not make this more visible and why not ask people from different disciplines help aesthetics to define its own identity and existence, in relationship with others? Aesthetics is many things, can be, and should be many things. And the scholars who think of themselves

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as doing mainly aesthetics, have maybe also not yet fully realised the potentials hidden in other disciplines, the sometimes very different ways of doing aesthetics outside of what could be conceived as the more disciplinary field of aesthetics. The book is, in a certain sense, a continuation of our previous co-edited volume titled Aesthetics in Dialogue: Applying Philosophy of Art in a Global World (Berlin, Peter Lang, 2020), where the collected essays demonstrated how aesthetics, its questions, and methods can be particularly useful for a wide range of other disciplines – while at the same time advocating a more global approach. The earlier publication can be interpreted as a well-selected collection of case-studies of these questions, hence illustrating how aesthetics can better explain certain cultural phenomena; this book aims at investigating these issues more methodologically. The contributions examine the history, theoretical conditions, and connection points between aesthetics and other disciplines. At the same time, we are interested in practical clashes of methodology and agenda. The invited academic contributors all work on the edge of aesthetics and at least one other academic field, hence through their regular scholarly activities they constantly benefit from their cross- and interdisciplinary practice, and this makes them ideal interpreters of these methodological questions. Therefore, instead of analyses of actual works of art or of any areas of culture, the essays provide the reader with a strong historical and theoretical survey of the position of aesthetics with other disciplines. Velence, Hungary, 27 May 2023 NOTES 1. Also deceased plants were viewed as ruins. Alexander Wragge-Morley, Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), e.g. 39, 75–76, 90, 96. Quote on page 41. 2. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). 3. Stember, Marilyn. “Advancing the Social Sciences Through the Interdisciplinary Enterprize,” The Social Science Journal 28, Issue 1 (1991): 1–14.

Chapter 1

Aesthetics and Evolutionary Theory Wendy Steiner

Evolutionary biologists from Charles Darwin to Richard O. Prum1 characterise female animals as the ‘choosers’ when it comes to mating, and their choices, when not coerced, as ‘aesthetic’ in nature. Mate choice is not preprogrammed or merely prudent, but an expression of taste – of what delights and attracts a given female in a male. As descendants of such animal choosers, women thus inherit a special relation to aesthetics, one in which taste, freedom, and identity are existentially linked. This aesthetic expression has far-reaching consequences. From primordial times to the present, the choices women have made in pursuing their pleasure have shaped humankind as we know it. Aesthetics is women’s way of creating what it is to be human. These claims, of course, are sweeping and might be dismissed out of hand as essentialist, sexist, or heteronormative. Besides, given that men as actively choose their partners as women do, extrapolating from animal to human mating may seem doomed from the start. And yet, I can attest that viewing my own aesthetic theories through an evolutionary lens has been revelatory, and I hope you will suspend your scepticism for the space of this brief history. My first book to focus on beauty was The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (1995). Its claim was that an aesthetic response ‘is a subjective preference. To like, to find important, at this time and in suchand-such a situation: this is the essence of the critical act’.2 I felt compelled to make this perhaps obvious statement, because extremists of all stripes were suddenly taking aim at art: US Senator Jesse Helms, critic Hilton Kramer, philosopher Allan Bloom, the Ayatollah Khomeini. During the Culture Wars of the 1980s to 1990s, artists and cultural institutions were dragged into court, banned from public funding, and even threatened with assassination.

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Such real-world punishments for harmlessly virtual artistic expression struck me as both a category error and a dangerous assault on democratic rights and freedoms. The Scandal of Pleasure set out to explain what it means to invest art with value and derive pleasure from it [. . .] to demonstrate the utility of a liberal aesthetics in which art is neither identical to reality nor isolated from it, but a virtual realm tied to the world by acts of interpretation [. . .] a realm of thought experiments that quicken, sharpen, and sweeten our being in the world.3

This was a somewhat risky position for a university professor to advance. An academic discipline is a sphere of communicable, disprovable facts and theories, not of personal predilections. Kant had avoided this problem by defining the subjectivity of taste as a human universal,4 but I was claiming just the opposite: that the acts of interpretation by which ‘subjects’ tie artworks to reality are valuable precisely for their individuality and their grounding in contingency. Taste understood as the I like is personal, ephemeral, and difficult to convey to other people, an unscientific ‘softness’ that poses a dilemma for academic aesthetics. This dilemma troubled me for some years before I realised that it was itself no more than an expression of taste – just not my taste – a claim explored in my next book, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (2001).5 As a student of modernism, I had noted a marked contempt and even hostility toward beauty on the part of avantgarde artists and thinkers, and I must admit that as a young scholar, I had shared this view. What could be more distasteful than art openly catering to its audience’s pleasure: pink nudes, neatly resolved plots, flowery poeticisms, passion-heavy operas? In an age of alienation, world war, and genocide, surely only a coward would value such art. Modernism offered instead the heroic asceticism of abstraction and the absurd. As late as 1967, the painter Barnett Newman was explaining the origins of Abstract Expressionism in just this way: We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce world war, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of painting that we were doing – flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello. [. . .] So we actually began [. . .] as if painting were not only dead but had never existed.6

‘Make it new’7 was a modernist mantra. It was daring in its day, but by now it sounds more like cancel culture. After a decade or two of teaching students to appreciate modernist art – often against their taste and inclination – I realised that I myself had been

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trained in it against my taste and inclination. Why should the horrors of modernity be met with cutting-edge aggression and withholding, rather than generosity and charm? Surely beauty would be all the more valuable in a wasteland world. Besides, it could hardly be a coincidence that both the experts and the modernist artists they championed were in almost every case men. Though I was not yet sure how to connect the dots, the ‘softness dilemma’ seemed suspiciously aligned with misogyny. Research revealed that the decoupling of modernist art from beauty, pleasure, and self-expression was almost invariably accompanied by gratuitous swipes at women and the ‘eternal feminine’. Artists from Tolstoy to Epstein, Marinetti, T. S. Eliot, Hemingway, and Mailer deplored the chains of bourgeois domesticity and conformity that women were said to impose on men – and on art. In 1910, the abstractionist André Derain dismissed the female subject outright: ‘Why, what, after all, is a pretty woman? It’s a mere subjective impression – what you think of her. [. . .] In my ideal, I [. . .] bring that beauty forth in terms of line or volume’.8 Derain’s position derives from eighteenth-century aesthetics. As musicologist Mark Evan Bonds writes, for Kant, In taste as in law, judgment had to be impartial and removed from any hint of personal self-interest. [.  .  .B]eauty became an increasingly abstract quality capable of being recognized only in the absence of longing, morality, divinity, or any other consideration beyond the quality of beauty itself. [. . .For Shaftesbury,] admiration, joy or love turns wholly upon what is exterior and foreign to ourselves. [. . .T]his absence of desire became the sine qua non of aesthetic judgment for [. . .] Enlightenment thinkers.9

Impartiality, lack of self-interest, the absence of longing and desire, foreignness to the self: it would be hard to come up with a list of criteria more alien to beauty conceived as the I like. Though Enlightenment aestheticians insisted on the subjectivity of beauty, their need to dissociate it from self-interest had left beauty a paradox. Its subjectivity was not what Derain meant when he described a pretty woman as ‘just a subjective impression’, but more like the beauty of Platonic ‘line or volume’. It delights us as subjects who have transcended their embodied, historical necessity. For without this ‘subjective universality’, the judgement of taste is ‘interested’, and hence unfree, and freedom was the sine qua non of Kantian aesthetics. The notorious variability in judgements of taste – de gustibus non est disputandum – was irrelevant. Those who disagreed [with Kant?] as to what was beautiful obviously suffered from faulty sensory organs or deficient powers of reason or meagre resources, misfortunes that prevented them from transcending necessity. ‘Only when men have got all they want [to eat]’, Kant wrote, ‘can we tell who among

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the crowd has taste or not’.10 The ‘disinterested interest’ of Kantian beauty, a subjective universal, is not available to all ‘subjects’. Thus, judgements reflecting power relations in society can be viewed as ‘correct’ expressions of taste. Invisible is the pressure people feel to fall in line with experts’ decisions as to what is beautiful or the assumption that being ‘educated’ or ‘cultured’ means finding beautiful something that teachers and tastemakers have declared is such. With these social contingencies denied, no wonder people so often talk as if objects were intrinsically beautiful, ‘had beauty’ as one of their traits. But one of the great values of experiencing beauty is seeing the similarity or dissimilarity between our own and other people’s taste. For beauty is not a fixed property of specific things, but the name of an interaction we can have with almost anything. When I find something beautiful, I am registering its value to me, a value signalled by the sensation of pleasure it evokes in me. My consciousness of that pleasure is an intrinsic part of the experience of beauty. Perhaps I did not know I had it in me to like Picasso or Satie or Morrison. How interesting to discover that I do! After a lifetime of finding Moby-Dick unreadable, what does it tell me that I suddenly find the book mesmerising? Beauty is a shifting target, like the self-knowledge it prompts. Noting my attunement to something I find beautiful, I discover my own ‘beauty’, as it were, and that discovery causes me still more pleasure. This ‘interactive theory of beauty’, as I called it, eliminates the perennial problem that tastes differ, no matter how stringently people’s upbringing and social affiliations police them. And more pointedly, it eliminates the problem that opinionated male modernists, in outlawing ‘soft, feminine’ beauty, were muffling their misogyny under a cloak of existential heroism. In Venus in Exile, I documented their rejection of the ‘excess’ of ornament in favour of the ‘purity’ of form, and their rejection of the allure of the female subject in favour of the dangerous mystique of the fetish. It was their right to do so, of course, but male dominance in the world of art and ideas had made what was merely an expression of taste into an incontestable truth, a truth that left women out in the cold. That said, Venus in Exile unfortunately raised another dilemma. The I like appears to send us down a narcissistic rabbit hole. Delighting in my attunement to ‘something beautiful’, that thing becomes all the more beautiful to me, and my attunement to it increases accordingly, along with my delight in my attunement to it . . . and so on and so on. At best, this interactive spiral might be considered self-absorbed. At worst, it produces the individualistic extremism of an Ayn Rand. In her 1943 novel The Fountainhead, the protagonists turn the I like into a militant credo. The result is a misogynist travesty of interactive beauty that to this day inspires anti-democratic think tanks across America.

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The ‘self-absorption dilemma’ led me to write The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (2010).11 Its claim is that if beauty is an interaction, that interaction involves far more than an individual and whatever that individual finds beautiful. Art sets in motion an expanding network of interactions, actual and virtual, involving artist, artwork, viewer, context, preexisting artistic norms, and – less often discussed – the model. Some models are actual human beings who pose for artists, but ultimately, a model can be anything outside the work that is pictured, signified, or evoked in it. In the ‘mirror of art’, almost everything – artist, audience, even the work itself – can function as a model. Entering the interactive system of art, viewers thus connect with a host of factors beyond themselves. In experiencing beauty, they learn about their inmost selves, to be sure, but in relation to realities and ideas that are outside them. And since each viewer is only one of many experiencing the work and describing the experience to still others, this network grows ever more complex and dynamic with time. Driven by pleasure and personal choice, the experience of beauty links people by revealing their shared or differing tastes. In this way, it helps build communities and cultures. The presence of ‘the model in the mirror of art’ has a further and quite momentous effect, at least in terms of the self-absorption dilemma. The model – something real outside the work that becomes part of it – causes the work to impinge on reality. In other words, the model-in-reality is affected by being a model-for-an-artwork. This realisation challenged my belief in the free-expression absolutism of The Scandal of Pleasure. I now saw that beauty, as an interaction, might indeed have real-world consequences. That did not mean those consequences were consistent or predictable, or that they could or should be controlled, but the ethical situation was more complex than I had previously understood. The Real Real Thing appeared in 2010, entering a world increasingly wracked by crisis: climate disaster, racist atrocities, terrorism, pandemics, and a worldwide assault on truth and democratic freedoms. The perplexities of interactive aesthetics pale by comparison. In short, another dilemma had arisen: the ‘who cares?’ and this time, another book did not seem indicated. Or so it seemed, until in the depths of the pandemic I happened upon Richard O. Prum’s astonishing book, The Evolution of Beauty, ‘a natural history of beauty and desire’.12 Prum appeared to have taken up the I like just where I left off. His peahens and female bowerbirds pursue their aesthetic preferences single-mindedly, their identity totally bound up in expressions of taste. And most striking of all, their aesthetic choices had real-world consequences: nothing short of the redesign of their species. I sensed the beginnings of an answer to the ‘who cares?’

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Evolutionary scientists who concern themselves with beauty proceed from Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871. A decade earlier, Darwin’s theory of natural selection in Origin of Species had transformed biology – and everything else – forever. However, that book left certain phenomena unexplained: the ubiquitous ‘ornaments’ among animals, such as vivid colouring or virtuosic birdsongs. Most puzzling of all were wonders like peacock feathers, since these ornaments actually interfered with their bearers’ survival, consuming precious energy and making them vulnerable to predators. ‘The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it’, wrote Darwin, ‘makes me sick!’13 Darwin’s solution, laid out exhaustively in The Descent of Man, was a second evolutionary process, sexual selection, operating in parallel with natural selection. Sexual selection ‘depends on the advantage which certain individuals have over others of the same sex and species solely in respect of reproduction’.14 This advantage stems from ornaments such as the peacock’s tail, which evolved, Darwin concluded, because peahens liked them. As Prum explains, The most notable and revolutionary feature of Darwin’s theory of mate choice is that it was explicitly aesthetic. He described the evolutionary origin of beauty in nature as a consequence of the fact that animals had evolved to be beautiful to [each other]. What was so radical about this idea was that it positioned organisms – especially female organisms – as active agents in the evolution of their own species. Unlike natural selection, which emerges from external forces in nature, such as competition, predation, climate, and geography, acting on the organism, sexual selection is a potentially independent, self-directed process in which the organisms themselves (mostly female) were in charge. Darwin described females as having a ‘taste for the beautiful’ and an ‘aesthetic faculty’. He described males as trying to ‘charm’ their mates.15

For a century, the notion of sexual selection was ignored or outright dismissed by evolutionists, who considered the possibility of ‘females as choosers’ risible. Whether animal or human, females were assumed to be passive, lacking the drive and intelligence to develop preferences and act upon them, and certainly not capable of altering males through their choices. Darwin himself wrote in The Descent of Man, ‘I fully admit that it is astonishing that the females of many birds and some mammals should be endowed with sufficient taste to appreciate ornaments’.16 Darwin presented this ‘astonishing’ female agency as a function of the very passivity that would lead one to discount it in the first place. He portrayed the female as fearful and reticent; she “‘requires to be courted’; she is coy, and may often be seen endeavouring for a long time to escape from the male. [.  .  . Yet] the female, though comparatively passive, generally exerts some

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choice and accepts one male in preference to others. [.  .  .] The exertion of some choice on the part of the female seems a law almost as general as the eagerness of the male.”17 It was not until the rise of feminism in the 1970s that sexual selection became a focus for scientific inquiry,18 and by our century, evolutionary researchers frequently go much further than Darwin in ascribing mating agency to females. Psychologist Michael J. Ryan depicts females as ‘the biological puppeteers, making the males sing exactly what their brains desire’.19 Primatologist Sarah Hrdy describes men as ‘one long breeding experiment run by women’.20 Even the more measured Prum claims that ‘Ultimately, it is female sexual autonomy that is predominantly responsible for the evolution of natural beauty. This was a very unsettling concept in Darwin’s time – as it is to many today’.21 Psychologist Geoffrey F. Miller parallels the early evolutionists’ scepticism toward female autonomy to ‘twentieth century Modernism (which rejected the concepts of beauty and virtuosity)’. The dismissal of sexual selection, he claims, was abetted by the ‘Modernist machine aesthetic [. . .], which viewed ornamentation as morally decadent, economically oppressive, and tasteless’.22 If you recall that the subtitle of Venus in Exile is ‘The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art’, you will perhaps picture my excitement in reading these words. A whole chapter of Venus is devoted to the modernist campaign against ornament, including Adolf Loos’s 1908 essay, ‘Ornament and Crime’. Scientists like Miller and Prum confirmed my hunch that evolutionary theory was deeply relevant to interactive aesthetics. Indeed, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection provokes the very ‘softness dilemma’ that had arisen with Venus in Exile. The preferences of animals, never mind humans, are ‘ultimately unknowable’, Prum writes. ‘Most scientists have therefore been allergic to the idea of making a scientific study of subjective experiences, or even to admitting that they exist. [.  .  .] I will argue that we need an evolutionary theory that encompasses the subjective experiences of animals in order to develop an accurate scientific account of the natural world’.23 I would argue that we need an evolutionary theory that encompasses the subjective experiences of humans in order to develop an accurate aesthetic account of the human world. But how to develop such an account without embracing gender essentialism? It is all-pervasive in evolutionary thought. According to psychologist Matt Ridley, for example, ‘Men and women have different minds. Women’s minds evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men’s minds evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family’.24 The starkness of this ‘different minds’ theory is disconcerting, to say the least. Broadly stated, it turns on the gendering of taste. Whereas the

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reproductive success of females depends on their being exceedingly choosy about their mate, males’ reproductive success depends on their being relatively undiscriminating. The chance of a male’s genes living on in future generations increases according to the number of offspring he sires, and hence, the number of females he impregnates. Thus, indiscriminate lust is an adaptation allegedly built into maleness. As Miller puts it, ‘For male genes, copulation is the gateway to immortality’.25 The only genes that count from an evolutionary perspective are those passed on to offspring, ‘All of us’, psychologist David M. Buss writes, ‘descend from a long and unbroken line of ancestors who competed successfully for desirable mates, attracted mates who were reproductively valuable, retained mates long enough to reproduce, fended off interested rivals, and solved the problems that could have impeded reproductive success. We carry in us the sexual legacy of those success stories’.26 Female choice, in the ‘separate minds’ approach, is an equally survivalist imperative. The number of offspring a female can bear is severely limited, since she has only so many eggs and it can take years to gestate and raise an offspring to independence. Thus, the chance of a female’s genes living on in future generations depends on her success in keeping her offspring alive until puberty. Hrdy thus speaks of females as the ‘investing sex’.27 Psychologist Matt Ridley puts it more crudely: ‘Casanova left more descendants than the Whore of Babylon’.28 Male ornaments, the theory goes, are ‘fitness indicators’. To be successful attractors, these ornaments must be (or must appear to be) costly enough to demonstrate the given male’s superiority in strength or resources over other males. This costliness escalates according to a process called ‘runaway’, advanced by the biologist-statistician R. A. Fisher in 1930.29 According to Fisher, females select males who display attractive ornaments and reject males lacking or less endowed with them. As a consequence, these traits are more likely to reappear in the next generation of male offspring, and the females of that generation will up the ornamental ante by choosing even more pronounced cases. Over time, peacock feathers become increasingly spectacular and hummingbird dances more virtuosic. Runaway stops only at the point where it clashes with survival, as when an ornament prevents males from reaching breeding age and passing on their genes. Miller describes runaway selection as ‘an arms race between female preferences and male ornaments’,30 as if female choosers victimised males with the curse of beauty. And what do human females – women – find beautiful? Men have evolved relatively few physical ornaments beyond a V-shaped body and a large, flexible, pleasure-giving penis. Rather, for women, male beauty extends to men’s entire phenotype. ‘The real reason why there is an apparent paucity of morphological ornaments in human males’, Prum writes, ‘is that

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female mate choice in human evolution has focused largely on social rather than physical traits [. . .] qualities that indicate the potential for relationship endurance’.31 Recent sociological and psychological research indicates that women in widely differing cultures are attracted by displays of attachment, resources, and mental and physical fitness. In The Evolution of Desire, Buss reports the results of internationally administered questionnaires in which, with surprising consistency, women identified male traits such as financial prospects, social status, intelligence, and strength as attractors. The choice among these traits is hugely ‘subjective’ in a non-Kantian sense, contingent upon individual women’s shifting responses to accidents of time, place, and culture. What they rated highest and with greatest consistency was evidence of love.32 ‘ Contrary to common belief in the social sciences, love is not a recent invention of the Western leisure classes. People in all cultures experience love. [. . .W]ith its key components of commitment, idealized perceptions of loved ones, deep empathy, and overwhelming passion, [love] is an inevitable part of the human experience’.33 The ‘separate minds’ approach is further complicated by the fact that even evolutionists agree that men can be as choosy as women when it comes to long-term mate choice. And unlike the animal world in which males use ornaments to induce picky females to select them, among humans, females are the apparently ornamented sex, using physical ‘beauty’ to attract men. Evolutionists have enumerated an all too familiar inventory of traits of female beauty: facial and bodily symmetry, full breasts, low waist-to-hip ratio, and youthfulness. These traits supposedly signal fertility (as costly male ornaments supposedly signal fitness), and hence the promise of genetic immortality for the man who selects them. Since mating with an old or sick woman is less likely to produce viable offspring, the theory goes, men in the past who did not select according to the ‘beauty = fertility’ formula were not as successful in passing on their genes. Such thinking equates women’s evolutionary value with their appearance and ineluctably leads to their objectification. But widespread as this belief may be among both evolutionists and the general public, it is obviously not the whole story. Apart from (pre-menopausal) youth, the conventional traits of womanly beauty do not correlate especially well with fertility. As Darwin himself stated, ‘The men who succeed in obtaining the more beautiful women will not have a better chance of leaving a long line of descendants than other men with plainer wives’.34 Moreover, the sexual divide even among animals is not as simple as the ‘separate minds’ approach suggests. Beautiful displays may turn up in females as well as in males, since a female offspring inherits half of her genes from her father. As Miller notes, ‘The ornaments common to both sexes were

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acquired by one sex, generally the male, and then transmitted to the offspring of both sexes’.35 It is the taste for those ornaments, as Prum explains, that drives evolution. Male Argus [pheasants] have such extreme ornaments precisely because most males are not chosen as mates. Thus, a calm, under-impressed female Argus is actually acting as [. . .] an experienced, well-educated connoisseur evaluating one of the many extraordinary works available to her scrutiny. [. . .I]t’s her coolheaded mating decisions over the course of millions of years that have provided the coevolutionary engine that has culminated in the male Argus’s display of hundreds of golden balls shimmering and gyrating in the air.36

Prum uses the word ‘coevolutionary’ here because the male Argus is not the only one affected by the female’s taste for ornament. Fisher’s insight was that her taste is itself heritable. The female passes on to her daughters her preferences in ornaments, and through runaway, her female descendants will choose those ornaments ever more consistently. In this way, beauty and the taste for it coevolve. This seems to me an ornithological analogue to interactive aesthetics. In responding to something we find beautiful, we discover our attunement to it, and hence, our own beauty. Coevolution is in evidence when men and women ‘use the same mental machinery to produce [courtship] displays that they use to judge the displays produced by others’, Miller claims. ‘To produce a really effective display, it helps to anticipate how the display will be judged. [. . .] Conversely, to be a really good judge of something, it helps to be able to do it oneself. [. . .] So, even given a pure runaway process based on male courtship and female choice, male minds will tend to internalize the sexual preferences of females in their own courtship equipment, in order to produce better displays’.37 The creativity of the displayer burgeons with the burgeoning creativity of the critic. But what Miller does not say is that the minds of female judges will gradually become like those of male displayers, too – prone to creating such displays themselves. And who will their displays please: themselves?, males who have inherited female standards of taste?, other female judges? Here is perhaps one crack in the evolutionary wall of sexual essentialism and heteronormativity. You will have noticed that the line between nature and nurture, or between genetic inheritance and cultural transmission, has become increasingly blurred in this discussion. Fisher’s claim that preferences are heritable begins this blurring, in that individual mating choices have an impact on the genetic makeup of the whole species. Richard Dawkins’ concept of the ‘extended phenotype’ further softens the boundary between genes and culture. ‘The phrase communicates that an organism is more than the proteins created by the expression of its DNA, more even than its anatomy, its physiology, and

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its behaviour. An organism’s complete phenotype includes all of the consequences of its genome’s interacting with its environment, including its impact on the environment’.38 The phenotype of humans comprises language and the arts, politics and science, and much more: the by-products of our ornamental brain itself, which evolved through eons of sexual selection by our primordial mothers.39 Taste has designed the human species. This designing may be the most consequential action we take as organisms. Darwin wrote that ‘It is not the weal or woe of any one individual, but that of the human race to come, which is here at stake’.40 Even for the most callous Casanova, ‘What decision could be more important than with whom to combine one’s [genetic] inheritance to produce one’s offspring?’41 Males engage in mortal combat to attain and retain females, and devote vast amounts of time and energy to costly, sometimes dangerous displays to make themselves attractive to potential mates. ‘No force in nature causes individuals to extend their phenotypes as does the drive to increase one’s sexual beauty’,42 writes Ryan. Sometimes males do not succeed, and their genes die with them. The poignancy of this failure is apparent in the recent coinage ‘involuntary celibate’, incel, and discussions of ‘the right to sex’.43 But – and this is a claim of paramount importance – the transformative interaction between display and evaluation depends on female freedom of choice. Among humans, females are all too often deprived of this freedom, but all females face this risk. In response, many females have acquired traits that specifically protect their chances of choosing partners that please and attract them, such as the excruciating lengths women go to in altering their appearance in order to multiply their mating choices. Or, to put the matter in negative terms: many females have evolved adaptations to prevent their rape or coerced fertilisation. In the case of ducks, for example, incel drakes frequently attack unwilling females brutally, and in response, duck vaginas have evolved to be so corkscrewed and convoluted, as to reduce the chances of procreation from such attacks. In contrast, ‘when a female duck solicits sex with a chosen mate, her cloacal muscles dilate to allow uninhibited entry. The result is that, even for species in which nearly forty per cent of all copulations are violently coerced, only between two and five per cent of ducklings come from extra-pair matings’.44 Rape is a crime against beauty and its correlate, autonomy, and females of all species abhor it. Take the female bowerbird. The bower the male builds is not a nest but ‘a seduction theatre – an ornamental stage for male sexual display’.45 In mating season, females of the species go from bower to bower shopping, checking out the gorgeous colour and complexity of each structure and the strutting prowess of its male architect. But the bower is more than a theatre for display: it is a theatre in which female judgement of that display can go on in safety, both from external predators and from the male inside. Ornithologists have

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ascertained that the bowers that a hen is most likely to enter are those that contain an escape route! The longer the female sits in a bower, the longer she has to appreciate the display and experience its attraction. Her drive for free choice has thus influenced the way successful males construct their bowers to accommodate her. ‘Bowerbirds provide us with a particularly vivid example of what I call aesthetic modelling’, Prum writes, ‘the coevolution of female aesthetic preferences and male traits that enhance female autonomy. The result is a sexual partner that is both more pleasing to females and more amenable to female choice’.46 For the bowerbird hen, as for all females, sexual autonomy is an imperative built into her by the genes of the free female choosers who preceded her. These genes remake the male of their species to increase the freedom of female choice. The aesthetic choices women have made in their desire for sexual autonomy have led, since our common ancestry with chimpanzees, to numerous adaptations in men. Prum describes these as constituting a ‘de-weaponization of maleness’, including the elimination of self-sharpening male canine teeth, the reduction in male body size relative to females, the elimination of infanticide by ascendant alpha males, and the origin of paternal investment in their offspring. By evolving to regard violent, antisocial maleness as unsexy, females may have instigated the evolution of many elements critical to our biology, including big brains, language, and even our capacity for self-awareness and reflection.47

Women themselves have changed in the process. The evolution of hidden ovulation makes it all but impossible for men to know whether a given copulation, forced or otherwise, will lead to pregnancy and decouples the pleasure of sex from procreation. Equally transformative are the cultural adaptations women instigate. We could consider the #MeToo movement a transnational female strategy to deprive rapists of their sexual attractiveness, and hence of their genetic immortality. The public accusation of assault ‘ruins’ them, eliminating the ornaments of wealth, power, and social respectability that previously made them desirable. The men outed by #MeToo become repellent after this ‘aesthetic remodelling’, causing other men to rethink their behaviour accordingly. But note how ‘soft’ the means available to women are for resisting rape. In the eons-long struggle for women to mitigate ‘biology as destiny’ through sexual selection, the fact remains that women are susceptible to violence and other forms of coercion in mating to a degree that men are not. As the female detective in the cable series The Fall put it (echoing novelist Margaret Atwood): ‘Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them’. Though it is never safe to posit an absolute difference between

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the sexes, this one seems hard to deny. Prum contrasts ‘the female acting on her sexual desire for beauty and the male using sexual violence to subvert her ability to choose her own mate’.48 Patriarchy – whatever its proponents may claim – enables rape. By evolutionary standards, patriarchy arose relatively late, but its effects have been virulent. Darwin wrote that the ‘far more abject state of bondage [men keep women in] than does the male of any other animal’ has given men virtually total control over mate selection.49 According to Hrdy, in no species does the victimisation of the weak by the strong occur on the scale it does with people, ‘and never directed exclusively against a particular sex after the fashion of female infanticide, claustration of daughters and wives, infibulation, or the suttee’.50 ‘Men consistently underestimate how unacceptable sexual aggression is to women’, Buss states; ‘men’s failure to correctly understand the psychological pain that women experience from sexual aggression may be one cause of men’s lack of empathy for rape victims’.51 According to Prum, the cost of rape to the female of any species is not just physical harm, but also reproductive disadvantage. Females who mate with males whose traits they prefer will likely have offspring preferred by other females, and hence more descendants. After forced copulations, however, her offspring will be, like their rapist father, less attractive to other females, ‘which will result in fewer grandchildren for that female. This is the indirect, genetic cost of male sexual violence’.52 Let us be clear: this is a cost differential in beauty. The free exercise of female choice has a social benefit beyond the individual female’s pleasure and the perpetuation of her genes. Her freedom of choice improves the attractiveness of the entire species long after she is dead. Thus – in another refutation of the self-absorption dilemma – female sexual autonomy is a force for collective good, in the sense of ever-expanding species pleasure. Constraints on it may temporarily increase the continuity of a particular male’s genes, but they diminish the attractiveness of the species as a whole. Linda Nochlin said that ‘The core of feminism is justice’. That justice, I would argue, is the engine of beauty.53 Of course, human females seldom cite such evolutionary concerns in decrying rape. Sexual autonomy is driven by pleasure. Attractive courtship displays, according to Miller, create ‘experiences of aesthetic rapture, curiosity, warmth, happiness, awe, lust, and adoration’.54 Miller uses this fact to explain the role of conversation, humour, art, and entertainment in courtship. These ‘displays’ enhance the pleasure of both men and women. The human brain – far more complex and energy-consuming than necessary for mere survival – is itself ‘a magnificent sexual ornament’: ‘an entertainment system that evolved to stimulate other brains’.55 Thus, runaway sexual selection produced a species with a hyper-evolved brain inventing hyper-attractive

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displays to evoke hyper-evolved critical pleasure in the opposite sex. And clearly, by this point in human evolution, it is not easy to tell the displayer from the audience, since both mirror the primordial roles of the other in their behaviour and sensibilities. This mutual modelling and remodelling of men and women has profound ethical consequences. I would go so far as to claim that the expansion of human pleasure through female choice has produced socially conscious liberalism, an evolving ideology of freedom and equality. Consider that Darwin’s Descent of Man is replete with references to the inferiority of women. Yet as later scientists have explored the idea of sexual selection, they have been led to a very different assessment of women: as benefactors of their species for expanding not only pleasure but the justice and freedom of choice upon which that pleasure depends. Coevolution and sexual autonomy tend to even out unequal power relations by promoting empathy and reciprocity, rather than hardening the binary divides of patriarchal dominance. And what is art’s role in this ethical evolution? Darwin observed that sexual ornaments in animals can become an end in themselves, irrespective of their effect on potential mates or on the well-being of the displayer: ‘male birds [. . .] continue singing for their own amusement after the season for courtship is over’.56 Prum reports that manakin males ‘expend most of their time and energies in the rehearsal, perfection, and performance of a set of highly choreographed song and dance routines, in duet, group, and solo forms. By Darwin’s criteria, the manakins and bowerbirds beat humans by far’57 in their aesthetic dedication. But ask human artists whether they agree. Until recently, most were men expending vast amounts of time and energy on displays intended to gain them ‘recognition’: the prestige, influence, and in some cases, wealth that function as male sexual attractors among humans. Their efforts – existentially fused with their identity – seldom paid off. For every Picasso there were tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of struggling artists, drained, defeated, often in despair, their work consigned to ‘the dustbin of history’. And yet few of them would deny that their creativity was the greatest source of pleasure in their lives, whether potential mates – or the world – recognised it. Similarly, art criticism can be understood in evolutionary terms as the equivalent of female mate choice. Experts and collectors deploy runaway selection, developing ever more refined, esoteric, and exclusive preferences, which have a long-lasting influence over future generations of critics and markets. The eight- or even nine-figure price tags on paintings deemed masterpieces and the notorious viciousness of critical disputes indicate the stakes of the critical act, despite the alleged marginality of art in human affairs.

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If male songbirds go on singing after courtship is over, I would wager that the females of the species go on finding their singing attractive. In the same way, after spending an entire adolescence pursuing the giddy pleasures (and frustrations) of sexual display – clothes, hair, makeup, flirting, dancing, and all the rest – it would be strange indeed if women suddenly lost their taste for these pleasures upon finding a mate, and equally strange if men stopped enjoying these female displays. So too with conventionally male displays: after marriage, men go on cultivating wealth, power, and mastery in sports, ideas, music, etc., far beyond what is necessary to retain a spouse or support children. Not only their own wives but other women and men find them attractive for doing so. And being found ‘beautiful’ by others – and by oneself – is a great pleasure. One can again and again be ‘chosen’. The arts thus stage sexual selection as a virtual event that can be re-experienced in different guises throughout life. I think of music, dance, art, and literature as courtship displays out of season. Or perhaps they show that human courtship has no season, as men and women take up the roles of creators and critics throughout their lives, at their pleasure. This is an evolutionary riposte to the self-absorption dilemma. Indeed, Prum’s ideas about art suggest an elegant alternative to the malign individualism propounded by Ayn Rand and her ilk: ‘art is a form of communication that coevolves with its own evaluation. This coevolutionary definition of art implies that art necessarily emerges within an aesthetic community, or population of aesthetic producers and evaluators’.58 Many people are disturbed at the notion that art (or language or our oversized brain) is a sexual ornament. ‘It is a disquieting thought that our heads contain a neurological version of a peacock’s tail’, writes Ridley, ‘an ornament designed for sexual display whose virtuosity at everything from calculus to sculpture is perhaps just a side effect of the ability to charm. [. . .O]ne of the strangest of the consequences of sex [is] that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness, and individuality turn other people on’.59 I find nothing shocking in the idea that art and other human ornaments re-enact (or in youth, anticipate) the signal moment of pleasured choice in mating. But art has the further virtue of allowing us to examine this choice consciously and showing us far more possibilities within it than a single lifetime could encompass. For example, art foregrounds what can go wrong in sexual selection. Let me count the ways! For familial interference we have Romeo and Juliet; for the pain of infidelity, Camelot; for the trauma of infertility, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; for flawed mate choice, Portrait of a Lady; and for lovers’ rejection, every madrigal ever sung. Plots of rape and oppression abound in opera and fiction. Our oldest stories

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are rife with displayers and choosers: male suitors winning the hands of fair damsels by solving riddles or triumphing in jousts or slaying dragons. Sometimes the roles are reversed, as when a patriarchal Prince tests every female foot in the kingdom to find the one that fits an exiguous glass slipper. The ecstasies and perils of sexual selection are an empathetic legacy passed down in the playbook of art from generation to generation, and they are a theme that never disappears. The hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, traverses Dublin and all of world culture peddling ads. But it is not his male display that has the last word, but Molly Bloom’s memory of the moment when she chose him as her husband: ‘and yes I said yes I will Yes’.60 In short, though Darwin’s legacy does not hold all the answers for aesthetics, the profundity it accords to taste is a contribution of profound importance. For evolutionists, the free choice of women expressing their pleasure creates what it is to be human, or better, what it is to be becoming human. Taste drives this becoming, and beauty is its runaway triumph. NOTES 1. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relationship to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871); Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (New York: Anchor Books, 2017). 2. Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 7. 3. Steiner, Scandal of Pleasure, p. 8. 4. ‘For, since the delight is not based on any inclination of the Subject (or on any other deliberate interest), but the Subject feels himself completely free in respect of the liking which he accords to the object, he can find as reason for his delight no personal conditions to which his own subject self might alone be party. Hence he must regard it as resting on what he may also presuppose in every other person; and therefore, he must believe that he has reason for demanding a similar delight from every one. [. . .] The result is that the judgement of taste, with its attendant consciousness of detachment from all interest, must involve a claim to validity for all men, and must do so apart from universality attached to Objects, i.e. there must be coupled with it a claim to subjective universality.’ Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), pp. 50–51. 5. Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); published in the UK as The Trouble with Beauty (London: Heinemann, 2001). 6. Barnett Newman, quoted in wall text for the exhibition, “Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera” (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021).

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7. Ezra Pound’s phrase, “Make it new,” is taken, interestingly, from eighteenthcentury Chinese sources: https://www​.guernicamag​.com​/the​-making​-of​-making​-it​ -new/ (consulted 23/09/22). 8. Gelett Burgess, “The Wild Men of Paris,” The Architectural Record, May 1910, pp. 406–07. 9. Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 80–81. 10. Kant, Critique of Judgement, pp. 49–50. 11. Wendy Steiner, The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 12. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, p. 8. 13. Charles Darwin, letter to Asa Gray, 3 April, 1860, https://www​.darwinproject​ .ac​.uk​/letter​/DCP​-LETT​-2743​.xml (consulted 09/25/21). 14. Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 175. 15. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, p. 23. We might recall Plato’s female priest Diotima, teaching Socrates that love is a “longing not for the beautiful itself, but for the conception and generation that the beautiful effects.” Plato, “The Symposium,” trans. Michael Joyce, in Plato: Collected Dialogues (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 558. 16. Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 496. 17. Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 186. 18. Geoffrey F. Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Doubleday/Heinemann, 2000), p. 63. 19. Michael J. Ryan, A Taste for the Beautiful (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 3. 20. Quoted in Prum, Evolution of Beauty, p. 71. 21. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, p. 20. 22. Miller, précis of The Mating Mind, Psychology (August 2001) pp. 38, 11: http://www​.cogsci​.soton​.ac​.uk​/psyc​-bin​/newpsy​?12​.008 (accessed March, 2021). 23. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, p. 7. 24. Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 247. 25. Miller, Mating Mind, p. 87. 26. David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 2016 [revised ed.]), pp. 7–8. 27. Quoted in Buss, p. 31. 28. Ridley, Red Queen, p. 179. 29. R. A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (London: Clarendon Press, 1930). 30. Miller, Mating Mind, p. 56. 31. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, pp. 242–43. 32. Buss, pp. 40–56. 33. Buss, p. 2. 34. Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 471. 35. Miller, Mating Mind, p. 189.

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36. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, pp. 63–64. 37. Miller, Mating Mind, p. 93. 38. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, pp. 191–92. 39. In an email to the author in October 2021, Prum wrote that he considers the extended phenotype a possible model for a unified scientific/cultural concept of gender/sex compatible with the feminist critique of thinkers such as Donna Haraway. 40. Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 471. 41. Miller, Mating Mind, p. 44. 42. Ryan, Taste for the Beautiful, p. 70. 43. Amia Srinivasan explores this argument in The Right to Sex (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2021). 44. Richard O. Prum, “Duck Sex and the Patriarchy,” The New Yorker, May 17, 2017. Accessed November 13, 2021, https://www​.newyorker​.com​/tech​/annals​-of​ -technology​/duck​-sex​-and​-the​-patriarchy. 45. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, p. 186. 46. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, p. 185. In an October 6, 2021 email to the author, Prum stated that a mathematical model has been developed that “demonstrates the plausibility of this idea and establishes some dynamics.” 47. Prum, “Duck Sex.” 48. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, p. 158. 49. Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 481. 50. Sarah Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999 [1981]), p. 185. 51. Buss, p. 230. 52. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, p. 158. 53. Elaine Scarry connects beauty with justice on different grounds: the notional parallel of symmetry and even-handedness, and the copresence of “lovely” and “just” among the meanings of the word fair. On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 54. Miller, Mating Mind, p. 149. 55. Miller, Mating Mind, pp. 5, 152. 56. Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 304. 57. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, p. 225. 58. Prum, Evolution of Beauty, p. 356. 59. Ridley, Red Queen, p. 344. 60. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1966 [1922]), p. 783.

Chapter 2

Aesthetics and Environmental Humanities The Fieldwork on Ourselves Mami Aota When I, as an environmental aesthetician, have conversations with researchers in other fields, I am often told that I have expressed exactly what they have been feeling. I have learnt a lot from my conversations with different people, such as architectural historians, urban planners, artists, and others, and have also contributed to their perspectives. Each of them has a specialised approach to deal with issues surrounding the environment. They probably have some kind of ‘feeling’ during their research, investigation, and production in their respective fields. However, ‘the feeling’, that is the basis of their experiences, is difficult to verbalise and is ephemeral. If they believe that their ‘feeling’ was captured through their conversations with me, then it was an aesthetic experience in their environment. Often, people are unaware of aesthetics; however, people perceive and live in the world using their sensibilities. Thus, while people may not have an academic understanding of aesthetics, they have definitely experienced it. Aesthetics, like other disciplines, is one of the core areas of human existence. This chapter examines the role of aesthetics within environmental humanities. In particular, I will clarify the significance of aesthetics for verbalising the experiences mentioned above. So far, aesthetics has not held a significant presence in environmental humanities. However, environmental humanities (developed in the 2010s) is a field that reconsiders the relationship between the environment and humans using an interdisciplinary approach, which is similar to the field of environmental aesthetics. Note worthily, Arnold Berleant’s method of descriptive aesthetics demonstrates that aesthetics can verbalise subjective environmental experiences and construct theories that can be shared with others. Thus, aestheticians can formulate a perspective of descriptive aesthetics and collaborate with environmental humanists to help researchers from other disciplines to verbalise experiences that they find elusive. 25

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WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES? Environmental humanities emerged as a cross-disciplinary framework for the practice of humanities that focuses on the environment. Since the launch of the international journal Environmental Humanities, based in New South Wells, Australia in 2012, several introductions and companions to environmental humanities have been published.1 Scholars from various fields, such as history, literature studies, anthropology, geography, and philosophy have entered the field. Deborah Rose and others argue that ‘environmental humanities engages with fundamental questions of meaning, value, responsibility and purpose in a time of rapid, and escalating change’.2 The ‘environment’ is not a field that is new to the 2010s. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, the environment has been gradually addressed in philosophy, history, literary studies, and other fields. In terms of methodology, there is not much that is new either. Ursula K. Heise pointed out that ‘the environmental humanities do not so much propose a new object of study, a new humanistic perspective on a non-humanistic field, or a particular set of new methods, as they combine humanistic perspectives and methods that have already developed in half a dozen or so disciplines over the last four decades’.3 She continues: Although each of them struggled for a decade or more to be fully accredited by its own discipline, their academic recognition has in recent years opened up the possibility of closer collaborations with neighboring disciplines such as environmental anthropology, cultural geography, and areas in political science and urban studies that converge around the theoretical paradigm of ‘political ecology’.4

Environmental humanities is unique in that it re-positions the environmental crisis as a fundamental question for the humanities, and the various disciplines work in unison based on this recognition.5 It is also worth noting, as Heise points out, that some environmental humanities researches have adopted a political nuance. Dolly Jørgensen and Franklin Ginn note that environmental justice issues that stem from inequalities of race, gender, and sexuality have received increasing attention.6 They suggest that 2012 and today are different ecopolitical moments, and several issues have been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. There are also collections of papers that take a post-colonial approach. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan point out, post-colonial environmental humanities require us to reconsiders the border between the self and the other.7 It denotes that we should ask how we have defined ‘humanity’ and how it must be redefined in the future.

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Moreover, multi-species became one of the keywords for environmental humanities.8 The study of multi-species ethnography has also increased in environmental humanities in recent years. This allows us to acquire a manner of perceiving the world with non-human species at the centre, which in turn functions to reconsider the art of living for the human species. However, the fundamental idea that environmental humanities reviews the concept of the ‘human’ is unshakable. As Rose et al. suggest, the emphasis on dialogues across the humanities stem from a concern that recent debates over environmental issues have only narrowly focused on the concept of humanity. The environmental issues should be viewed from the perspective of reflective thinking about what humans can and will do. And by doing so, the very nature of humanity itself should be re-organised.9 Environmental humanities can be considered a framework for the amalgamation of a series of studies that share this major goal. No matter how much science comes to understand the biological structure of human beings, our environmental destruction will not be halted. Literary works offer fresh perspectives in the consideration of what our relationship with the environment is and should be. Like ecocriticism and other environmental humanities, environmental aesthetics has turned its attention to literature, especially nature writing. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that environmental aesthetics has developed through the theorisation of the aesthetic experience of nature as depicted in nature writing. In the following section, we will examine the arguments of Allen Carlson and Emily Brady, two scholars who have worked specifically in this direction.

ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS AS A ‘SMALL ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES’ Environmental aesthetics is a field that has been actively discussed since the late 1960s. It emerged against the lack of sufficient discussion on natural beauty in aesthetics at the time. It is also a response from aesthetics to the increasingly serious nature of environmental problems. Initially, the subject matter of environmental aesthetics focused on pristine nature; however, after reflection on the strict dichotomy between the natural and manmade, the human environment that is inclusive of the countryside and cities is now actively discussed.10 In his 1966 article ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, Ronald Hepburn, who is considered a pioneer in environmental aesthetics, identifies that the issue of natural beauty was not addressed in AngloAmerican aesthetics at the time. He attributes this to the fact that people’s experience of nature is no longer as rich as it was. Outdoor activities using

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trailer homes and private cars, according to Hepburn, deprive people of ‘a serious aesthetic interest in nature’.11 He also argues that experience is impoverished when theory is not discussed. Hepburn tried to view the problem of the neglect of natural beauty in the context of the back-and-forth relationship between theory and experience. Environmental aesthetics has always sought to present a theory to discuss people’s experiences and to transform them in the process. In order to connect theory and practice, scholars in environmental aesthetics have traversed a variety of fields to find the ideal state of our aesthetic appreciation. For example, Allen Carlson, one of the key theorists of environmental aesthetics, connects aesthetics with literature and ethics. He formulates ‘scientific cognitivism’, which argues that common sense/scientific knowledge is necessary for the appropriate aesthetic appreciation of the environment. According to him, knowledge-based aesthetic appreciation is what nature writers have actually done. He suggests a reading list for the correct curriculum, including Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, Aldo Leopold, Joseph Kurtch, Marston Bates, Sally Carrighar, Sigurd Olson, Loren Eiseley, Barry Lopez, and David Quammen.12 He emphasises that knowledge-based appreciation of nature is morally appropriate. We often appreciate nature as if it were a work of art. We may perceive stone in terms of sculpture, an object detached from its surroundings. Or, we may appreciate the scene in front of us as if it were a landscape painting. These appreciations, according to Carlson, are not appropriate. Natural things belong to an environment, and the environment is something that envelops us and should be appreciated through various senses that are not limited to the sight. If we have scientific knowledge of nature, we can make our appreciation reflect these facts about the natural environment. Thus, this appreciation can avoid anthropocentrism.13 Moreover, according to Carlson, it is possible that knowledge gives us an objective basis for the aesthetic appreciation of the natural environment. Though some people believe that aesthetic judgements are subjective and do not help us make practical decisions on the environment, scientific cognitivism can contribute to it because aesthetic judgements on the environment are objective due to knowledge. Emily Brady disagrees with Carlson in terms of the superiority of scientific knowledge. However, like Carlson, she attempts to connect literature and ethics through aesthetics. She has recently turned her attention to John Muir and is attempting to construct a Muirian environmental aesthetics. This approach is an attempt to construct a theory of environmental aesthetics by reading the nature writing even more specifically than Carlson. Brady considers one of the characteristics of Muirian environmental aesthetics a pluralistic perspective that combines the aesthetic, the religious, and the scientific.14 It may be observed that Muir has a respect to nature through his direct experiences.

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Brady describes that ‘he observes beyond the human – to God as the ultimate category of nature, but importantly, also, to geological forces and evolution’.15 Brady identifies that Muir’s aesthetic experience provides a reason for him to choose environmental activism. She further interprets that, through his writings, his personal experience corresponds to environmental pragmatism, in that he communicates his personal experiences to the public sphere and motivates the general public to conserve nature.16 Although only a few examples from environmental aesthetics, referring to Carlson and Brady’s arguments, can be observed, it may be said that environmental aesthetics is itself, a ‘small environmental humanities’. Environmental aesthetics has used the field of literature to elucidate the mechanisms of (ideal) appreciation of environments within the framework of aesthetics, and has connected this to environmental ethics. Aesthetics is the glue that holds the humanities together. Our aesthetic appreciation of the environment is often limited to a superficial viewpoint, which focuses only on spectacular scenery, for example. However, if we connect our experience with scientific and religious perspectives, a deeper appreciation of non-human existence is incorporated into aesthetic appreciation. The subjective experience of aesthetic appreciation becomes an opportunity to open up to others. In this respect, environmental aesthetics has already addressed one of the goals of environmental humanities, which is to use aesthetic appreciation to question the place of human beings in the world.

ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS IN ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES Despite the fact that environmental aesthetics has long been an interdisciplinary discussion, it has not had a significant presence in the environmental humanities. For example, a picture of the environmental humanities by Philip Buckland and Steven Hartman illustrates literature, philosophy, anthropology, human geography, archaeology, and history as major components, with overlapping sub-disciplines depicted; however, it makes no mention of the word aesthetics.17 Since aesthetics is also a branch of philosophy in the broadest sense, it can be considered here to be included within philosophy. However, given that environmental ethics is independently named, and wherein philosophy and anthropology overlap, it is only aesthetics that has no place in this diagram among philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, which constitute philosophy in the broad sense. Aestheticians are not visible among the list of names of other historians, literary scholars, philosophers, anthropologists, human geographers, feminists, and researchers on animal studies who have made important contributions to environmental humanities.18

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Following a more careful observation, we can find shades of aesthetics in discussions of environmental humanities. Aesthetics is primarily referred to in relation to literature. As Peter Quigley writes, the ecocritic Scott Slovic ‘considers aesthetics to be one of the elephants in the room at eco-conference, something folks are aware of, thinking about, but for some reason hesitant to engage with’.19 Quigley states that, from around 1990, beauty and aesthetics have sometimes been used interchangeably, and beauty was thought to distract people from the social and political complexities of nature and the environment. Recently, scholars such as Quigley and Slovic have been trying to reconnect aesthetics and literature. This time, aesthetics is perceived not as a theory of beauty, but rather as a discipline for the analysis of experiences that connect us to the world through our senses.20 If so, then aesthetics is a tool for the analysis of literature; through it, it brings new knowledge to the environmental humanities. Carlson and Brady have already attempted to do precisely this. Furthermore, aesthetics is not only a tool for the analysis of individual literary works, but also a framework for the understanding of what role literature plays in environmental humanities. German ecocritic, Hubert Zapf, who discusses how literature functions as a form of knowledge in environmentalist literature, argues that literature is not only a written text, but also a medium for aesthetic communication between writer and reader.21 He mentions the names of Baumgarten, Kant, Hegel, Adorno, and Gernot Böhme, and notes that aesthetics ‘has struggled with the double status of the aesthetic as both an experience and a form of knowledge, a paradoxical, non-systematic form of sinnliche Erkenntnis, of ‘sensuous knowledge’, in which the tension and ambiguous co-agency between mind and body, thought and life was part of the ways in which the productivity of aesthetic and imaginative processes was conceived’.22 Zapf believes that literature, as aesthetic text, provides transdisciplinary knowledge by questioning the mind-body dualism that aesthetics has tried to formulate, as well as the dualism of nature and culture. At first glance, Zapf’s argument might be interpreted as aesthetics that supports this knowledge as theory and literature as practice. However, aesthetics does not contribute to new knowledge only in relation to literature. The dichotomy of aesthetics as theory and literature as practice should also be overcome. In the following section, we will examine this point using Arnold Berleant’s descriptive aesthetics as a guide, but first, we take a close look at how aesthetics has been dismantling the dichotomies. EXPERIENCING OURSELVES Literature plays a significant role in the development of environmental humanities. The contribution of aesthetics in relation to literature is noted by

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Quigley and Zapf. However, what is the role that aesthetics can actively play, rather than that of being subordinate to literature? As already mentioned, the purpose of environmental humanities is to clarify the definition of humanity. In the face of unprecedented environmental degradation, we must strive to change our future by questioning what it means to be a human being. What role can aesthetics play when considered from the perspective of the understanding of human nature? Though there are few examples that mention aesthetics in the context of environmental humanities, J. Andrew Hubbell and John C. Ryan, in their recent introduction to environmental humanities, refer to environmental aesthetics as ecoaesthetics.23 Hubbell and Ryan describe the characteristics of ecoaesthetic experience in the environment as follows. Through direct experience, the environmental spectator is transformed into an ecological agent. As she or he moves through a place, the dichotomy between human subject and natural object disintegrates.24

Here, ‘ecology’ is considered the overcoming of the dichotomy between the subject and the object. The boundary between oneself and the environment is overcome. When we overcome the dualism that suggests that humans are the subject and nature is the object, we are transformed from being environmental spectators to ecological agents. Due to experiencing the environment directly, we are transformed into a new being. Thus, through aesthetic experience, we ourselves come to realise that we were not originally separate from our environment. Hepburn has already mentioned our continuity to the environment. When he analysed the difference between the aesthetic experience of nature and art, he identified that one of the differences between nature and art is the degree to which the viewer is involved in the aesthetic situation. We have not only a mutual involvement of spectator and object, but also a reflective effect by which the spectator experiences himself in an unusual and vivid way; and this difference is not merely noted, but dwelt upon aesthetically. The effect is not unknown to art, especially architecture. But it is both more intensely realised and pervasive in nature-experience – for we are in nature and a part of nature; we do not stand over against it as over against a painting on a wall.25

We are not only in nature but also a part of it. We can realise our c­ onnection to nature through aesthetic experience. The dichotomy between nature and humans, or object and subject nearly disappear during the a­ esthetic ­experience of nature. We are supposed to experience nature, but we experience ourselves. It is the environment that brings about this strange phenomenon.

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BERLEANT’S AESTHETICS OF ENGAGEMENT To take account of how to experience ourselves more deeply, we will consider the arguments of Arnold Berleant, one of the most influential environmental aestheticians. He is known for his aesthetics of engagement which rejects the traditional dualism subject and object of aesthetic experience. Berleant argues that we cannot be separated from the environment because we are continuous with environment; an integral part of its processes.26 We cannot go outside of our environment and be observers of it. As part of our environment, we experience a sense of oneness with it through sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, and other senses. While there are works of art that can provide us with this experience, we will most typically and strongly experience this with our environment. Furthermore, according to Berleant, we are not just part of our environment; our existence is changed by our environment. the landscape in which I move as I walk, drive, or fly is my world, as well, ordered by my understanding, defined by my movements, and molding my muscles, my reflexes, my experience, my consciousness at the same time as I attempt to impose my will over it.27

The landscape or environment is not merely an object that we define, but in a sense it acts on us as a subject because it moulds us. We are not only active but also passive participants of the environment. Under the aesthetics of engagement, aesthetic appreciation is not an encounter with a solid object, but an event wherein our own existence is repeatedly remade. Thus, we do not merely experience ourselves in the environment. We can feel ourselves gradually change. Carlson criticises Berelant’s aesthetics of engagement in terms of subjectivity. He argues that, if we are immersed in the environment, ‘aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgement can fluctuate widely from subject to subject’.28 He believes that it is problematic for the subject to become so immersed in the environment that the boundary between subject and object becomes blurred. This is because the loss of the object as common ground causes the aesthetic appreciation and judgement of the environment to differ from person to person. In some respects, this paper agrees with Carlson’s point that states that there is a problem with how our aesthetic judgements can be objective, as per Berleant’s theory. However, if we consider the previous discussion, we cannot continue to be unchanging subjects when we experience the environment aesthetically. According to Berleant’s aesthetics of engagement, we are not the same person after the experience. We inevitably change through the aesthetic

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experience of the environment. Even though the individual experiences of change may be different each time, the recognition of a fluctuating self is can be a fundamental common element of our aesthetic experience of the environment. The following points become clear after reference to Berleant. To experience oneself is not to discover a solid, unchanging self. Rather, we must realise that we ourselves are changeable beings due to interaction with our environment. Such an experience, however, may be difficult to capture in traditional language. Even for aesthetics, which has always spoken of sensory experiences that are difficult to verbalise, this is a difficult task. Thus, we also require an extension of our methodology. Berleant proposes a method called ‘descriptive aesthetics’. DESCRIPTIVE AESTHETICS Berleant states that one of the methodologies of aesthetics is descriptive aesthetics.29 He first identifies substantive aesthetics, which ‘comprises theories that propose positive (and sometimes negative) view about the character, experience, and meaning of art in general and about individual arts, examining their place in the order of society and the scheme of philosophy’30; as the method developing with the longest history in aesthetics. He refers to meta-aesthetics as the second methodology, which ‘reflects an attempt to set aside these large issues in favour of the seemingly more manageable tasks of refining the classifications, distinctions, and concepts that deal with art and the problems of aesthetics’.31 Berleant argues that descriptive aesthetics should be considered the third methodology of aesthetics, though it is not as familiar as these aforementioned methodologies. Descriptive aesthetics are ‘accounts of art and aesthetic experience that may be partly narrative, partly phenomenological, partly evocative, and sometimes even revelatory’.32 Though descriptive aesthetics is also useful in the analysis of the aesthetic experience of artwork, it is especially suitable for the environment. Berleant states: Descriptive aesthetics combines acute observation with compelling language to encourage the reader toward vivid aesthetic encounters. It shares with criticism a normative interest, not, however, in its interpretive and judgmental modes, but in recognizing the central place of aesthetic appreciation and in leading the reader toward such experience.33

Descriptive aesthetics is established by the observation and verbalisation of the author’s own vivid aesthetic experience. However, it is not about mere impressions. It has a normative interest in its guiding the reader to similar

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experiences, even if it does not judge the object. Furthermore, Berleant argues that descriptive aesthetics not only communicates to the reader, but also has theoretical importance.34 It is a self-contained study, not a secondary one attached to substantive aesthetics or meta-aesthetics; it can be considered a valuable mode of aesthetic exploration in its own right. Berleant himself practices descriptive aesthetics based on his Bantam River experience. The following description may well characterise this form of inquiry: Parking my car in a pull-off near the river, I hoist the canoe over my head and carry it down a winding path to the edge of the stream. As I descend the bank and prepare the canoe, I sense that I am entering a liminal state between different orders of things. It is a time of transition, when the translucence and fluidity of the water are about to replace the opaque solidity of the earth, transforming my gravity and balance.35

Here, Berleant uses the first person to describe his experiences without hesitation. Before paddling his canoe into the river, he ‘senses’ his transitional state as he moves his body from the ground to the water. In other words, he feels himself more vividly than usual. When he is on the river, he realises that ‘a sensuous immersion has occurred in which my world is thick with the immediate presence of perception and meaning, inseparable from the occasion and from each other’.36 He presents his aesthetics of engagement not as an armchair theory, but as a theory acquired through his own experience. Although descriptive aesthetics shares some similarities with nature writing and nature poetry, Berleant argues that it is a genre that shares commonalities with others but is founded on distinct interests. He states: Evocative description is a feature that poetry and nature writing may share. However, this trait occupies a more critical position in descriptive aesthetics, even though that is not its exclusive purpose. The language of aesthetics is more equivocal here: not primarily evocative, as in poetry; not mainly narrative, as in nature writing. That language . . . goes two ways, to the author’s experience, which it relates, and to the reader’s experience, which it elicits.37

The language of aesthetics is ambiguous; it is not evocative as in poetry, and not narrative as nature writing. Moreover, Berleant states that ‘while nature poetry and nature writing depict experience in ways that encourage participation and association, aesthetics has a theoretical purpose’.38 Thus, aesthetics uses equivocal language to demonstrate a theory for the explanation of our rich and complex experiences in the environment. It attempts to speak of our experience while trying to remain a language that presents theory.

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This conundrum is one that aesthetics has continually addressed. Aesthetics has been attempting to discuss, within the framework of a discipline, the elusive and difficult to verbalise matter of experience through our sensitivity. Since experience is the subject, aesthetes must reflect on their own experience and draw theoretically important points from it. Descriptive aesthetics is a methodology that explicitly acknowledges the requirement for aesthetics to undertake this task. It does not hide the ‘I’, but acknowledges that aesthetics is a discipline that can only depart from subjective experience. It acknowledges that fieldwork on oneself is a valid methodology for aesthetics. Berleant notably argues that the practices of descriptive aesthetics are found not only in so-called aesthetic studies, but also in a variety of texts, such as literature and criticism: ‘Efforts at aesthetic description occur most often as parts of other kinds of writing – novels, poems, nature writing, criticism, philosophical aesthetics’.39 According to him, aesthetics is ubiquitous in practice through various texts. In other words, aesthetics does not merely supply theories for practice and their interpretation; it is itself a practice. As previously stated, the environmental humanities seek to thoroughly help us reconsider our human existence in times of environmental crisis. Aesthetics has traditionally been a shadowy presence in the environmental humanities. The role of aesthetics has sometimes been discussed, only insofar as it analyses literary works and defines what literature is. However, the field somehow manages to theorise our sensory experience, which is difficult to verbalise. In particular, the aesthetic experience of the environment has an aspect of experiencing oneself. Moreover, when we experience the environment aesthetically, we are being transformed by it. Descriptive aesthetics is a method to understand such experiences that are difficult to theorise.40

THE FIELDWORK ON OURSELVES There is a growing interest in first-person experience outside of aesthetics. In the social sciences, autoethnography has already established itself as a methodology. It ‘emphasises subjectivity, self-reflexivity, emotionality, and the goal of connecting social sciences to humanities through storytelling’.41 Autoethnography makes authors the objects of research. It is a challenge to know the world through ‘I’. In the field of anthropology, Tim Ingold touches on the issue of the ‘I’ in his explanation of participatory observation. He states that anthropologists do not simply observe their objects; they themselves undergo transformations through their sequential reactions to occurrences.42 This attitude of actively putting forward the researcher’s own ‘I’ and recognising that ‘I’ as variable is being shared by researchers in various fields. This may, in some respects, overlap with Berleant’s descriptive aesthetics.

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In the process of questioning how human existence should be in relation to the environment, we cannot ignore what and how the ‘I’ feels, too. There are efforts to bring the experience of the ‘I’ into the academic realm in environmental humanities. A companion on environmental humanities includes a section for ‘ecostories and conversation’, in which authors write about their own experiences and memories to directly communicate with readers.43 This interest in the ‘I’ is also expressed in literary studies in the form of narrative scholarship. Scott Slovic, an ecocritic, states that narrative scholarship is a method that introduces into literature studies ‘the scholar’s sense of situatedness in a living, breathing world, in an ecological reality where there is give and take between the human and the broader realities of the planet’.44 Sometimes, scholars avoid the use of ‘I’ and share their narratives from their experiences in their academic text because they want to write objectively, not subjectively. However, Slovic states that ‘the goal of narrative scholarship is usually not to highlight the unique subjectivity of the scholar, but rather to use the seemingly subjective language of story as a scaffolding to reveal a shared human experience of ideas, texts, social realities, and the physical world’.45 This purpose has a significant similarity with Berleant’s descriptive aesthetics in terms of the connection of personal experiences with shareability between people. Berleant stated that descriptive aesthetics is not limited to aesthetics, but can flow out into various areas, such as literature and criticism. As can perhaps be understood from the aforementioned examples, aesthetic issues are also raised in various texts from other disciplines. Aesthetics is not just interdisciplinary, but ubiquitous across disciplinary boundaries. In environmental humanities particularly, there are repeated attempts to overcome existing language in order to capture the relationship between the environment and human beings. In doing so, we must recognise ourselves not as an abstract subject, but as an ‘I’ who directly interacts with the environment through the body. In a way, there is a requirement for fieldwork not only on our environment, but also on ourselves. Berleant’s descriptive aesthetics stand out in the manner in which he articulates how this fieldwork should be done. By the overviewing of environmental humanities through his ideas, it may be observed that aesthetics is an essential field that interrogates the concept of the human being.

CONCLUSION This chapter illustrates how aesthetics can help us reconsider humanity through contribution to the challenge of environmental humanities. Berleant’s ideas suggest that we are plastic subjects who participate in our environment and continue to transform in our interaction with it. This type of experience is difficult to capture in conventional theory and language. Descriptive

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aesthetics aims to practice the fieldwork on ‘I’ to acquire new theories that clarify the aesthetic experience of the environment. This fieldwork is partially practised in various disciplines apart from aesthetics. Aestheticians can instal a perspective of descriptive aesthetics and collaborate with environmental humanists in a manner that helps researchers from other disciplines to verbalise experiences that they find elusive. As mentioned in the introduction, aesthetics can enrich other fields through this collaboration. This chapter presents only one perspective of the role of aesthetics within environmental humanities. The possibilities of aesthetics should be further explored through interdisciplinary collaboration.

NOTES 1. Several books that I list do not include ‘environmental humanities’ in their titles; I have mentioned books that have been edited from a similar perspective. Louise Westling, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, eds., Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (New York: Routledge, 2015); Hubert Zapf, ed., Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (Handbook of English and American Studies Volume 2) (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016); Robert S. Emmett and David E. Nye. The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge and London: MIT University Press, 2017); Serpil Opperman and Serenella Iovino, eds., Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017); Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Nieman, eds., The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (London and New York: Routledge, 2017); Jeffery Jerome Cohen and Stephanie Foote, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Andrew J. Hubbell and John C. Ryan, Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (London and New York: Routledge, 2022). 2. Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, Matthew Chrulew, Stuart Cooke, Matthew Kearnes, and Emily O’Gorman, “Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities,” Environmental Humanities 1, no. 1 (2012): 1. 3. Ursula K. Heise, “Introduction: Planet, Species, Justice—and the Stories We Tell about Them,” in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, eds. Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Nieman (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 1. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 2. 6. Dolly Jørgensen and Franklin Ginn, “Environmental Humanities: Entering a New Time,” Environmental Humanities 12, no. 2 (2020): 498. 7. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, “Introduction.” in Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, 8.

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8. Ibid., 11. 9. Rose et al., 2. 10. Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson, “Introduction: The Aesthetics of Human Environments,” in The Aesthetics of Human Environments, eds. Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2007), 17. 11. Ronald Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art―The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology, eds. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 521–534. 12. Allen Carlson, Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 113. 13. Ibid., 35–36. 14. Emily Brady, “John Muir’s Environmental Aesthetics: Interweaving the Aesthetic, Religious, and Scientific,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76, no. 4 (2018): 463. 15. Ibid., 466. 16. Ibid., 470. 17. Masami Yuki, “Kankyo-Jinbungaku-no-Genzai (The Present Situatuin of ­Environmental Humanities),” in Kankyo-Jinbungaku 2: Tasha-to-shiteno-Shizen (­Environmental Humanities II: Nature as Otherness), eds. Ken-ichi Noda, Yohei ­Yamamoto and Keitaro Morita (Tokyo: Bensei Publishing), 239. Philip Buckland and Steven Hartman made the figure on Yuki’s article with modification from Thomas Nygren, Anna Foka and Philip Buckland, “The Status Quo of Digital Humanities in ­Sweden: Past, Present and Future of Digital History,” H-Soz-Kult 23.10 (2014), https://www​.hsozkult​.de​/debate​/id​/diskussionen​-2402 18. Astrida Neimans, Cecilia Asberg and Johan Hedren, “Four Problems, Four Directions for Environmental Humanities,” Ethics and the Environment 20, no. 1 (2015): 71. 19. Peter Quigley, “Introduction,” in Ecocritical Aesthetics: Language, Beauty, and the Environment, eds. Peter Quigley and Scott Slovic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018): 2. 20. Research on environmental aesthetics that is referred to by ecocritics is scant. Kevin Trumpeter interpreted that writer Edward Abbey agreed with the positive aesthetics espoused by Carlson: all untouched nature is aesthetically good. However, Trumpeter also stated that this idea is based on a nature-culture dichotomy, which is under ample criticism. See Kevin Trumpeter, “The Can is Beautiful, the Road is Ugly”: Edward Abbey, KAB, and the Environmental Aesthetics of Litter,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 28, no. 1 (2019): 15–29. 21. Hubert Zapf, “Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Transdisciplinary Knowledge of Literature,” in Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene: 66. 22. Ibid. 23. Here, ecoaesthetics is included as one of the major areas of Western environmental philosophy along with environmental ethics, radical ecology, and ecofeminism. 24. Hubbell and Ryan: 115.

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25. Hepburn: 523. 26. Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 12. 27. Ibid., 4. 28. Allen Carlson, “Arnold Berleant’s Environmental Aesthetics,” Ethics, Place and Environment 10, no. 2 (2007): 234. 29. Emily Brady underlined the importance of descriptive aesthetics in the age of global warming. She argued that descriptive aesthetics can be a useful method for collecting narratives, including indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge. She added that it is increasingly significant in the age of climate change. See Emily Brady, “Global Climate Change and Aesthetics,” Environmental Value 31, no. 1 (2022): 27–46; Emily Brady, “Learning from Aesthetics of Engagement,” Popular Inquiry: The Journal of the Aesthetics of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture 6, no. 1 (2022): 34–39. 30. Berleant: 25. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 26. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 30. 36. Ibid., 33. 37. Ibid., 36. 38. Ibid., 37. 39. Ibid. 40. This paper focuses on the way in which we describe aesthetic experiences through writing. However, it appears that our experiences can also be described through other means. Zoltán Somhegyi, for example, points out that landscape paintings reflect how the painter saw the landscape. By viewing landscape paintings we can gain insights into the relationship between humans and nature. See Zoltán Somhegyi, “The Painter in the Landscape: Aesthetic Considerations on a Pictorial Sub-genre,” in Retracting the Past: Historical Continuity in Aesthetics from a Global Perspective (International Yearbook of Aesthetics 19), ed. Zoltán Somhegyi (Santa Cruz: International Associations for Aesthetics, 2017), 42–53. 41. Arthur P. Bochner, “On First-Person Narrative Scholarship: Autoethnography as Acts of Meaning,” Narrative Inquiry 22, no. 1 (2012): 156. 42. Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 4–6. 43. Oppermann and Iovino eds Part IV. 44. Scott Slovic, “Narrative Scholarship as an American Contribution to Global Ecocriticism,” in Hubert Zapf, ed., Handbook of Ecocritical and Cultural Ecology (Handbook of English and American Studies Volume 2) (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 317. 45. Ibid., 318.

Chapter 3

Aesthetics and Architecture Tyrus Miller

ARCHITECTURE AS AESTHETIC METAPHOR Some two thousand years ago, in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul the Apostle addressed the growing factional divisions and other misgivings he had about his followers in the Greek city of Corinth, where he had resided for a year and a half on an earlier missionary visit. Perhaps especially aptly for new Christians dwelling on the site of a classical city-state dating back centuries before his Epistle, Paul turned to architecture to metaphorise not only the progress of establishing and fostering the Christian community of Corinth but also the analogous process of spiritual ‘edification’ within the souls of the believers. In 1 Corinthians 3: 9–17, Paul writes: 9  For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building. 10 According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. 11 For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12 Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; 13  Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. 14 If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. 15 If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire. 41

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16  Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? 17 If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.1 Although Paul’s intentions are ethical and religious rather than aesthetic, his metaphor evokes aesthetic qualities in the noble (gold, silver, precious stones) and humble (wood, hay, stubble) materials of which the edifice of the Church will be constructed. But such external ‘aesthetic’ matters, he avers, are but ciphers for the hidden, inner solidity of the spirit: man’s external ‘works’ will be subject to the judgement of God, who tests them not through his aesthetic delectation but with his consuming fire. This passage from Paul’s letter suggests one possible approach to the question of architecture’s relation to aesthetics, that of a ‘metaphorology’ that would trace out the transformations and translations of figures of thought as they move from one domain to another and through different moments of history.2 Any study of the variegated metaphors that architecture has generated over time would, of course, require a vastly more extensive discussion than I can offer in the space of a short essay. However, I do suggest a few points at least adumbrate the directions such an investigation could take, making reference to writings by Goethe, Ruskin, Worringer, and Panofsky on Gothic architecture. Following that, I pass on to consideration of a few key figures who, in the eighteenth century, opened new perspectives in architectural theory by placing accent on the specifically artistic and sensorial dimensions of buildings, a development in architectural thought that parallels the emergent philosophical discipline of aesthetics. These include the German art historian Winkelmann; the French theorists Quatremère de Quincy, Le Roy, and Le Camus; and the Italian antiquarian and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi. In conclusion, and to some extent in contrast to the first two sections, which suggest a lively dialogue of architecture with aesthetic concerns, I turn briefly to architecture’s rather tenuous position in the discipline of philosophical aesthetics proper, and, in turn, to the dubious relevance of philosophical aesthetics to much recent architectural theory and history. Returning to the Pauline metaphor of ‘edification’, which had mapped the external building onto the inner structure of a developing soul, we can observe that many centuries later, romantic thought secularised this figure of thought, establishing a parallelism between the (inner) cultivation of an aesthetic subjectivity and the (outer) formal construction of the artwork, as complementary aspects of an Art elevated to the status of a surrogate aesthetic religion. As Dorothea E. von Mücke has discussed, this metaphorical edification of subjectivity in dialogue with the artwork could even, in a further translation, be re-literalised in the encounter of the beholder with the architectural work

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of art, as she finds documented in Goethe’s early essay ‘On German Architecture’ (1772), where he describes his experience of the Strasbourg Cathedral, a masterpiece of Gothic architecture.3 Goethe designates a specific type of art that he considers the Strasbourg Cathedral to exemplify, the ‘characteristic’, in which the feeling of a free creative spirit ‘begins to cast about for matter to inspire with his spirit’ and in which this spirit is preserved in autonomous artistic form. We can hear in Goethe’s notion of the ‘characteristic’, on the one hand, the expressive notions of subjectivity typical of romanticism, yet on the other, allusion to a conception of architectural character articulated by his French contemporary Quatremère de Quincy. For Quatremère, character designated a building’s outward expression of its type and purpose; he related architectural character also to the specific ‘character’ of a nation or people.4 Although Goethe suggests by his title ‘Von deutscher Baukunst’ that the Strasbourg Cathedral too is ‘characteristic’ of the German people, he also decidedly swerves from French architectural theory in viewing this broader collective resonance as an effect of the primary expressive nature of architectural character as the outward mark of an inner, creative impulse from the artist. Architecture’s collective character is not so much a datum as a project: a goal to be accomplished subsequently through the building’s ability to inspire aesthetic feeling in later spectators, and not in just any man on the street who passes by, but as Goethe underscores, only in those rare men who have cultivated their souls in ways that allow them to be receptive even to the strange and overwhelming sentiments that an authentic experience of an architectural work of art might entail. In his later notes towards an uncompleted book on architecture, ‘Baukunst’ (1795), which followed his travels to Italy where he had experienced outstanding examples of classical and Renaissance architecture, Goethe further develops his notion of a non-representational, expressive ‘character’ in architecture. He distinguishes between architecture that appeals primarily to the visual and kinesthetic-spatial senses, rooted in proportion and rhythm, and architecture that overstimulates the senses and ‘carries a cultivated spirit to astonishment and rapture’; only in this latter, he continues, do we experience ‘the poetic side of architecture in which fiction is genuinely at play’.5 Goethe appeals to this notion of poetic fiction to criticise the modern architect’s slighting of ‘character’ in favour of mathematical measure and proportion. Reflection on character has in recent times become even more important, Goethe asserts, insofar as the forms of classical public buildings such as temples and churches have been applied to domestic buildings such as villas. This involves, he argues, a ‘double fiction’, that of the original architectural forms and their translations onto other building types and for other purposes. If earlier he had held up the Gothic as his exemplary form of a ‘characteristic’ architectural art, the mature Goethe now turns to Andrea Palladio’s classicist

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villas as exemplars of poetic fiction in architecture. The ‘spiritual laws’ of architectural fiction reside with the creative freedom of the building-artist, the Baukünstler, in contrast to those ‘purists who in architecture as well would happily turn everything to prose’.6 In his discussion of the Gothic in The Stones of Venice (1853), John Ruskin likewise employs an expressive notion of character in the ‘universal Gothic’, an abstract ‘Gothicness’ expressed ‘to a greater or lesser degree in each building we examine’.7 This character is ‘made up of many mingled ideas, and can consist only in their union’.8 As did Goethe, Ruskin understands this complex union as a poetic process that expresses and condenses into architectural forms certain shared mental traits of the artists of an historical age. Accordingly, as was implicit in Goethe’s metaphor of ‘fiction’ and his criticisms of made-to-measure ‘prosaic’ architecture, Ruskin views the aesthetic experience of Gothic architecture as modeled upon the reading of religious epic. Thus, for example, he writes: The idea of reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stone as out of the stanzas, never enters our mind for a moment. And for good reason; – There is indeed rhythm in the verses, quite as strict as the symmetries or rhythm of the architecture, and a thousand times more beautiful, but there is something else than rhythm. The verses were neither made to order, nor to match, as the capitals were; and we have therefore a kind of pleasure in them other than a sense of propriety.9

But, Ruskin argues, Gothic architecture, more than any other type, is precisely an architecture of freedom of invention and infinite variation; it is capable, as he writes, ‘of perpetual novelty’.10 It brings architecture closest to the freedom of poetry and hence demands not just that it be seen or walked around in, but also that it be ‘read’. These poeticising approaches to the Gothic can be fruitfully compared with the conception of the Gothic of two pioneering ‘critical’ historians of art, Wilhelm Worringer and Erwin Panofsky.11 Worringer, in his 1912 book Form-Problems of the Gothic employed the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl’s cultural-psychological notion of ‘artistic will’ (Kunstwollen) to argue for historical understanding of the Gothic as an expression of a specific spiritual disposition that could not be reduced to an aesthetic measure common to art universally. Interestingly, this methodological postulate led Worringer to a critique of art history’s entanglement with the discipline of philosophical aesthetics, which in Worringer’s view depends entirely on an uncritically adopted European classical canon and concept of ‘beauty’ derived from it, inapplicable to Gothic art and architecture as well as to non-European art. Worringer affirmed the diversity of art, relativistically interpreted by a theoretically-grounded, critical history of art, against the limits of aesthetics

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as they had been formulated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophers and psychologists: The world of Classical art, and of the later art derived from it, has long since been the subject of such a codification of the laws underlying its forms: for what we call scientific aesthetic is nothing but such a psychological interpretation of style applied to Classical works of art. The first requirement of Classical art was held to be that concept of beauty which aesthetics, despite the diversity of its methods of approach, is solely occupied in establishing and defining. But because aesthetics applies its results to the totality of art, and believes that it has explained also those artistic facts which have quite other presuppositions than this concept of beauty, its usefulness becomes detrimental, its authority becomes intolerable usurpation. A clear distinction between aesthetics and an objective theory of art is therefore the most vital necessity in an objective, scientific investigation of art.12

In contrast to Worringer’s rejection of ‘aesthetics’, we might see the attempt of art historian Erwin Panofsky, writing in the late 1940s, to relate the forms of Gothic architecture to neo-Platonic thought and to the conceptual architectonics of scholastic philosophy as a distant, scholarly heir of the Pauline metaphor of the edifying soul whose aesthetic corollary Goethe and Ruskin drew out in their romantic interpretations of the Gothic.13 Notably, however, reinforcing Worringer’s turn from prescriptive aesthetics to critical history, Panofsky no longer views the relationship of Gothic architecture to scholasticism as an expressive one, as if the medieval architect were translating philosophical ideas into Gothic forms, or scholasticism stood in a causal relationship with the development of medieval architecture. Panofsky rather situates artforms and ideas holistically within a bounded cultural–historical milieu, in which shared styles of thought may be realised in apparently divergent disciplines and practices. Though ultimately historical and changeable with epochal shifts, certain topoi, in this perspective, will take on a quasitranscendental status as constitutive conditions for intellectual and technical invention in a variety of spheres. The scholar’s ‘critical’ task, in Panofsky’s view, is to trace the variegated phenomena of a period to such common underpinnings and in this way to more richly apprehend their ultimate historical unity. Architecture in the System of the Arts In his recent study, Four Historical Definitions of Architecture, Stephen Parcell offers an illuminating intellectual history of architecture’s place amidst changing historical epistemes, systems of knowledge that determined architecture’s adjacency and hierarchical value relative to other forms of knowledge and cultural practice. As he writes:

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Although classifications in different historical periods repeated many of the same terms (e.g. music, architecture), they did not simply shuffle the same elements on a neutral field. As classifications and practices changes, so did the definitions of their disciplines. At a disciplinary level, architecture in one period was not the same as architecture in another period. In fact, the ancient Greeks had no word for architecture. If we assume that the current definition of architecture is timeless, this is bound to impede an understanding of earlier periods that relied on a different definition.14

If this is so for historical understanding, it is also pertinent to questions concerning the problematic status of architecture as a ‘fine art’ and as an object of aesthetic reflection, since this designation was the result of a lengthy historical evolution and a shifting set of relations between architecture as an autonomous discipline and other domains of knowledge and practice, both artistic (e.g. drawing, sculpture, etc.) and non-artistic (e.g. engineering, technology, urban planning, etc.). Drawing inspiration from Paul Oskar Kristeller’s influential essay ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, which traces the long trajectory by which the five arts of painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and architecture were systematically related in eighteenth-century Europe,15 Parcell characterises architecture with four shifting concepts coinciding with classical, medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth-century European systems of knowledge. In ancient Greece and Rome, Parcell argues, architecture was conceived in terms of technē; in medieval Western Europe, it was classified as a mechanical art, outside the system of the more elevated ‘liberal arts’ codified in the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy; in Renaissance Italy, it came in closer proximity to the arts of painting and drawing through the concept of disegno employed by influential humanist writers such as Leon Battista Alberti and Giorgio Vasari; and finally, in eighteenth-century Europe, it gained full membership in the modern system of the arts, hence also becoming a potential object of the new philosophical discipline of aesthetics, ready to be interpreted through its typical concepts such as beauty, sublimity, harmony, and taste.16 However, as the further evolution of architecture in the modern and contemporary period reveals, the aesthetic status of architecture continues to be historically inflected and in some ways challenged by new developments up to the present day, such as the emergence of the global celebrity-architect designed art museum building such as Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim, Richard Meier’s Getty Center in Los Angeles, or Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, which Eisenman states was planned to be a ‘building about the art of the 21st century’, which at its opening in 1989 it speculatively anticipated by a decade.17 So too the increasing use of digital means in contemporary architectural design, which

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allow an unprecedented flexibility to visualise structures and spaces departing from traditional architectural languages. With respect to the incorporation of architecture into the ‘modern system of the arts’, we find eighteenth-century treatises such as Johann Joachim Winkelmann’s Remarks on the Architecture of the Ancients (1762) offering analytical treatment of architecture through reflection on the materials and structures of the building, building-forms and the classical orders of columns, and both external and internal ornamentation.18 As Anthony Vidler has suggested, Winkelmann’s work is best understood as a ‘historical aesthetics’ or even an ‘aesthetics of history’, insofar as he attempts to reconcile a philologically-grounded contextual history with an immanent reading of forms through an aesthetical–historical narrative of origination, maturation, and decline spanning from Greek antiquity to late Roman descent into barbarism.19 Vidler finds staged in Winkelmann’s work a problem that would become formative for later developments in the disciplines of art and architectural history. Taking as his object a reflection on the artifacts of classical antiquity, Winkelmann would seek a productive solution to a problem that was, in Vidler’s words, ‘in the second half of the eighteenth century perhaps the most important among the many choices that confronted the historian of art’, namely, mediating between ‘a history of antiquities that relies on textual evidence and one based on aesthetic judgement’.20 It is in grappling with this problem of method in connection with classical art and architecture that Winkelmann developed his ‘double scheme of aesthetic judgement and chronological pattern’, setting the stage for the later emergence of historicist aesthetics in nineteenth-century romanticism and idealism. Analogously, in the French context and slightly preceding Winkelmann, Julien-David Le Roy focused his account on, as his title has it, The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece, and provides an historical account that has as its subtext the emergence of an autonomous sense of beauty and sublimity out of practical and functional demands of construction. Thus, for instance, in a typical passage, he asks the reader to consider the aesthetic aspect of columns, which far exceeds their structural role in supporting weight: The earliest use of columns in architecture, as is well known, was to support lintels and ceilings; but it was not long before it was recognized how much they enhanced the appearance of the buildings for which they were so necessary.  . . . The peoples most celebrated for their architecture may sometimes have been induced by requirements of firmness or shelter or economy or by other causes to build porticoes; but it is nonetheless certain – it is nonetheless proved by the facts – that they have always preferred peristyles with these porticoes and that these, of all forms of decoration, afford us the most pleasing sensations.21

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And he passes from the pleasures of beautiful buildings to the sense of grandeur and sublimity that a well-shaped, large-scale ornamented work of architecture can evoke: This is not the only advantage of peristylar ornaments: almost infallibly they supply the grandeur that alone can affect us powerfully and without which even the purest architecture commands but little of our attention. All grand spectacles impress the human race. The immensity of the sky, the vast expanse of land or sea, which we discover from the peaks of mountains or from the middle of the ocean, seem to elevate our souls and expand our thoughts. The grandest of our own works impress us in the same way: on seeing them, we receive powerful sensations, far superior to those – pleasing, at best – that we receive from small buildings. This is not to say that the impression conveyed by a building is always proportionate to its size; it often depends as much on the divisions within its masses or its surfaces as on their dimensions.22

With his title indicating the main argument of his book – the relation of architectural, and particularly the decorative, forms with various sensations and pleasures – Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières’ 1780 study The Genius of Architecture; or, the Analogy of that Art with Our Sensations similarly argued for the evocation of aesthetic feelings by architecture’s various types and decorative elements. ‘Architecture’, Le Camus writes, ‘is divided into a number of branches. It is our purpose to consider this art relative to decoration, in which true beauty consists in the proportions that relate the various parts of buildings to each other. Their harmony, their accord, produces the whole that gratifies and delights us: from this harmony, and from a real and proportionate beauty, the various sensations spring’.23 In his pro-Roman counter-polemic against the preeminence of Greek architecture in Le Roy and Winkelmann, On the Magnificence and Architecture of the Romans (1761) and in his witty dialogue Opinions on Architecture (1765), Giovanni Battista Piranesi argued against the austerity of French classicising architectural theory and for the freedom of imagination to decorate and vary works of architecture freely, without the strictures of rules that the ancients themselves had never followed and that were, Piranesi believed, nothing more than deleterious projections of contemporary writers onto the past. Through his champion Didascalo, in Opinions on Architecture Piranesi in fact suggests that what makes architecture genuinely architecture are precisely the aesthetic qualities conferred on it by ornaments that are external to and in excess of the building’s practical function, for it is here that the free play of imagination discovers its proper empire. Didascalo says to his interlocutor Protopiro, who advocates for positions found in Le Roy and in the much-discussed Essay on Architecture by Marc-Antoine Laugier, who had derived the bases of architecture from an archetypal primitive hut:

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You are the sophist, you who impose on architecture rules that it has never possessed. What will you say, if I proved to you that austerity, reason, and imitation of huts are all incompatible with architecture? That architecture, far from requiring decorative features derived from the parts necessary for constructing and holding up a building, consists of ornaments that are all extraneous?24

Didascalo presses forward for several pages with this argument, concluding that ‘in truth, if the ornaments used in architecture are beautiful in themselves, then the architecture will be beautiful. Why choose to give the eyes a single pleasure, such as that of looking at a piece of architecture, when we can give them the twofold pleasure of seeing it clothed in ornament, since we can see our way to reconciling the two?’25 And having hammered home this argument for the autonomy of ornament, he lastly turns to make direct reference to the graphic artwork of his own literary author, Piranesi himself, setting him free of both language and building into an autonomous domain of artistic communication with his viewers, who will be the ultimate judges of the debate at issue, which is the relative value of theory and imagination. Didascalo thus returns to Piranesi, who, the dialogue had noted earlier, ‘in these designs of his, has taken the crazy liberty of following his own caprice’.26 Didascalo dismisses Protopiro with these parting words: In the drawings that prompted this discussion of ours, Piranesi has found a way to convey information to us through a work of art, realizing that to do so in words would be difficult. This is because, if architects are to have a free hand in their work, it would take them an eternity to discuss the constraints that will nevertheless apply to them, freedom or no freedom. Now, as to whether in his own work Piranesi has conformed to his own and my way of thinking, he himself will judge or the public will judge. Goodbye, my dear Protopiro. Stand by your own opinion – it would be whimsical to concede defeat to a madman like me.27

Although Winkelmann, Le Roy, Le Camus, and Piranesi diverged greatly from one another, each offers important indices of how architecture had been incorporated in the eighteenth-century system of the arts and considered specifically as the bearer of aesthetic properties or as the occasion of aesthetic experiences in its beholders. Nevertheless, even as architecture’s entry into the aesthetic pantheon became more definitive, its place within the disciplinary system of knowledge was by no means static nor its aesthetic status fully secure. In her discussion of Quatremère de Quincy’s writings on Egyptian architecture, Sylvia Lavin offers an intriguing example of how even a single architectural treatise, rewritten and republished after a lapse of years, could settle into a new discursive context that lent it a radically altered role within the framework of disciplinary knowledge. In 1785, Quatremère had submitted a winning essay to a competition of the Académie des Inscriptions

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et Belles-Lettres on the topic ‘Of Egyptian Architecture and what seems to have been borrowed from it by the Greeks’. In keeping with Enlightenment interests in human origins, and in establishing a civilisational narrative that derived from these origins, Quatremère’s championing of a classical line running from the Egyptians to the Greeks, thus by-passing the ancient Hebrews, challenged a sacred history that started from the Bible and progressed to the present authority of the Catholic Church. Thus excluding matters of faith from the writing of history, Quatremère went on to develop a set of anthropological principles that would allow a comparative study of architecture.28 Subsequent to Quatremère first version of his essay and starting in 1798, however, Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and the proximate publication of the multi-volume compendium of new archeological data Descriptions of Egypt lent fresh scientific objectivity to the matters of antiquity that Quatremère had expounded. In the midst of the preparation of the Descriptions, Quatremère published a revised version in 1803, now entitled Of Egyptian Architecture, Considered in its Origins its Principles and its Taste and Compared in the Same Terms with Greek Architecture. Its accent had shifted from the historical to the theoretical and as well to the aesthetic, as the introduction of the term ‘taste’ in the title suggests. Lavin suggests that if, in 1785, Quatremère had had to protect history from faith, by 1803 it had become necessary to protect his view of history from science. Quatremère accomplished this redefinition of the lines of battle by shifting the disciplinary camp with which his essay was to be aligned.29

Lavin underscores the new emphasis in Quatremère’s text on abstract theoretical schemes over positive facts; yet his intensified aesthetic accent on taste, imagination, and ingenuity also contributed to his work’s new function in a changing economy of disciplinary knowledge. In turn, we cannot properly evaluate Quatremère’s aesthetic interests in Egyptian and Greek classical architecture solely in terms of artistic concerns, but rather must also see them as polemical forces arrayed on the dynamic fronts of early nineteenth-century disciplinary disputes in the ‘human sciences’. ARCHITECTURE AND PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS Despite this rich history of ideas connecting conceptual, spiritual, and ethical thought with the art of architecture, one would have to admit that in the millennia-long history of formal philosophy and even in the shorter span of explicitly aesthetic philosophy, reflections on architecture have played only an occasional role. Emphatically in ancient and medieval philosophy, but also in early modern and modern philosophy, architecture’s associations with

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technē and the mechanical arts and with, in Hegel’s words, ‘heavy matter, shapeable only according to the laws of gravity’,30 have been obstacles to its becoming a consistent object of philosophical attention. Although one might want to classify Renaissance treatments of architecture by Alberti (On the Art of Building, written 1443–1452; first printed 1485) and Vasari (The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptures, and Architects, 1550 and 1568) as ‘proto-aesthetic’, for their bringing of architecture into proximity to other fine arts such as drawing and painting under the concept of ‘arts of disegno’, Saul Fischer’s assertion about architecture’s role in historic philosophy remains valid: Just as the history of philosophical aesthetics subsequent to Plato and Aristotle and prior to Baumgarten represents a relatively thin canon, a similar judgement applies to philosophical explorations of the nature and fundamental concepts of architecture. Indeed, as Plato and Aristotle have little to say on the topic, the pre-Baumgarten catalogue of philosophical accounts of architecture is even more slender.31

Even when modern philosophers such as Hegel and Schopenhauer considered architecture explicitly in their aesthetics, they dealt with it as a threshold instance of art, low on the hierarchy of artistic types. Hegel’s placement of architecture low in the system of the arts followed from its continued dependency on external functions – for instance, housing human beings or giving shelter to representations of their gods – and, as already noted, its heavy materiality, which indicated a limited degree of ‘internalization’ and permeation by spirit. His pursuit of architecture’s specifically aesthetic traits led Hegel confessedly to ‘look around for buildings which stand there independently in themselves, as it were like works of sculpture, and which carry their meaning in themselves and not in some external aim and need’.32 Yet his account of the forms of architecture – corresponding to his sequential ­categories of symbolic, classical, and romantic art – hinges on the degree to which the artistic characteristics of a building converge with its external purpose, are subordinated to it, or stand in a free parallelism with it. In his chapter on ‘The Aesthetics of Architecture’ in the second volume of World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer too derives architecture’s potential aesthetic satisfaction exclusively from our apprehension of low-level Platonic Ideas having to do with its load-bearing characteristics, such natural properties as gravity, rigidity, and cohesion.33 This remains the case even when, later in the same chapter, Schopenhauer turns to the aesthetic qualities of Gothic architecture, which he treats as transgressing and overcoming the gravitational essence of architecture. Even so, however, Schopenhauer admits that Gothic architecture’s overcoming of weight is only an artistic ruse. In its real properties Gothic architecture is determined by ‘the conflict of gravity and

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rigidity’ that classical architecture ‘so openly and innocently exhibits’, while ‘the complete overcoming of gravity by rigidity remains a mere semblance, a fiction authenticated by description’.34 The ambivalence that bedevils Hegel’s and Schopenhauer’s treatment of architecture, especially the relation of functional to aesthetic properties, persists even in recent philosophical discussions and has come down to us in the form of the now-clichéd distinction between ‘architecture’ and (mere) ‘building’, while the philosophical grounding of this distinction remains a matter of considerable, unresolved debate. Architecture has been the object of occasional treatment in contemporary philosophy, yet in comparison to other artistic disciplines such as painting or music, here too it has remained a fairly marginal topic for philosophical aesthetics. In the English-speaking scholarly world, a much wider range of historic European architectural writings has recently become available in translation, including the psychological and phenomenological aesthetics of late nineteenth-century Germany, as well as key texts by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architect-theorists such as Gottfried Semper and Hermann Muthesius.35 In addition, translated or republished editions of key historical contributions to European architectural and urban aesthetics by historical figures such as Leon Battisti Alberti, Andrea Palladio, Johann Joachim Winkelmann, Augustus Pugin, Gottfried Semper, and August Endell among others have also appeared in the past few decades.36 Yet contemporary aesthetics’ dialogue with these important historical sources remains limited, as do historical studies of the intertwining of architecture and philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the philosophical discipline of aesthetics emerged as a distinct area of investigation.37 Correlatively, architectural aesthetics often diverge from disciplinary architectural discourse that engages with canons, histories, functions, examples, and goals that are distinct from those of philosophical aesthetics. For example, philosophical discussions of architecture may stand at odds with that prevalent form of architectural theorising that Tafuri, in Theories and History of Architecture, called ‘operative criticism’. Operative criticism, in Tafuri’s view, is ‘an analysis of architecture . . . that, instead of an abstract survey, has as its objective the planning of a precise poetical tendency, anticipated in its structures and derived from historical analyses programmatically distorted and finalized’.38 Operative criticism ‘plans past history by projecting it towards the future, [measuring] itself .  .  . against the results obtained’.39 This discourse defines a vast span of works, from Vitruvius’s classic treatise on building to writings by Alberti, Blondel, Pugin, Ruskin, Wagner, Loos, Wright, Corbusier, Behne, Taut, Johnson, Mumford, Giedion, Rossi, and Venturi. Operative criticism overlaps to a substantial extent with the writings of practicing architects, who often aim to provide ideological undergirding for their own creations, polemically arranging philosophical and historical

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arguments with question-begging circularity rather than engaging in dispassionate philosophical reflection. The more recent tradition of continental philosophy includes discussion of architecture by Roman Ingarden in Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work, the Picture, the Architectural Work, the Film40; the semiotic reflections on architecture and aesthetics by the Czech structuralist theorist Jan Mukařovský41; and the early work of Massimo Cacciari, who along with other philosophers and historians such as Manfredo Tafuri, Francesco Dal Co, and Franco Rella, was a key figure in so-called ‘Venice School’, teaching and conducting research at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV).42 In aesthetics deriving from analytic philosophy, extended consideration of architecture is sparse, with Roger Scruton’s book-length study from 1979 The Aesthetic of Architecture still constituting the towering example in the field.43 Philosophers such as Nelson Goodman, Stephen Davies, Michael H. Mitias, Edward Winters, Gordon Graham, Larry Shiner, Andrea Sauchelli, and Rafael de Clerq among others have also contributed to debates in analytical aesthetics of architecture.44 In addition, Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson’s consideration of ‘functional beauty’ in design, while not solely focused on function in architecture, offers new perspectives on problems raised for architectural aesthetics by the co-habitation of aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties in buildings, an issue also explicitly posed and addressed by Scruton.45 From the opposite perspective, practicing architects have varied greatly in the degree to which they conceive of the architectural discipline as an artform that requires or that might at least lend itself to explicit theoretical reflection on aesthetic principles beyond very general, intuitive, or instrumental notions of appropriateness to the type and purpose of the building and pleasing ‘fit’ with its spatial surroundings. In the modern movement in architecture there was a significant anti-aesthetic tendency in its theory and criticism, in which aesthetic concerns were often subordinated or even shunned in favour of functional, social, or technological considerations. For their part, influential historians of architectural modernism such as Manfredo Tafuri and Reyner Banham considered the artist-architect to be an increasingly questionable role in a modern division of intellectual labor in which specialised expertise in technology, engineering, and social planning had taken precedence over traditional humanistic concerns. So too, accordingly, the relevance of aesthetics to architecture in our contemporary, technologically saturated, and globalised age may be a matter for a skepticism without easy resolution. NOTES 1. 1 Corinthians 3: 9–17, The Holy Bible, King James Version, online at: https:// www​.biblegateway​.com​/passage/​?search​=1​%20Corinthians​%203​&version​=KJV.

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2. For the notion of a “metaphorology” as a methodological concept of intellectual history, see Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On German Architecture,” Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey, trans. Ellen von Nardroff and Ernest H. von Nardroff (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3–10; Dorothy E. von Mücke, “Beyond the Paradigm of Representation: Goethe on Architecture,” Grey Room 35 (2009): 6–27. 4. On Quatremère de Quincy’s theories of type and character, see Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), 147–164, and Vittoria di Palma, “Architecture, Environment and Emotion: Quatremère de Quincy and the Concept of Character,” AA Files 47 (2002): 45–56. 5. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Baukunst,” online at: https://www​.projekt​-gutenberg​.org​/goethe​/ks92​-97​/chap007​.html. 6. Ibid. 7. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ed. J. G. Links (London: Penguin, 1960), 157. 8. Ibid., 158. 9. Ibid., 166. 10. Ibid., 167. 11. See Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 12. Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic, trans. Herbert Read (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 9–10. 13. See Abbot Suger and the Abbey Church of St. Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. Erwin Panofsky (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1946) and Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Wimmer Lecture 1948 (Latrobe, Pennsylvania: The Archabby Press, 1951). As David Wagner has pointed out, in addition, Panofsky’s association of Gothic architecture with scholasticism was anticipated by Ruskin’s peer Gottfried Semper and (probably unbeknownst to him) by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.—See David Wagner, “Peirce, Panofsky, and the Gothic,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 48/4 (2012): 436–455. 14. Stephen Parcell, Four Historical Definitions of Architecture (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), 253–254. 15. See Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” in Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 163–227. 16. Parcell, 8. 17. Peter Eisenman, quoted in James Parkes, “Wexner Center for the Arts is “a building that is waiting to be a building,” Denzeen (16 May 2022), online at: https:// www​.dezeen​.com​/2022​/05​/16​/peter​-eisenman​-wexner​-center​-for​-the​-arts​-deconstructivism​-architecture/. For a broad exposition of this recent nexus of contemporary art and architecture, see Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (London: Verso, 2011).

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18. Johann Joachim Winkelmann, Anmerkungen über die Baukunst der Alten (Leipzig: Johann Gottfried Dyck, 1762). Online at: https://arachne​.dainst​.org​/entity​ /1255479. 19. Vidler, 134ff. 20. Vidler, 125. 21. Julien-David Le Roy, The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of the Ancients, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004), 369. 22. Ibid. 23. Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, The Genius of Architecture; or, the Analogy of that Art with Our Sensations, trans. David Britt (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1992), 77. Rudolf Wittkower, in his celebrated study Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: The Warburg Institute, 1949), traced the genealogy of such derivation of architectural beauty from proportion and harmony to the humanist thought of the Italian Renaissance. 24. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette, with Opinions on Architecture, and a Preface to a New Treatise on the Introduction and Progress of the Fine Arts in Europe in Ancient Times, trans. Caroline Beamish and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2002), 104. 25. Ibid., 113. 26. Ibid., 104. 27. Ibid., 113. 28. Sylvia Lavin, “In the Names of History: Quatremère de Quincy and the Literature of Egyptian Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 44/3 (1991): 131–132. 29. Ibid., 134. 30. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, vol. 2, trans. T.M Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 624. 31. Saul Fischer, Supplement to “Philosophy of Architecture,” Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, online at https://plato​ .stanford​.edu​/entries​/architecture​/perspective​.html. 32. Hegel 632. 33. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. David Carus and Richard E. Aquila (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011), 467. 34. Schopenhauer, 471. 35. See Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, ed. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994); Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004); Hermann Muthesius, Style-Architecture and Building-Art: Transformations of Architecture in the Nineteenth Century and Its Present Condition, ed. and trans. Stanford Anderson (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). 36. See Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT

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Press, 1991); Andrea Palladio, The Four Books of Architecture, trans. Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997); Johann Joachim Winkelmann, On Art, Architecture, and Archeology, trans. David Carter (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2014); Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture: Set Forth in Two Lectures Delivered at St Marie’s, Oscott  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); August Endell, The Beauty of the Metropolis, trans. James J. Conway (Berlin: Rixdorf Editions, 2018). 37. See, for example, Vidler’s rich intellectual contextualization of French architectural theory in The Writing of the Walls, and Daniel L. Purdy’s study On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2011). 38. Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, trans. Giorgio Verrecchia (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 141. 39. Ibid. 40. Roman Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work, the Picture, the Architectural Work, the Film, trans. Raymond Meyer and John T. Goldthwait (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1989). 41. Jan Mukařovský, “On the Problem of Functions in Architecture,” in Mukařovský, Structure, Sign, and Function, trans. and ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1978), 236–250. 42. See the essays collected in Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1993). 43. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979). 44. See, for example, Nelson Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” Critical Inquiry 11/4 (1985): 642–653; Stephen Davies, “Is Architecture Art?” in Philosophy and Architecture, ed. Michael H. Mitias (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 31–47; Michael H. Mitias, “The Aesthetic Experience of the Architectural Work,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 33/3 (1999): 61–77; Edward Winters, Aesthetics and Architecture (London: Continuum, 2007); Gordon Graham, “Art and Architecture,” British Journal of Aesthetics 29/3 (1989): 248–257; Larry Shiner, “Functional Beauty: The Metaphysics of Beauty and Specific Functions in Architecture,” Sztuka i Filozofia 35 (2009): 78–99; Andrea Sauchelli, “The Structure and Content of Architectural Experience,” Esthetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics 49/5 (2012): 26–44; Rafael de Clerq, “Architecture,” in The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Anna Christina Ribeiro (London: Continuum, 2012), 201–214. 45. Glenn Parsons and Allen Carleson, Functional Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). On the question of “function” in architecture, see Scruton 21–27 and 34–38.

Chapter 4

Aesthetics and Urban Studies Mateusz Salwa

The aim of the chapter is to discuss the relationship between aesthetics and urban studies. The author claims that despite the development of the ‘philosophy of the city’, philosophical aesthetics is still more focused on architecture than on urban space. It is noteworthy that the aesthetic dimension of the latter is also analysed in urban studies which may be seen as ‘aesthetics beyond the aesthetics’ or applied aesthetic. Given that the exponents of urban studies do not analyse issues paradigmatic for aesthetics and yet are interested in the aesthetic, their approach may be termed ‘implicit aesthetics’. The chapter elucidates what role the aesthetic plays in urban studies and what input philosophical aesthetics may give to them. It is claimed that there are three interconnected lessons someone intent on studying cities may draw from aesthetics: aesthetics together with its questions concerning the aesthetic experience, aesthetic qualities and objects, may offer insights into various modes of the urban experience; by offering these insights, aesthetics may be useful in defining the agenda of research, since it may help in addressing aesthetic experiences and aesthetic qualities as objects of study; aesthetics understood as philosophy of art allows for asking questions essential to the interpretation of urban art. AESTHETICS AND THE CITY That both cities and city life possess aesthetic qualities and may be aesthetically valued is a remark that today verges on triteness. Yet, curiously enough, this platitude has been virtually overlooked for a considerable period of time by the discipline which, one would expect, should be interested in the subject 57

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in the first place, namely aesthetics, despite that it has been widely theorised over the centuries. Starting from Vitruvius (1st c. B.C.), the famous Roman theorist, architectural theory initially and then – since the nineteenth century – theory of urban planning were meant to offer rules that were supposed to guarantee that cities would be beautiful. Owing to the beauty of their buildings and of their spatial organisation, living in and among them would be aesthetically attractive. It is then no wonder that cities have been analysed as aesthetic ‘objects’ by history of art and history of architecture. In the twentieth century, the aesthetic qualities of urban environments and of activities taking place in them have also been noticed by urban anthropologists, sociologist, geographers and exponents of other disciplines that may be put under the label of urban studies. It is noteworthy that Georg Simmel, who is regarded as one of the founders of what later became urban studies and who wrote essays offering aesthetic insights into the concept of landscape, as well as into aesthetic analyses of the Alps and cities such as Venice and Rome, considered the aesthetic qualities of city life as the foundations of the metropolitan ‘mentality’. In his famous essay entitled The Metropolis and the Life of Spirit (1903) Simmel claims that city dwellers’ interpretation of their world is rooted in ‘the rapid succession of changing images, the gruff distance of what one perceives at a single glance, or the unexpected nature of impressions that impose themselves’, all of which is produced ‘in every crossing of the street and in the tempo and multiplicity of its economic, occupational and social life’.1 The abovementioned neglect of the city on behalf of aesthetics can be partially explained by the fact that even if – according to an often repeated adage – philosophy was born in the Greek polis and is therefore an urban phenomenon, philosophy was not particularly sensitive to the city as a philosophical topic until recently. In the past decade or two, philosophy, so to speak, ‘discovered’ the city and the ‘philosophy of the city’ subsequently has joined the team of urban studies, realising what was suggested, albeit not uncritically, by no other than Henri Lefebvre.2 The relationship between philosophy and the city is, then, sought after in classic philosophical texts as well as in twentieth and twenty-first-century writings.3 The philosophy of the city is also practiced as a philosophical attempt at analysis and interpretation of the problematic of the city.4 The latter includes such issues as: ‘What is a good city? What is citizenship? How do we nurture meaningful, coherent communities that respect and support diversity? What standards of beauty should inform our architecture and urban plans? What kind of built environments best sustain engaged human lives? How do we achieve justice in our cities?’5 Undoubtedly, the above questions sound familiar to practitioners of urban studies, but as Sharon M. Meagher justly states, they require a philosophical

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insight which ‘makes values claims and grounds those claims in critical arguments’.6 Such an approach is all the more needed as it addresses the very foundations of human contemporary existence, which is getting increasingly more urban in character. It is important to note that it ‘cannot result merely in a single philosophical account of the city. There can be no unique ‘philosophy of the city’ any more than there can be one city that is the model for all cities or for the modes of life the city enables’.7 A way to avoid a totalising philosophical perspective, one that Lefebvre was afraid of, is to combine philosophical interpretations with analyses of case studies offered so willingly by urban studies.8 The agenda of the philosophy of the city or ‘metrosophy’9 may then be said to cover an array of cultural, economic, environmental, political, social, and aesthetic concerns.10 In fact, all the above-mentioned questions – and not only the one which directly refers to beauty – may be answered in a manner that includes or even pulls to the foreground aesthetic qualities of cities and lives lived in them. If the philosophy of the city is thought of as an approach that is supposed to offer a particular understanding of ‘the nature of the city itself and the modes of life and existence that the city enables’, which is namely a perspective that takes into consideration ‘the reality of the city as a social, political, economic, material, spatial, environmental, and topological phenomenon’,11 one does not have to adopt the point of view of, for example, ‘urban hermeneutics’, that is a perspective that overtly associates philosophy with the city.12 There are other ways to analyse the experiences which make cities meaningful to their inhabitants and to recognise that they are of a different sort and more often than not (if not always) have a significant aesthetic dimension. The reason for which aesthetics, understood as philosophical aesthetics, has largely been unwilling to recognise this fact, following philosophy in general in this respect, is that the city was largely seen as an extension of buildings from which they cannot be divorced.13 As a result it was hard to recognise that urban spaces, understood as something more than aggregates of architecturally designed places, may have other aesthetic qualities than buildings which define these spaces and may, thus, be aesthetically experienced in a different manner than architecture and that architecture aesthetics and urban aesthetics may be regarded as complementary, even if quite distinct from each other. In fact, before the invention of urban planning aesthetic considerations on urban space were either explicitly, or implicitly included in works on architecture. Given that philosophical aesthetics, born as philosophy of arts and a theory of sensory cognition in the eighteenth century, was pretty soon limited to the former field, and given that architecture was finally classified as fine art at the same time, one can easily see why these two fields eventually met.

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Aesthetics of architecture has not developed to the same extent as aesthetics of other arts, so it comes as no surprise that ‘aesthetics of city’ does not appear in the body of contemporary aesthetic literature and plays a marginal role, if any, in aesthetic considerations of architecture. Nor are urban design (even if design aesthetics is quite well developed) or urban planning mentioned (as an aside, landscape architecture, a field overlapping with urban planning, does not appear, either). It may be noted that, just as it is difficult to apply to architecture concepts and approaches used in, for example, aesthetics of visual arts, it is not easy to apply aesthetic of architecture to urban spaces. Thus, the aesthetics of city is still largely associated with urban planning and is treated as a ‘technical’ issue that has to be solved in order to secure attractiveness, effectiveness, functionality, etc. Following, it goes without saying that these issues are to be coped with by architects or urban planning professionals. Interestingly however, the city is philosophically discussed in aesthetic terms in other contexts. It is approached within, for example, philosophy of design,14 philosophy of technology,15 literary theory,16 or digital media theory17. In other words, someone interested in approaching what may be called as ‘the aesthetic energy of the city’18 should turn to other fields than philosophical aesthetics conceived as philosophy of arts. Yet, it should also be noticed that these fields have much in common in the two intertwined areas of aesthetics of a recent origin, namely: environmental aesthetics and everyday aesthetics. This is where urban aesthetics may be sought after. The fact that one willing to pursue urban aesthetics has to make use of various approaches and take into account a vast variety of phenomena constituting every city as an environment of city life, some of which were never before considered as aesthetics, corresponds with the claim that the philosophy of the city must not pretend to offer universal answers. In other words, even if urban aesthetics does not want to only be descriptive, but also normative, the only possible normativity has to have an a posteriori and a case sensitive character. Hence, it must differ from the kind of urban aesthetics one may find in architectural theory manuals built upon utopian assumptions.

URBAN STUDIES AS IMPLICIT AESTHETICS If we agree on the above view of philosophy of the city, then its theoretical resource may be found in urban studies. The same, perforce, holds true for aesthetics. It may even be claimed that it is urban studies that is the first field for someone interested in aesthetics of the city to look into and not, for example, urban aesthetics.

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Władysław Tatarkiewicz, a Polish philosopher and the author of a monumental History of Aesthetics, suggested a very felicitous distinction that may be applied to the relationship between aesthetics and urban studies. While defining the scope and limits of aesthetics, he states that ‘the history of aesthetics, when understood in its broadest sense, is composed not only of explicit aesthetic statements made by aestheticians, but also of those that are implicit in the prevailing taste or in the works of art. It should embrace not only aesthetic theory, but also the artistic practice which reveals that aesthetic theory’.19 In his own work covering aesthetics from the Antiquity to mid-eighteenth century, Tatarkiewicz includes it’s both explicit and implicit dimensions as he takes into account philosophers on a par with art theoreticians and artists, and – consequently – theoretical statements as well as works of art. Even if exponents of urban studies do not raise questions that are paradigmatic for aesthetics, concerning, for example, nature of aesthetic objects or values, of aesthetic appreciation, or of aesthetic experience, they do ruminate on these and similar issues, since these are undoubtedly elements of their object of study, namely the city and city life. What is more, urban studies scholars are very often interested in everything which is associated with the way in which people sensorily experience their surroundings. Thus, it shall not be a gross exaggeration to think of urban studies as a sort of implied aesthetics, even more so, if we take into consideration that many of the philosophers whose views urban scholars adopt as bases for their own research are also pillars of contemporary aesthetics. Consequently, aesthetic theories of Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to name a few, are embedded in urban theories. Given that this sort of philosophy is part of the framework of urban studies, it shares their descriptive orientation, even if it may also make normative claims, as urban studies do (e.g. the research shows that aesthetic qualities of cities and urban aesthetic experiences should be taken into account in urban policies). Another feature determined by the fact that the aesthetics discussed is ‘implied’ in urban studies is the fact that this field is very often based on case studies, which makes it also possible to discuss it in terms of applied aesthetics. In fact, much more attention to the aesthetic is paid within urban studies than it may appear prima facie.20 The aesthetic is perceived rather broadly and is linked to a variety of social practices and phenomena inherent to the contemporary cities and city cultures. Hence, it is identified with aesthetisation understood as shaping aesthetic qualities of events, objects, places, and people in order to give them an attractive ‘feel’ or ‘look’. The aesthetic is thusly seen as rooted in processes of, among other things, commodification

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or gentrification. The aesthetic is also conceived of as an experiential and affective means of expressing, negotiating or producing individual or group identities, and hence as a field of social and cultural contrasts or power relations. Furthermore, it is associated with environmental issues: on the one hand nature as a source of aesthetic experiences has recently been widely acknowledged, on the other – cities have been more and more analysed as environments in which people are bodily engaged. Another aesthetic field that has been recognised as important for city cultures is urban art, analysed as a sphere where all of the abovementioned issues come to the foreground either as contents – usually critically approached by artists – or as forms, namely as planned and performed actions or intentionally created environments, in which the aesthetic is used as an artistic medium and at the same time presented as valuable. In other words, the aesthetic has recently been widely recognised as one of the foundations of human city life (in fact, not only human, as urban studies began to cover the presence of non-human inhabitants). Cities, as environs in which people live their everyday lives, are thus approached as material, inasmuch as immaterial, insofar as made of physical elements, as well as of meanings, objective inasmuch as subjective or inter-subjective, that is as spaces, things and events that are objects of people’s sensory and other experiences, as well as the contents of these experiences.21 Consequently, cities are seen as permeated by tensions defining their meanings and sensory qualities. Cities are then conceived of as objects of experiences, environments offering experiences, as well as objects and environments determined in one way or another by the experiences which are aesthetic per se. A good illustration of this experiential character of cities, is a figure that combines various manners of experiencing urban environments and epitomises what is perceived as crucial for modern metropolises, namely dynamics, flows, crossing of borders, placeness and placelessness; to say it a la Edward Relph.22 It is the figure of flâneur, famously theorised by, among others, Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. If Simmel is right in his analyses of the metropolitan spirit of life, the latter is such as well because it is necessarily shaped by the aesthetic experiences of what is inherently aesthetic. All this has never been denied – how could it be? – yet only lately has the townscape been fully identified with the sensescape.23 Thus, urban studies have gained a new perspective: sensory studies.24 In this respect, research on urban environments is in accordance with ideas promoted by a number of architecture theorists and urban designers as well as with ‘sensuous geographies’ practiced by anthropologists, archaeologists, cultural studies scholars, and geographers, who think of landscapes as of environments, in which

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people are physically immersed and which become meaningful insofar as they are aesthetically, that is sensorily experienced.25 Even if it is a vain task to enumerate philosophical sources of the abovementioned approaches, it is possible to make a general remark that they owe much to the great classics of urban studies which abound in ideas which allow to call their theories ‘aesthetics beyond aesthetics’ – to use the Wolfgang Welsch’s expression.26 Few prominent examples will suffice. One of the reasons behind Jane Jacobs’ criticism of American cities was their poor ‘look’, which reflected their malfunctioning on a technical as well as a social level. ‘The look of things – she claims – and the way they work are inextricably bound together, and in no place more so than cities’.27 At the same time, she identified the good look with, among other things, buoyancy, diversity, liveliness, and richness – all aesthetic qualities – rooted in urbanites’ mundane activities and attitudes. Indeed, the city’s look influences the daily life of its inhabitants, but at the same time is determined by the latter. According to Jacobs, without such a feedback a city cannot regenerate and the death of American cities was largely due to the fact that modernist urban planning, with its centralised big plans, did not respect this condition and did little to enhance it. In fact, it was modernism and its aesthetics that has been almost unanimously identified as responsible not only for the shape of twentieth-century cities, but also for how social life developed in them with all its pros and cons. Even if more than half a century has passed since Jacob’s book was published (1961) and in the meantime modernism was replaced by post-modernism, another kind of aesthetics decisive for how contemporary cities look and function, many of her ideals are still up to date. Still ‘the right to the city’, namely – as David Harvey claims – the right to ‘some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanisation, over the ways in which our cities are made and re-made’28 has to be fought for. And the battlefield is mainly public space or common grounds together with their aesthetic qualities. Harvey borrowed the concept of the right to the city from Henri Lefebvre, for whom it meant a ‘transformed and renewed right to urban life’.29 For the French theorist, establishing this right required an ‘integrated theory of the city and urban society’30 and in fact he devoted much space in his work to create one. His efforts were focused on analysing, among other things, everyday bodily practices performed in space and the same time producing the space, yet not in an abstract sense, but a very practical one. One way of interpreting the urban life was, as Lefebvre called it, rhythmanalysis, namely analysis of rhythms inherent to various aspects of the life of a city that is of being immersed in a city. It is noteworthy that, as Lefebvre writes, such an enterprise requires that ‘the rhythmanalyst calls on all his senses’.31

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A similar way of thinking may be found in Michel de Certau’s writings. His Practice of Everyday Life (L’invention du quotidien) is in part dedicated to urban space and practices taking place in it. de Certau famously makes a distinction between a place, that is an ‘instantaneous configuration of positions’ and a space, namely ‘a practiced place’, that is defined by ‘direction, velocities, and time variables’32 of the practices (such as walking), performed in such and such location. As he claims himself, this distinctions is analogous to the one offered by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who juxtaposed ‘geometrical space’ with ‘anthropological space’.33 The latter is the space of human experiences, that is a space experienced by people and shaped by their experience, or – to put it differently – their lived space. As such, it is located ‘on ground level, with footsteps’ and these are part and parcel of pedestrian movements that have ‘a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation’.34 Needless to state that there are other spatialising practices than walking, in fact all that is involved in living in a place may be said to turn it into space as understood by de Certau. This line of thought was also adopted by Edward W. Soja who invented the concept of ‘Thirdspace’, which is supposed to cover the ‘trialectics of being’, that is the fact that human condition is determined by ‘Spatiality, Historicality, and Sociality (summary terms for the social production of Space, Time, and Being-in-the-world)’.35 This triple bond is accompanied by another trialectics, that of spatiality, constituted by the ‘lived’, ‘perceived’, and ‘conceived’.36 Soja claims that the concept of Thirdspace is supposed to allow for overcoming the shortcomings of what he calls the Firstspace and Secondspace epistemologies: the former was focused on ‘material worlds of human geography’, while the latter on ‘conceived rather than perceived space’, and ‘thirdspace epistemologies’ are supposed less to criticise their precedents than to offer a way to ‘reinvigorate their approaches to spatial knowledge with new possibilities heretofore unthought of inside the traditional spatial disciplines’.37 All of the abovementioned approaches lead to a view according to which – as Manuel Castells writes – ‘cities are living systems, made, transformed and experienced by people. Urban forms and functions are produces and managed by the interaction between space and society, that is by the historical relationship between human consciousness, matter, energy and information’.38 In other words, one has to recognise – following Richard Sennett’s reference to Immanuel Kant– that in urban environments ville, the physical surroundings, and cité, ‘mentality compiled from perceptions, behaviours and beliefs’ penetrate each other, even if they ‘can never fit together seamlessly’.39 This penetration is multi-level, and the aesthetic (bodily, sensory, as well as aesthetic in the ‘art-like’ meaning of the term) level is not less important than other levels theorised by other disciplines.

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Summing up, the aesthetic implied in urban studies shows that the city is an environment which is aesthetic in the spatio-temporal sense – let us remind that for Immanuel Kant, aesthetics was not only about the nature of judgements of taste, but also about space and time, as two factors determining how people experience their world – and as such is organised according to numerous, contingent, socially constructed criteria resulting in ‘the distribution of the sensible’, as theorised by Jacques Rancière.40 The sensible is always meaningful, so its distribution, that is various exclusions, inclusions, hierarchies, admissibilities, permissibilities, is also the distribution of meanings. Given that the sensible not only conveys meanings, but also creates them, the sensible is inherently political. One may repeat after Rancière that aesthetics is politics, and follow in the footsteps of Crispin Sartwell, who claims that ‘all politics is aesthetic, [and] the aesthetic embodiments of political positions are material transformations and interventions, with concrete effects’.41 If the aesthetics-politics equation is recognised, then it is impossible to overlook or, worse, ignore the aesthetic, which is understood as the sensory experience and all that which may be sensorily experienced, as well as all that which may be grasped through the sensory experience, even if it is not sensory itself. The aesthetic, covering bodily practices, sensations, as well as aesthetic preferences and actions governed by them, is the field – or one could say space, be it private or public – where all the tensions identified and analysed in urban studies, using various concepts, methodologies, and theories, take place. Thus, practicing urban studies as implicit aesthetics does not nullify the assumptions and achievements of other approaches, it rather enriches them or broadens their scope by pulling to the foreground what they take for granted. ‘The city – writes David Harvey – is the site where people of all sorts and classes mingle, however reluctantly and agonistically, to produce a common if perpetually changing and transitory life’.42 And the aesthetic is its integral part since it defines everyone’s urban life. Everyone is, no matter whether one likes it or not, involved in urban aesthetics.

URBAN AESTHETICS Jan Gehl, a Danish architect, urban planner and theorist, for whom urban life takes place mainly ‘between buildings’, underlines that public spaces have to favour urbanites’ practices and it is the qualities of these spaces that make cities lively, safe, sustainable and healthy, that is ‘for people’.43 Such cities facilitate many outdoor activities, not only walking analysed by de Certau, or other ways of moving around, but also – as Gehl claim – staying, meeting, playing, and expressing oneself. Cities, according to him, should be beautiful, that is they should offer conditions for ‘celebrating the delights of place’

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and in order to be able to do that they have to present ‘aesthetic qualities for all senses’ and provide people with ‘positive sensory experiences’.44 All of these aspects are responsible for the quality of public life and hence have to be taken into account when one intends to study it.45 Gehl’s ideas are noteworthy as they illustrate the fact that urban aesthetics is above all aesthetics of space conceived of as an arena of social practices, which, by the way, makes urban aesthetics irreducible to aesthetics of architecture. They also show that places, spaces, or cityscapes have aesthetic qualities which are not, so to say, additional embellishments. As Kevin Lynch wrote in the Preface of his famous book, ‘the urban landscape, among its many roles, is also something [.  .  .] to delight in’.46 Gehl and Lynch, both urban planners, are understandably interested in enhancing aesthetic qualities of cityscapes and therefore they identify them with positive ones. Yet, aesthetic qualities need not be only positive – negative aesthetics is also possible – and, consequently, aesthetic appreciation does not necessarily amount to giving someone’s approval. The scope of aesthetics, as well as nature of aesthetic appreciation or experience, is issues that are not part of an agenda of urban planning or urban design. Instead, they lie at the heart of the two branches of contemporary aesthetics that – as it has already been mentioned – seem to be the most significant for urban studies: environmental aesthetics and everyday aesthetics. In fact, if we agree on perceiving urban studies as implied aesthetics, what is implied in them is precisely these two fields. Environmental aesthetics, initially mostly interested in natural environments, but today also in human environments, including cities, stems from the belief that aesthetics had largely neglected the environment limiting itself to the arts.47 It is said that philosophical aesthetics, assuming an unwarranted perspective, either misconceived aesthetic qualities of environments and nature of aesthetic experience (appreciation) of them, or ignored simply environments. In one case, the art-centredness of aesthetics made theorists approach environments as if they were artworks and look for qualities and experiences they could associate with art, mostly landscape pictures. In the other case, the artistic focus of aesthetics caused that environments were deemed lacking aesthetic qualities whatsoever. Contemporary environmental aesthetics, as developed mainly in Anglo-American academia, criticises both approaches. It claims that there are alternatives to applying art-centred criteria to environments and stresses the fact that environments have aesthetic qualities as well as offer aesthetic experiences, although the former and the latter are quite different from those encountered in the arts. There are two positions within environmental aesthetics that are worth mentioning here. The non-cognitive approach, developed mainly by Arnold Berleant, who claims that an environment (or a landscape) is the lived space

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of the people, experienced through the senses, as well as through various cultural and social filters.48 Thus, a positive aesthetic experience amounts to feeling delight in being immersed in an environment, to feeling well in one’s surroundings. The other, cognitive position developed by, among others, Allen Carlson, is in turn focused on the aesthetic appreciation of environments and based on the assumption that an adequate appreciation requires knowledge of the factors which gave the environment its shape.49 Hence, what is at stake is less people’s feeling than their judgement, which takes into consideration, for example, the history of a place, its cultural meanings, and natural processes inherent to it. Similar concerns are at the root of everyday aesthetics. In this case, philosophical aesthetics is criticised for excluding all that is banal, commonplace, ordinary, etc. The traditional approach is defined as one that identifies aesthetic qualities with those to be found in ‘paradigmatic arts and the aesthetic experience with the experience one may have in front of a paradigmatic work of art.50 For Yuriko Saito, one of the major exponents of everyday aesthetics, the problem lies in that art-centred aesthetics not only pays too much attention to certain aspects of objects such as frameness, stability or extraordinariness, but is also too attached to the concept of authorship, and too focused on higher senses. As a result, it is not able to recognise the aesthetic qualities of the everyday or the familiar, and hence it does not want to acknowledge that the mundane, non-artistic world may offer aesthetic experiences. The agenda of everyday aesthetics is, then, to reclaim the ordinary as a sphere inherently aesthetic, one that is as important to people as the arts or even more important, given its ubiquity. Such a project requires abandoning the art-centred approach, since the everyday is structurally different from such arts as painting or music, in that it is unstable, has no frames or author, involves all the senses and implies engagement instead of contemplation. The difference between the everyday and arts also lies in the fact that, by definition, it passes unnoticed. Hence, what is needed is a theory of what aesthetic qualities the everyday may have and what it means to aesthetically experience (appreciate) it. If we think of the everyday as of all that fills our everyday lives – places (e.g. bus stops), actions (e.g. sipping morning coffee), and objects (e.g. laundry) – we usually do not find it beautiful or sublime, but we may find it, for example, clean or dirty.51 And these may be said to be aesthetic qualities, too, just as finding something cute or filthy may be said to be an aesthetic experience. It should be noted that environmental aesthetics and everyday aesthetics overlap at some points as the environments in which people live are usually everyday for them and are full of commonplace objects, situations, and events. Urban environments are a good example. Furthermore, both approaches tend to question the art-centredness of philosophical aesthetics, yet they do not

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deny that art may be a factor influencing how people aesthetically experience their surroundings. Urban art, a non-paradigmatic genre discussed within philosophical aesthetics, may in fact be important for both everyday and environmental aesthetics, since it may enhance the quality of people’s everyday life, but it may also favour its artification, that is, it may result in making people aesthetically appreciate their everyday as if it were art. The two fields hereby summarised, as heterogeneous as they are, contribute to the awareness of the nature and significance of the aesthetic. According to them, the aesthetic experience is not confined to the arts and does not have to amount to contemplation. It involves not only all the senses, but also what one believes, feels, or knows; aesthetic qualities may be found in the most mundane, down-to-earth objects, places and situations; aesthetic experiences may be negative and so may aesthetic qualities be. And above all: aesthetic experiences (appreciations) are too important an aspect of everyday life to be ignored. It will not be an exaggeration to state that urban aesthetics, be it theoretical or practical, should be the aesthetics of everyday urban environments. In fact, what Gehl suggests as an urban planner and what is implied in urban studies, is precisely this.

CONCLUSIONS The fact that ‘from the citizen’s point of view, the city is a continuum of sensory experience, in which sounds, sight and smells, caused by all kinds of things are blended into a composite and constantly changing whole’ and that, among other functions the city has to fulfill, it has to respond to ‘the need for aesthetic satisfaction’52 was acknowledged a long time ago. So was the fact that ‘the city that we love or detest is the summation of all such things: Of its smells, its noises, its people, its voices, its clothes, its vehicles, its animals; it is the sum too of its markets and its sidewalks, of its trees, flowers, water, and sculpture, of its clean or grimy air, of its abundant or covered sun, of the colour of its sky, of its terrain, of a way of life, and a history’.53 The above remarks nicely present the city as an everyday aesthetic environment, while the adjective ‘aesthetic’ denotes all its possible sensory sides and dimensions, as well as urbanites’ experiences, including aesthetic appreciations. They also illustrate the belief that topophilia as well as topophobia have aesthetic grounds, just like placeness and placelessness do.54 The quoted passages were written by, respectively, a specialist in urban planning and a historian of architecture, but they are echoed by, on the one hand, what some of the urban studies scholars have researched, and on the other – by the claims of the aestheticians interested in environments

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and the everyday. Yet, despite that they all agree on that the aesthetic is fundamental for cities and life in them, they seem little interested in what the exponents of the other discipline do, which consequently creates a gap between these fields.55 Were one to offer an explanation of this mutual overlooking, one could claim that from the point of view of urban studies environmental aesthetics and everyday aesthetics re-invented the wheel, since they had been preceded in the discovery of the aesthetics qualities and aesthetic experiences of everyday environments by nothing else than urban studies. Aestheticians could in turn maintain that, even though urban studies scholars eagerly refer to thinkers crucial for contemporary aesthetics, in order to trace tensions in the aesthetic, they do not pay much attention to the aesthetic ‘in itself’; treating it as solely a vehicle of the content they are interested in. In other words, they identify the aesthetic with materiality imbued with meanings and consequently they do not approach it as an inherent ingredient of an urban experience which is always aesthetic insofar as it is sensory. The input that urban studies may give to aesthetics is obvious – as empirical as they are, they may mitigate the aprioristic pretensions of aesthetics. A little bit less clear is what aesthetics may add to urban studies, though. There seem to be at least three interconnected lessons someone intent on studying cities may draw from aesthetics. First, aesthetics together with its questions concerning the aesthetic experience, aesthetic qualities and objects, may offer insights into various modes of the urban experience, demonstrating that aesthetic appreciation – likes and dislikes, judgements and affects – is inherent to the Thirdspace and thus to urban life, which is nothing else than an ‘aesthetic engagement in the city’.56 Secondly, by offering these insights, aesthetics may be useful in defining the agenda of research, since it may help in addressing aesthetic experiences and aesthetic qualities as objects of study. It may suggest what questions should be asked, for example, questions concerning sensory and extra-sensory elements or positive/negative aspects of aesthetic experiences, or questions concerning ordinary experiences of objects usually dissociated from the aesthetic, as well as extraordinary experiences of such objects. In other words, aesthetics may instruct urban studies as implied aesthetics as to what their field is. For example, it may introduce such topics as urban atmosphere,57 urban kinaesthetics,58 or somaesthetics,59 or the relationship between urban aesthetics and urban ethics.60 Finally, it is aesthetics understood as philosophy of art that allows for asking questions essential to the interpretation of urban art (what is urban art? Is there anything special about its production, consumption, etc.? How should it be appreciated?) and – even more importantly – questions concerning the role of urban art as a factor favouring ‘celebration of the city’, an inherently aesthetic attitude and act without which it is hardly possible to maintain a

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meaningful and satisfying relation with urban space as an environment of one’s everyday life.61 All of the abovementioned issues are necessarily implied in any urban research, and such or similar questions are answered, if unconsciously, by anyone who starts a research on cities as environments where people live their urban everyday lives. It is another reason why urban studies may be said to be implicit aesthetics (in a sense closer to Tatarkiewicz’s intention): in fact, urban scholars willy-nilly express in their theories and approaches how they understand the aesthetic. Aesthetics would then be useful either in making explicit one’s aesthetic ‘pre-judices’ or in revealing aesthetic theories one implements – not necessarily fully intentionally – in one’s research. It seems that aesthetics and urban studies may well complement each other. Undoubtedly, aesthetics may bring theoretical advantages, but also, and more importantly, practical ones. Hans Paetzold, discussing, among other things, Allan Jacobs’ and Donald Appleyard’s text Toward an Urban Design Manifesto (1987),62 in which they identify goals of ‘good urban environment’ (e.g. livability; identity; access to opportunity, imagination and joy; authenticity and meaning; community and public life), underlines that if these goals are to be achieved, aesthetic sensibility has to be taken into account. He also remarks that ‘the aesthetic sensibility implies giving a style to our life, to make our life and the things necessary for our everyday life a meaningful project, a project which comprises living in a surrounding that is pleasurable to our senses and our experiences’.63 Finally, if urban design may be seen as an art, a very particular one, since it creates townscapes out of ‘sites’, ‘buildings and other objects’, ‘spaces created by the objects’, ‘noises, smells, tactile surfaces, moving bodies’,64 then its success depends as much on the talent of urban designers, as on their technical skills, awareness of certain problems that they have to cope with and their knowledge of what cities are, how they function and what it means to live in a city. A successful urban design, then, requires aesthetics and urban studies. There may be little doubt that the world is becoming more and more urbanised and shall turn into a global city sooner than later. Therefore, we – aestheticians, urban scholars, as well as urban designers – should all join forces to make this city and life in it as aesthetically satisfying as possible for us and for the generations to come.

NOTES 1. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and the Life of Spirit,” transl. John D Boy, Journal of Classical Sociology 21, no. 2 (2020): 6.

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2. Henri Lefebvre, “Philosophy and the City,” in Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, transl. and ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elisabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 86–93. 3. Philosophy and the City: Classic to Contemporary Writings, ed. Sharon M. Meagher (New York: State of New York University Press, 2007). 4. Ewa Rewers, Wstęp do filozofii ponowoczesnego miasta (Kraków: Universitas 2005); see also texts published in special volumes of the journals Contemporary Aesthetics 8 (2020); Open Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2020), Topoi 40 (2021). 5. Sharon M. Meagher, “Introduction,” in Philosophy and the City, 2. 6. Ibidem, 9. 7. Keith Jacobs, Jeff Malpas, “Introduction: On the Philosophy of the City,” in Philosophy and the City. Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives, ed. Keith Jacobs and Jeff Malpas (Rowman & Littlefield: London, 2019), X. 8. Ibidem, X. 9. D. Kishik, “Metrosophy: Philosophy and the City,” The New York Times, July 6, 2015. 10. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City, ed. Sharon M. Meager, Samantha Noll, Joseph S. Biel (Routledge: New York, 2020). 11. Jacobs, Malpas, “Introduction . . . ,” X–XI. 12. Reading the City – Developing Urban Hermeneutics / Stadt lesen – Beiträge zu einer urbanen Hermeneutik, ed. Nico Giersig, Dieter Hassenpflug, Bernhardt Stratmann (Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität, 2011); Rafał Koschany, “Interpretacje,” in Kulturowe studia miejskie. Wprowadzenie, ed. Ewa Rewers (Warszawa: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2014), 263–297. 13. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (London: Methuen, 1979); Bruno Zevi, Architecture as Space, ed. Joseph A. Barry (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993). 14. J. Craig Hanks, “Cities, Aesthetics, and Human Community: Some Thoughts on the Limits of Design,” in Philosophy and Design. From Engineering to Architecture ed. Pieter E. Vermaas, Peter Kroes, Andrew Light, Steven A. Moore (Delft: Springer, 2008), 329–339; Glenn Parsons, “Nature, Aesthetic Values, and Urban Design: Building the Natural City,” in Philosophy and Design, 340–354. 15. Sanna Lehtinen, “Urban Aesthetics and Technology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology, ed. Shannon Vallor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 449–469. 16. Bart Keunen, “The Aesthetics of the City,” The Routledge Companion to Literary Studies, ed. Lieven Ameel (New York: Routledge, 2022): 57–71. 17. Mónica Montserrat Degen, Gillian Rose, The New Urban Aesthetic. Digital Experiences of Urban Change (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). 18. This is the title of an annual conference organized at the University of Łódź (Poland), accessed December 13, 2022, https://www​.uni​.lodz​.pl​/aesthetic​-energy​-of​ -the​-city. 19. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics. Vol. 1. Ancient Aesthetics, ed. Jean Harrell (The Hague: de Gruyter, 1970), 5. 20. Encyclopedia of the City, ed. Roger W. Caves (London: Routledge, 2005); Handbook of Urban Studies, ed. Ronan Paddison (London: SAGE, 2001); Encyclopedia

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of Urban Studies, ed. Roy Hutchison (London: SAGE, 2010); The SAGE Handbook of NewUrban Studies, ed. John Hannigan, Greg Richards (London: SAGE, 2017); Urban Theory. New Critical Perspectives, ed. Mark Jayne, Kevin Ward (New York: Routledge, 2017). 21. Zuzanna Dziuban, “Doświadczenie”, in Kulturowe studia miejskie, 139–185. 22. Edward Relph, Place and Placeness (London: Pion, 1976). 23. Senses and the City. An Interdisciplinary Approach to Urban Sensescapes, ed. Mădălina Diaconu, Eva Heuberger, Ruth Mateus-Berr, Lukas Marcel Vosicky (Wien: Lit Verlag, 2011); 24. Senses in Cities: Experiences of Urban Settings, ed. Kelvin E.Y. Low, Devorah Kalekin-Fishman (New York: Routledge, 2018); see also: https://www​.sensorystudies​.org, accessed December 13, 2022. 25. Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (New York: Routledge 1994); Mateusz Salwa, “Landscape, Phenomenology, and Aesthetics,” Popular Inquiry 1 (2022): 185–196. 26. Wolfgang Welsch, “Aesthetics Beyond Aesthetics,” in Proceedings of the XIIIth International Congress of Aesthetics, Lahti 1995, Vol. III: Practical Aesthetics in Practice and Theory, ed. Martti Honkanen (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 1997), 18–37. 27. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 14. 28. David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” in David Harvey, Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 5. 29. Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 158. 30. Ibidem, 158. 31. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, transl. S ­ tuart Elden, Gerald Moore, with an introduction by Stuart Elden (london: continuum 2004), 21. 32. Michel de Certau, The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117. 33. De Certau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117. 34. Ibidem, 97. 35. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 71. 36. Ibidem, 74. 37. Ibidem, 74–82. 38. Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots. A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), XV. 39. Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling. Ethics for the City (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2018), 1, 4. 40. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, ed. and transl. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). 41. Crispin Sartwell, Political Aesthetics (Ithaka: Cornell University Press 2010), 1.

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42. David Harvey, “The Creation of the Urban Commons,” in David Harvey, Rebel Cities, 67. 43. Jan Gehl, Lige Between Buildings. Using Public Space (Washington: Island Press, 2011); Jan Gehl, Cities for People (Washington: Island Press, 2010). 44. Gehl, Cities for People, 174, 177, 181. 45. Jan Gehl, Birgitte Svarre, How to Study Public Life, trans. Karen Ann Steenhard (Washington: Island Press, 2013). 46. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), V. 47. The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, ed. Allen Carlson, Arnold Berleant (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004); The Aesthetics of Human Environments, ed. A. Berleant, A. Carlson (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2007). 48. Arnold Berleant, Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997); Arnold Berleant, Aesthetics and Environment: Variations on a Theme (New York: Routledge, 2017). 49. Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment. The Appreciation of Nature, Art, and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2000); Allen Carlson, Nature & Landscape. An Introdution to Environmental Aesthetics, Columbia (New York: University Press, 2009). 50. Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Yuriko Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar. Everyday Life And World-Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 51. Thomas Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary. The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2012). 52. Sydney H. Williams, “Urban Aesthetics: An Approach to the Study of the Aesthetic Characteristics of Cities,” The Town Planning Review 25, no. 2 (1954): 98. 53. John Ely Burchard, “The Urban Aesthetic,” The Annals of the American ­Academy of Political and Social Science 314 (1957): 113. 54. Yi Fu-Tuan, Topophilia. A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Relph, Place and Placelessness. 55. Mirza Tursić, “The City as an Aesthetic Space,” City 23, no. 2 (2019): 205–221. 56. Nathalie Blanc, “Aesthetic Engagement in the City,” Contemporary Aesthetics 11, (2013). https://digitalcommons​.risd​.edu​/liberalarts​_contempaesthetics​/vol11​/ iss1​/7. 57. Tonino Griffero, “The Atmospheric ‘Skin’ of the City,” Ambiances. Environnement sensible, architecture et espace urbain (2013), https://doi​.org​/10​.4000​/ ambiances​.399; Matthew Gandy, “Urban Atmospheres,” Cultural Geographies, 24, no. 3(2017): 353–374. 58. Tea Lobo, “Urban Kinesthetics,” Contemporary Aesthetics 8, 2020. https:// digitalcommons​.risd​.edu​/liberalarts​_contempaesthetics​/vol0​/iss8​/3; Jakub Petri, Somatyka miejskich dyscyplin performatywnych. Skateboarding, freerunning, parkour (Kraków: Wydawnictwa UJ, 2020). 59. Bodies in the Streets: The Somaesthetics of City Life, ed. Richard Shusterman (Leiden: Brill 2019).

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60. Hanna Mattila, “Aesthetic Justice and Urban Planning: Who Ought to Have the Right to Design Cities?” GeoJournal 58, no. 2/3 (2002): 131–138; Johannes MüllerSalo, “Informed Aesthetic Consensus and the Creation of Urban Environments,” ­Polish Journal of Landscape Studies 1, no. 2/3 (2018). https://doi​.org​/10​.14746​/ pls.2018​.2​.3​.9. 61. I am referring here to Mario Perniola’s idea; on this topis see especially Z. Somhegyi, “Valuing and Revaluing the City. Interpreting Art and Urban Regeneration with Mario Perniola,” Ágalma 43 (2022): 85–94. 62. Allan Jacobs, Donald Appleyard, „Toward an Urban Design Manifesto,” Journal of the American Planning Association, 53, no. 1 (1987): 112–120. 63. Hans Paetzold, “Aesthetics of Urban Design,” Diogenes 59, no. 1/2 (2013): 70. 64. Nigel Taylor, “The Elements of Townscape and the Art of Urban Design,” Journal of Urban Design 4, no. 2 (1999): 195–209.

Chapter 5

Aesthetics and Politics Karl Axelsson

Throughout history political forces have appealed to aesthetics and the art of the past to defend the present. This chapter explores how aesthetics and art that probe the moral principles of Western political society are tried and disfigured by malicious forces that wish to push back their development, from Nazi and fascist visual mythology to current ethno-nationalism. While exploiting the principles of aesthetic autonomy, these forces remain committed to instrumental and external values of natural beauty and art to secure self-preservation. HISTORICAL CONTINUITIES There are many ways to make sense of the past to better understand the present and to make predictions about the future. Depending on choice of method, accounts are likely to incorporate either a radical set of ideas about turning points or a dialectical continuity favouring stability and gradual conversion throughout time. While strengths and weaknesses of historical methods have been in the limelight of political history for a long time, attention has only recently arisen in meta-aesthetic debates; a welcome attention impelled by an inexhaustible need, during the past decades, to combine specialisation and interdisciplinary commitments. Much of recent debates centre on two consecutive articles published in 1951 and 1952 by Paul Oskar Kristeller. In his articles, Kristeller spelled out what had become integral to most assumptions about the history of aesthetics, namely that the evolvement of the arts witnessed a major cataclysm in that ‘classical century of modern aesthetics’ that is the eighteenth century; a turning point paving the way for a modern system of the arts consisting of 75

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painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry, where they from now on were thought to make up an ‘area all by themselves, clearly separated by common characteristics from the crafts, the sciences, and other human activities’.1 Taken as a whole, the five major arts constituted a system, and as such provided the cornerstone of modern aesthetic theory. Though we might detect traces of this system in the classical period, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, it received, or so Kristeller argues, its distinct modern form in the eighteenth century. While productions of treatises on poetry, painting, music, and other arts, were previously constructed as a set of technical manuals, the eighteenth century produces comparative studies, where one art form is examined in relation to another form, but from a shared set of principles. The impact of Kristeller’s thesis has been, and still is, enormous. As James I. Porter stresses: ‘In short, we are having to do here no longer with an academic thesis, and not even with an orthodoxy, but with a dogma’.2 The meta-aesthetic debate on the legacy of Kristeller’s thesis exposes roughly two approaches to the history of art and aesthetics. On the one hand, Kristellerians advocating a discontinuity model with the eighteenth century as a paradigmatic break that introduces a new institutional pattern as well as a modern concept of art, disinterestedness, and aesthetic autonomy; on the other hand, scholars advocating a continuity model emphasising recurring mimetic themes from the classical Greek and Roman period to modern aesthetics.3 Though the two models naturally overlap, I will in the following focus primarily on the continuity model and introduce some of its strengths in relation to politics. Aesthetics and politics are parasitic upon one another while simultaneously claiming autonomy. This complex interaction has always pushed philosophers to think across traditional boundaries and to rethink excessive specialisation and questions about autonomy. In the following I understand politics as process, which means that I perceive politics as an extensive phenomenon or mechanism in human society and art.4 Accordingly it is not only a matter of what happens within, or in relation to, established political institutions, but a natural presence involving matters of power in art. As Crispin Sartwell argues, ideologies (whether totalitarian or democratic) are aesthetic systems. But while political and aesthetic values are intrinsically related, they are, at the same time, ‘orthogonally connected’.5 This means that the values are not identical and that we cannot reduce them by ‘collapsing the either into the other’, but rather that we must ‘connect the dimensions of value in their complexity’.6 While Kristeller favours the idea of discontinuity, Porter has a different approach. He quotes Kristeller to kick off his claim: ‘[. . .] though confronted with excellent works of art and quite susceptible to their charm, [ancient philosophers] were neither able nor eager to detach the aesthetic quality of these

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works of art from their intellectual, moral, religious and practical function or content [. . .]’.7 In his articles Kristeller is ‘emphatically partial to aesthetic autonomy in its modern form, inasmuch as it stresses that the progress of the arts involved their steady “emancipation” from their background contexts, which is to say, their becoming autonomous’ from, for instance, morality and politics.8 However, a more workable definition of autonomy is available according to Porter. This definition does not locate the problem of autonomy outside of art and aesthetics. Rather, autonomy is throughout history a persistent movement within art itself, while at the same time remaining a movement beyond art. While recent Kristellerians (and Kristeller himself) would claim that such a movement is precisely the separation of modern life into various spheres (with aesthetics detached from politics, truth, and morality), Porter perceives such a movement as a continuously ongoing fact: a constant that does not reduce the significance of the aesthetic experience itself. Art is thus always embedded in certain cultural and political practices. My sensuous experience of artworks consists of aspects that are as significant as those considered to exist beyond the artwork. Art is, in Porter’s ‘materialist’ perspective on aesthetics, a ‘relay’, a transmitter, of meaning and a ‘window onto modes of sensory experience, onto modes of attention generally, onto perceptual habits and cognitive styles, and, therefore, onto the social relations that are embedded in things’.9 In the constantly ongoing political processes within and beyond the artwork itself, the work reflects, in an Adornian fashion, on its differentness (what it is not); as Porter stresses, the ‘negation of relation to a given sphere [. . .] involves a necessary entanglement in what is being refused’.10 This means that if I think about the absence of politics in art, or accept a distinct separation between politics and aesthetics, my thought is naturally shaped by my concept about politics. Thus, politics are always an integral part of art and aesthetics, even when it does not seem to be there. The absence is, so to speak, always present. Rejecting the idea of absolute autonomy of art and aesthetics does not, however, imply a denial of aesthetic autonomy as such. Aesthetic autonomy is an ongoing tension unfolding in the artwork. Porter’s continuity model is much indebted to Stephen Halliwell’s claim that Kristeller’s thesis fails to recognise that the ‘representational-cumexpressive character’ of mimetic art in the classical period (around fourth century BC) is not as far from a ‘unified concept of “art” (more specifically, of the mimetic or representational arts as a class)’, as we might think.11 Rather than maintaining the discontinuity model’s ‘radical separation of ancient and modern views of art’ Halliwell and Porter draw attention to the mimeticist tradition that extends from the classical period and undergoes slow transformations – or rather demonstrates a plurality of voices and emphases – throughout history.12 Thus, Porter’s attack on a protracted ‘progressivist,

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modernist ideology’ does not aim to eliminate discontinuity root and branch. Reminiscent of Jacques Rancière’s famous ‘counter-history of “artistic modernity”’, Porter perceives a constant blurring of separations between art and politics.13 Rancière’s historical model of art – from the ethical regime, via the representative regime, to the aesthetic regime – does not favour either continuity or discontinuity any more than Porter categorically resists them.14 The history of aesthetics and politics (both being distributions of the sensible) is not merely ‘a matter of succession, but of enduring creations’.15 Porter’s materialist perspective on aesthetics does not refer to political matters as situations or subjects beyond art but insists on politics as intrinsic to the sensuous experience of art itself, in ancient as well as in contemporary art. But if politics is intrinsic to the sensuous qualities of art, what do such qualities look like?

ARISTOTLE ON POETRY AND POLITICS In his Poetics, Aristotle states that ‘poetry does not have the same standard of correctness as politics’ (1460b13–15).16 Here, the Greek word for politics (πολιτική) refers to both the ethics of our social public lives and the ethics of our private lives. Politics is ‘architectonic’ in the sense that it ‘determines which other activities are to be permitted in the polis, subject to what limitations’.17 What is Aristotle suggesting with his claim on poetry and politics? Aristotle is, as Halliwell observes, neither implying that the standard of poetry is absolutely separated from those of politics, nor that the standard of the former supersedes the standard of the latter.18 From the perspective of the mimetic artist as well as from the audience, ethics is always internal to poetry. While the work of the mimetic artist imitates actions, the audience exercises its moral judgement to determine the qualities of the actions. The actions represented are either morally good or bad given the social status of the character performing them. A similar correlation is present in painting: Polygnotus (fifth century BC), like Homer, depicts men that are morally better than us, while Pauson, like Hegemon of Thasos and Nicochares, depicts men whose actions are morally inferior, and Dionysius (presumably Dionysius of Colophon) depicts actions as they are normally performed (1448a5–13). This is also the main difference between tragedy and comedy: while the former depicts people performing actions that are morally superior, the latter portrays actions that are morally inferior (1448a15–18), though not necessarily vicious (1449a2–3). While we learn in Aristotle’s Politics that young people ought to pay attention to the (moral) images by Polygnotus rather than the (immoral) images by Pauson, this does not mean that there is a particular political and ethical standard, separate from the mimetic

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creation itself, that governs the work.19 While moral judgements are requisite to both devising mimetic creations and to determine whether a certain moral or immoral action fits a particular poetic work, they cannot be externally imposed on the creation but must rather be the result of the internal logic of the work itself. As long as the poetic work succeeds with the end of the art itself (εἰ τυγχάνει τοῦ τέλους τοῦ αὑτῆς), it may even contain qualities that appear impossible (1460b23–25). In contrast, Plato thinks that while mimetic art can be politically and ethically relevant, the value must be ‘controlled by externally established standards’.20 This does not mean that Aristotle neglects the bearings of reality. Rather, he is trying to bring out a balance between the end of art itself and a seemingly different proposition, namely the fact that the poet’s function is to represent things that might indeed happen and that are ‘possible in terms of probability or necessity’ (1451a36–1451b2). There are principles of reality that neither can nor should be ignored since there is no ‘human activity that is not answerable to politics’.21 Not even poetry. Poetry is part of human nature: it is simply a human instinct to perform acts of mimesis and poetry enables us to gain understanding as well as pleasure (1448b5–9). While poetry, politics, and ethics are, as Malcolm Heath observes, not ‘unconnected’ but rather ‘not coextensive’, Aristotle’s Poetics remains a classical source of perennial aesthetic questions about the self-sufficiency of art and artists.22 Of course, neither Aristotle, nor any other ancient Greek or Roman philosopher, suggested a modern understanding of aesthetic autonomy. Such a diachronic narrative would be perverse. But what Aristotle draws attention to is that there are qualities that, while always related to politics, ought to remain exclusive to the experience of mimetic art. Resonating Socrates in Phaedrus, Aristotle claims that a plot in epic poetry ought to be assembled around an action that is a perfect whole (περὶ μίαν πρᾶξιν ὅλην) to cause its own kind of pleasure (ποιῇ τὴν οἰκείαν ἡδονήν) and as such the poem must be like a whole living animal (ζῷον ἓν ὅλον) (1459a19–21).23 Thus, we should observe two things here: (1) poetry includes a pleasure that is ideally exclusive to its kind and (2) poetry is ideally like a living animal or organism with a telos. While Aristotle’s Poetics was canonised in Italy in the sixteenth century, these two propositions had a pending effect that was to become manifest in early modern philosophy, particularly in the writings of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, a champion of Aristotle and the political legacy of Greco-Roman culture. For that reason, I will turn next to the idea about pleasure-cum-cognition in nature and art (broadly conceived) and the organism analogy. As we will see, these two Aristotelian propositions are in Shaftesbury’s writings combined and developed into a modern model of the self-sufficiency-cum-dependency relation of aesthetics, art, and politics.

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SHAFTESBURY ON THE INTRINSIC VALUE OF NATURE AND ART Shaftesbury’s The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody (1709) contains what is generally acknowledged as the locus classicus of modern aesthetic autonomy.24 In part III of the conversation between Theocles (the ‘gentlemanphilosopher’) and Philocles (the ‘airy gentleman of the world’), the former stages a hypothetical situation to introduce his claim on disinterestedness and to think through its consequences.25 Theocles asks Philocles if he finds it rational to experience natural beauty (‘being taken with the beauty of the ocean’) while simultaneously pondering how he might best exercise his power over nature (‘to seek how to command it’).26 Philocles’s reply is negative. He recognises that he cannot own the ocean as a property. Thus, the presumable pleasure of possessing the ocean (‘the enjoyment of this kind’) must, Theocles claims, be unlike the disinterested pleasure gained from ‘the contemplation of the ocean’s beauty’.27 The same must, they agree, hold true for any beauty that is physically located on a body of land. The difference between the pleasure we get (‘the enjoyment of the prospect’) from contemplation of a ‘delicious vale’ and the pleasure we gain from ‘property or possessions of the land’ is real and true; and to be ‘charmed’ with the beauty of a tree and to rest in its shade is not the same as satisfying a strong appetite by consuming its fruits.28 Similar to Aristotle’s view of a pleasure of its own kind, Shaftesbury’s understanding of a disinterested contemplation and pleasure includes a strong argument that beauty is not an externally applied form. Even serpents and insects (disagreeable as they might be) are ‘beauteous in themselves’ since they manifest an inner self-forming purpose.29 Along the lines of Aristotle’s claim in De partibus that it is the inner causal structure of the animal that is beautiful and causes pleasure, Shaftesbury argues that it is the intrinsic relations in nature that we perceive with pleasure.30 The only way to have such an experience is to be genuinely disinterested in the sense that you insist on the priority of natural beauty and avoid external motivations. The ethical and cognitive value of disinterestedness is particularly present in Shaftesbury’s critique of theological voluntarism (the common idea that divine will determines morality and truth). A central problem addressed by and in the wake of seventeenth-century voluntarism concerns the fundamental political question regarding what motivates me to act morally. Do I act morally because it is God’s (or a political authority’s) will? If I act because I am afraid of punishments or interested in rewards, God (or a political authority) is, as Shaftesbury argues in his Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1711), ‘beloved only as the cause of private good’ and God becomes just like ‘any other instrument or means of pleasure by any vicious creature’.31

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Hence, ethics are at the very core of Shaftesbury’s understanding of disinterestedness: neither natural beauty nor morality can be instrumentalised by an externally applied form. To accept such an external (divine or political) power would only obstruct the pleasure that I might obtain from natural beauty, and it would confirm my failure to understand my moral obligations as a human being. Shaftesbury’s stress on the intrinsic relations present in natural beauty appears in various forms throughout his writings. In Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author (1710) the argument revolves around artistic integrity naturally ignoring external powers and instructions. A ‘thorough artist in whatever kind’ (thus including skilled craft workers too) is simply unable to act because of an external ‘interest’, since such an act involves that he ‘prostitute[s] his art’ and violates the ‘justness and truth of work’.32 Whenever a ‘rich customer’ forcefully asks for a particular artwork, the answer from the artist must be that he is ‘mistaken in coming to [him] for such a piece’.33 The ‘real genius’ not only demonstrates that there is ‘truth in actions’ and that his art is ‘independent of opinion and above the world’, but that the moral actions themselves – the effect of artistic integrity – originate from the intrinsic qualities of the artwork.34 In this respect there is to Shaftesbury an uncompromising ‘truth of art’ that is taught by nature.35 Accordingly, the ‘early poets of Greece’ (for instance Homer and Hesiod) would only have weakened their impact if they had complied with society’s ‘first relish and appetite’. Though they do not always have the ‘world on their side’, it is only the ‘generous spirits who first essayed the way’ that can create artworks that are consistent with ‘truth and nature’.36 It is important to recognise that Shaftesbury’s claim on artistic integrity, and his stress on the intrinsic qualities of artworks and natural beauty, does not reduce the relevance of politics. In fact, by ignoring external motivations and by insisting on the priority of the artwork itself the Greek poets eventually became able, he argues, to ‘polish [. . .] the age’ and ‘refine [. . .] the public ear’.37 It is only by disregarding external powers that the artist can create an artwork that is true, and it is only by this disregard that the artwork itself might have an external impact. Thus, Shaftesbury objects to a philosophy that fails to acknowledge ‘politics to be of [philosophy’s] province’. If ethics constitutes, as Shaftesbury claims, an essential part of philosophy, then ‘politics must undeniably [still] be’ firmly integrated in philosophy.38 Artworks are imitations of nature, but not in the sense that they mechanically reproduce natural phenomena. What is imitated is, according to Shaftesbury, nature’s organic and creative activity (which also aids his conception of art as essentially creative). However, it is not only art that imitates the organic processes of nature. In his defence of Aristotle’s political naturalism, where polis is perceived as a creation of nature (τῶν φύσει ἡ πόλις ἐστί)

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and man by nature a political animal (ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον), Shaftesbury understands society as a natural organism.39 We are always part of this organism because ‘out of society and community’ man ‘never did, nor ever can, subsist’.40 There are two contextual aspects that need to be addressed here. The first concerns outcomes and remedies of the political philosophy that Shaftesbury attacks. Shaftesbury’s Aristotelian position on political naturalism is predominantly a critique of theological voluntarism and the instrumentalism that he believes is internal to Thomas Hobbes’s political anthropology. While dismissing the Aristotelian ‘Axiom’ of political naturalism as ‘False’, Hobbes perceives society as an artificial invention produced and sustained by suppressing our anti-social instincts.41 Part and parcel with Hobbes’s understanding of political society is a materialism that only addresses moral and aesthetic questions in subjective terms: there is simply nothing ‘to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but from the Person of the man’.42 This opens for unsound subjectivism and relativism that only consensus and rules established by external political authorities can put an end to: it is ultimately in political society that my self-interest is restrained and artificial normativity founded. In Hobbes’s political anthropology there is no room for a moral and beneficial nature and naturalness. There is no intrinsic (moral or aesthetic) value in the object itself. Harmony and agreement are produced by arbitrary and external standards that are instrumentally applied. In its capacity of being an artificial creation, the political organisation of the ‘state’ was during the Renaissance frequently addressed ‘as a work of art’.43 This idea was not unfamiliar to Hobbes and it remained vital to one of the most important men of letters in Enlightenment Europe, Joseph Addison. Even if he was largely indifferent to the details of Hobbes’s anthropology, Addison nevertheless advanced ‘along Hobbesian lines’ in his claim about the construction of political society.44 The ‘purposeful act of constructing the reality of society itself’ was to him ‘to be compared to a moment of artistic creativity, and the body politic to be likened to an original work of art’.45 Mixing his apologies for art (what makes art in general an important human activity) and evaluations of a work of art (what makes a particular artwork important), Addison defended a typical early modern instrumentalism.46 If one wished to make apologies for art and, like Addison, claim that ‘performances in general must aid the “Advancement of Morality, and [add] to the Reformation of the Age”, the evaluations of a particular play must accordingly confirm that the best play [was] the one that most successfully produce[d] such a desired effect’.47 Thus, though the artistic qualities of the artwork remain fundamental for its general ontological status as art, a supposedly external standard ultimately appears to determine, to Addison, the value of the artwork and the aesthetic experience itself.

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In a distorted mixture with a defence of the intrinsic value of natural beauty and artworks, aesthetic instrumentalism seems to offer a leeway for vicious ideological forces that are ready to exploit aesthetics and art. Thus, the second aspect, that I wish to address in the next section, concerns the fact that while aesthetic autonomy remains an attractive model, a strong commitment to instrumentalism is necessary for the political self-preservation of such forces.

IDEOLOGICAL DISTORTIONS: FASCISM AND NAZISM We can roughly define aesthetic instrumentalism as claims where the appreciation of natural beauty and artworks depend on external contingency and aesthetic value is determined by being externally required. Of course, all aesthetic experiences have external functions. The opening of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), with beautiful sculptures of naked Greek athletes coming alive, might make me want to learn to throw a discus, while a historically minded viewer might want to do a PhD on the propagandistic images uniting ‘the ancient Greek body of stone’ with the German Nazi ‘body of flesh’.48 Though different in character, both experiences have external functions. My focus here is neither on whether moral defects necessarily are aesthetic defects, nor on the upshot of the aesthetic experience itself, but rather on the ideological contingency that shapes the experience from within art. As Sartwell stresses with reference Riefenstahl’s films, they did not merely ‘reflect or communicate ideology’ but ‘constituted Nazism’.49 Both Nazism and Italian fascism existed, as I will show, in a historical tension between autonomy and instrumentalism; unable to comply with the principles of the former, destined to exploit the principles of the latter. While Aristotle’s philosophy was largely neglected or disdained by Nazi intellectuals for representing a ‘spiritual de-Nordification of Greece’ (the myth of the ancient Greeks as Nordics and ancestors of the Germans remained fundamental to NSDAP), ideals of classical antiquity were in general mythologised and distorted by the Nazis.50 Which should not of course be confused with a general philhellenism occurring throughout history and serving many (non-violent) purposes. In the early eighteenth-century writings of Shaftesbury, Addison, and Jonathan Richardson the Elder, classical ideals were frequently mythologised and mixed with claims about national superiority.51 And in continental Europe, the Graecophilia of German neohumanism was particularly persistent. The ‘elective affinity’ between contemporary and Greek culture, explored by Richardson’s ‘diligent student’ Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and in the writings of Friedrich August Wolf and Wilhelm von Humboldt, remained a ‘constantly recurring motif [. . .] down (at least) to 1945’.52 Hence, to exploit classical antiquity to make aesthetic or political

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claims about the present is a recurring theme throughout history, and not necessarily troubling as such. What makes German Nazism and Italian fascism stick out in this context is of course the unprecedented distortions of historical truths that the ideologies required and the devastating consequences of their atrocities.53 It is accurate to state that both Hitler and Mussolini recognised the political significance of art (or even recognised politics as art and politicians as artists; political leadership was, to Hitler, Staatskunst rather than Staatswissenschaft) by drawing on classical antiquity (Hitler) and Augustan Romanità (Mussolini).54 Indeed, a reason why both Nazism and fascism frequently are addressed with reference to art and aesthetics is, as is commonly stated, that Hitler, and to a lesser extent Mussolini, had a personal interest in art. However, such a perspective does not tell us anything substantial about in what way they perceived art and aesthetics to be significant and related to politics. Hitler perceived the mass audience of his (the artist’s) rallies as a yearning ‘feminine organism’ out of touch with ‘abstract reason’ and Mussolini brought the organism analogy into play by arguing that the ‘task of fascism is to make [the masses] an organic whole with the Nation, much as an artist needs raw material to forge his masterpieces’.55 However, here art and the artistic process are no longer reminiscent of an (Aristotelian or Shaftesburian) organism in the sense that it (ideally) evolves naturally over time without being molded into shape by external powers. Since Mussolini’s fascism argued that the ‘multitude is female’, the masses must, as Hitler also believed, be feminine, while a forceful political governance required a strong male and masculine leadership (recent ‘strongman style’ of ethno-nationalism show similar traits: at a campaign rally ahead of the Ohio primary in 2016, Donald Trump claimed about Vladimir Putin that ‘he might be bad, he might be good. But he’s a strong leader’).56 In Mussolini’s remarks, the organism analogy is essentially turned on its head: the artist (Mussolini and Italian fascism) is now forcefully shaping (making, forging) the despicable feminised masses – the passive yet potentially violent object – into a totalitarian whole (masterpiece). Crowds were in late nineteenth-century social theory frequently regarded as irrational, emotional, disorganised, and instinctive; inferior evolutionary features that were commonly attributed to women.57 The negative view of masses was to large extent the consequence of crowd theories.58 A democratic solution to the challenges posed by the plurality of crowds and masses would aim to accept further adult participation in political practice. However, totalitarianism proposes a very different solution, with people mainly remaining in a ‘pseudo-political’ state beyond any real participation and impact.59 Such quasi-conditions call for a communication which relies on myths and rituals: if masses are supposedly erratic, sentimental, irrational, and thus potentially dangerous to the political leadership, it seems sensible to

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rely on psychological manipulation, rather than explaining complex political realities.60 The rallies of the Nazi party excelled in staging performances of this kind: the annual gatherings in Nuremberg (1927–1938) constituting the ecstatic epitome of all productions, orchestrated with martial music, sound effects, and the cathedral of light. Relying on symbols of Italian fascism – rituals of clothing (black shirts becoming browns shirts) and rituals of acting (Mussolini’s Roman salute becoming the Nazi salute) – these rallies were important because they, as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels recognised, represented a substitute for any real democratic involvement by the people in the process of developing political policies.61 Hitler was a ‘media figure before the notion of media figure had arrived’.62 Characteristically, his confidant and press spokesman Otto Diedrich never experienced a speech by Hitler where he introduced a ‘statement of subject’; however, when reaching the end of his speeches the mass audience was so ‘overwhelmed’ that ‘serious political controversy and a real clarification of the problem no longer seemed necessary’.63 If we accept the idea of absolute aesthetic autonomy, there are certainly fascinating parallels to draw with Italian fascism and German Nazism. While absolute aesthetic autonomy would try to re-establish the aura of artworks, totalitarianism in a similar fashion tries to ‘respiritualize politics’ by introducing an ‘absolute self-referentiality’.64 However, absolute autonomy is, as we observed earlier, a myth (though myths were indeed essential for the construction of Italian fascism and German Nazism). By returning to the category of aesthetic instrumentalism we can see that totalitarianism establishes itself as precisely the external ideological contingency that determines the aesthetic value: the organism (the object that is expected to become an artwork) is ideologically shaped not only by terror but by pseudo-politics and psychological manipulations of the masses. However, the priority of natural beauty and the inner logic of the autonomous artwork itself remains ideal preconditions for aesthetic judgements. The appeal of the idea of the artwork and society as biological, living structures (organisms) evolving naturally by their own internal logic, remains strong in totalitarianism. While parts of the population (the ‘Aryan-Nordic race’) can be formed by myths and rituals, other parts (Jews, Romani, Slavs, homosexuals) have, according to this Nazi logic, to be separated from the ‘organic’ whole by terror and laws. Thus, to exist in nature, or to be in accordance with nature, is not natural. In a cynical attempt at political self-preservation, any proclaimed natural state must be externally produced by violence and legislation in order to conceal the real biological diversity of all living organisms. Modernist art movements like Cubism and Dadaism are along these lines ultimately only a ‘symptom of biological degradation threatening the German people as a whole’.65

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CONTEMPORARY ETHNO-NATIONALISM Fascism and Nazism focused on symbols, rituals, and ethnic myths, of a supposedly glorious common heritage. Constituting ‘one of the most powerful forces shaping modern human history’, the ethno-nationalism integrated in such a focus has recently gained increased momentum across the West.66 A recognised form of contemporary ethno-nationalism (integrated with political populism) appears in the former U.S. President Donald Trump’s digital communication to his supporters during the 2016 presidential election. His Twitter messages aimed to construct, as Robert Schertzer and Eric Woods argue, a ‘moral binary between an “in-group” and an “out-group”’, including, on the one hand, the so-called silent majority (gradually addressed in terms of a movement) and, on the other hand, the threat of ‘immoral outsiders’ recognised by their ‘foreignness’ (migrants) and religion (Muslims), as well as a claimed hostility to the ‘silent majority’ by the political establishment and the social elites.67 A moral binary that ultimately sought to justify the white ethnic majority’s struggle to ‘restore America to a mythical golden age’.68 While twentieth-century totalitarianism embraced the instrumental value of art either to unify and control, or to separate and expel, the imagined ‘immoral outsiders’, ethno-nationalism in the age of hyper-capitalism and digital communication to a degree follows a similar tack, though much less organised and with less interest in approaching deformed ideals of classical antiquity. In the budget proposal for 2018–2020, the Trump administration intended to eliminate federal funding for the arts (though the Congress rejected the proposal).69 But the indifference for art as a whole was not absolute. The deliberate lack of financial interest for art and culture ‘intensified an enmity between the arts community and the right that dates back to Reagan-era censorship of transgressive artists including Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley’.70 Following the murder of George Floyd on 25 May, 2020, and subsequent attacks on federal art, Trump supplemented the wish to eliminate federal funding with a nationalistic ethos of art. In a special Executive Order (nr. 13934) Trump stated that ‘works of art call forth gratitude for the accomplishments and sacrifices of our exceptional fellow citizens’ and that ‘works of beauty’ should aim to ‘ratify our shared national project’.71 As such, statues communicate a ‘great national story’ and along with painted portraits they ‘should be lifelike or realistic representations of the persons they depict, not abstract or modernist representations’.72 Though the Executive Order characteristically favours traditional realistic depictions and disapproves of abstract art – here expected to strike an upsetting chord of progressive yet incomprehensible experiments and a too strong formalistic interest in colours and shapes – there are however no further Nazi-like references to classical antiquity. Contemporary ethno-nationalism

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does not necessarily refer to an imaginary golden age in terms of ‘demanding the incorporation of co-ethnics currently living in other countries into their own territory [.  .  .] or using military threats or power’ to gain lost or new territories (Russia of course being the current exception).73 Rather, the ethnonationalism advocated by Trump, the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum in 2016, and the current Rassemblement National in France, to name just three recent populist forces across the West, maintains a highly defensive approach: frequently aiming to protect the nation by preventing immigration, supporting trade protectionism, and attacking supranational organisations.74 To this list we might add that contemporary ethno-nationalism is defensive about art as well. Trump’s Executive Order was not part of a large ideological package pursuing a new aesthetic regime of instrumentalism aiming to take further control of the arts. Though he certainly holds strong aversions to high culture and modern art, Trump is most of all indifferent and lacks a coherent aesthetic vision. As Dave Eggers recognises, the White House during the presidency of Trump was the first in ‘American history that [was] almost completely devoid of culture’.75 In contemporary ethno-nationalism, art and aesthetics are marginalised because they have given way to modern hyper-capitalism. Politics is not, as twentieth-century totalitarianism thought, an art anymore. Politics is, to Trump, first and foremost business. And it is only by being recognised as business that politics can merit itself as art. It is the modern capitalist, not the artist, that needs to defend, as Trump states, the ‘intrinsic value’ that is ‘beyond monetary value’.76 Picasso was to Trump not predominantly an artist, he was a successful capitalist who ‘viewed his art as a business’.77 Any integrity arising from the insistence on the intrinsic value of art and aesthetic experiences must however be instrumentally applied since it ultimately should aim to strengthen ones ‘business sense’.78 Thus, aesthetic instrumentalism is still related to aesthetic autonomy in a distorted way, but the determining contingency is now capital itself. NOTES 1. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (October 1951): 496–527 (quotes on 496 and 498). 2. James I. Porter, “Is Art Modern? Kristeller’s ‘Modern System of the Arts’ Reconsidered,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 1 (2009): 1–24 (quote on 2). 3. Recent support for the discontinuity model is present in Larry Shiner, “Continuity and Discontinuity in the Concept of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 2 (2009): 159–69; Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001); Peter Kivy, “What Really Happened in the

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Eighteenth Century: The ‘Modern System’ Re-examined (Again),” British Journal of Aesthetics 52, no. 1 (2012): 61–74. Recent support for the continuity model is present in Porter, “Is Art Modern?” 1–24; Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 4. See e.g. Adrian Leftwich, “Thinking Politically: On the Politics of Politics,” in What is Politics? The Activity and its Study, ed. Adrian Leftwich (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 14. 5. Crispin Sartwell, Political Aesthetics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 31. 6. Ibid. 7. Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” 506 (quoted in Porter, “Is Art Modern?” 3). 8. Porter, “Is Art Modern?” 19. Emphasis added. 9. James I. Porter, “Why Art has Never been Autonomous,” Arethusa 43, no. 2 (2010): 165–180 (quote on 171). 10. Ibid., 168. 11. Halliwell, Aesthetics of Mimesis, 7. 12. Ibid. 13. Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013), xiii. 14. See Eric Méchoulan, “Sophisticated Continuities and Historical Discontinuities, Or, Why not Protagoras?” in Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, eds. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 55–66. As Méchoulan stresses, the archi-politics (of Plato), the para-politics (of Aristotle and Hobbes), and the meta-politics (of Marx), “parallels” to some extent the regimes in aesthetics (the ethical, representational, and aesthetic), but not in a “linear way.” To Rancière, the “discontinuity of productions does not entail a complete substitution of the ancient regime by the new one, but a complex overlapping of the different regimes” (quote from 56). 15. Ibid., 57. 16. All references to Aristotle not preceded by the title are to the Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell, Loeb Classical Library 199 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 17. Malcolm Heath, “Should There Have been a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics? Classical Quarterly 59, no. 2 (December 2009): 468–85 (quote on 469). See also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 73 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 1.2, 1094b. 18. Stephen Halliwell, Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 216. 19. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 264 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 8.5, 1340a. 20. Christopher Janaway, Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 183. 21. Heath, “Should There Have been a Polis,” 469.

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22. Ibid. Cf. Sartwell, Political Aesthetics, 11. 23. For similarities with Plato’s Phaedrus, see Malcolm Heath, Ancient Philosophical Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 84. Cf. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library 36 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 264c. 24. Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 36. 25. Shaftesbury, Miscellaneous Reflections on the Preceding Treatises and Other Critical Subjects, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 460. 26. Shaftesbury, The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, Being a Recital of Certain Conversations on Natural and Moral Subjects, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 318. 27. Ibid., 319. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 315 30. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck and E. S. Forster, Loeb Classical Library 323 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 1.645a. 31. Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 185. 32. Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 117. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 118. 37. Ibid. 38. Shaftesbury, The Moralists, 232. 39. Aristotle, Politics, 1253a 1–3. See also, 1252b 31–2. 40. Shaftesbury, The Moralists, 287. 41. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, The English Version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 42. 42. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a CommonWealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, Vol. 2, ed. Noel Malcolm, The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 80–82. 43. Fred D. Miller, Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s  Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 29. 44. Karl Axelsson, Political Aesthetics: Addison and Shaftesbury on Taste, Morals, and Society (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 20. 45. Ibid. 46. Karl Axelsson, “Taste is not to conform to the art, but the art to the taste’: Aesthetic Instrumentalism and the British Body Politic in the Neoclassical Age,” Journal

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of Aesthetics & Culture 5, no. 1 (2013): 3, DOI: 10.3402/jac.v5i0.21096. The general distinction between apologies and evaluations is made by T. J. Diffey, “Aesthetic Instrumentalism,” British Journal of Aesthetics 22, no. 4 (1982): 337–49. 47. Ibid., 3. 48. Johann Chapoutot, Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe’s Classical Past, trans. Richard R. Nybakken (California: University of California Press, 2016), 167. 49. Ibid., 32. 50. Chapoutot, Greeks, Romans, Germans, 207. 51. See Axelsson, Political Aesthetics, 119–130. 52. Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), xviii. 53. For comparisons, see Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts, ed. Richard Bessel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 54. On politics as art and politicians as artists, see Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 15–17. 55. Quote from Hitler, see Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Woodstock and New York: Overlook Press, 2003), 49; quote from Mussolini, see Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 21. Also quoted in Sartwell, Political Aesthetics, 15. 56. Quote from Mussolini, see Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 24; quote from Trump, see “Donald Trump Campaign Rally in Vandalia, Ohio,” C-SPAN, March 12, 2016, https://www​.c​-span​.org​/video/​?406393​-1​/donald​-trump​-campaign​ -rally​-vandalia​-ohio​&transcriptQuery​=putin​&start​=1907; on “strongman style,” see Gideon Rachman, The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World (London: Bodley Head, 2022). 57. See Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 17–21. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 20. 60. Ibid. 61. Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 4th ed. (London: Sage, 2006), 238. 62. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, 56. 63. Ibid., 49. 64. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 10. 65. O. K. Werckmeister, “Hitler the Artist,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (1997): 270–97 (quote on 281). 66. Robert Schertzer and Eric Taylor Woods, The New Nationalism in America and Beyond: The Deep Roots of Ethnic Nationalism in the Digital Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 2. 67. Robert Schertzer and Eric Woods, “#Nationalism: The Ethno-Nationalist Populism of Donald Trump’s Twitter Communication,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no. 7 (2021): 1154–1173 (quote on 1163). 68. Ibid., 1155.

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69. Peggy McGlone, “Once Again, Trump’s Budget Calls for Cuts to Kill Federal Cultural Agencies,” Washington Post, February 11, 2020, https://search​ -ebscohost​-com​.till​.biblextern​.sh​.se​/login​.aspx​?direct​=true​&db​=bwh​&AN​=wapo​.8b9e8df2​ -4c4f​-11ea​-bf44​-f5043eb3918a​&site​=ehost​-live. 70. Judy Berman, “Donald Trump’s Presidency Was Supposed to Be Great for Art. It Wasn’t,” Time, January 5, 2021, https://time​.com​/5922973​/donald​-trump​ -presidency​-art/. 71. Executive Order 13934, “Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes,” Federal Register 85, no. 131 (July 2020): 41165–41168 (quote on 41165), https://www​.federalregister​.gov​/documents​/2020​/07​/08​/2020​-14872​/building​-and​ -rebuilding​-monuments​-to​-american​-heroes. 72. Ibid., 41167. 73. Gabriella Elgenius and Jens Rydgren, “Nationalism and the Politics of Nostalgia,” Sociological Forum (2022), https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/socf​.12836. 74. On this, see Schertzer and Taylor Woods, The New Nationalism. 75. Dave Eggers, “A Cultural Vacuum in Trump’s White House,” New York Times, June 29, 2018, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2018​/06​/29​/opinion​/dave​-eggers​ -culture​-arts​-trump​.html. 76. Donald Trump and Meredith McIver, Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education in Business and Life (New York: Vanguard Press, 2010), 188. 77. Ibid., 43. 78. Ibid., 188.

Chapter 6

Aesthetics and Philosophy From Baumgarten to Nietzsche Joseph Tanke

This essay offers non-specialists an overview of the field of aesthetics as seen from the discipline of philosophy. Although it emerged somewhat belatedly, aesthetics is today recognised as one of the five main branches of philosophy, where it is often treated as a synonym for the ‘philosophy of art’. However, scholars working in these areas are increasingly inclined to distinguish between these two enterprises. The basis for this distinction is the idea that the philosophy of art is concerned primarily with clarifying the concept of art, while aesthetics also considers questions of taste, judgement, and natural beauty as part of its more general inquiry into the nature of aesthetic experience. Throughout, I trace the rise and fall of aesthetics within the context of modern German philosophy. As such, I am not concerned here with contemporary issues and debates in the field of aesthetics; but with showing how classical German aesthetics gave rise to certain ideas regarding the field of experience specific to art. My aim is to show how the idea for a distinctly aesthetic form of experience was born in the writings of Baumgarten and Kant, before then explaining how this type of experience was assigned political, ethical, and existential significance by Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. My contention is that this history is important not just for understanding philosophical aesthetics today; but for assessing many of the claims that our culture makes about art, particularly since these claims revolve around the idea that art sustains a singular form of experience, one thought to be separable from cognitive and moral considerations – and which may well be replete with political, ethical, and existential significance. While aesthetics is not a theory or foundation for art, it nevertheless empowers art by reframing it as an occasion for this type of experience. For this reason, we might say of aesthetics that it is a discourse which sustains art by attributing to it the capacity to engender a wholly unique form of experience. For 93

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aestheticians cannot claim that the aesthetic experience is meaningfully different from – and perhaps even superior to – ordinary experience, without at the same time extending these claims to art.

ALEXANDER BAUMGARTEN (1714–1762) AND THE SCIENCE OF AESTHETICS It is customary to begin essays like this by noting that the discipline of aesthetics takes its name from Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750/1758), but to then apologise for our dearth of knowledge about this work, since there is not yet a complete English-language edition of Baumgarten’s Latin text. Fortunately, however, in recent years this picture has changed somewhat as scholars have begun to examine Baumgarten’s influence upon formation of the discipline.1 To understand Baumgarten’s contributions, it is important to recognise that, for him, ‘aesthetics’ did not yet have many of the connotations that it does for us today. His call for a ‘science of sensible cognition’ was based on the Greek understanding of aísthēsis as sense perception. In general, his idea was that aesthetics could be for matters of sense and sensible cognition what logic is for reason and intellectual cognition. Accordingly, aesthetics was intended to aid the perfection of sensible cognition, similar to the way in which logic perfects intellectual cognition. As these formulations indicate, Baumgarten’s science of aesthetics was premised upon a stark opposition between sense and reason that will be called into question by the tradition he helped found. Baumgarten first articulated an idea of aesthetics in his 1735 dissertation, Reflections on Poetry. There, he contends that poetry depends upon the ‘lower cognitive faculty’ of sensibility, and that logic is wholly inadequate for the purposes of composing and appreciating poetry. As a result, a new science of aesthetics is needed to ‘improve the lower faculties of knowing . . . and apply them more happily for the benefit of the whole world’.2 In his Metaphysics (1739), Baumgarten defined aesthetics as the ‘science of knowing and presenting [proponendi] with regard to the senses’.3 He adds that aesthetics is ‘the logic of the inferior cognitive faculty, the philosophy of graces and muses, inferior gnoseology, the art of thinking beautifully, [and] the art of the analogue of reason’.4 These definitions occur within the context of Baumgarten’s discussion of empirical psychology, or his account of the soul’s different powers.5 There, Baumgarten makes an important distinction between sensibility and intellect. Sensibility is the ‘faculty of knowing something obscurely and confusedly’,6 while the intellect, is the ‘faculty of knowing something distinctly’.7 This distinction is based upon the Cartesian

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account of knowledge, and in particular the idea that the intellect is capable of achieving clarity and distinctness, while the senses produce only obscure and confused representations. While Baumgarten accepted the traditional division of the mind into higher and lower powers, he nevertheless contended that the rationalist project remains incomplete as long as one fails to account for sensibility’s unique laws. Nuzzo credits Baumgarten with ‘uphold[ing] the worthiness of [the] lower faculty while still maintaining the ranking of mental powers proper to scholastic psychology’.8 Aesthetics was thus initially conceived of a contribution to metaphysics, where it was charged with clarifying and improving the faculty of sensibility. But in rehabilitating the sensible Baumgarten also revalued the field of experience in which art is enmeshed. Baumgarten’s Aesthetics is divided into two main parts, the theoretical and the practical. The theoretical division is concerned with the nature of cognition, while the practical deals with the application of these principles. At the start of the theoretical division, Baumgarten explains that the ‘purpose of aesthetics is the perfection of sensible cognition’, and that such a perfection constitutes beauty.9 This perfection of sensible cognition is distinguished from the perfection of intellectual cognition (i.e. truth) on the grounds that perfect sensible cognition is clear yet confused as opposed to clear and distinct. For Baumgarten, one recognises perfection in a combination of properties like ‘richness, greatness, truth, clarity, certainty, and life of cognition’.10 McQuillan contends that by associating beauty with perfection Baumgarten created ‘a genuinely new concept of beauty, which cannot be reduced to proportion, harmony, symmetry, or any other conceptions of beauty . . . with which philosophers are familiar’.11 However, by defining beauty as perfection, Baumgarten seems to have fallen back upon a framework in which beauty becomes a matter of rules, precisely because perfection admits of a standard. For this reason, it is unclear whether Baumgarten’s notion of sensible cognition can do justice to our intuition that beauty involves a feeling of pleasure. Kant will agree with Baumgarten that aesthetics should consider that which is universal. But he will object that in making this universality a function of concepts, Baumgarten threatens to destroy that which is distinctive about the aesthetic.

IMMANUEL KANT (1724–1804) AND DISINTERESTED TASTE The primary basis for Kant’s aesthetics is found in the divisions of the Critique of Judgment (1790) entitled the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ and the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’. In those sections, Kant attempts to justify the ‘universal voice’ one adopts when making a judgement of taste.12 Kant claims

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that the judgements ‘this is beautiful’ and ‘this is sublime’ express not just a subjective liking, but rather a liking others ought to feel as well. He explains that ‘many things may be charming and agreeable .  .  . [and] no one cares about that. But if [someone] proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others; he then judges not just for himself but for everyone’.13 Of course Kant was not interested in developing a framework which would end all disputes regarding taste; rather, he aims to show that these judgements are in keeping with a basic human ability for determining whether or not a particular type of liking is sharable. Kant elected to consider the feelings we have for art and nature in these terms since he believed that art and nature promote certain feelings which are not reducible to either physical sensations or purely intellectual cognition. The Critique of Judgment postulates a capacity for what Kant calls the ‘reflective’ use of judgement, and it contends that the experiences of beauty and sublimity (together with the teleological use of reason) depend upon this capacity. Reflective judgements are contrasted with the ‘determinative’ use of judgement. A judgement is determinative when it subsumes a particular under a general concept. On the other hand, a judgement is reflective when ‘only the particular is given and judgement has to find the universal for it’.14 In these cases, Kant contends, the subject is compelled to ‘ascend from the particular .  .  . to the universal’.15 Kant distinguishes further between two forms of reflective judgement, namely the judgement of taste and teleological judgement. Some scholars have argued that Kant’s account of teleology was developed in order to support his deeply problematic concept of race; however, since we are concerned with Kant’s contributions to aesthetics, we need not consider issues of teleology here.16 Kant claims that judgements of taste are ‘aesthetic’. It is important to recognise that when Kant uses this word, it is usually to describe a quality of judgement, not necessarily to indicate that he is concerned with questions of art, or even beauty and sublimity. By describing the judgement of taste as ‘aesthetic’, Kant sought to indicate that these judgements are premised upon the individual’s feelings of pleasure and displeasure. The idea that the judgement of taste is ‘aesthetic’ establishes an opposition between two different ways of relating to the same presentation: aesthetically, or in terms of the subject’s capacity for pleasure and displeasure, and logically, wherein the subject aims to cognise the object by means of a concept of the understanding. Accordingly, Kant distinguishes the judgement of taste, which is reflective and aesthetic, from cognitive judgements, which are determinative and logical. One source of possible confusion is the fact that Kant characterises both the ‘judgement of taste’ and ‘judgements of sense’ as ‘aesthetic’. This distinction is nevertheless important for honing in on the specific kind of pleasure that

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Kant associates with the former class of judgements, particularly since judgements of sense pertain to ‘what the senses like in sensation’ and the form of pleasure known as the ‘agreeable’.17 The judgement of taste is distinguished from the judgement of sense on the grounds that the former: (1) lays claim to universal validity; (2) engages both the imagination and understanding; and (3) has a reflective structure wherein the mind senses its freedom. Judgements of sense, on the other hand, are wholly subjective, based entirely in sensation, and determinative. Kant claims that the ‘liking that determines a judgement of taste is devoid of all interest’.18 This is the famous idea of ‘disinterestedness’, which is the hallmark of aesthetic judgement and the cornerstone of the aesthetic tradition that we are concerned with here. By ‘interest’ Kant means those forms of satisfaction which are determined by the object’s existence, in particular the cognitive, moral, and practical investments we have in a particular object. Kant’s idea is that in order to judge with taste, one must set aside one’s cognitive, moral, and practical interests and base one’s judgement upon the object’s appearance alone. To help us understand what he means by claiming that our liking for the beautiful is disinterested, Kant develops a series of contrasts between the different forms of satisfaction we might take in an object. As embodied human beings, we have a powerful set of interests in those agreeable things which please our senses. As rational beings, we are likewise interested in those good things which accord with our morality and fit our practical pursuits. In both cases, however, our liking depends upon the object’s existence, and our power of desire is determined. By way of contrast, the specifically aesthetic form of satisfaction we take in the beautiful is a free liking not determined by any interest. Kant explains that ‘the liking involved in taste .  .  . is disinterested and free, since we are not compelled by any interest, whether of sense or reason’.19 In this way, Kant warns against confusing the specifically aesthetic form of liking at issue in taste with the interests we have in what is agreeable and good. Early in the Critique of Judgment, Kant offers a remarkable illustration of what it means to judge with taste. He places his readers before a hypothetical palace, asking only whether they find the architectural structure beautiful. Here, Kant endeavours to clarify the notion of disinterestedness by way of a number of refusals, and what emerges from this process is a specifically aesthetic mode of evaluation. Kant: Suppose someone asks me whether I consider the palace before me beautiful. I might reply that I am not fond of things of that sort, made merely to be gaped at. Or I might reply like the Iroquois sachem who said that he liked nothing better in Paris than the eating-houses. I might even go on, as Rousseau would,

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to rebuke the vanity of the great who spend the people’s sweat on such superfluous things. I might, finally, quite easily convince myself that, if I were on some uninhabited island with no hope of ever again coming among people, and could conjure up such a splendid edifice by a mere wish [bloßen Wunsch], I would not even take that much trouble for it if I already had a sufficiently comfortable hut. The questioner may grant all this and approve of it; but it is not the point. All he wants to know is whether my mere presentation of the object is accompanied by a feeling of pleasure [Wohlgefallen begleitet], no matter how indifferent I may be about the existence of the object of this presentation.

Kant concludes: We can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beautiful, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself [was ich aus dieser Vorstellung in mir selbst mache], and not the [way] in which I depend on the object’s existence. Everyone has to admit that if a judgment about beauty is mingled with the least interest then it is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste. In order to play the judge in matters of taste, we must not be in the least biased in favor of the thing’s existence but must be wholly indifferent about it.20

This passage is intended to illustrate the difference between the pure judgement of taste and those judgements which are mingled with interest. And for this reason it is not difficult to see why Kant dismisses as ‘not the point’ those judgements which are based upon the palace’s actual existence. The most famous of these responses involves Kant anticipating how Rousseau might have responded to such a structure. Kant’s point is that in rebuking the rich for wasting resources on this edifice, Rousseau would determine the palace’s worth in exclusively moral and political terms, thereby missing not only the point of the initial question but also a source of pleasure. While few today would judge art with the same moralistic fervor that Kant ascribes to Rousseau, there is nevertheless a tendency to confuse questions of moral and aesthetic value. This tendency is particularly pronounced in those cases where artists are dedicated to some sort of salutary endeavour to repair the social fabric. While Kant would likely applaud the development of new artistic forms, he would undoubtedly remind us that art’s power stems from the fact that it is treated as the basis for a wholly singular form experience, which is itself the product of judgement. By separating aesthetic judgements from cognitive and moral considerations, Kant endowed our experience of art with a fair amount of heterogeneity vis-à-vis daily life. And this, in my view, is an important source for the idea that art issues in experiences which are exceptional and perhaps even disruptive.

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FRIEDRICH SCHILLER (1788–1805) AND THE POLITICS OF AESTHETICS Schiller’s most systematic account of aesthetics is contained within a series of letters that he wrote to the Danish Prince, Friedrich Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenburg, and which were later collected and published as On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). Schiller began working on these letters in 1793, just as it was becoming evident that the French Revolution had taken a fatal turn towards Terror. This context is important because it allows us to understand some of the motivations for Schiller’s text, and in particular his idea that the political problem of the day could be solved through aesthetics. In the Fifth Letter, Schiller puts the problem like this: The fabric of the natural State is tottering, its rotten foundations are yielding, and there seems to be a physical possibility of setting Law upon the throne, of honouring Man at last as an end in himself and making true freedom the basis of political association. Vain hope! The moral possibility is wanting, and the favourable moment finds an apathetic generation.21

Schiller’s goal was to overcome this condition so that humanity might move from its current, historical state towards a more moral order resembling the Kantian ‘kingdom of ends’. To accomplish this goal, he devised a concept of ‘aesthetic education’ whereby humanity would learn to navigate its recently won freedom by first playing with beauty. Importantly, aesthetic education is not a matter of internalising any lessons that art might contain; it is a special form of experience wherein the human being realises its full humanity by reconciling the sensuous and rational components of its nature. Schiller did not think that art and aesthetics should tell people how to live – this would merely replace one form of domination with another – but rather that the aesthetic experience was in itself an education, since it is ‘through Beauty that we arrive at Freedom’.22 For Schiller, then, aesthetic education was a radical cultural politics designed to facilitate the project of human emancipation. To understand how Schiller’s aesthetic solution for politics is supposed to work, it is important to recognise that his discourse operates on at least two levels simultaneously, and that it tends to assume that changes to the individual will result in a broader social transformation. His idea was that the aesthetic experience allows individuals to reconcile the sensuous and rational aspects of their nature, thereby effecting a transition from the existing natural state, where force governs, to the realm of morality, where human beings would govern themselves in harmonious freedom. ‘For this purpose a total revolution is needed in the whole mode of perception.’23

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Schiller attributed the political impasse of his day to the division of labour, and in particular to the fact that there was as yet no way of reconciling the competing demands issuing from the human being’s physical and moral natures. Schiller largely accepted the tradition’s division of the human being into sensuous and rational faculties; however, he aimed to soften this duality by placing sensibility on equal footing with reason. For Schiller, the human being can be understood as comprised of two competing and contradictory drives, namely the ‘sense impulse’ (Sinnestrieb) and the ‘form impulse’ (Formtrieb). The sense impulse aims at life and thus time, while the form impulse aims at shape and eternity. These drives are typically understood in terms of the Kantian distinction between inclination and duty, since the sense impulse compels us physically, while the form impulse moves us morally. As Schiller diagnosed it, the problem was not just that these two impulses contradict each other, but that the tension between them has become so exacerbated by the advanced division of labour found within modern societies that ‘whole classes of human beings develop only a part of their capabilities’.24 Aesthetic education combats precisely this condition. It is the process by which the human being overcomes its own alienation, by learning how to integrate the two sides of its nature. Schiller’s famous dictum is that ‘Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing’.25 To this, Schiller adds the Kantian idea that ‘Man is . . . serious with the agreeable, the good, the perfect; but with Beauty he plays’.26 On this basis he concludes that the human being is most fully human when playing with beauty. According to Schiller, beauty satisfies a third drive, which he calls the ‘play impulse’ (Spieltrieb). The play impulse is significant because it cancels out the force of the other two drives, thereby issuing in an aesthetic experience of freedom. Schiller claims of this aesthetic experience that it is here alone that ‘our humanity expresses itself with a purity and integrity’, since it is ‘as though it had not yet experienced any detriment from the influence of external forces’.27 In aesthetic experience, the human person is freed from the sensuous inclinations and cognitive demands which determine ordinary experience. Schiller’s hope was that this experience could ‘support the whole fabric of aesthetic art, and the still more difficult art of living’.28 As we see, Schiller offers a compelling account of why art is necessary for a fully human life. Many of our current ideas regarding the importance of art can be traced back to Schiller, and in particular the claims he makes regarding the humanising effects of aesthetic education. Paul de Man remarks that ‘whatever way we have of talking about art .  .  . whatever justification we give ourselves for teaching . . . they are more than ever profoundly Schillerian’.29 In recent years, Jacques Rancière has revived interest in Schiller’s work by developing the connections it makes between aesthetics and politics.

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Rancière credits Schiller with having discovered the basic paradox upon which the ‘politics of aesthetics’ is built: art is only art on the condition that it promises to be something more than art, and art is capable of issuing this promise only on the condition that it insists upon its difference as art.30 This paradox is a reminder that art need not engage directly with political content in order to have a political function, since art’s politics are a function of the specifically aesthetic form of experience in which art has been shrouded.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (1788–1860) AND THE AESTHETIC FOUNDATION OF ETHICS Similar to the way in which Schiller hoped that aesthetic education might provide a new starting point for politics, Schopenhauer argued that ‘aesthetic contemplation’ effects a transition from ordinary experience to ethics. Schopenhauer recommended an ethics of resignation designed to quiet the will, since he was convinced that all existence is an incessant striving without goal, and that human existence, in particular, is perpetual torment. He argued that aesthetic contemplation momentarily frees us from the thralldom of the will, and in so doing provides us with the knowledge that it is possible to moderate our suffering by renouncing the will. Schopenhauer’s account of aesthetic contemplation is premised upon Kant’s claim that aesthetic judgements are ‘devoid of all interest’, and he uses this idea to argue that aesthetic experience transports us to ‘another world, so to speak, where everything that moves our will, and thus violently agitates us, no longer exists’.31 For this reason, aesthetic experience is said to provide an intimation of that ‘unshakeable peace, deep calm and inward serenity’ that could be ours if only we could overcome the will-to-live.32 Since these claims regarding the force of aesthetic contemplation are bound up with Schopenhauer’s account of reality, it is important to consider briefly the metaphysical worldview presented in his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (1818). As the title of this work indicates, Schopenhauer regards the world from two distinct points of view, namely the world as it appears to the subject of knowledge (‘representation’) and the world as it appears to the subject of volition (‘will’). Schopenhauer’s twofold conception of reality is premised upon Kant’s distinction between the world of appearances and the world-as-it-isin-itself. Unlike Kant, however, Schopenhauer contends that our body grants us access to the inner nature of this true world. ‘Representation’ refers to the world of phenomenal appearances governed by the principle of sufficient reason and the principium individuationis. Since Leibniz, the principle of sufficient reason has been used to name the idea that everything which exists has a cause that explains how and why it exists; however, Schopenhauer uses

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this principle as shorthand for the forms of time, space, and causality which structure the world of representation. The principium individuationis likewise refers to the idea that divisions of time and space establish plurality and with it the illusion that the individual exists as a discrete unit. Schopenhauer uses the concept of ‘will’ to refer to the blind, inhuman striving which animates all being. The will is the ‘innermost essence, the kernel, of every particular thing and also of the whole’.33 This same will ‘appear in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate conduct of man’.34 Schopenhauer is careful to avoid claiming that representations are ‘caused’ by the will, since this would ascribe causality – which is unique to world of representation – to being-in-itself. Rather, he claims that will and representation are one and the same reality viewed from two perspectives. Schopenhauer compares the world of representation to the veil of Maya, and suggests that it is analogous to a dreamworld erected over the will. For Schopenhauer, it follows that most knowledge pertains to mere phenomena, and that, at bottom there, is no distinction between our will, those of others, and the great cosmic striving which carries the same name. Within this framework, aesthetic contemplation is said to provide important insights into the nature of reality that cannot be gleaned from representation alone. Specifically, Schopenhauer claims that aesthetic contemplation raises us from the level of sensible particulars to that of Platonic Ideas. It is important to recognise that, for Schopenhauer, the world is composed of different grades of objectified will. Platonic Ideas are the highest such gradation, since they act as archetypes for the countless physical things that comprise the world of representation. However, since these Ideas transcend representation, our experience must undergo a wholesale transformation in order for them to become objects of knowledge. Schopenhauer describes this as a twofold process. First, aesthetic contemplation isolates the object and apprehends it independently of the principle of sufficient reason. In these cases ‘we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what’.35 As a result, the object of perception comes to function as the Idea of its species. In the second instance, the principium individuationis is broken, and the aesthetic spectator becomes a ‘pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge’.36 In these moments, we are raised above all willing, and can ‘infer how blessed must be the life of a man whose will is silenced’.37 Schopenhauer’s thought represents a considerable aggrandisement of aesthetic experience. As we saw, he compares aesthetic experience to the process of entering another world where one is free from suffering. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic experience is so powerful that it is capable of momentarily overcoming an otherwise hopeless existential situation in which ‘there is no measure or end of suffering’.38 As an example of this, Schopenhauer explains

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that it is ‘all the same whether we see the setting sun from a prison or from a palace’.39 This is because aesthetic experience entails a radical loss of self wherein perceiver and perceived become indistinguishable. In this way, aesthetic experience foreshadows the asceticism by which we might mortify the will.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) AND THE AESTHETIC JUSTIFICATION OF EXISTENCE To conclude, I want to consider briefly two moments from Nietzsche’s writings which together seem to encapsulate the fate of aesthetic discourse, and, in particular, the reversal of fortune it undergoes towards the close of nineteenth century. Nietzsche’s early work claims that aesthetic experience can justify all of existence. However, in his later writings, Nietzsche appears to reverse himself by casting doubt upon the very idea of a disinterested aesthetic experience. With this movement in mind, one could say that aesthetics reaches a crescendo in Nietzsche’s early writings, where it is so empowered that it is thought to be capable of redeeming the world, but that it quickly fades as a new act is dawning. The Birth of Tragedy (1872) is a work of classical philology, which attributes the flourishing of Attic tragedy to a productive strife between Dionysiac and Apolline cultural influences. In Section Five of that work, Nietzsche claims that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified’.40 This slogan is typically interpreted in terms of the juxtaposition Nietzsche develops between knowledge and art, and, in particular, the claim that while knowledge of the world’s truth threatens to paralyse action, ‘art .  .  . can re-direct those repulsive thoughts about the terrible or absurd nature of existence into representations with which man can live’.41 Nietzsche repeats this line about the possibility of an aesthetic justification in Section Twenty Four, adding that this ‘means that tragic myth . . . must convince us that even the ugly and disharmonious is an artistic game which the Will . . . plays with itself’.42 As this addendum suggests, Nietzsche takes over this idea that existence stands in need of justification from Schopenhauer. However, if Schopenhauer sought in aesthetic experience an escape from suffering and a way out of the world, Nietzsche will find in aesthetic experience an immanent source of justification which allows him to remain in it. To grasp this point, it important to see how the idea of aesthetic experience allows Nietzsche to sidestep traditional forms of justification, in particular those premised upon cognition and morality. In the first instance, Nietzsche suggests that cognitive justifications inevitably fail since they attribute a single meaning to that which is without one.

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Moreover, justification is an evaluative matter, and, for Nietzsche, a question of arriving at the possibility of a life-affirming attitude; it is not clear that reason alone can provide such a justification, or that it lends itself to anything but Schopenhauer’s diagnosis. In the second instance, Nietzsche explains that his book was directed ‘against the moral interpretation .  .  . of existence’.43 And that this intent is legible in the work’s ‘hostile silence about Christianity’.44 He explains that ‘there is no greater antithesis to the purely aesthetic exegesis and justification of the world . . . than the Christian doctrine which . . . banishes art, all art, to the realm of lies’.45 To combat this moral justification, then, Nietzsche will work not only to rehabilitate art, but to ‘situate morality itself within the phenomenal world’.46 This move exposes morality as ‘semblance, delusion, error, interpretation, manipulation, [and] art’, and, most importantly, it means that morality can no longer provide a justification for the world precisely because it is part of it. By way of contrast, Nietzsche’s aesthetic approach ‘acknowledges only an artist’s meaning’.47 What Nietzsche means by this isn’t immediately clear, but later he tells us that the artist must learn to look upon life without any will and desire, since ‘without pure, disinterested contemplation we are unable to believe that any creation, however slight, is genuinely artistic’.48 Accordingly, we can infer that the meaning in question involves setting aside cognitive and moral considerations, so as to evaluate life solely in terms of its appearances. This is an important step in Nietzsche’s proposed justification, for it allows one to look upon ‘even the ugly and disharmonious’ aspects of the world as somehow integral to it. In our discussion of Kant we saw that the judgement of taste is indifferent as to the object’s existence since it is based upon the mere form of the object’s appearance. Nietzsche seems to have something similar in mind: aesthetic contemplation distances us from the ugly and disharmonious aspects of life, considered in terms of their existence, while keeping us connected to the world, considered as appearance. Thus, in aesthetic experience, we learn to see those ugly and disharmonious aspects of life as essential to its aesthetic phenomenon. While this line of argumentation positions the aesthetic as the very pinnacle of human existence, Nietzsche’s later writings call into question the terms in which this justification was articulated. Specifically, Nietzsche casts doubt upon the idea of disinterested contemplation, and with it the framework upon which his aesthetic justification hinges. In the Third Essay of the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Nietzsche charges Kant with having placed aesthetics on the wrong footing. The error stems from the fact that Kant ‘considered art and beauty from the position of the ‘spectator’, instead of viewing the aesthetic problem through the experiences of the artist’.49 Nietzsche thinks that this starting point, coupled with a lack of ‘more sensitive personal experience’, led Kant to conceptualise beauty in terms of disinterestedness. He speculates

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that Schopenhauer was unable to break from Kant because he ‘interpreted the phrase ‘without interest’ in the most personal way possible’, namely as a remedy for his own suffering.50 Nietzsche raises the question of whether aesthetics might have been better off following the path marked out by Stendhal when he associated beauty with the will, defining it as a promise of happiness.51 And Nietzsche seems draw the age of aesthetics to a close when he recommends wistfully ‘from now on, my philosophical colleagues, let us be more wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairytale which has set up a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’.”52 In following the course of classical German aesthetics from its origins in the work of Baumgarten to its closure in Nietzsche’s writings, we saw that the very idea of aesthetic experience depends upon the notion of disinterestedness: Kant claimed that disinterestedness is necessary for establishing the judgement of taste in its freedom; Schiller hoped that inasmuch as beauty is the place where human beings escape from the determinations of sense and reason that this freedom might transform politics; Schopenhauer located the beginnings of ethics in disinterestedness and the distance it affords us from the will; while the young Nietzsche found in disinterestedness a new economy of meaning capable of justifying existence. Today, however, perhaps no idea elicits more consternation than the idea that aesthetics is a matter of taste and judgement, and that these judgements should be disinterested. Pierre Bourdieu purports to show in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste that ‘disinterested taste’ is nothing but a ‘cultural game’ that masks the reality of class domination.53 And this sociological critique is indicative of how many in the arts now view aesthetics, namely as a woefully out-of-date discourse that is not only incompatible with modern democratic sensibilities, but wholly inadequate for the purposes of discussing contemporary artistic production. While many have come to distrust notions like taste, judgement, and disinterestedness, it seems to me important to remember that art’s transformative powers may well depend upon them. For while aesthetics may not exhaust the nature of art today, it was nevertheless essential for establishing its identity – and thus the framework in which it becomes possible to accord individual works of art political, ethical, and existential significance.

NOTES 1. Most notably, see the collection of essays edited by J. Colin McQuillan, Baumgarten’s Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), and the translation of Baumgarten’s Metaphysics: A Critical Translation with Kant’s Elucidations, Selected Notes, and Related Materials, trans. Courtney Fugate and John Hymers (London Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013).

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2. As cited in J. Colin McQuillan, “Introduction,” Baumgarten’s Aesthetics, 12. 3. Baumgarten, Metaphysics, 205. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 198. 6. Ibid., 202. 7. Ibid., 228. 8. Angelica Nuzzo, “Baumgarten’s Conception of Aesthetic Truth in the Aesthetics,” in Baumgarten’s Aesthetics, 106. 9. Alexander Baumgarten, “Aesthetica,” in Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics, eds., Joseph Tanke and Colin McQuillan (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 160. 10. Ibid., 161. 11. McQuillan, “Introduction,” 19. 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 59. 13. Ibid., 55. 14. Ibid., 18–19. 15. Ibid., 19. 16. See, for example, Sally Hatch Gray, “Kant’s Race Theory, Forster’s Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color,” The Eighteenth Century 53, no. 4 (2012): 393–412; and John Hoffmann, “Kant’s Aesthetic Categories: Race in the Critique of Judgment,” Diacritics 44, no. 2 (2016): 54–81. 17. Ibid., 47. Italics retained. 18. Ibid., 45. 19. Ibid., 52. Italics retained. 20. Kant, Judgment, 45–46. Translation modified. I have elected to retain Kant’s inexcusable reference to an “Iroquois sachem” so as not to distort the historical record, and to allow readers to form their own assessments of Kant’s racism. 21. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2004), 35. 22. Ibid., 27. 23. Ibid., 132. 24. Ibid., 38. 25. Ibid, 80. 26. Ibid., 79. 27. Ibid., 103. 28. Ibid., 80. 29. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 142. De Man reminds us that “…if you ever try to do something in the other direction and you touch on it you’ll see what will happen to you. Better be very sure…that your tenure is very well established.” 30. Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” in Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics, 613–626. 31. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 197.

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32. Ibid., 390. 33. Ibid., 110. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 178. Italics retained. 36. Ibid., 179. Italics retained. 37. Ibid., 390. 38. Ibid., 309. 39. Ibid., 197. 40. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Spears (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 33. 41. Ibid., 40. 42. Ibid., 113. 43. Ibid., 8. Italics retained. 44. Ibid., 9. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 8. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 29. 49. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 74. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 87. 53. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 16; 56–57; 498.

Chapter 7

Aesthetics and the Classical Tradition Remarks on Baumgarten and Batteux Oiva Kuisma

In this chapter, my aim is to shed some light on the influence of ancient classical authors on the formation of modern aesthetics in the eighteenth century. This is a phenomenon that usually has been dealt with occasional references to Plato, Aristotle, Horace, and other ancient authors. Instead of highlighting the perspective provided by the earlier history of aesthetics, scholars often survey eighteenth-century aesthetics from the standpoint of its later development. This becomes evident, for example, from Paul Guyer’s survey History of Modern Aesthetics,1 which offers a critical overview of how Jerome Stolnitz, George Dickie, Terry Eagleton, and others have interpreted eighteenthcentury aesthetics from the standpoint of their own theoretical agendas. In another survey on the history of modern aesthetics, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics,2 Guyer himself discusses eighteenth-century aesthetics ‘with an eye to Kant’.3 In appraising Kant or twentieth-century aesthetics, this approach undoubtedly can produce enlightening results. On the other hand, it is easy to raise doubts as to whether eighteenthcentury thinkers themselves worked to prepare the way for Kant or other later thinkers. Quite obviously they did not. Instead, they elaborated concepts and theories that they had inherited from their teachers and predecessors; especially those from classical antiquity, partly suffused by the new classical scholarship of Renaissance thinkers. Renaissance humanism brought forward new standards in reading classical sources, especially the requirement to read classics in their own right and not merely as interpreted and evaluated by ancient church fathers and medieval scholastics. On this account, it is worthwhile bearing in mind that eighteenth-century aesthetic thought is a continuation of a tradition that has its roots in ancient Greek and Roman thinking. In this chapter, I focus on two subjects and two authors: the introduction of aesthetics as an academic discipline by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten 109

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and Charles Batteux’s idea of imitation as the unifying principle of the fine arts. The introduction of the science of aesthetics and the entrenchment of the modern notion of fine art were pivotal achievements of eighteenth-century aesthetics, even if, as this chapter emphasises, both had their roots in classical antiquity.

THE CLASSICAL ROOTS OF ALEXANDER GOTTLIEB BAUMGARTEN’S PROJECT OF AESTHETICS Many of the basic issues in eighteenth-century aesthetics indeed have their origin in the works of ancient authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Longinus (or Pseudo-Longinus), and Plotinus. I am thinking particularly of issues concerned with beauty (to kalon) as the essential principle of aesthetic evaluation, and mimesis as the fundamental notion in explaining artistic activity. Both notions come from classical antiquity. In addition, Nicolas Boileau’s version in French of Longinus’s treatise on sublimity – Traité du Sublime ou du Merveilleux dans le Discours (1674)4 – promoted the popularity of the notion of the sublime as a topic of discussion in learned circles,5 to be followed by the contributions of such figures as Burke and Kant. In general, the abiding influence of classical Greek and Roman thinkers on later and contemporary aesthetics is shown by the fact that systematic introductions to aesthetics still discuss the views of the ancients, and historical anthologies of aesthetics reproduce their key texts. In fact, some ancient authors had a crucial influence on the establishment of aesthetics as an academic discipline from the eighteenth century onward. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten formulated the neo-Latin term aesthetica on the basis of the Greek term aistheta, signifying objects of perception in contrast to objects of intellectual cognition, noeta. In his graduate thesis Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735, § 116),6 Baumgarten explains that Greek philosophers and fathers, that is, church fathers, had already made a distinction between objects of thought (noeta) and objects of perception (aistheta). This distinction draws attention to the cognitive value of intelligible matters at the cost of engagement with perceptible phenomena. Against this background, Baumgarten bravely (being a young man in 1735) suggested an episteme aisthetike, sensory knowledge (or science), as a specific domain of inquiry in order to raise the cognitive appreciation of sensory perception and experience.7 Later, in his unfinished systematic work Aesthetica (1750; Prolegomena § 1),8 Baumgarten continues his project, defining aesthetica, aesthetics, as the science of surveying sensory cognition. In parentheses, he offers alternative names for aesthetics, of which one is theoria liberalium artium (a theory of liberal arts). As a

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locution, it originates from antiquity through the Middle Ages and points to the same field of research as Baumgarten’s term aesthetica, aesthetics. Thus, both the early Meditationes and the later Aesthetica make clear that Baumgarten’s project of aesthetics was a continuation of the ancient tradition.9 Baumgarten’s definition of aesthetics as a science surveying sensory perception is, in fact, very broad and generous. Taken literally, the field of sensory perception covers the limitless domain of all the possible phenomena of perception and, in addition, the even more limitless domain of the imaginary objects of perception, since imagination was conceived as an inner counterpart of physical perception. In connection with memory, the imagination ‘stores’ images of perceptions in the mind, and as an active cognitive faculty it produces possible objects of perception, to which arts and crafts may give perceptible or imaginary instantiations. In terms of time, the imagination acting in the present unites the past with the future in imagining future possibilities on the basis of past actualities (cf. Aesthetica § 31). From the standpoint of the imagination, we are not only living in the evanescent present, since we strongly experience the effects of the past and anticipate with emotional involvement what the future will bring us. An important feature of both perceptual and imaginative activities is that they are usually attended by experiences of pleasure or displeasure. Artists work intentionally with this mixture of perception and imagination with emotional and cognitive experiences. The traditional theory of imitation acknowledged that artworks may produce not only pleasant but also unpleasant emotive experiences. The experience of unpleasant emotions may imply something to be avoided, as Plato (Republic 603e–606d)10 and Augustine (Confessions III.2)11 pointed out, but alongside this critical stance, the Aristotelian view of art explicated, that unpleasant emotions, such as fear, can become cathartically rehabilitated in the safe sphere of artistic experience (cf. Aristotle, Poetics 1449b23–27).12 In Baumgarten’s view aesthetics pays special attention to how we experience objects of actual or possible perception. It is the task of science based on logic, Vernunftlehre, as Baumgarten’s follower Meier would say,13 to determine what plants or animals we see, for example, in a garden or a painting representing a garden, while aesthetics pays special attention to how – with pleasure or displeasure – we perceive or experience things and, further, how we evaluate things on the basis of our experiences. In other words, aesthetics surveys how humans engage with objects of perception; objects are not just things in themselves but objects in relation to subjects of perception. This sphere of subjective experience and especially its links to the production and reception of art, was what Baumgarten aimed to chart in his project of aesthetics. In his introductory section of the Aesthetica (§§ 1–13), Baumgarten first defines aesthetics to be a science surveying sensory cognition and then

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proceeds to describe its scope in more detail. In broad terms, he divides the domain of aesthetics into theoretical and practical parts, of which he finished in literary form only one section of theoretical aesthetics, which deals with issues of heuristics. In this theoretical section, Baumgarten offers a pedantically systematic treatment of matters belonging to the aesthetic perfection of cognition, covering such topics as aesthetic richness, greatness, truth, light, and certainty. For the purposes of this article, we do not need to go into the details of Baumgarten’s painstaking exposition.14 Instead, it is pertinent to note the kind of literary sources available at the time that Baumgarten used to construct his project of aesthetics. It has already been pointed out that Baumgarten appeals to the conceptual distinction between aistheta and noeta made by the ancient philosophers and church fathers. Strictly speaking, this distinction is best suited to the tradition of Platonism, in which eternal intelligible matters and time-bound perceptible phenomena were conceptually, ontologically, and axiologically separated from each other.15 From this standpoint, one might think it possible that Baumgarten would have constructed his project of aesthetics explicitly on the tradition of Platonic thinking, either pagan, Christian, or both. This, however, is not Baumgarten’s choice. Indeed, he relies on ancient sources in constructing his theory of aesthetics but not particularly on the Platonic tradition. He refers to Plato on several occasions but not as a theoretical authority to be followed but rather to illustrate various topics of discussion. For example, through Cicero’s De finibus (II. 15)16 he refers to Plato’s Timaeus as an example of a text which is difficult because its subject matter is difficult (Aesthetica § 672). A text could also be difficult for other reasons, say, due to its abstruse terminology. To get an idea of the kind of literary sources Baumgarten uses to build up his project of aesthetics, we can take a glance at the literary sources he used in one of the thematic topics of the Aesthetica: for example, his treatment of aesthetic richness. Following his introductory paragraphs (§§ 1–13) of the Aesthetica, Baumgarten offers a general characterisation of the beauty of cognition (§§ 14–27), of the nature of aesthetician (§§ 28–114), and then discusses aesthetic richness (ubertas aesthetica) in paragraphs §§ 115–176. In general, richness signifies abundance, both in terms of perception and artistic production. From the conceptual standpoint, Baumgarten makes such distinctions as absolute and relative aesthetic richness (§ 116), objective and subjective aesthetic richness (§ 118), and the aesthetic richness of matter and mind, materiae and ingenii (§ 119–176). Alongside his detailed exposition of aesthetic richness, Baumgarten supports and illuminates his argument with references to and quotes from many authors: Homer, Hesiod, Thucydides, Socrates, Philistus, Theopompus, Aristotle, Menander, Theocritus, Terence, Cicero, Sallust, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Phaedrus, Seneca, Pliny,

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Quintilian, Tacitus, Martial, Juvenal, Petronius, Claudian, Ramon Lull, Petrus Ramus, J. J. Brucker. Most of these names are afforded only a brief mention or comment, while others have a visible role in Baumgarten’s argument in this section, namely Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Quintilian. Of these, Virgil and Ovid represent poetry, while Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian represent theory. As the list and especially the theoretically most important sources show, Baumgarten constructs his aesthetics conspicuously on wellknown ancient classical sources of poetics and rhetoric. In other sections of the Aesthetica, Baumgarten also frequently applies the doctrines of Aristotle and Longinus along with those of Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian. All of these authors belong to the tradition of rhetoric and poetics, which raises the question of whether Baumgarten’s project of aesthetics was not much more than a continuation of the traditional teaching of poetics and rhetoric. From antiquity, and especially from the age of Renaissance humanism onwards, poetics and rhetoric had a regular place in the curriculum of studia humanitatis.17 A notable feature of university teaching in poetics and rhetoric was that they were not just theoretical disciplines but also practical arts in the sense that students also had to learn to produce poetic verses and speeches (often religious sermons) for various occasions. And since Baumgarten’s project of aesthetics has both a theoretical and practical side, it seems to overlap, at least partly, with traditional teaching in poetics and rhetoric. Baumgarten’s Aesthetica shows that he was aware that his project might be criticised for being merely old poetics and rhetoric under a new name. In his introduction (Aesthetica § 5) he mentions this possibility, responding that the domain of aesthetics is broader and covers more areas than simply those of rhetoric and poetics, that is, more than just the literary arts. Occasionally, Baumgarten refers to the wide domain of the different arts with open-ended etcetera-listings of makers: oratorem, poetam, musicum e.c. (§ 77), poeta, musicus, pictor e.c. (§ 178), scriptorum, pictorum e.c. (§ 410), poeta, pictor, sculptor e.c. (§ 592). Likewise, a reference to the chorus of divine muses (§ 83) implies the field of art in its unified variety. From this standpoint one might expect that Baumgarten’s Aesthetica would contain chapters dealing in systematic order with the aesthetics of poetry, eloquence, music, dance, painting, etc., but this is not his procedure. He picks up issues concerned with aesthetics in a general manner to cover the whole field of aesthetic research at the same time. The principles, or laws (leges), of aesthetics have a wider application than the principles of particular arts (Aesthetica § 72), and for this reason, Baumgarten focuses on these. But despite his wide perspective on the field of the arts, Baumgarten usually appeals only to classical authors on poetics and rhetoric, as well as to representatives of classical poetry to give practical illustrations of theoretical

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issues. In the Baumgartean lecture notes on aesthetics published by Poppe in 1907,18 it is explained that the history of aesthetics (die Geschichte der Ästhetik) covers painters, sculptors, professionals in music, poets, and orators but that it would be a too wide-ranging project to discuss all of them.19 It is stated that it suffices to focus on those who have had a clear comprehension of the matters at issue.20 For Baumgarten, these were for the most part ancient authorities on poetry and rhetoric even though theoretical texts on architecture (Vitruvius), music (Boethius), and painting (Alberti) were available. Here, however, it is not necessary to go through Baumgarten’s use of classical sources in further detail. It suffices to underline the fact that ancient authorities on poetry and rhetoric have a visible place in Baumgarten’s project of modern aesthetics. Whoever bothers to start reading paragraph by paragraph the abstrusely succinct and bone-dry text21 of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica will in due course become acquainted with many doctrines of Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, Longinus, and other ancient authors. In this reading project, a basic knowledge of Latin is very useful, even if one avails of Mirbach’s German translation (Ästhetik I–II; 2007) in the modern edition of Baumgarten’s text. In fact, readers with a background in classical studies may salute references to and quotes from classical sources as a useful aid in understanding the technical argumentation of the Aesthetica. In Baumgarten’s era, all university students knew Latin and a set of classical texts. Nowadays this is no longer the case.22

CHARLES BATTEUX AND THE NOTION OF THE FINE ART Baumgarten’s exposition of aesthetics makes manifest the presence of the classical tradition in the formation of modern aesthetics as a branch of learning but, on the other hand, it clearly aims for a fresh start. As an explicitly defined humanistic discipline, aesthetics aims to widen the traditional theoretical perspective on beauty and imitation by paying systematic attention to notions such as imagination, taste, and sublimity.23 Further, it was understood that poetry, painting, sculpture, music, dance, and theatre formed a special group of fine arts, separable from productive crafts that served practical human needs. In this regard, special credit has been given to Charles Batteux by Kristeller in his well-known study on the origin of the modern system of the arts: ‘The decisive step toward a system of the fine arts was taken by the Abbé Batteux in his famous and influential treatise, Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (1746).’24 It might be debatable as to just how decisive was Batteux’s contribution in this matter but, in any case, along with Baumgarten’s notion of aesthetics, Batteux’s work shows that, from the eighteenth

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century onward, learned people had become more and more conscious that there was a special set of the fine arts, beaux arts, schöne Künste, or artes elegantiores, attracting public attention and also deserving scholarly investigation. This is also the topic of Batteux in his Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe.25 Discussion on the fine arts in the eighteenth century did not necessarily require Baumgarten’s terminological innovation of the term aesthetics. As Kant notes in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft,26 only Germans use the term Aesthetik, aesthetics, to denote what others call the Kritik des Geschmacks, critique of taste.27 This holds also of Batteux (1713–1780), who happened to live at almost the same time as Baumgarten (1714–1762). Batteux pays much attention to the notion of taste, claiming that modern thinkers theorise on what taste is, because in matters of taste, they are not led instinctively by nature as the ancients were (Beaux arts, part II). To put this into contemporary parlance, modern people have become more estranged from nature, and for this reason, they need guidance from the ancient masterpieces of art in their orientation toward beauty or, in Batteux’s term’s, belle nature, by which he means not beauty as it is, but as it can be (Beaux arts, 27–28). Thus, in Batteux’s view, the ancients had an implicit notion of taste as revealed in their artworks’ embodiment of true beauty. In the case of the notion of art, the situation was somewhat similar, except that the ancients had an explicit handy concept of mimesis (imitatio) to name and explain the function of art. In the Beaux arts, Batteux builds his theory of the fine arts largely on this classical basis. To see more accurately what kind of sources Batteux uses to construct his theory of the fine arts, we can take a closer look at the authors to which he refers in the preface and the first two parts of his three-part work Beaux arts. In the first two parts, he discusses artistic imitation, especially from the standpoints of genius, taste, and nature. In the final part, he discusses imitation from the perspective of different arts or, as he puts it, verifies theory by practice (Beaux arts, xiii). The third part can be left out of this brief review of literary sources. Batteux’s reliance on classical authors is already evident in the preface (v– ix), where he offers an overview of the theoretical sources he had consulted. He first critically refers to the French authors Charles Rollin, Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, René Le Bossu, and the abbé d’Aubignat (François Hédelin), describing their views as obscure, like oracular sayings.28 Then he turns to Aristotle’s commentators, whose names he neglects to mention, declaring that they serve only as an introduction to Aristotle. Finally, he names Aristotle, Horace, and Boileau as the most important theorists. In a footnote to the preface, he also quotes Cicero in order to highlight the interconnectedness of the arts (Beaux arts, x).

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In the Beaux arts, Batteux, being a professor of rhetoric at that time,29 proceeds mostly through a common-sense linguistic and conceptual elaboration, consciously avoiding speculative obscurities (cf. Beaux arts, 60). He often makes references to artists, as well as to theorists, in order to support and illuminate his argument. Here we can pass over examples from the art world to list the theoretical authorities to which Batteux refers: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Seneca (unacknowledged quote, p. 17), Quintilian, Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre, Marco Girolamo Vida, Francis Bacon, Boileau, Fontenelle, Remond de Saint-Mard.30 In addition, Batteux often refers in a collective manner to les anciens, the ancients; for example, he points out that the doctrine of imitation was known to the ancients (Beaux arts, 18) and that in matters of taste, the ancients followed nature (Beaux arts, 56–57). Likewise, he refers collectively to les modernes, the moderns, though not as often. Compared with Baumgarten, Batteux refers more often to authors from the modern era – the sixteenth to the eighteenth century – but, with the exception of Boileau, they are not important authorities for him. Although he refers to numerous authors, the list of Batteux’s most important theoretical sources is not long: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, and Boileau. Apart from Boileau, these names belong to antiquity. And if we count the fact that in his L’art poetique, Boileau follows Horace’s precedent in Ars poetica, we can see how firmly Batteux’s theory of the fine arts rests on classical sources. A brief overview of some of the basic doctrines of the Beaux arts will make this evident. Batteux brings forward the principle of imitation to explain the unity of the arts in determining the fine arts as consisting of music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance. Not unexpectedly, he reminds us that, as a doctrine, imitation had its origin in ancient thought. He refers to Aristotle, Plato, and Horace, noting that at the beginning of the Poetics Aristotle had listed music, dance, poetry, and painting as imitative arts (Beaux arts, 18–22). Even if sculpture is not explicitly included in this list, it certainly was an imitative art for Aristotle.31 Thus Aristotle’s list concurs with Batteux’s list of the fine arts (cf. Beaux arts, viii). In realising that the fine arts form a class of their own, separable from both productive crafts and intellectual sciences, there is thus a clear continuity from classical antiquity to the eighteenth century. Halliwell’s The Aesthetics of Mimesis draws attention to this continuity, suggesting that Kristeller’s view of the modern notion of fine art as an invention of the eighteenth century does not do justice to ancient thinking.32 Batteux, at least, acknowledged his indebtedness to the classical tradition in his elaboration of the notion of fine art, in this way acting in parallel with Baumgarten in his project of aesthetics. Batteux’s indebtedness to the classical tradition brings with it certain limitations, one of which is that the category of fine art is conceived as a closed set. It may allow some interventions from architecture and oratory

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and perhaps from some other fields too, but in general, the set of fine arts was strictly circumscribed by the principle of imitation. This view differs from twentieth-century art-theoretical thinking, which sees the field of art as a potentially ever expanding domain.33 Nowadays it is taken for granted that different cultures, new technological innovations, and artistic creativity can expand and enrich the field of art with ever more new types of art. This trend emphasises the fact that the theory of imitation is no longer the theory of art, providing only one theoretical view of art besides theories of formalism, expressionism, aesthetic attitude, contextualism, etc. Batteux, however, relied strongly on the theoretical adequacy of the theory of imitation in art; a view which, it should always be borne in mind, fits perfectly into the traditional Christian view of a divinely created world order that humans can enrich only through imitation and reproduction.34 The notion of genius could have enabled surpassing the confines of imitation (cf. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft § 47),35 but Batteux believed firmly that the work of the genius is not grounded on inventing new things but on observing what there is and working imitatively on its basis (Beaux arts, 11–12).36 The theory of imitation is easily understood as a theory that emphasises the cognitive value of art37; for example, when imitative artworks produce cognitive delight in allowing people to see that a certain artwork represents a certain object (cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1371b4–10). In emphasising the cognitive point of view, ancient thinkers noted that artistic imitation also has emotive value. Plato, for example, paid attention to this feature though in a strictly critical manner, claiming that imitative art (poetry) affects the lower parts of the soul at the cost of reason (Republic 606d–607a). As already indicated, Aristotle’s stance on this issue was more positive, since through the cathartic effect of tragedy negative emotions can become enjoyable ingredients of audience response (Poetics 1449b23–27). Batteux concurs with Aristotle’s view in appraising positively art’s emotive function in lyric poetry, music, and dance. On the other hand, attention to art’s emotive function raises the question of whether art, in expressing and arousing emotions, is essentially imitative. Discussing lyric poetry in the third part of the Beaux arts (244–255), Batteux takes up this issue. Epic and dramatic poetry can be held as imitative without gainsaying, since they represent action, but does lyric poetry have an object to represent? In Batteux’s view, lyric poetry has an object, namely emotion, and because of this, it is not against the principle of imitation (Beaux arts, 251). The same holds for music and dance; they do not nullify the principle of imitation. Emotions in music and dance are objects of representation simply because they are artists’ creations (Beaux arts, 277). In dealing with the emotive function of lyric poetry, music, and dance, Batteux comes closer to the point where the explanatory adequacy of the principle of imitation seems to be in need of amendment by a theory of expression;

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or even to be substituted by it. Batteux, however, was so convinced of the validity of the theory of imitation that he did not see or realise any need to reform it through critical discussion.38 In the mid-eighteenth century this stance did not raise loud protests, but the situation changed in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Hegel, for example, exclaimed in his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik39 that if art wants to compete imitatively with nature, it is like a worm crawling after an elephant.40 The notion of imitation explains to a certain extent artistic activities and production, but not art in its entirety. In classical antiquity, it had already been noted by certain thinkers, namely by proponents of allegorical exegesis, that as an explanatory notion imitation has its limitations. To take an example, the late Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus explicated in his Commentary on Plato’s Republic41 that the notion of mimesis is not capable of explaining all of poetry, since there are also epistemic and inspired types of poetry.42 A proper understanding of inspired poetry often requires allegorical interpretation; or, symbolic interpretation, since Proclus’s key term is symbol. He states simply that ‘Symbols (symbola) are not imitations (mimemata) of the things which they symbolise’.43 The symbolic dimension of meaning should especially be heeded in the case of Homer, whom Plato had criticised severely in the Republic (second, third, and tenth books). With the help of symbolic and other suitable interpretations, Proclus believed to be able to show that there is nothing to be blamed in Homer’s poetry and that, in fact, there was no serious disagreement between Plato and Homer.44 While promoting the value of inspired poetry, Proclus also granted to mimetic poetry (more precisely, to its subcategory eicastic poetry) some relative value. An authoritative reason for Neoplatonists to afford mimesis some value is that Plato, the great critic of mimetic art, availed himself of mimesis to depict persons, events, and environments in his dialogues. In fact, Proclus argued that Plato was a philosophical follower and competitor and thus, in a sense, an imitator of the poet Homer.45 Acknowledgement of the genre of allegorical poetry does not necessarily require discarding the theory of imitation, since in conjunction with imitative depiction, allegory can be understood as having a deeper meaning. In this regard, allegory is related to parables, with which all Christians are familiar from their reading of the Gospels. Parables may describe in the imitative mode ordinary things such as seeds and weeds but their deeper parabolic, or allegorical, meaning may point to matters beyond sense-perception (cf. Matthew 13:1–43). On this account and because of such everyday linguistic phenomena as riddles and double entendres, people in general have been accustomed to non-literal modes of interpretation, even without being acquainted with ancient or modern allegorists. Batteux, of course, was conversant with classical as well as with modern literature, so it is no surprise that he has something to say about allegory.

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Batteux briefly discusses allegory in the Beaux arts in a footnote on pages 210–211. He divides allegory into two types – moral and oratorical – and then explicates their uses in different genres of poetry. Batteux, however, is not very explicit in determining the relation of allegory to imitation, but the examples he uses to illuminate his view make it evident that he regarded allegory as a second dimension of meaning in art but not as its essential meaning.46 Batteux compares this to paintings that depict historical figures but portray contemporary figures. Those who can recognise both the historical figures and their contemporary counterparts can enjoy both objects, while those who cannot, can nevertheless enjoy the historical scenes if only the work is well made. Thus, in Batteux’s view, allegory can be adjusted within the imitative framework without bigger problems. The most serious theoretical challenge to the sufficiency of the theory of imitation is the fact that in the eighteenth century people paid gradually more attention to the role of emotions in art. This topic has already been discussed briefly above, but some final remarks are apposite, since the focus on emotions points to the theory of expression, which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries followed and even supplanted the theory of imitation. To put it in a nutshell, the theory of expression explains that artists not only depict the outer perceptual world but also give an expression to the inner world of the human heart and soul, as well as the body as a sphere of internal experience. Even in the forms of the outer world artists can express the inner world of their soul, especially in the light of emotional experience. Batteux was aware of this possibility, as explained above from the standpoints of lyric poetry, music, and dance. In explicating the features of these arts, Batteux explicitly uses the term expression. Speaking of opera, he says, for example, that its language expresses (exprime) ecstasy, enthusiasm, and fervent passion (Beaux arts, 220). In one of the chapter titles of the Beaux arts (p. 287), he speaks about the expressions in music and dance: Des qualités que doivent avoir les expressions de la Musique, & celles de la Danse. In Batteux’s view, however, expression fits in the framework of imitation. Thus, similarly to his stance on allegory, Batteux observes that there is such a phenomenon as artistic expression, but he sees no need to reject his great idea of imitation as the single unified source of all art. To raise some other function of art – allegory, expression, etc. – to the position of a ruling principle next to the principle of imitation would have undermined his project of grounding all the arts on a unitary principle – imitation. CONCLUSION Both Baumgarten and Batteux constructed their views, on aesthetics and fine arts respectively, on the classical tradition, starting from ancient Greece

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and moving through the Roman era to eighteenth-century Neo-Classicism. Baumgarten’s Aesthetica and Batteux’s Beaux arts are set in a theoretical context, where many of the most important ideas come from such authorities as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Horace. Hence a proper understanding of Baumgarten’s and Batteux’s theories requires acquaintance with classical literature. To offer one more example: in the introduction to his translation of Batteux’s Fine Arts (xl), Young explains that Batteux anticipates Nelson Goodman’s idea of a picture referring to a class of beings without referring to any definite member of the class. This is to say, in Young’s example (deriving from M. C. Beardsley via Goodman), that a drawing representing, for example, a smew may refer to all smews without referring to any particular smew.47 Young compares this case to Batteux’s example of Alceste, the protagonist in Moliere’s Misanthrope to point out that this person represents ‘misanthropes in general’ instead of a certain individual (ibid.).48 Instead of, or perhaps along with, making a link from Batteux to Goodman, one might in this case, as in so many others, compare Batteux with Horace, who rules that poetic persons representing figures such as Achilles, Medea, and Orestes should accord with their known character traits (Ars poetica 119–136).49 In other words, Achilles in poetry should represent the Achilles-type known from Homeric epics and in this way accord with or enrich readers’ conception of a character that is brave and hot-tempered by nature. Thus, to understand Batteux properly, it is always, or at least often, useful to turn to his classical sources, especially Horace. In fact, both Batteux and Baumgarten would deserve a detailed comparative reading through Horace, and Aristotle.

NOTES 1. Guyer, Paul. “History of Modern Aesthetics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, edited by Jerrold Levinson, 25–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 2. Guyer, Paul. Values of Beauty. Historical Essays in Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 3. Guyer, Values of Beauty, 32–33. 4. Full title of Nicolas Boileau’s work: Oeuvres diverses du Sieur D***, avec le Traité du Sublime ou du Merveilleux dans le Discours. Traduit du Grec de Longin. Denys Thierry: Paris, 1674. 5. Cf. the comment by D.A. Russell (editor of Longinus) on the popularity of Longinus’s treatise after the publication of Boileau’s translation: Russell, Introduction, in Longinus, On the Sublime, xliv. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. 6. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Reflections on Poetry. (Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus 1735.) Text and translation by Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954.

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7. Baumgarten was not, of course, living in a philosophical vacuum. For a useful account of Baumgarten’s relation to his predecessors and contemporaries, see Clemens Schwaiger, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten – Ein Intellektuelles Porträt: Studien zur Metaphysik und Ethik von Kants Leitautor. Stuttgart: frommann-holzboog, 2011. 8. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Ästhetik I–II. Herausgegeben von Dagmar Mirbach. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007. 9. In between, Baumgarten had offered some remarks on aesthetics in his Metaphysica (1739); cf. esp. § 533. Mirbach’s edition of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (Ästhetik I–II) reproduces as an appendix the relevant sections of the Metaphysica. 10. Plato. Republic. Books 1–5. Edited and translated by Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy. The Loeb Classical Library: Plato V. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press 2013. Plato. Republic. Books 6–10. Edited and translated by Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy. The Loeb Classical Library: Plato VI. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press 2013. 11. Augustine. Confessiones. Bekenntnisse. Eingeleitet, übersetzt und erläutert von Joseph Bernhart. München: Kösel-Verlag, 1966, Dritte Auflage. 12. Aristotle. De Arte poetica liber. Edited by Rudolf Kassel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. 13. Georg Friedrich Meier, Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften Theil I (Halle: Carl Hermann Hemmerde, 1754; 2. Auflage), § 5. 14. Guyer’s A History of Modern Aesthetics. Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 329–340, offers an overview of these topics. 15. Plotinus comments on aisthesis and noesis from epistemological and ontological points of view throughout his writings (Enneads); cf., e.g., Ennead VI.3. (Plotinus I–VII with an English translation by A. H. Armstrong. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press & London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1966–1988.) 16. Cicero. De finibus bonorum et malorum. With an English translation by H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library: Cicero XVII. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1931, 2nd ed. 17. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II. Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York: Harper & Row 1965), 3, lists the basic humanistic subjects of learning as “grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy”; cf. also Kristeller “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics I–II” (Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 12 1951, 496–527; vol. 13 1952, 17–46), 510. Benjamin G. Kohl, “The Changing Concept of the Studia Humanitatis in the early Renaissance” (Renaissance Studies vol. 6 1992, 185–202), offers some amendments to Kristeller’s view. 18. Poppe, Bernhard. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Seine Bedeutung und Stellung in der Leibniz-Wolffishen Philosophie und seine Beziehungen zu Kant, nebst Veröffentlichung einer bisher unbekannten Handskrift der Ästhetik Baumgartens. Borna—Leipzig: Buchdruckerei Robert Noske, 1907. 19. Poppe, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, § 1; p. 67.

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20. Ibid. 21. In the Baumgartean lecture notes it is remarked that the Lesebuch (reader), i.e., Aesthetica, is not meant for being a paradigm of aesthetic writing. Poppe, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, § 115; p. 130. 22. Two decades ago, Richard Shusterman exclaimed in Pragmatist Aesthetics. Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000; 2nd ed.), 265, that it is a scandal that Baumgarten’s Aesthetica has not been translated into English. As far as the author of this article knows, the situation remains the same. 23. As Johann Georg Sulzer’s dictionary format Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste I–II shows, the range of possible issues was soon realised to be quite limitless. Sulzer, Johann Georg. Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste in einzeln, nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter auf einander folgenden, Artikeln abgehandelt. I–II. Leipzig: M. G. Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1771, 1774. 24. Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts II”, 20. 25. References are to the amended nouvelle edition: Charles Batteux, Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe. Nouvelle edition. Paris: Durand, 1747. (1st ed. 1746.) 26. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Herausgegeben von Theodor Valentiner. In I. Kant, Sämtliche Werke I. Leipzig: Verlag von Felix Meiner 1919. 27. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 76, note. 28. In identifying Batteux’s modern sources, I have consulted the introduction and footnotes of James O. Young’s English translation of Batteux’s treatise: The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Young (pp. xxiv-xxv) also provides a brief summary of Batteux’s debt to classical authors, especially Aristotle and Horace. 29. Batteux introduces himself as a professor of rhetoric in the unnumbered dedicatory pages at the beginning of the Beaux arts. Later, he acted as a Professor of Greek and Roman philosophy and as a member of the French Academy. 30. Batteux also names other theorists and philosophers, such as Parmenides and Empedocles (Beaux arts, 52), but only to illustrate some particular issue. 31. For example, in the Rhetoric 1371b5–8 Aristotle lists as examples of imitation painting, sculpture, and poetry. Aristotle, Ars rhetorica. Recognovit brevique adnotatione critica instruxit W. D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. 32. Halliwell, Stephen. The Aesthetics of Mimesis. Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002. 33. This view was forcefully put forward by Morris Weitz in “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” (The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15 1956, 27–35); cf. esp. p. 32. 34. As Thomas Aquinas states the Christian view in the Compendium theologiae, cap. I.70, the only creative agent (creator) in the universe is God. (Thomas Aquinas, Compendium theologiae. Übersetzt von Hans L. Fäh, herausgegeben von Rudolf Tannhof. Heidelberg: F. H. Kerle Verlag, 1963.) In passing, Batteux (Beaux arts, 247) mentions that God has no need to imitate, since God creates. 35. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Herausgegeben von Heiner F. Klemme. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001.

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36. In the Philosophical Enquiry, part I sect. xvi–xvii, Edmund Burke acknowledges the explanatory power of the notion of imitation, but with regard to human behaviour more generally he notes that mere imitation (i.e. learning, acculturation, and production by imitation) would not lead to ‘improvement’. Since, however, God has implanted in men ‘a sense of ambition’, they want to excel over others and thus improvement is made possible. (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and other Pre-Revolutionary Writings. Edited by D. Womersley. London: Penguin Books, 1998.) 37. In his introduction to Batteux’s Fine Arts, xxxviii, Young rightly attributes aesthetic cognitivism to Batteux, but adds that ‘Aesthetic cognitivism is the view that works of art are, in an important way, sources of knowledge.’ Even with the qualification ‘in an important way’ this is a dubious way to characterise art’s cognitive value. Didactic poetry may offer knowledge to readers, but more often works of art have cognitive value because they invite people for perceptual, imaginary, and intellectual engagement, regardless of whether they literally offer ‘knowledge’ or not. In Batteux’s terms, the arts deal rather with truth-likeness than with truth (Beaux arts, 14). 38. In fact, Batteux (Beaux arts, 246–247) can accept the view that divinely inspired prophets may sing the word of God without imitation. But in Batteux’s view, this is not a serious complaint against imitative art theory. 39. Hegel, G. W. F. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I–III. Werke 13–15. Redaktion Eva Moldenhauer und Karl M. Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001–2004. 40. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I, 66. 41. Proclus. Proclus the Successor on Poetics and the Homeric Poems: Essays 5 and 6 of His Commentary on the Republic of Plato. Text, translation, notes, and introduction by Robert Lamberton. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012. 42. Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Republic, I 178.6–179.32. Ancient allegorical interpretation, especially its Neoplatonic version, has received much attention in scholarly literature during recent decades. See, e.g., Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian. Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of Epic Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Oiva Kuisma, Proclus’ Defence of Homer. Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 109. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1996. Luc Brisson, How Philosophers Saved Myth. Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology. Translated by Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. 43. Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Republic I, 198.15–16. 44. For a survey of Proclus’s interpretation of Homer, see Kuisma, Proclus’ Defence of Homer, 79–121. 45. Cf. Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Republic, I 162.20–172.30. 46. In passing, we may note that this differs from the Gospel parables, where the essential meaning is the meaning concealed behind narratives depicting ordinary things and events. 47. To be precise, talk about a picture of a smew representing the class of smews should be substituted by a talk about a pair of smews, since male and female smews

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look quite different. Only when male smews have the so-called eclipse plumage in late summer and early autumn do the sexes look fairly similar. 48. This case refers to pages 12–13 of Young’s translation of Batteux’s Fine Arts. Perhaps worth noting is that in this section (p. 13). Young has misunderstood Batteux’s footnote about Maximus of Tyre (Beaux arts, 27). Maximus’s point is not that Plato ‘has written’ of sculptors in the Republic but that Plato has acted like sculptors in constructing his ideal political constitution. Cf. Maximus of Tyre, The Philosophical Orations, 17.3. Tanslation, introduction, and notes by M. B. Trapp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. (Batteux and Young give as reference Maximus’s Dissertation 7.) 49. Horace. Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica. Translated by H. Rushton Fairclough. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press 1929.

Chapter 8

Aesthetics and Cultural Studies On the Relationship between a Small Discipline and Her Bully Big Brother Max Ryynänen

As the title, with its rather provocative subtitle (forgive me, we aestheticians have reason to claim recognition) suggests, my chapter focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and cultural studies. It is important to note that there are many schools of aesthetics, from phenomenology to the Indian approach, and besides Anglo-American post-Birmingham cultural studies, there are many other approaches that can be and are being called cultural studies (or studies of culture). These are all the objects of discourse here, but when I talk about the post-Birmingham approach, I discuss it as Anglo-American cultural studies. This is partly due to the fact that its reference points are very much restricted to Anglo-American scholarship (and Australian), which is also the case with analytic aesthetics, which has been one of the main (‘Aristotelian’, ‘Kantian’) opponents of cultural studies in the English-speaking world. In the first section, The Clash, I start with experiences of dismissal that I and my colleagues in aesthetics (I consider myself to also be a scholar of cultural studies, though) have experienced in dialogues with scholars in cultural studies. I hope the reader can forgive me for being quite personal in this respect, but so has the negative discourse been about aesthetics in cultural studies too, very much re-collecting the negative experiences in academia. The text, anyway, also proceeds to present the varieties of aesthetics out there, and the way some of them have been the basis for later cultural studies and how some contemporary approaches could still be counted in – like in my case: I consider myself to work in both territories (although I experience problems only in one). Cultural studies, I argue, should change its self-victimising attitude and start understanding that it is the discipline that has had lately had the power in the issue of arts and culture in the academy and that 125

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it needs to look out for the work done in aesthetics, too, if it wants to grasp well the phenomena it studies. In the second section, Where to Head Next – And the Future, I present more views on the relationship between aesthetics and cultural studies. I also tackle some of the main brands of cultural studies, like the idea that cultural studies are more multi-culturally informed – aesthetics does this job much better, it looks to me – or that it views aesthetics in the plural, and the discipline of aesthetics does not. I also discuss the myth that cultural studies is socially and politically alert and aesthetics is not. The current change in the Anglo-American academy is interesting. The classical humaniora is again gaining a stronger stance. As this happens, it may be good for scholars and students in cultural studies to know a bit more about the history and contemporary nature of aesthetics. In the small epilogue, I also shed some light on the future, and possible points of convergence and dialogue, which could benefit both ‘parties’. THE CLASH A colleague of mine, a hip-hop scholar in the field of Anglophone cultural studies, held the view that scholarly work on rap music started in the early 2000s. I told her that thinking about my interests the work was pretty much done by that time. I had done my B.A. thesis on rap in 1997. There was a whole wave of critical and aesthetically rich rap scholarship from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. She looked like one big question mark, so I mentioned some of the scholars involved (Shusterman, Snaevarr, Brennan, ya Salaam) – and added that the debate took place in aesthetics. My colleague nodded her head, but she did not comment on what I said – in a way that made me feel uncomfortable and dismissed. What I said did probably not matter, as it came from the wrong source, from one of the marginal ghettos of the academy, called aesthetics. She picked up a source or two for a footnote, later on, maybe out of a need to be polite, but that was it. In the end, nothing surprised me, though. Not the dismissal of my background, nor the fact, that my colleague had not read even classics of the topic, like David Toop’s 1986 The Rap Attack. It was not the first time someone who represented cultural studies showed ignorance about my belonging to a less powerful scene of scholarship, nor was it the first time someone from that discipline thought that they did not need to study the ‘classics’ or the history of their field of study.1 I recall that coming from Finland to Western and Continental Europe was a bit like that in the old days before we became a rich country with a

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positive presence in the media and the European Union. Climbing from a poor background to a middle-class culture created similar responses. Being, for example, ethnically marginalised or living with a disability, I can imagine, must create the same kind of reaction too, even more so, but I have no experience of how that works. It is absurd that scholars of cultural studies pride themselves in representing a discipline that works critically on power relations and privileges, aiming for democratisation and bringing up marginal voices. Aestheticians that I have raised the issue with, though, share the same experience. ‘Finally, someone is writing about that’, they say. It goes without saying that writing about this is not easy. When someone dismisses you, there is not much to tackle, as it is invisible. Aesthetics is not a reference point in cultural studies. Anyway, what does this say about the much-advertised interdisciplinary nature of Anglo-American cultural studies? For us aestheticians, it is not hard to see that cultural studies are not very interdisciplinary by nature. While aesthetics extends from holistic Heideggerian ‘jargon’ to anal, clean-cut concept analysis which mimics natural science (i.e. analytic philosophy), and from Indian rasa theory (with its Sanskrit concepts – yes, I had to study this, too, for our MA) to the cryptic writings of Deleuze and Guattari, cultural studies, although one can posit different free (writing) thinkers like bell hooks and Douglas Kellner as belonging to its sphere, looks like it has quite a one-sided recipe for how thoughts and argumentation should be built. Theoretical articles in cultural studies mostly reproduce continental theory in a straightforward down-to-earth style typical of Anglo-American social sciences – and lead the discourse with social thematics. The argumentation has to be square and quite positivist. Of course, there is also a wing of cultural studies that has not much to do with aesthetics, the less philosophical, more case-study, and method-driven studies with interviews and data – but this side of the discipline is outside of the scope of this chapter. I would be surprised if aesthetics would ever have been an issue there. To get back to my experiences – and those of my colleagues in aesthetics – sadly, I have also seen, that if I had been more ‘exotic’, and come from India, for example, with Indian philosophy in my back pocket (as my family is partly Indian, I actually happen to do that, but there is no practical use for it in hip hop studies, for instance), I might get more respectful treatment, but as I never see scholars in cultural studies build their approach on a nonWestern theory-base, it is not hard to guess that this attitude might be only about ‘political correctness’. Working through nearly only Anglo-American sources (Commonwealth scholars and their work counted as part of the inner

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circle), cultural studies look as much as analytic philosophy like a remnant of the old British empire. If aesthetics was once doomed in Anglo-American cultural studies to be canon-driven, conservative, and not informed by social and political issues (it might have been that, at a certain moment, in the United States and the United Kingdom, where this myth started to spread), at least today most aesthetics, everywhere where I roam, really takes into account non-aesthetic matters a great deal. We also read cultural studies, and of course, we have learned from that, too – no question about it. Has the early critical stance against the canons, conservative theory, and overtly backward-driven gazes of classical humaniora, which cultural studies takes pride in representing, become a stiff ideology that produces lazy scholarship with too little looking at the roots of discussions and a professional field which stays too much inside of the Anglo-American realm? Think of the example of the scholarly rap discussion at the beginning of the chapter. It often looks like that, and I am not the only one saying it. Sometimes even absurd things happen. In recent years I have, for example, seen many (mostly white) middle-class and upper-class scholars of cultural studies coming from the centres of the West, mainly London, to Eastern Europe to preach about the need to break out of our Western frameworks and our old way of thinking only about ourselves, and to think more globally – mentioning the colonies of their respective countries – without any sensitivity to the way Eastern Europe has been in the shadows of centres like London in Europe and also colonialised in the close past (by e.g. its big bully eastern neighbour), and still being underrepresented in the international academy. I have never seen this sort of political stupidity in aesthetics, and it must have to do, besides Anglo-centrism, with the ignorance of history and background study that has, maybe through an overtly black-and-white reaction against classical humaniora and its methodology, become a recent trademark of cultural studies. Something has gone really badly wrong with cultural studies! Of course, there are also many flourishing scenes and individuals working within its reach. When history disciplines are combined with cultural studies, backgrounds and classics are studied, too. And when there are enough non-Anglophones around, at least some leaps out from the Anglo-American context are easily possible. What I am criticising here is a mass phenomenon that has made many of us living in its shadows grow tired. And, don’t take me wrong. I think of myself actually as someone also doing cultural studies (I will come to this soon, with some substantial points of reference). And yes, of course, I sometimes see in conferences of aesthetics scholars who are really living in the nineteenth century – still stuck, not just passionate about, for example, nineteenth-century notions of aesthetic experience, which

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then, of course, do not necessarily answer well the needs we have to discuss TV series. I see scholars who are stuck in mindless Central and Continental European, or even more often British, cultural canons. And I see scholars who are unable to find a way out of the twilight of dead German philosophers. There exists dusty work in the field that needs revamping. And there are conservatives around. But I have not seen them dominating aesthetics as a field. ‘What is the role of philosophy in cultural theory’, Peter Osborne asks in his Philosophy in Cultural Theory.2 A house concept at the time, the turn of the millennium, ‘cultural theory’, or (sometimes) ‘art theory’, has since then diminished its presence, and got mixed up with the massive presence of ‘cultural studies’, which just expanded since the 1960s, until quite recently many started to distance themselves from it. If it was still normal to hear, in the early 2000s, people giving presentations on the difference between aesthetics and art theory,3 or the abovementioned relationship of aesthetics and cultural theory, all these discourses have somewhat slowly drifted away, as cultural studies swallowed them. Looking at the history of Anglophone cultural studies, it, as well as aesthetics, had many promising origins. For example, Stuart Hall was widely read, and had a global cultural approach, although he did not use non-Western theory in his research. He tackled issues like identity with philosophical rigor. Lawrence Grossberg’s background is famously in French philosophy and his studies of, for example, fans and the performative revolution of the 1960s are mind-blowing. Angela McRobbie, Simon Frith, Ben Highmore, and Jane Juffer write in a way that makes sense for us aestheticians, too, and so do many others, and they keep producing important knowledge for all humanities. But many of the remains of the Birmingham approach and its American versions are now also laden with jargon, like old and dusty AngloAmerican aesthetics probably felt for the early scholars of cultural studies. If endless Kantian discourse made new scholars tired in the 1960s, the easyto-apply, often unnecessarily binary (something either is or is not something, which for most philosophers sounds very much like a simplifying way of thinking), trend-concept-laden discussions of culture are now the wall that many of us are trying to pierce. The language of especially British cultural studies is really heavy and still, weirdly, theoretically not very complex. And the approach is not only just Western, but even more, restricted, like I have already said, to Anglo-American approaches. In aesthetics, in forums like Contemporary Aesthetics and the International Association of Aesthetics, one can see many cultural and theoretical roots used as bases for scholarly work. As I myself sail between these worlds, I can feel the narrowness of the horizon when I enter cultural studies, as, when we pass the classics of aesthetics (and semiotics) that are in use in cultural studies, from Gramsci to Althusser, Deleuze, and Guattari, only contemporary Anglophone thinking matters.

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As aestheticians are still encountered in the way they are in cultural studies (partly for historical reasons that I will discuss below), no wonder some have become frustrated. I have heard aestheticians say ‘Kill cultural studies’, which of course are not really breaking any reasonable path for future discussion or dialogue. In ‘Cultural Studies and Philosophy: An Intervention’, Douglas Kellner states that cultural studies have not been able to work out its relationship to philosophy, including what it owes to it.4 But I also think we aestheticians start to need some new thinking on this. I follow Adrian Kvovacka’s maxim, ‘make aesthetics great again’, which promotes a new understanding of the historical role of aesthetics as a central theoretical axiom for other disciplines interested in culture and the arts5 – which really was the case in the nineteenth century in Europe, and, for example, in classical Indian art research and study of culture too. And aesthetics is again increasing its presence on the academic map. This turn, I believe, could also be beneficial to study in Anglophone cultural studies. It is helpful to understand the history and the potentials of the role aesthetics once had, and the role it might sneakily be taking back again. This development might, and I hope so, also bring about a change in cultural studies, and maybe, for good or bad, help to at least partly unite these approaches. Partly, I am sure, the complicated relationship between cultural studies and aesthetics stems from the fact that aesthetics is too theoretical for many scholars who have a background in social sciences, and who ‘migrate’ from that source to the platform of cultural studies. The level of theoretical complexity is the true difference between these disciplines. And, for sure, in Anglophone countries, people in cultural studies have been mostly fighting scholars in analytic aesthetics, which is, though, not a group that dominates international aesthetics, and which, definitely, is where ‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Kantian’ conceptions of culture, which scholars in cultural studies often hate, still lurk. (I have nothing against also having these approaches around, myself.) As I did not only rap studies but mainly aesthetics of popular culture for a long time – for some reason many scholars of cultural studies think that they started aesthetic and cultural reflection on popular culture, which is not true6 – I had such an amount of these experiences that I eventually became alert. When someone tagged themselves as doing cultural studies, I was on my toes, and no longer easily started a dialogue. I had learned a lesson. But it is time for scholars in cultural studies to start listening to the margins. And not just because of our experience of academic dismissal. The winds have changed, and something has happened to the nature of the defensive stance of cultural studies. The defensive stance? Scholars in cultural studies are often defending themselves like they are victims of an endless cultural war run by conservatists, although they represent through their sheer

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size (and in many countries the major chairs at universities which they have occupied) the dominant field in the study of art and culture. There is no longer any place for a victim mentality. But also, it is interesting to think that aesthetics, in its continental European form, which should not be restricted to phenomenology only (which is often the case, when the concept of the continental is mentioned), might actually be the original cultural studies, an attitude that was appropriated by Anglophone scholars, and this is something I want to accentuate here. Also, this role is coming back, at least marginally. When I started my studies in aesthetics in 1995, we immediately read analytical, French, German, and on some courses, for example, Japanese aesthetics – and we read cultural studies, too: scholars like Grossberg and Hall were commonplace among our readings. I studied mostly in Helsinki, which of course has had a key role in the development of everyday aesthetics and environmental aesthetics, for instance, but it was not much less open when I studied in Uppsala, Pisa, or even in Philadelphia, where I stayed during my PhD studies with pragmatists like Richard Shusterman and Joseph Margolis, who were open to everything and knew a lot about global aesthetics. And I know that in cities like Bologna and Copenhagen and in German universities, there is a long tradition of looking at culture broadly not just culture-wise, but also methodologically. At the same time, I have, all my professional life, been reading accusations by scholars in the far bigger discipline, cultural studies, against aesthetics. This straw man of ‘aesthetics’ has maybe helped cultural studies to keep itself uninformed about research done in aesthetics. The myth might also be one reason for the bad treatment of aestheticians. While it is true that scholars of cultural studies questioned what ‘culture’ is and studied more than any school of cultural research before them the way industrialised capitalist societies are divided with lines stemming from race, class, and gender,7 without forgetting inquiring into the way these divisions have an impact on cultural production and consumption, Marxist aesthetics was not foreign to this. From Gramsci to the Frankfurt School, especially Herbert Marcuse, and from Lucien Goldman to Althusser, without forgetting neo-humanist thinkers like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marxist aesthetics thought had a major impact on the development of cultural studies.8 Of course, it is not only a straw man we are talking about, but the role of the people who have used the word aesthetics to defend their conservative stances in universities, for example, the United States might be central to the problematics. They, however, have no patent on the word aesthetics. Scholars in cultural studies have, though, maybe had to fight for the relevance of their work. But these are more regional than global issues, in the end, and should not be universalised – which might be hard to understand for linguistically, culturally, and economically privileged scholars in the centres of the Western

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world who have a hard time recognising their own practices to be sometimes just local, and not universal, ironically in the same way that classics of aesthetics like Kant and Hegel could not reflect on their own nature as ethnic upper-class thinkers of German breeding. WHERE TO HEAD NEXT – AND THE FUTURE Jen Webb traces differences and analogies of aesthetics and cultural studies as disciplines in her text ‘Cultural Studies and Aesthetics: Pleasures and Politics’ (2002), by discussing aesthetics as being more interested in aesthetic value and identity, and cultural studies as being into social, political, and economic effects of art and culture,9 but even if this marks a certain overall tendency, the description she gives for cultural studies also fits a lot of work in aesthetics. Also, John Fiske asserts that culture in what we call cultural studies ‘is neither aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but political’, and the word emphasis is maybe good to keep in mind here.10 At the turn of the millennium, cultural studies as a concept signified still pretty much only the discourse that was built on the social sciences and that had developed its core rhetoric in the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (established 1964). While the new take on culture, a route chosen and built by Hall, Hoggarth, Williams, and Hebdige, still offers the name for the broader take that dominates academia today, two things have for sure happened that we need to note. Although the approach of the Birmingham School started as an escape route from conservative Eurocentric and highbrow humanities and their partly outdated rhetoric about culture – dominated by canons and cultural hierarchies – classical humanities have now even in Anglo-American countries taken a new route, at the same time as cultural studies ‘have experienced a decline in popularity’, as Caitlin Cowley writes: The methods of literary criticism that cultural studies organized in opposition to – including aestheticism, formalism, antihistoricism and apoliticism – have experienced a significant resurgence. Over the last academic year at Fordham University, I attended Sianne Ngai’s brilliant talk on aesthetic categories, participated in Wojciech Malecki’s workshop on magical realism and object-oriented philosophy, heard Annika Thiem reconsider Benjamin through metaphysics, and practiced book history with the digital humanities initiative. In short, with the exception of Judith Butler’s lecture ‘We, the People or Plural Action’, the alleged pendulum shift away from cultural studies has been part of my lived graduate educational and academic life.11

While Cowley’s generic but neatly written note on the change might sound to most people somehow very regional, a situation that says something about

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American university life, it is also about schools of thinking. Analytic philosophy, the ruler of philosophy departments in Anglophone countries, has not really been able to revamp aesthetic theory, nor to take much into account, for example, the work done in cultural studies. It is not, that I would not enjoy reading it myself (I am a big fan of e.g. Noël Carroll), but analytic philosophy has not yet reached out as a possible way of thinking outside of its narrow, almost only English-speaking community, which has not hesitated in waging wars against other theoretical schools. Ngai’s, Butler’s, and Malecki’s approaches are pragmatist or at least half-continental. What has happened is, interestingly, that the comeback of classical humanities in America has made the scene resemble more the continental European situation. “In its Anglo-American development, cultural studies appears as one of philosophy’s most stridently non-philosophical – indeed, proudly ‘post-philosophical’ – others,” Osborne writes.12 But aesthetics, too, has been full of post-philosophical attitudes, actually, besides its interdisciplinary nature, in Europe, for a long time. Think of the Italian mix of aesthetics and semiotics that Umberto Eco already pioneered (and, e.g. Omar Calabrese followed), and in countries like Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland, being open-minded and working out a broad view based on classical humanities with interests in new cultural formations has long been a norm. One can say that the Americans are finally finding their way to how aesthetics is done in Europe. Cultural studies in Uppsala (Sweden), when I studied there in the late 1990s (I am still thankful to Lars-Olof Åhlberg’s courses), was exactly what the comeback of humanities is now in the United States. There is nothing new to it for us here, or in many places in Asia or South America. The wave in America is producing great new scholars, like Ngai, though, whose work I enjoy very much. Aesthetics, in many areas of (continental) Europe, raises multi-methodological and multi-cultural associations. In surprisingly many places, it has been and is possible to study aesthetics as its own discipline, without the pressure from philosophers in other fields or having to work in the margins of literature and art history departments. The discipline of aesthetics has often been a bit like cultural studies, and aestheticians have collaborated with anthropologists, disciplines in language and culture (Japanology, South Asian Studies), and other forms of art research. Universities in Europe have often also had a discipline which has been called in the local language something like cultural theory, which has always meant a broad view of what can be done methodologically to understand the culture (I have lectured in a few places like this in Latvia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Finland, and Italy) – but aesthetics has often been a key discipline in the mix. For example, in these departments and programs that study culture, aesthetics has often been considered as a field that binds

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together disciplines. Its nature has so been synthetising and its framework is open-minded, although still philosophical. In every small country in Europe, there have been excellent scholars who have – this is the old way – published in their own often small language or, for example, German. Only some of them have so far been found by AngloAmerican cultural studies. When today, we who are relatively young and have mastered English, as our world is totally marinated in its dominance, enter the international scene, we absurdly encounter categories and clashes that are British and American, and we then find our way in this field interestingly often with the help of our own classics, written in the way today’s American new humanities people write. Teddy Brunius (Sweden), Jan Mukarovsky (Czechoslovakia), Karel Teige (Czechoslovakia), and Henry Parland (Finland) all wrote in small languages. Mikhail Bakhtin and Antonio Gramsci wrote in bigger ones (Russian, Italian). Mukarovsky, Gramsci, and Bakhtin have of course famously even gained a name in cultural studies. They all were foremost interdisciplinary, but they have not been shy to openly deal with and base their thinking on aesthetics as part of their approach. What is interesting is the history and change in the role of aesthetics here. With roots in Mukarovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin, often the Prague School, too – a key figure is Roman Jakobson who turned linguistics into cultural theory – or, for example, Gramsci’s Marxism, classics of cultural sociology like Simmel or art theorists of various kinds, artists and art historians, the European scene of aesthetics could be considered the original cultural studies, without in any way debasing the great work done in the Birmingham school and its afterwaves. Operating in Brno, Bologna, Tartu (where Jury Lotman worked), various cities in Germany, or Aarhus, Helsinki, or the Netherlands, aesthetics in this sense is half-philosophy, half-open dialogue with cultural theory, cultural semiotics, and whatever approach that shows what culture is, what art is, from anthropology to sociology, to make sense on a meta-level about issues that could be called aesthetic in one way or another. To really understand Slavoj Zizek’s work, for example, I think one has to understand this tradition that has been a key feature of the Eastern European academy from the days of the formalists and the Prague School, or the Italian, where people like the semiotician Eco and the philosopher Gianni Vattimo have studied and taught side by side. And it is not that I’d here appropriate semiotics to be aesthetics, it is just that it has been so mixed that you can interpret these schools, thinkers, and movements in both ways. How do we make people in Anglophone cultural studies more informed about international academia and/or aesthetics? First of all, we non-Anglophone aestheticians, or we who just work in an interdisciplinary field internationally, of course, need to better understand our bullies. They have gone

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through weird and hard periods with their approach. Also, if you have a lot of power, and you live in a very privileged environment, it can be hard to understand others. Men don’t listen enough to females, white people don’t listen enough to brown people, people with good health do not spend much time thinking about people with health problems, and economically privileged people don’t listen enough to poor people. It is that simple, partly. We aestheticians need to find ways to communicate our position and what we have to offer. Being negative will not help. Rita Felski wrote in 2005 that ‘bashing cultural studies is a popular pastime’.13 Cultural studies is one of those tag words that are sometimes used negatively, and as a cultural philosopher and aesthetician, I have, based on my experiences in working mainly in these circles, noted the same as Rita Felski, who has written, that cultural studies has been a negative generic term among conservatives, too, in the Anglophone world, although outside of the Anglophone world I have not seen a fight between these two poles. Actually, I myself have only met enthusiastic people doing traditional humanities, who are happy about new ways of applying humaniora, and I have only heard negative comments on cultural studies based on today’s power-relations and ignorance, but, for sure, historically it sounds like something that we who build dialogue should be careful to not mess with. Felski discusses the role of cultural studies as negative among disciplinary traditionalists, something that has shared this role with postmodernism and deconstruction, which many people seemed to hate before cultural studies, as Michael Bérubé notes.14 What Felski, interestingly, discusses as aesthetics, seems to be pretty much beauty, pleasure, style, and form – which is not a commonplace list of concepts in contemporary aesthetics, but something that we consider to be ‘old school’ (although nothing to be against). An interesting note is that Felski, as she defends cultural studies, mentions that there is a lot of interest in the work done in ‘Australia, Canada, South Korea, South Africa, and Indeed the United States’.15 The only country mentioned that is not Anglophone is South Korea, although one can note that South Korea was in some sense culturally half-colonialised after the Second World War by the United States. Interestingly, what she writes about cultural studies, that the intent was actually to broaden up what could be discussed for example in disciplines like aesthetics, is the same as had been done since the 1960s in European aesthetics. Felski might also be right in saying that those who criticise cultural studies have often not really read it well enough, but just attack it based on assumptions about what it is.16 I can imagine that this could have been the case – as it definitely also is with the attacks on aesthetics. At the same time, I would like to mention that my experience from international academia is, that even in Anglophone countries, where people usually speak and read only one

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language, the traditionalists have been easier to encounter for me, as they are also interested in non-Anglophone readings, and they have been more eager to learn from non-US or non-British approaches, even Indian philosophy, that I myself have applied to issues of contemporary art and culture. Scholars in cultural studies have had a much more closed idea of the world methodologically. Cultural studies often landed in English departments. Is this the reason for its dismissive attitude toward non-Anglophone theory? Michael Bérubé writes in his introduction to The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (2005) how cultural studies was at least in the 1990s seen to just continue the tradition of English departments – and how this was wrong at least in the American context – claiming that this is not true, as English departments were turning less cultural. John Frow writes that “the ‘desire called cultural studies’ was formed in the principled rejection of the established aesthetic fields of literary studies, film studies, and, less cogently, art history,”17 and for sure, not only in Britain and the United States was there a need for this kind of change and opening up, what the Prague School thinkers, for example, did in the 1940s, Umberto Eco in the late 1950s and Jury Lotman and his peers in Tartu in the 1960s. Semiotics/semiology, hand-in-hand with aesthetics (which has dominated, like in Eco’s work on art and popular culture), has actually been one of the homes of interdisciplinary work, and in many universities, there have been departments of semiotics where this type of work has been done. But like I said, many semioticians have been as much aestheticians. For us it also looks like it is the work of aestheticians which is the base for cultural studies – but they are not mentioned as aestheticians. Jan Mukarovsky, Gilles Deleuze, and many others who are quoted as being French or semiologists were aestheticians, without a doubt. It seems to be an ongoing work to hide aesthetics from the history and roots of cultural studies. What is called aesthetics in the Anglophone debate, then, is mostly analytic aesthetics or some sort of formalism of the Bell/Fry type – this is how it seems to be when, for example, Krieger talks about its ‘Aristotelian’ and formalist nature.18 As Bérubé notes, though, John Frow has claimed neatly that cultural studies is not as far from aesthetics as its scholars believe,19 and this is something I of course welcome. This is how most of us aestheticians see it. Michael P. Clark’s edited volume Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today (2000) nails a sort of presence for aesthetics, too, in literary theories, which goes against this grain, and Clark himself mentions the aesthetician Walter Benjamin’s work on popular culture and politics.20 Felski says that cultural studies did not take aesthetics away, but argued for multiple aesthetics, that is, for multiple different ways of approaching it,21

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and, for sure, this turn in cultural studies has greatly affected aesthetics too – but even here it is good to remember how much this happened in aesthetics, too (think of the names mentioned above). She also acknowledges some of the continental European roots of Anglophone cultural studies, by noting how Jan Mukarovsky worked in the cultural studies way before cultural studies.22 Felski also, beautifully, remarks that, for example, in the work of Hebdige (who we often quote in aesthetics of popular culture) aesthetics was always part of his way of viewing popular culture phenomena.23 She also writes that ‘even a cursory glance at the academic literature makes it clear that many philosophers of art no longer have much faith in an ideal of pure and contemplative detachment’.24 I agree. Why the clash, then, the way it is portrayed? What is the aesthetics in cultural studies? Bérubé says, for example, that it is about understanding the role of popular culture in the formation of subjectivity.25 I would keep the more traditional meaning of the concept and say that it is the meta-understanding of arts and culture, our way of interpreting and experiencing them. Of course, as already indicated at the beginning, institutional boundaries and identities are hard to catch, and, for example, Felski is right in saying that, for instance, cultural sociology and anthropology are disciplines that (also actually for aesthetics, as one looks, for example, at the work of Michael Taussig and Elisabeth Povinelli) somehow can do pretty much the same thing as cultural studies – and that there is a great deal of cross-pollination. It is just important to note how in different countries, different universities, and in different languages this takes place in so many different ways that it is impossible to keep an eye on the whole. You must know when you are talking about regional issues or issues closed to one particular language, and when you are into disciplines and approaches globally. Felski is right in saying that cultural studies has kind of become a little diffused as a term, and broader than its real scholarly core,26 but this helps it to be accurate, as we know that cultural studies in different places are very different. I hope this leads cultural studies to find its historical forerunners in aesthetics and to see our contemporary work, too. It is also good if the gates to Anglophone cultural studies are slowly opening up for global thinking. Here, it is a good reminder that aesthetics should be thought of in a more diffuse way, too, as its scholarly role is broad and more mixed than many people seem to realise. In 2018 Ben Highmore asked in his ‘Aesthetics Matters: Writing and Cultural Studies’ what it could mean if cultural studies were seen as having produced a new approach to aesthetics27. He acknowledged that cultural studies have as one of its central characteristics the migration from other disciplines and the experience that one can write with a new voice within its framework

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– and, for example, in mixed registers (personal, non-personal, etc.), among many other features which could be described as ways of contextualising aesthetics and its role in various ways. While Highmore does not pose this to be a feature only of cultural studies, and while later forms of doing aesthetics inside the discipline of aesthetics might have also become inspired by cultural studies, it is, however, remarkable that these notions label mine and many other people’s experience of aesthetics, too. It is just that in cultural studies not many people know that aesthetics is done in the same way. Reading Wolfgang Welsch, Arnold Berleant, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Richard Shusterman, Madalina Diaconu, Gianni Vattimo, Kathleen Higgins, Carole Talon-Hugon, or Sianne Ngai sounds just like the description above. It is just that they might place a bit more weight on aesthetic issues than most aesthetically driven scholars of cultural studies, and that they take the theoretical considerations a bit further, not desiring to create models or tools for study. Here might lie one of the most important differences the fields still have. The more complex theoretical interest, which does not stop at naming and modeling phenomena, but asking yet more questions until there is no certainty, might be the aspect that now separates the disciplines more than anything else. While showing, how American cultural studies had, besides British Cultural Studies, another ‘root’ in John Dewey’s and his followers’ pragmatism (i.e. American philosophy and aesthetics), James W. Carey warned the profession (of cultural studies) already in 1996 about the truth content, which some critiques of cultural studies contained – critiques which should not just be called off as witch hunt. He hoped that the discipline (of Anglo-American cultural studies) could be developed with less reductionism, which in the worst case made everything just, for example, ‘ideology’.28 This culturally ‘flat’ way of thinking, though, won – I’d say – and this might be the main reason for the very narrow methodological interdisciplinarity, that today’s cultural studies embody. This is at least how we coming from aesthetics and cultural philosophy often see it.

CONCLUSION From our smaller discipline, we are able to see a larger picture. The smaller ones always know the bigger ones. But what can be done with this relationship? We at least accept – most of us – that cultural studies, its most theoretical margin, and sometimes the base for many great applied studies of theory, is partly doing the same work, and this could lead to fruitful collaboration and dialogue. Let us hope this chapter also stimulates some of those potentials in scholars of cultural studies. What needs to be done is the same thing that haunts white people who don’t listen to non-white, or males who don’t listen to females, or who become angry when someone

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who feels overshadowed asks them to listen for a moment and to reflect on their power and privileges. Look at what we do, too. Let’s hope this chapter gives at least some scholars a good start in understanding the relationship between these two disciplines, while of course, both are many different things, as already noted – and not monoliths. Writing this has forced me to work on some institutional intuitions that cannot be backed up with hard data, but I hope the inquiry has raised questions and reflections necessary for the development of both aesthetics and cultural studies, which I think, as already mentioned, pretty much often do the same thing in nearly the same way.

NOTES 1. More on both the history of rap scholarship and power-relations, e.g. the relationship of the aesthetics of rap and cultural studies in Max Ryynänen and Petteri Enroth, ‘Pioneers, Postmodernisms and Aesthetic Experience: A Brief History of Aesthetic Approaches to Rap Music’, forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Global Rap, edited by Richard Longborough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). And as we are here talking about the way aestheticians often get dismissed, I need to add special thanks to Richard for inviting us to write for his anthology. 2. Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge 2000), 1. 3. See e.g., the work of Morten Kyndrup. 4. Douglas Kellner “Cultural Studies and Philosophy: An Intervention.” Https​:// pa​​ges​.g​​seis.​​ucla.​​edu​/f​​acult​​y​/kel​​lner/​​essay​​s​/cul​​tural​​studi​​es​phi​​losop​​hy​.pd​f (2008). 5. Adrian Kvovacka, “What Kind Of Aesthetics Are We Looking For And Why?” in Aesthetics in Dialogue: Applying Philosophy of Art in a Global World, edited by Zoltan Somhegyi and Max Ryynänen, 263–276 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020). 6. See e.g. Jozef Kovalcik and Max Ryynänen, “The History of the Aesthetics of Popular Culture,” in Aesthetics of Popular Culture, edited by Jozef Kovalcik and Max Ryynänen, 14–49 (Bratislava: Slovart, 2014). 7. John Fiske accentuates this neatly in John Fiske, “British Cultural Studies and Television,” in What is Cultural Studies? A Reader, edited by John Storey (London – New York: Arnold, 1996), 116. 8. Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation (and of course all his 1960s lifework) might sound too late, thinking about the way British cultural studies developed from the 1950s onwards, but the process which led to its way of changing Western leftist culture had deep roots in the older philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which made culture a central issue in Marxism already after the Second World War. Marcuse mediated race, class, and gender not just into Marxist thought, but through his students, like Angela Davis, and also into the everyday revolts of the late twentieth century, which changed in many respects the Western world. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

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9. Jen Webb, “Cultural Studies and Aesthetics: Pleasure and Politics,” in Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinarity and Translation, edited by Stefan Herbrechter, 147–157 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 10. Fiske, “British Cultural Studies and Television,” 115. 11. Caitlin Cowley, “What is Cultural Studies?” www​.caitlincawley​.com https:// static1​.squarespace​.com​/static​/5cc​c61d​0da5​0d34​840337ea1​/t​/5cc​da1e​34e1​7b63​ e436363e3​/1556980197352​/Website​_Cawley​+TheoryEssay​.pdf (2022). 12. Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory, 1–2. 13. Rita Felski, “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies,” in The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, edited by Michael Bérubé, 28–43 (Malden: Blackwell, 2005). Reference on page 28. 14. Michael Bérubé, “Introduction: Engaging the Aesthetic,” in The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, edited by Michael Bérubé, 1–27 (Malden: Blackwell: 2005). Reference on page 5. 15. Felski, “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies,” 31. 16. Felski, “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies,” 30. 17. John Frow, “Literature in Cultural Studies,” in The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, edited by Michael Bérubé, 44–57 (Malden: Blackwell, 2005). Reference on page 44. 18. See Murray Krieger, “My Travels With the Aesthetic,” in Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today, edited by Michael P. Clark, 208–214 (University of California Press, 2000). Reference on page 12. Krieger finds Dewey, again a major name in aesthetics, to somehow escape “aesthetics,” which is weird for us aestheticians, for whom Dewey is very central – and who have usually never even read Bell. 19. Bérubé, “Introduction,” 17. 20. Michael P. Clark, Ed., Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 12. 21. Felski, “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies,” 25–35. 22. Felski, “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies,” 39. See also Jan Mukarovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Fact (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1970). 23. Felski, “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies,” 33. 24. Felski, “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies,” 34. 25. Bérubé, “Introduction,” 6. 26. Felski, “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies,” 32. 27. Ben Highmore, “Aesthetic Matters: Writing and Cultural Studies,” Cultural Studies 32, no. 2 (2018): 240–260. Reference on page 240. 28. James W. Carey, “Overcoming Resistance to Cultural Studies,” in What is Cultural Studies? A Reader, edited by John Storey, 61–74 (London – New York: Arnold, 1996). Reference on page 70.

Chapter 9

Aesthetics and Art History Zoltán Somhegyi

Erwin Panofsky, who definitely belonged to those art historians who were very well trained in philosophy and aesthetics, famously formulated in his 1940 text titled The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline that: When we call the connoisseur a laconic art historian and the art historian a loquacious connoisseur, the relation between the art historian and the art theorist may be compared to that between two neighbors who have the right of shooting over the same district, while one of them owns the gun and the other all the ammunition. Both parties would be well advised if they realized this condition of their partnership.1

Despite the fact that Panofsky’s study is more than eighty years old, it has definitely remained one of the most precise and succinct modes of describing the relation of these two areas, the theoretical and historical investigation of art, and thus the two disciplines, aesthetics and art history. Needless to say, both disciplines can be defined in diverse modes, and thus describe their nature and establish their research interests differently. Aesthetics, for example, is sometimes, and mistakenly, used as a sort of synonym for philosophy of art. The two may overlap in certain parts, but not fully coincide. Here – and for the sake of this very chapter focusing on the examination of the relationship between aesthetics and art history – I consider aesthetics as a discipline interested in (also) art and in the work of art, a study area focusing more on the theoretical aspects of art, and less on the historical ones. Naturally, aesthetics can also be interpreted much broadly, as we can see in the texts of both classical and contemporary theoreticians who regard aesthetics as concerning sensuous cognition in general, and in this way, they move beyond the sphere of art itself. Regarding the other term, ‘art history’ is used here in its classical sense, that is, designating the scholarship of analysing works of visual arts (e.g. painting, 141

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drawing, sculpture, multiplied graphic works, etc.), of architecture, and of applied arts – that is, the traditional core areas of research of this discipline. Of course, all other branches of art have their own history (like the history of literature or of music) but that is beyond the scope of the present chapter. Obviously, there could be many approaches to and modes of discussing the relationship between aesthetics and art history, and many of these would definitely exceed the length of my current text, and would hence rather deserve an own book. Therefore, from these several possibilities of the discussion of the relations of the two disciplines here, I will concentrate on what we can learn from the (pre)history of their interconnectedness, as well as focus on the current and future benefits of them continuing to stay so. While investigating these questions, I would like to show that these benefits or gains for both professions will be especially evident if our main aim is to better understand the work of art itself. In other words, art history and aesthetics have been and still are closely connected, and – as I will argue in this chapter – they should continue to actively collaborate in the future too, even despite some earlier and occasionally still present attempts of strictly setting them apart from each other and thus diminishing the potential in their active co-operation. This interconnection between the historical and philosophical investigation of visual arts, architecture, and applied arts is therefore evident not only from even a brief overview of the history of the two disciplines (e.g. as I will also refer to that later in this chapter, through the scholarly activity of many of the key figures in the history of these disciplines), but it also continues to be highly beneficial for both, in particular to tackle many of the questions and issues raised by both contemporary art and contemporary reading of older art. A similar emphasis on the closeness between art history and aesthetics – taking into consideration both their own disciplinary history and their tasks and responsibilities – is what was claimed also by James Elkins, who organised an influential discussion session and edited an often-quoted volume on the relationship of the two disciplines: I can’t imagine two disciplines that are better suited to one another, more securely historically intertwined, than art history and aesthetics. The two share common traditions regarding the ways that artworks create meaning, and they even share notions of rebellion against some of those meanings.2

The inextricability of the two disciplines was highlighted by several other participants in the seminar organised by Elkins, including Thierry de Duve, who even went a step further when claiming during the discussion that: Art history without aesthetics in inconceivable to me because art history is first of all constituted by the evidential record of previous aesthetic judgements.

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In other words, by their jurisprudence: at once the inventory of what is on the record as art, and the prudence that helps aesthetic judges take account of the judgements of their predecessors. We cannot judge out of our personal judgements alone. We have to take into account the history of other people’s judgements – which is another word for tradition.3

However, the same interconnection naturally does not mean that there are not any obvious and inevitable differences in the foci and main questions of these study fields. And it does not mean either that any of the two should ‘surrender’ to the other, or, just the contrary, to become a privileged mode of enquiry. In the following I aim to further investigate the history and the challenges of this fine balance, and also show that continuing and further developing the fruitful ‘partnership’ (in Panofsky’s term) between art history and aesthetics is also essential if we want to have efficient modes of keeping works of visual art, architecture, and design – both classical and contemporary works – relevant and meaningful for us and for future generations. The fascinating results and still actual approaches, methods, questions, and proposed answers that these two scholarships have accumulated over the centuries are thus inevitably crucial. Important is however the question of how to maintain this partnership, and how to develop the knowledge and knowledge production that can inspire scholars to learn from each other. Taking the above quote from Panofsky’s key study as a guideline for my present investigation, first, we should see what is exactly the ‘same district’ that the art historian and the art theorist are hunting on? What are they chasing there? What is it that they want to find, to find out more about, to know, to analyse, and to understand better? Naturally, several possible answers could be developed that fit in this scheme, that is, what represents the best of that that stands in the centre of the examination of art history and aesthetics. One could argue that what they are ‘hunting’ is ‘art in general’, so it would be ‘art’ that scholars of the two disciplines scrutinise, hence without highlighting any further specifications. Others would perhaps put the artists in the very focus, arguing that it is their activity, broadly construed, that we shall examine. Again others could define the world of art as the target of art history and aesthetics, and possibly also add to this the category of the art world, which would thus also result in analysing not only the creative act of the artist in itself but also the changing institutional relations of art. While all this could be relevant and viable readings of what historians and theoreticians of art are ‘shooting’ at, nevertheless I think the most comprehensive – and, at the same time, perhaps also most obvious – answer is that historians and theoreticians of art are, in the end, targeting the work of art. Although it may seem selfevident as a proposal, still, as also Gottfried Boehm has warned us more than

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three decades ago, that if we ignore this, we not only miss our actual goal but risk other unwanted consequences too. In his point of view: As a philosopher, one can also get right too quickly – if one does not even get involved in the face of the many works of art and the resistance they contain. This being right and staying right has become stale in the meantime; it is partly responsible for the perpetual shadowy existence that aesthetics currently leads as a philosophical discipline. Its decline began when philosophy abandoned the form of the system and its universal claims. In the process, it lost the function that had made it great since the late 18th century. It gained a new one only hesitantly. It was an obstacle-laden path (e.g. for Heidegger or Adorno) to do what seems to be obvious: to accept that art exists only under respective conditions, i.e. as a work.4

What’s more, if we accept this focus, we will then have another benefit, perhaps less ‘theoretical’, but rather ‘methodological’ benefit. With the work of art standing at the centre of our interest, it encompasses all other approaches and ‘levels’ in the research. Scholars in their examination would naturally never rule out any other, further aspects or broader viewpoints and diverse levels of investigation that can help them in their exploration. Using the work of art as a basic point of departure and a reference to which researchers of the two disciplines, aesthetics and art history, turn their attention to this also means that (ideally) all the other research fields, neighbouring areas, auxiliary studies, and sub-disciplines of art history and art theory, with their special and specialised methods, approaches and interest can really efficiently contribute to the investigation of numerous further aspects regarding essential features of the object of art, its effects, and function(ing). This myriad of possible other foci in the examination can be both ‘narrower’ and ‘broader’ than the singular work itself, or, as I hinted at it above with the word ‘level’, we can say that they go ‘under’ and ‘above’ the actual level of the piece of art. Just think of a few examples to illustrate this – without naturally trying to make a full list of all the relevant (sub)disciplines and areas of research. The social history of art scrutinises not only the artwork in itself but also the artists and their public throughout the changing social, historical, and political contexts. Criticism of art evaluates artistic production, both in order to reveal further aspects of the piece that assists its aesthetic judgement and, at the same time – by bringing it closer to the audience – it often helps shape the (larger) public’s opinion of the artwork and of recent trends in art production, either praising the works’ qualities or raising awareness of their flaws. Iconography and iconology, by taking one aspect from the complexity of the work, that is, its subject-matter, aid art historical research in identifying motifs and reconstructing the meaning of, for example, a painting or a sculpture. Philosophy of art – that is, as mentioned above, occasionally, and erroneously, used as a

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sort of synonym for aesthetics – is also observing, among other possible study fields, the nature of art itself, for example, through the reasoning that attempts to analyse the phenomenon of art. Museology develops the comprehension and expertise of creating the ideal circumstances of categorising, storing, and displaying artefacts, including those with exceptional historical, artistic, and aesthetic values, as well as strengthening the role of both classical museums and other institutes in society. Art education and art pedagogy engage in finding efficient ways of disseminating values of art to future generations and stimulating creativity. Though the list could be continued for a long, I think already these few examples illustrate that these types of neighbouring disciplines and auxiliary study fields and sub-disciplines all have essential roles in the complex and full investigation of art, artists, their creations, hence the work and the working of art. Aesthetics and art history can only benefit from relying on their results too, and, as we have seen, forms of investigation can include many approaches both within and beyond the actual piece, therefore, the work of art could be a common denominator that includes and refers to the other factors. However, exactly through the complexity of the phenomenon as well as due to the variety in the details of methodology that the two disciplines can offer, all the above also implies that if we put the piece of art in the focus of interest, then the collaboration of aesthetics with art history, that is, the philosophically inclined and historically focused readings of the piece is inevitable for a better and fuller understanding. There are however naturally also further aspects in the investigation, as we can feel that perhaps the starting question itself had further elements too. When exploring the details of the collaborative ‘shooting over the same district’ of art history and aesthetics, the question is not only the target but also the modes of collaboration. Hence it is not only the what that matters, but also the how. If art history and aesthetics have, naturally, different capabilities, then how does this partnership actually look like? Since the prey is the same, the question is not only what it is, but it is just as important how to get it, and what to do with it once it is got? More precisely: how to optimise the potential in the partnership of the historical and theoretical investigation of art, and how to put the collaboration in the service of the real benefit, that is, achieving the real gain of understanding more of the artwork? In order to answer the above question, and to see the details of this optimisation of the collaboration between aesthetics and art history, it is important to see that it is not something that we have to create some time in the future, but it already has a robust history. Therefore, in a certain sense, there is nothing new in it, nevertheless, when consciously turning to further examine the still-partly-hidden potentials that are in this partnership, we can find very intricate cases. The parallel investigation of historical and theoretical aspects

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of art is actually what motivated many professionals, hence thinkers, artists, researchers, and scholars both before and since the birth of the independent academic disciplines of art history and aesthetics in the eighteenth century. In this way, the interconnectedness of the theoretical and historical approaches, and that they mutually support and rely on each other is also evident from the fact that many of the ‘heroes’ of thinking and writing about art are shared, that is, their crucial importance is mutually claimed in art historical and aesthetic discourse. Without attempting to make a fully comprehensive list, let’s just remember some of these figures from the history – in this sense common history – of both disciplines, actually, and as mentioned, even before their institutionalisation. The names are naturally among the best-known ones in the profession(s), however, we may not have thought of them from this point of view, that is, as ones whose theoretical achievements underpin the closeness of the two fields and thus illustrate the inextricability of the two disciplines. For example, if the terms existed in his time, and if we had to ‘categorise’ Vitruvius, would he be considered more as an ‘architecture historian’ or an ‘aesthetician of architecture’? As it is well known, he was a Roman architect from the first century BC and wrote a highly influential text, the Ten Books on Architecture.5 The books, naturally in modern editions easily fitting in one single volume, are of pivotal significance, and not only because it is the only work written exclusively on the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of one of the branches of art (architecture) that has survived in its full integrity from the entire Antiquity (other texts we have either inherited in fragments or are not only on questions of art). It is also important because it covers a really broad range of subject-matters, many of which today we would definitely not find in a book on architecture, for example, astrology or water organs. Therefore, our above question of how to define the ‘profession’ of Vitruvius (historian or theoretician of architecture) is practically senseless, and not only because of the anachronism of the terms. Besides this anachronism, naturally, there is also little point in asking this because one could easily argue that, in the end, he was a practicing architect, hence obviously he needed to know both the historical aspects of architecture and the questions concerning its aesthetic qualities. Nevertheless, even if the question may at first seem strange, it can direct our attention to the fact that Vitruvius’ work, the Ten Books on Architecture is a work of someone not focusing (and not even feeling the need to focus) on only one aspect of his subject and thus diminishing the development of the other aspect, and it is exactly this that makes his work highly relevant today for both art – and, more specifically, architecture – historians and for scholars working on (the history of) aesthetics, both of architecture and general aesthetics. For the parts on aesthetics, we can remember Vitruvius’ analyses on the elements of architecture, with

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direct explications of ideas and principles that are essentially relevant in the aesthetic discourse, for example, book 1, chapters 2 and 3 on the elements of architecture, or regarding the proportion of temples, in book 3, chapter 1. At the same time, his investigations on the history of the origins of certain motifs (e.g. about the Caryatids, book 1, chapter 1) are of great importance for architecture historians and art historians. This would definitely make it difficult if one had to choose which (modern) discipline he would be closer to. Another example from about one and a half millennia later: Giorgio Vasari. Is his opus magnum, The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (first edition 1550, second, enlarged in 1568)6 more relevant for the (pre)history of aesthetics or art history? Do today’s aestheticians or art historians benefit more from reading his book? On the one hand, one could argue that he definitely counts as a founding father of art history, among others by his attempt of creating a historical account of art, even if he still did that through a series of biographies, hence putting the artist both in the limelight and thus as the basic organisational element of the structure of the book too. Nevertheless, he managed to create an orderly system that provided an answer to a question of the historical and stylistic changes in the art of the investigated era, that is, that of between the late Mediaeval and Mannerist art. His concept of the three phases of art – ‘maniera vecchia’ (old manner, approx. the thirteenth to fourteenth century), ‘maniera secca’ (dry manner, approx. the fifteenth century), and ‘maniera perfetta’ (perfect manner, the sixteenth century, hence his own age)7 – seemed to be working to describe the stylistic change and the development of certain pictorial solutions in the given period. Therefore, this historical point of view in his writings could contribute counting him being closer to art history. On the other hand, aesthetics definitely gains just as much when not discontinuing the examination of Vasari’s texts, as there are numerous ideas and still highly pertinent considerations on both the theory and nature of art. Suffice to recall his enquiry of the complexity of the concepts like that of disegno and imitazione, and his search for a more profound understanding of creativity and innovation. We can also remember how in his historical system the grades of imitation will define the various modes and hence styles in the different subsequent eras. Through all this he had then opened new perspectives of looking at art, or, we can say that besides the historical observations he initiated a rather selfreflexive perspective of art. This is what also Christopher S. Wood claimed regarding the Renaissance author: ‘Vasari lifts art out of worldly history; art now has its own history, the history of its self-realisation’.8 And it will be precisely this aspect that is essential for a theoretical investigation of some crucial questions of art, a conscious observation of its changing nature as well as of the possible reasons for such changes.

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Let’s see a third example from two centuries later: regarding Johann Joachim Winckelmann we again seem to have the same undecidability as what we had concerning Vitruvius and Vasari when we are attempting to pinpoint his ‘main field of research’, as it is called today. At first, it would be tempting to consider him an art historian or even ‘the first’ art historian, especially due to the fact that he was the first one to use the term itself: his 1764 book is titled History of the Art of Antiquity (Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums).9 Regarding the ‘birth’ of the discipline – if one wants to consider it as such, based on the above reasoning – it is worth mentioning that Winckelmann founded art history or if you prefer, paved the way for its becoming a modern, autonomous and academic discipline in practically the same time as Baumgarten did something similar with (or for) aesthetics. As it is well known, the (pre)history that has led to this eighteenth-century institutionalisation of art has been thoroughly studied, for example, in the classical text by Paul Oskar Kristeller.10 It is also worth mentioning that recently there have also been attempts to critically re-examine the global applicability of this ‘Central European’ system of art, for example, by Max Ryynänen.11 Coming back to Winckelmann however, in the History of the Art of Antiquity he surveyed the changes of styles in ancient art, in chronological order. This approach by itself – that is, of the chronological discussion – would still make his project similar to Vasari’s. However, there are important differences, the most important of which is the way the historical changes in art are analysed and assessed. One of these is that when writing on ancient art, Winckelmann does not focus on individual artists, taking their life and oeuvre as the basic unit through which to discuss history. Obviously, this is also explainable by the fact that in the analysed period, in Antiquity, significantly less artist names and documented artists’ oeuvre have survived compared to the late Middle Ages and especially to the Renaissance and Mannerism. The other major difference is that in Winckelmann’s view, the history of the surveyed era is not merely a development towards perfection, as we saw in the case of Vasari, but after reaching a peak, it starts its decline.12 This latter aspect obviously also explains why he suggests a sort of return to the ideals of the classical Greek period. However, what he exactly suggests had been, and still is, often misunderstood. When reading beyond the title of his often-quoted text On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755) which has become just as influential as the History of the Art of Antiquity, one can easily see that what he urges is not simply to imitate the Greek works themselves or to merely copy the styles or forms of expressions of these Greek pieces of art from the classical period. Winckelmann’s ideas are more sophisticated and more precise than what this simplification (or even banalisation) would imply, that is, he is not arguing in favour of that superficial approach of some Neo-Classical artists (and of more recent ones),

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that already through a mere ‘imitation’ of a certain classical form the result will automatically be successful. In other words, while many of the contemporary artists of his age hoped to be on an equal level with Antiquity simply by imitating Greek works, Winckelmann suggests something else. He recommends profoundly understanding the Greek masters’ ‘working method’: the way they have elaborated their ideals from the directly perceivable. In Winckelmann’s words: These frequent occasions of observing nature, taught the Greeks to go on still farther. They began to form certain general ideas of beauty, with regard to the proportions of the inferior parts, as well as of the whole frame: these they raised above the reach of mortality, according to the superior model of some ideal nature.13

Naturally, here my task is not to analyse Winckelmann’s approach to Antiquity, nor to assess Neo-Classical art in detail. I just wanted to again highlight that such observations by Winckelmann would definitely make us think that they belonged more to the (modern) field of aesthetics. The question of idea and ideal in art, of meliorating Nature, as well as issues of selection, imitation and thus idealisation all lead to philosophical approaches to art (too) besides the historical statements seen above. Therefore, I just want to draw attention to the fact that such complex examinations of equally complex issues again result in a theoretical oeuvre that is not that easy to categorise or to put either in the ‘box’ of art history or of aesthetics. Obviously, these important figures (Vitruvius, Vasari, and Winckelmann) are just three examples from a much longer list. We could easily reconstruct a similar cross-disciplinary interest, and, through this, historical and philosophical perspectives from which to analyse art in general and artworks in particular, through the writings of, say, Pliny the Elder, Leon Battista Alberti, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jacob Burckhardt, or Georg Simmel (and many others, more recent and contemporary scholars, to be quoted a bit later in this chapter), to name just a few, and indifferently from the fact that these figures are not, ‘strictly speaking’ art historians or aestheticians. Given the fact that we do have important scholarly bodies of texts and entire academic oeuvres of fascinating research that scrutinise art and artworks from different angles, I think, as mentioned above, that it is worth concentrating less on earlier and present attempts to alienate these approaches from each other. Instead, we should focus more on what the practitioners of the two disciplines can learn from each other. Such mutual inspiration would not mean denying the own disciplinary past, more like trying to find ways of studying the considerations, claims, and achievements of ‘the other side’, and combining them with the own results, in order to strengthen the analyses. It is not overly ambitious to imagine that such work and working methods will

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then lead to more efficient results: more elaborated and holistic interpretation and evaluation of the piece of art, as well as a more complex awareness of its effect and ‘working’. Needless to say, there are numerous methods – and many more could be developed – of how to actually proceed with such cross-disciplinary examinations of artworks. Some may argue that first classifying basic (art) historical facts and then, building on this strong basis can help when formulating aesthetic-related claims of the piece. Others would perhaps prefer proceeding the other way around: delving directly into certain theoretical questions and evaluative statements – regarding, for example, meaning and significance, quality, and value, the particular (aesthetic) features and properties of the work that may make it an exceptional piece from among many other, partly similar ones, or characteristics that distinguish it from everyday objects, etc. – and then, once these properties examined and assessed, turning the focus of the analyses towards the art historical perspectives, like all the aspects of the connection of the work in question with others before (and after) it. Just to open a side-track, as a matter of fact, any of the above two approaches may be familiar to us from the practice of art criticism. Although occasionally this important field is disdained by the ‘serious’, academic world, sometimes even labelling it as a form of ‘cheapening’ the discourses of the two disciplines and accusing it of using their results in an applied context, like in (art) journalism. This sort of disrespect towards practitioners of art criticism is however not fair, for at least two reasons. One reason is that art criticism can be just as ‘intellectual’ and ‘heavyweight’ as academic art history or aesthetics – not to forget that many important scholars of art history and aesthetics are often active as critics, the most obvious example is Arthur C. Danto. The other reason why the above disrespect towards art criticism is undeserved is given the fact that art criticism often serves to disseminate critical and historical evaluation of artworks, artists, exhibitions, etc. for example, through newspapers, TV, websites, blogs, podcasts, etc., often reaching a significantly broader public, if it was criticised by academia for ‘trading’ or diluting the science(s) of art, it was an exaggeratedly elitist and exclusivist standpoint of our disciplines, as if to say that art is not for everyone. Naturally, art criticism can be of higher or lower quality, bold or boring, innovative or shallow, revelatory or redundant, but, to be honest, the same could be said of the research of ‘classical’ and ‘pure’ aestheticians and historians of art. It is quality that matters, both in art and in analysing art, and then the form is practically secondary. Therefore, what I am claiming is that it often happens that texts that academic scholarship would automatically categorise (or even worse: reject) as ‘art criticism’ often courageously plunge into what I am arguing for here: synthesising considerations of art history and aesthetics when analysing works, using important reflections too (and of) both

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disciplines when positioning works of art compared to other pieces based on diverse categories and criteria when identifying indirect forerunners or direct influences and even scrutinising what effect the piece in question played on other, later ones, or when evaluating the importance and value of the creation. It will be exactly this that will then bring us back from the above sidetrack regarding the status of art criticism to our main discussion in this chapter. When advocating for a stronger collaboration between art history and aesthetics in better understanding art and artworks we should naturally not overlook that certain questions or problems can be answered easier and more efficiently with the methodology and from within the system of either art history or aesthetics. Hence, they shall keep their different abilities (in Panofsky’s words the gun and the ammunition), but, after successfully collaborating in hunting the prey, we should, ideally, not go a step backwards, and let one or the other discipline bring the entire game home. This is why, if we want to get the whole picture (pun partly intentional), then we shall find ways – and there are many ways that are fine – to efficiently combine the perspectives that both art history and aesthetics can offer, for the promised results that such co-operation might entail. It is precisely this that we can also learn from the disciplines’ (pre)history. Today we may not agree with every aspect of, for example, Vasari or Winckelmann anymore, or with each and every one of their assessments, statements, ideas, and approaches. Nevertheless, they have undeniably created a coherent system in which – or, we can say: seeing through which – the elements, that is, singular works and entire artist oeuvres, individual achievements and the full history (at least that of a chosen period) does ‘make sense’, and not only make sense, but evaluations, stylistic changes, quality and historicity are properly defined and explained. And, in my opinion, they could not have done that without actively seeking the answers with the help of historical and philosophical approaches to art.14 There are numerous other researchers whose work I consider great examples for this double or even multiple perspective. Again, just to name but a few to illustrate this, we can thus see a parallel interest in art historical and aesthetic questions, as well as the confident use of the methodology and toolkit of these two disciplines in the work of classical and contemporary scholars. Just remember, for example, Edgar Wind’s texts, especially his Art and Anarchy from 1963 (originally as a BBC lecture series in 1960), analysing a series of crucial issues in art and theory over the centuries with references to essential considerations both from art and aesthetic history.15 A perhaps even broader toolkit was applied by Arnold Gehlen in his 1960 book Zeit-Bilder, in which the German philosopher (otherwise, strictly speaking, neither an art historian nor an aesthetician) aimed at analysing classical Avant-Garde and mid-twentieth-century art with the help of art history, aesthetics, sociology, psychology, and philosophy.16 Turning towards contemporary scholars, the

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above line could be continued with, for example, Werner Busch’s exemplary analyses of seventeenth to nineteenth-century art, paying attention to historical details and relevant aesthetic and philosophical theoretical background of the period and the artist, like in the case of Caspar David Friedrich.17 The philosopher Arthur C. Danto and the art historian Hans Belting both go boldly beyond their original profession when examining phenomena in art and the art world, as well as when searching answers for the particularities in the history of art (and its history, i.e. art history writing).18 Michael Diers and Horst Bredekamp both successfully broaden their source material, including nonartistic visual sources, for a fuller, more thorough investigation and convincing explanation of how art in general and images (including media images) in particular work.19 Oskar Bätschmann developed the comprehensive method of analysing images through object-specific hermeneutics, thus combining research techniques of art historical scholarship with the meaning-centred interpretative methodology of philosophical hermeneutics. In all these mentioned cases – and innumerous other ones could be further quoted – there are thus followable examples of how to proceed with a conscious and active synthesising of diverse perspectives, especially those of (classical) art history and aesthetics.20 So far in this chapter I have mainly focused on the earlier and by now classical cases of interconnections from the histories of art history and aesthetics, except for the above few examples of contemporary scholars, many of whom examined modern and contemporary art as well. Therefore, after this classic-dominated investigation, let’s now turn our attention to some further aspects of the implications of these considerations on the collaboration of art history with aesthetics, for a better orientation in the present art production. As I anticipated earlier in this chapter, the question is not only what we have had so far, but that what do we need now? After learning our history that is shared in a significant proportion, what do we do with the acknowledging of this? How the continuation of the collaboration can help in tackling present issues in both contemporary art and contemporary scholarship? I call attention to contemporary art not because I think that examples of art production from earlier times do not merit the shared or combined attention of the scholarship of art history and aesthetics. Just the contrary, works of any historical era can and should be analysed from this double perspective. Naturally also in the case of earlier art production, we can trace some signs of reflections on art, on its tradition, on earlier and contemporary phenomena, for example, in the re-elaboration of certain motifs, in the modifications of style and iconography, or even through the fascinating examples of competition and rivalry. Some of the forms of these connections between works, often separated by long periods of time, were surveyed by George Kubler in his work The Shape of Time,

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focusing especially on issues of formal characteristics.21 Nevertheless, in contemporary art – even in a temporally extended sense, so let’s say from the classical Avant-Garde onwards – we can see an increased and especially more explicit self-reflection of art, so much so that it often becomes the main subject matter of the very piece itself and understandably it has consequences on the scholarship too, that is, on the disciplines that investigate the contemporary phenomena. Therefore, despite the many possible examples of a more or less evident and conscious reference to art (and its history) that we can find in the production of earlier periods too, such an explicit self-reflection of art and in contemporary art has definitely been not only increased, but it is this selfreferentiality what makes – of course, among other factors – contemporary art so exciting. However, given that this auto-interpretative attitude of contemporary art obviously includes both historical and philosophical aspects and elements (e.g. regarding the tradition and its ‘weight’ or the changing concept, role, and status of art), it is easily understandable why we again need to find ways of strengthening the collaborative examination of works of art (see figures 9.1–9.3). ​​​

Figure 9.1  Lada Nakonechna. Made in Ukraine / 02.06.2014 / 1 working day / 8 hours / from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. / average price per hour – 18 Hr Total 144 Hr, 2014. Graphite on paper. 46 × 64 cm. Source: Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin. Photo: Otto Felber, Berlin.

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Figure 9.2  Lada Nakonechna. Made in Germany / 05.02.2014 / 1 working day / 8 hours / from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. / average price per hour – 21€ Total 168€, 2014. Graphite on paper. 46 × 64 cm. Source: Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin. Photo: Otto Felber, Berlin.

Let me quote just one illustrative example, an exciting work that incorporates many of these above aspects, and helps us understand why a broad spectrum of investigation is really useful for a fuller interpretation and comprehension. The Ukrainian artist Lada Nakonechna started her ongoing project titled Cards in 2010, in which she draws a series of landscapes in a uniform size (46 × 64 cm), in equal style and fixed time, based on photos from the Internet. There are naturally differences between the pieces, however the most significant of these differences is not what we may think of to be at first, that is, the represented land (some are from her home country, others from other European states), but it is the price of the otherwise quite similar pieces. She works on each drawing for a day and then prices them according to the average hourly salary of the particular country which the landscape originates from, multiplied by the hours that she had spent on producing the image. The working hours and the hourly rate of pay are also documented on each artwork, under the image, hence the construction of the price is perfectly transparent. Understandably then, there can be really noteworthy differences between the prices of the otherwise quite similar representations. In the artist’s own example, taken from her website, if the piece represents a Swiss landscape, it is worth 315 Swiss Francs, while a location from her

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Figure 9.3  Lada Nakonechna. Made in Germany / 06.02.2014 / 1 working day / 8 hours / from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. / average price per hour – 21€ Total 168€, 2014. Graphite on paper. 46 × 64 cm. Source: Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin. Photo: Otto Felber, Berlin.

home country is prized at 104 Ukrainian hryvnia, which is the equivalent of 13 CHF, as indicated on the website,22 however, at the time of me writing this chapter it is about 2.5 (!). Therefore, the price difference between the two, otherwise very similar works is over a hundred-fold. Obviously, through the works the artist criticises current social and economic issues, surveying the sources of these problems and the present and future implications too. As Maria Anna Potocka wrote in the catalogue of the exhibition Economics in Art, in Krakow’s MOCAK museum, where Nakonechna’s series was also exhibited: ‘She (Nakonechna – Z. S.) is interested in the countries of Eastern Europe undergoing transformation, their every move bearing the mark of their difficult past’.23 However, just as important is her critique towards art in general and contemporary art infrastructure in particular. Such critical approaches she can develop precisely through a revisitation of a series of values that are not only clashing, but she even inverts them, compared to their traditional functioning. Normally artworks (even of the same artist) have different properties and qualities, for example, some are smaller while others are larger, or some are better (for any reason, e.g. better executed, more ‘beautiful’, more convincing, more detailed, more expressive, etc.) while others are not as good. These different works will

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thus have different prices. Here however the works are intentionally made as similar as possible in size, quality, and ‘beauty’, hence they should cost the same too. It is only an extrinsic and arbitrary system that creates its ‘material’ value, that will thus not have any direct connection with the actual piece of art and with its intrinsic properties. Based on all this we can understand that through these oppositions and the inspiring clashes Nakonechna questions several aspects of value systems in art, and for the proper mapping of all these aspects we need to investigate the project from the perspectives of both art history and aesthetics. For a fuller understanding, one needs to take into consideration, for example, the history and particularities of landscape painting as a genre (including its formerly being considered as a ‘lower’ category in the hierarchy of genres in the classical academies). One also needs to add in the reading the history of earlier instances of art being critical of social and economic inequalities, or the tradition of conceptual art, just like the history and present state of art commerce. These are all aspects of the interpretation that may be considered being closer to the research domains of art history. However, just as important could be the detailed analyses of aesthetic quality, of selection (e.g. of the motif, of the segment of the ‘model’ Nature and natural formation), of the variety in the styles and modes of representation (or the intentional lack thereof), of the grades of expressiveness (or, again the intentional lack thereof), of the question of imitation and of the relation of the rendering to the original location, of the particularities of the mediality (the drawings are based on photographs from the Internet, hence digital and analogue technology are both present), etc. All these are questions that are perhaps more often analysed and analysable through and within aesthetic scholarship. We can thus easily see that when unifying the research strength and specialisation, that is, the capabilities of the two disciplines, we can have a fuller understanding of all the intriguing layers of the work in question. Although there could be many more equally inspiring examples, with this series by Lada Nakonechna I wanted to illustrate and also emphasise that we need the active collaboration of art historical and aesthetic scholarship more than ever. Especially in our age when artworks are directly targeting the conscious interpretation and re-interpretation of art and its forms, history, qualities, limits, and new perspectives, and when not only singular works but even entire artistic oeuvres can be dedicated to such investigations, then for the more precise reading of these creative productions, we need a unified toolkit that we can establish from the theoretical knowledge and methodological resources of both disciplines. This ‘unified toolkit’ can be particularly helpful in scrutinising current art production, for example, showing the historical precedents and the actual work’s relation to them, the way how the art piece constitutes meaning, how it adds novel solutions to a particular subject matter or

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a special issue. While doing so, through complex interplays the work will also reflect to art in general and to its history in particular. This is why I think we should absolutely keep in mind Panofsky’s description of the mutually beneficial relationship between the two disciplines, having different abilities but ‘shooting over the same district’. Also, as he continues in the same text with a warning, failing to do so might have unexpected and unpleasant consequences: It has rightly been said that theory, if not received at the door of an empirical discipline, comes in through the chimney like a ghost and upsets the furniture. But it is no less true that history, if not received at the door of a theoretical discipline dealing with the same set of phenomena, creeps into the cellar like a horde of mice and undermines the groundwork.24

I think we can all agree that we definitely want to avoid any of these two worrisome options happening to our disciplines.25 NOTES 1. Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts. Paper in and on Art History (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 22 (orig.: 1940). 2. James Elkins, “Why Don’t Art Historians Attend Aesthetics Conferences?” in Art History Versus Aesthetics, ed. James Elkins (New York – London: Routledge, 2006), 41. 3. Thierry de Duve’s observation in: Elkins, Art History Versus Aesthetics, 60–61 (Italics in the original – Z. S.) 4. Gottfried Boehm, “Abstraktion und Realität. Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Kunstphilosophie in der Moderne,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 97 (1990): 226. I am grateful for the suggestion of Manfred Milz in how to best translate the original German into English – none of them being my mother tongue. 5. From the many modern editions, see for example: Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (New York, Abrams, 1979). 7. See more on the categories in Lajos Vayer’s instructive introduction to Vasari’s work: Giorgio Vasari, A legkiválóbb festők, szobrászok és építészek élete (Budapest: Magyar Helikon, 1973), especially 17–18. 8. Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019), 82. 9. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006). 10. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” Journal of the HIstory of Ideas, Part I.: Vol. 12. No. 4 (October 1951), 496–527 and Part II.: Vol. 13. No. 1 (January 1952), 17–46.

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11. Max Ryynänen, On the Philosophy of Central European Art. The History of an Institution and Its Global Competitors (Lanham – Boulder – New York – London: Lexington Books, 2021). 12. Wood, A History of Art History, 155. 13. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Writings on Art, ed. David Irwin (London: Phaidon, 1972), 65. 14. I was also interested in something similar in my personal path: although trained as an art historian, I have for years attended courses in aesthetics too. These interdisciplinary studies resulted in my continuous efforts and experiments of working on descriptions, evaluations and interpretations that in the process of the analyses refer to both old and new examples, applies art historical and aesthetic methods and viewpoints, and, whenever possible and applicable, comment on at least some of the tangible, practical implications of an otherwise theoretical issue. This has helped me a lot, for example, when examining classical topics and phenomena, like landscapes or ruins, – for example: Zoltán Somhegyi, Reviewing the Past. The Presence of Ruins (London – New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020) – that, besides their traditional manifestations, still have not only relevance and actuality today, but that had been and still are in the focus of many artists, of both earlier and contemporary creators. 15. Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985 – orig.: 1963). 16. Arnold Gehlen, Zeit-Bilder. Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der modernen Maleri (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1986 – orig.: 1960). 17. Werner Busch, Caspar David Friedrich. Ästhetik und Religion (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003). 18. See especially: Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) and Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte. Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002 – orig. 1985 and 1995). 19. Michael Diers, FotografieFilmVideo. Beiträge zu einer kritischen Theorie des Bildes (Hamburg: Philos & Philo Fine Arts, Fundus, 2006), Horst Bredekamp, Image Acts. A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018 – orig.: 2010). 20. Oskar Bätschmann, Einführung in die kunstgeschichtliche Hermeneutik: Die Auslegung von Bildern (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984). 21. George Kubler, The Shape of Time. Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven – London: Yale University Press, 1962). 22. See the artist’s website: http://www​.ladanakonechna​.com​/project​/listivki​ -cards; last accessed 24 May, 2023. 23. Catalogue entry written by Maria Anna Potocka in: Economics in Art, Monika Kozioł, Delfina Piekarska and Maria Anna Potocka (eds.) (Krakow: MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, 2013), 180. 24. Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” 22. 25. I am grateful for Lisa Giombini, Jacob Lund, and Max Ryynänen for their insightful comments regarding the first version of this chapter.

Chapter 10

An Exercise in Metamorphosis Aesthetics of the Curatorial Jacob Lund

Let me start by quoting Raqs Media Collective, who takes us to the heart of the matter: The arrangement of forms with a view to the discovery of patterns makes for an accumulation of resonances played off against the concentration of contrast. It can also be a paring down, a shaving off, a distillation. The curatorial is an exercise in metamorphosis.1

This chapter does not concern how curatorial studies are undertaken, but rather how curatorial work may be regarded in aesthetic terms, or with the help of aesthetic terms and thinking. My point of departure is the assumption that curating concerns a situated generation of publicness around a given phenomenon or set of phenomena. While I subscribe to an understanding of curating that sees it as not only pertaining to art, my primary interest in curating is its relation to that particular phenomenon and its practice. Curating – or what Maria Lind has called ‘the curatorial’ – does not only consist of exhibition making, re-presenting something that already exists or that is already known. It also consists in producing new knowledge, facilitating dynamic relations, etc. When done most interestingly, through its mode of address it invites the public, spectators, and participants to take part in a process of sense-making. Its modes of address and the situated generation of publicness as one of its primary concerns make it, the chapter argues, obvious to theorise curating in terms of certain insights from reception aesthetics and their developments in recent aesthetic theory.

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THE CURATORIAL In relation to contemporary art, curating, or what theorist and curator Maria Lind coined ‘the curatorial’, exceeds mere exhibition making2: I mean a practice that goes beyond curating, which I see as the technical modality of making art go public in various ways. ‘Curating’ is ‘business as usual’ in terms of putting together an exhibition, organizing a commission, programming a screening series, etcetera. ‘The curatorial’ goes further, implying a methodology that takes art as its starting point, but then situates it in relation to specific contexts, times, and questions in order to challenge the status quo. [. . .] For me, there is a qualitative difference between curating and the curatorial. The latter, like Chantal Mouffe’s notion of the political in relation to politics, carries a potential for change.3

Thus, the distinction between ‘curating’ and ‘the curatorial’ marks a shift of attention within curatorial work from the staging of an event to the actual enactment, dramatisation, and performance of the event itself, a shift that also stresses the temporal aspect of curatorial practice.4 A couple of years later, in a conversation with art historian and theorist of contemporary art Terry Smith, Lind expanded on this notion of curating and its role in relation to contemporary art: ‘To me, perhaps the most important message of Thinking Contemporary Curating is that the curator, or curating, is setting the agenda of contemporary art to a degree that the critic, or art criticism, did previously. Our generation has no Hal Foster among us because curating, and not art critical reflection, produces new ideas nowadays’.5 While the status of individual star curators seems to be renegotiated these years, the role of the curator as taking an active part in generating new senses, interdisciplinary knowledge, and ideas has not diminished.6 Curating, understood in terms of the curatorial, has to do with the making or becoming public of art and culture and involves relational dynamics of various human and non-human participants.7 These dynamics or constellations of curated events ‘contain epistemological processes and are presentational rather than representational’, that is, they generate something new rather than merely reproducing what is already there, and they are able to do so due to the visitors to the event or exhibition, who are invited to take part in the production of meaning.8 The decisive role of the visitors, or what philosopher Jacques Rancière would call ‘emancipated spectators’, in processes of meaning-making points to an aesthetic dimension of curatorial work that I will try to shed light on in the following.9 As curator and art historian James Voorhies remarks, ‘Aesthetic criteria rooted in Kant’s writing, plus theories added to it over the decades, are what substantiates art’s ability to distinguish itself from other parts of culture. The differentiation upheld gives art the capacity to do something that everyday

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objects and the phenomenological experiences of daily life cannot’.10 I would like to expand a bit on how this capacity is established and how the relationship between art and socio-political reality has changed in recent decades, challenging some of the fundamental Kantian assumptions that have defined our (modern) notion of art. The involvement or constellation of non-human participants and visitors, spectators, and other agents in the curatorial work point to the latter as a socialising process of sense-making, a process whose mode of operation, being presentational rather than representational, seems to invite aesthetic theorisation for its clarification and a more nuanced understanding. ‘All human and non-human participants come together and gather others around them in public’, art historian and curatorial theorist Beatrice von Bismarck writes, adding further circles of reception as integral components of the curatorial context. They create an aesthetic experience, just as they cause the additional participants to become their public in the sense of a Latourian ‘res publica’. All those involved constitute an ensemble that can be understood as social in an expanded sense, coming together for processes of negotiation, but also for processes of proclamation, demonstration, or argumentation.11

Thus, in addition, in terms of aesthetics and aesthetic experience, an important part of curatorial work, in distinction from mere exhibition-making, is a salient element of reflection on institutional conventions and the very process of public and socialising sense-making and knowledge-generation.12 GENERATION OF PUBLICNESS Perhaps we may take the work of Forensic Architecture as a clarifying prism of how curatorial work may be regarded in aesthetic terms.13 An agency composed of an interdisciplinary team of architects, filmmakers, artists, scientists, coders, journalists, and lawyers the practice of Forensic Architecture consists of the production of architectural evidence in the form of building surveys, physical or digital models, animations, video, and maps of various forms, and in the presentation of this evidence in juridical, political, and artistic forums.14 With reference to the etymology of the term ‘forensics’, the origins of which can be traced back to the Latin forensis, which means ‘pertaining to the forum’, they regard their practice as a mode of public address.15 It is also, founder and head Eyal Weizman stress, an aesthetic practice ‘because it depends on both the modes and the means by which reality is sensed and presented publicly’.16 Following philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour, he understands aesthetics as ‘the ability to perceive and to be concerned’, so that, in their practice, aesthetics concerns an augmentation of the capacity

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to sense as well as a process of sense-making and composition, a rhetoric of presentation.17 The rhetoric of presentation establishes a public assembly, a forum. In this way, the practice of Forensic Architecture is inspired by Latour’s plea for a move from Realpolitik based on matters of fact to a Dingpolitik based on matters of concern. We are, Latour argues, connected to each other by our worries, our matters of concern, the issues we care for (the words ‘curating’ and ‘care’ share the same root, curare). Dingpolitik comes into being when objects become things, that is when matters of fact give way to their complicated entanglements and become matters of concern. Each object gathers around it an assembly of relevant parties, mapping out a public space.18 It is furthermore a public space that is dependent on the active agency and temporal involvement of the participants assembled. According to literary critic and social theorist Michael Warner, a public exists only by virtue of address and it must predicate some degree of attention from its members. A public is a scene of self-activity, of temporary historical rather than timeless belonging, and of active participation rather than ascriptive belonging or a static identity.19 Or, as Hannah Arendt remarks, the public realm, and what she calls ‘the space of appearance’, ‘does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the dispersal of men [and women, JL] [. . .] but with the disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves. [. . .] [The public realm] resides ultimately on action and speech’.20 To repeat my point above, the overall, curatorial practice may be said to consist in generating a public sphere around a given thing, artefact, phenomenon, etc., that is, in addressing something to someone. Exhibitionary events can be seen as acts of poesis that call the public into existence and an invitation to take part in shared sensing and sense-making.

THE ACT OF EXHIBITION Contemporary artistic and aesthetic practices like Forensic Architecture’s seem particularly suited to lend themselves to art theorist Lucy Steeds’ suggestion – with reference to Walter Benjamin’s notions of Ausstellbarkeit [fitness, or capacity, for exhibition, or its exhibitionability] and Ausstellungswert [exhibition value] in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ – to analyse art based on its exposability, understood as ‘its capacity to produce socio-political entanglement’.21 Steeds connects her notion of exposability to the German term Darstellung, which shares its root with Ausstellung in the verb stellen (to place), but which is more orientated toward a taking-place, something that is activated situationally. According to Steeds, the exposing or staging of art implies a shift from display to a process

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of collective imagination or social action and points to the continued actuality of Benjamin’s aesthetic thinking: Exposability, underscored by Darstellung as much as Ausstellung, insists that art operates in concert with the circumstances in which it is encountered – situationally, historically, and geopolitically. We might say that it proves conscious of the exhibitionary context, of the situation of exposure, so that it both magnifies and is magnified by the particular and transitory here-and-now – operating through the commons temporarily convened, with future chapters in other settings to be experienced and debated distinctly.22

The act of showing, displaying, exhibiting, and demonstrating something, is an indispensable part of the manifestation of any artwork – contemporary as well as modern – and hence a condition for its being perceived and experienced. This is not yet, however, what makes the thing being shown an aesthetic object, be it physical or not. Apart from being perceived – phenomenologist philosopher Mikel Dufrenne’s definition of an aesthetic object – what makes it aesthetic, is a certain openness with regard to the meaning or signification of the thing that appears, which ignites a process of reflexivity that, ultimately, is a negotiation of the world and how we live in it.23 In other words, there is a decisive difference between exhibition as the presentation of an object or phenomenon ‘as it is’ (non-artistic), as a matter of fact, and exhibition as the presentation of an object or phenomenon as an object of reflection that sparks a process of sense-making or a renegotiation of the meaning the object is generally attributed, that is, as a matter of concern. The latter is a socialising image practice that creates what Weizman calls an ‘open verification’ where ‘verification relates to truth not as a noun or as an essence, but as a practice, one that is contingent, collective, and poly-perspectival’.24 To a large extent, contemporary artistic and aesthetic practices resist the categories of modern art theory, as traditional genres of art have been dissolved in all kinds of hybrid forms, and increasingly art destabilises the border between art and non-art in endeavours to address urgent socio-political questions about climate change, migration, violence, human rights, decolonisation, racism, sexism, etc.25 The destabilisation of the border between art and non-art, between art and political reality, of course also involves the ways in which these practices are made public, exposed, and exhibited, and our art theoretical notions of ‘exhibition’. According to art historian and critic Kim West’s reading of sociologist and museologist Jean Davallon, ‘an exhibition creates a separate symbolic space, but one featuring ‘real’ objects rather than representations [.  .  .] the exhibited objects always retain a connection to their ‘external’ reality, transcending their adherence to the exhibition’s symbolic dimension’.26 I argue that the double articulation of the objects as real and symbolic through an

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act of exhibition is a decisive element in making a negotiation of our sense of reality possible. The act of exhibition makes something, a work, present to those it assembles but, at the same time, it creates a distance to the thing, precisely because the appearance of the work has been arranged and addressed to someone, to a forum; what is exhibited is given as having been organised and deliberately made available to appear to those who – actually or potentially – take part in the forum or assembly.27 This distance from the object presented installs a difference and an indeterminacy with regard to its status and meaning. In the language of Jacques Rancière, the object becomes a pensive image in a zone of indeterminacy between passive representation and active operation, between non-art and art.28 The curatorial creation of such difference and indeterminacy is what allows for a reflexive transformation and questioning of the status quo, of hegemonic, authoritative narratives about the world and what is. We have become used to thinking about exhibitions as that through which (most) art becomes known.29 According to curator Bruce W. Ferguson, exhibitions of art are, by virtue of their visible prominence, structurally intrinsic and perhaps psychologically necessary to any full understanding of most art. Exhibitions can be understood then as the medium of contemporary art in the sense of being its main agency of communication – the body and voice from which an authoritative character emerges.30

In addition, West stresses that exhibitions are the media of art’s public realisation: ‘as media, art exhibitions should be conceived of as affirmative in their mediating functions. They are the spatial and technical arrangements through which artworks are publicly realised’.31 The question, then, is, what constitutes an exhibition? Does it have to take on a more or less institutionalised form, in a space or at a site dedicated to art, like the ones Ferguson writes about? When does the exhibition or, perhaps rather, the exposition of a work of art begin? When does a work of art become ‘an object of appreciation’, in the terminology of philosopher George Dickie’s institutional theory of art?32 I am in many ways sympathetic to Ferguson’s analogy between an exhibition of art and an utterance or a set of utterances and to his proposal to see the art exhibition as the speech act of an institution, as well as to philosopher Peter Osborne’s claim that curation is ‘like a speech act in the institutional language of art’.33 Trying to point to some aspects of how aesthetics may inform curatorial work, I am, however, less after ‘how art serves exhibitions as their very element of speech’, than ‘the public realisation’ of art through particular modes and structures of address.34 Any work of art has a structure of address – an Appellstruktur in the terminology of literary theorist Wolfgang Iser – that informs the ways in which it can be received.35 It is thus, in a fundamental way, addressing and exposing

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itself to a public of indefinite strangers.36 I propose that structurally, curatorial work does something similar. It is a kind of speech act addressed to a public, a you, an assembly, situated in a given temporal and spatial context – even though the first moment of exposition of course already occurs in and through the address of the work ‘itself’: a work of art always already involves an act of exhibition in its initial address to someone, a you, an audience, readers, listeners, spectators, participants, collaborators. It is open to be ‘received’ by anybody who is able to enter into its structure of enunciation, and who will actualise or concretise it. It is in this sense that I think that the curatorial can be related to insights from reception aesthetics, while also moving beyond some of the individualistic aspects of the latter, and connects to recent aesthetic thinking developed by Rancière and philosopher and cultural critic Juliane Rebentisch, among others. Originally developed in relation to studies of literature, reception aesthetics regards the act of reading as a creative, co-producing process. It is the aesthetic act of co-creation by the ‘recipients’ I find to be a salient feature of the curatorial as outlined above, and hence one of the ways in which curatorial work and aesthetics are cross-pollinating each other. A branch of phenomenological art theory, reception aesthetics insists that, in considering a literary work, it is not only the actual text, the artifact, which must be taken into account but also the actions involved in responding to the textual artifact. As Iser remarks, philosopher of phenomenology and aesthetics Roman Ingarden confronted the literary text with the ways in which it could be realised or konkretisiert by its readers.37 The textual artifact offers various so-called schematised views through which the work’s subject matter can potentially appear, but the actual realisation of that appearance is an act of concretisation. The reader concretises the work by turning the schematic formation into an accomplished aesthetic object. The literary work has an inherently dynamic character that is unfolded through acts of reading. Therefore, the literary work – any aesthetic work, including the curatorial, I would add – has what Iser calls an artistic and an aesthetic pole, referring to the text created by the author and the realization accomplished by the reader, respectively: From this polarity follows that the literary work cannot be completely identical with the text, or with the realization of the text, but in fact must lie halfway between the two. The work is more than the text, for the text only takes life when it is realized, and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader – though this in turn is acted upon by the different patterns of the text. The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence, and this convergence can never be precisely

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pinpointed, but must always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader.38

The dynamic nature of the work is occasioned by its virtuality and this dynamic is a precondition for the work’s effects and how it may transform the worldviews of those who set it in motion. As should hopefully be clear, I propose that it is possible to replace ‘text’ with ‘exhibition’ or ‘exposition’ and to consider curatorial work as being able to facilitate a similar potentially transformative creative process. REFLEXIVE TRANSFORMATION From the perspective of the theory, history, and critique of art, the social relevance of contemporary art is not only based on the urgent issues it raises: climate change, racism, human rights, etc., but also on how these issues are raised and made public through an artistic generation of meaning. In contrast to a certain classical understanding of the avant-garde, I do not see the aesthetic as becoming political through an art that lets itself dissolve into everyday life. The aesthetic is political precisely because of its ability to differentiate itself from the normally inconspicuous organisation of our everyday lifeworld, and, through such differentiation, provoke critical reflection on this organisation – which is what makes a certain degree of exhibition and exposition of decisive importance.39 I subscribe to Juliane Rebentisch’s analysis that the art theoretical answer to the question of the continuation of artistic autonomy in contemporary art lies in the coupling of its boundless form with the effects of art.40 This means that we must move our focus from the work as an organic, distinct unity to the ways in which it interacts with its surroundings and the subjectivities that experience it and set it in motion; that the specificity of the aesthetic must be considered as characterised by a particular relation between sense-making subjects and objects open to sense-making that mutually affect each other. As Theodor W. Adorno phrased it: ‘Artistic experience accordingly demands a comprehending rather than an emotional relation to the works; the subject inheres in them and in their movement as one of their elements’.41 The contemporary work of art – as well as curatorial work – depends on the subjects who take part in it, and it is, so to speak, not until in and through this participation that it is realised as work. The spectators thereby entangle their contemporary social realities in the structure of the work. In the process of sense-making, they make their own associations and dissociations, based on their particular spaces of experience.42 Artist Tania Bruguera’s political-timing-specific art is an example of how the work of art is linked to the specificity of the political moment of its realisation. According to Bruguera,

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Political-timing-specific art doesn’t simply address the news cycle. It’s also about understanding how, under certain circumstances, politics can define the aesthetic. This kind of art practice embraces the fact that the work will not have a stable meaning, because this is how politics operates – tackling perceptions as they unfold in real time and mobilizing the emotional landscape these perceptions generate.43

The autonomy of art, therefore, has to be understood as something e­xperiential, not to abandon the category of work but to redefine it as a dynamic process in which the aesthetic is no longer separated from the nonaesthetic as something objectifiably different, but where the aesthetic consists in a reflexive transformation of the non-aesthetic.44 The work of art consists not only of its physical presence but also of its senses and the values in which it is inscribed and which are inscribed in it. As politically time-specific, it takes part in the unfolding of the present.45 We may say that it is the role of curatorial work to facilitate such a potentially transformative unfolding of the present. This research has been supported by Novo Nordisk Foundation I­ nvestigator Grant in Art History Research 0068539. NOTES 1. Raqs Media Collective, “On the Curatorial, From the Trapeze,”, in Jean-Paul Martinon, ed., The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 23. 2. Maria Lind, “The Curatorial,” Artforum 68, no. 2 (October 2009): 103. 3. Maria Lind in Jens Hoffmann and Maria Lind, “To Show or Not to Show,” Mousse Magazine no. 31 (November 2011). https://www​.moussemagazine​.it​/magazine​/jens​-hoffmann​-maria​-lind​-2011/ [accessed 20 December 2022]. Cf. Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), pp. 49–51; James Voorhies, Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial (Cambridge, MA: MIT, forthcoming), pp. 6–10; and Maria Lind, ed., Performing the Curatorial: Within and Beyond Art (Berlin: Sternberg, 2012). 4. Cf. Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff, “Preface,” in Jean-Paul Martinon, ed., The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. ix and Paul O’Neill, “Exhibitions as Curatorial Constellations,” in Paul O’Neill, Simon Sheikh, Lucy Steeds, and Mick Wilson, eds., Curating after the Global: Roadmaps for the Present (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), pp. 499–509: 500–501. 5. Maria Lind and Terry Smith, “Stirring the Smooth Surfaces of the World: The Curatorial and the Translocal,” in Terry Smith, Talking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2015), pp. 319–342: 319. Lind refers to Smith’s earlier book Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012). 6. As Bernd Scherer, director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt 2006–2023, stated at the opening of Kader Attia’s arts space La colonie in Paris in 2016: “We curate ideas in the making.”

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7. Cf. Beatrice von Bismarck, The Curatorial Condition (London: Sternberg, 2022), p. 8ff. 8. Cf. Maria Lind, “Situating the Curatorial,” e-flux journal #116 (March 2021): pp. 01-15: 05. https://www​.e​-flux​.com​/journal​/116​/378689​/situating​-the​-curatorial/ [accessed 20 December 2022]. 9. Cf. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009 [2008]). 10. James Voorhies, Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial (Cambridge, MA: MIT, forthcoming), pp. 60–61. 11. Beatrice von Bismarck, The Curatorial Condition, p. 16. 12. Cf. Beatrice von Bismarck, The Curatorial Condition, p. 10 and also James Voorhies who lays out “a longer trajectory of change in curating whereby knowledge production and research are increasingly brought to the foreground in contemporary art.” Postsensual Aesthetics, p. 25. 13. Parts of the following build on my article “Exhibition as Reflexive Transformation,” OBOE – Journal on Biennials and Other Exhibitions, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2022): I-X and Chapter 8 of my book The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity (London: Sternberg, 2022), pp. 140–154. 14. Cf. Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (New York: Zone Books, 2017), pp. 9 and 64. 15. Ibid., 65. Apart from the etymological connection between forensics, forensis and forum, it is worth noticing that we not only use the word “exhibit” for an object that is shown to the public in a museum or gallery, it also designates a thing used as evidence in a juridical context. 16. Ibid., 94. The notion of aesthetics involved in Forensic Architecture’s practice is elaborated theoretically in Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (London: Verso, 2021). 17. Ibid., 95. 18. Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 4–31. 19. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture, 14:1 (2002): 59–90. 20. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]), pp. 199–200. 21. Lucy Steeds, “Exposability: On the Taking-Place in Future of Art,” in Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions, eds. Tristan Garcia and Vincent Normand (Berlin: Sternberg, 2019), pp. 75–84: 75 (italics in the original). 22. Steeds, “Exposability,” pp. 82–83. Steeds’ points here are made with reference to Walter Benjamin’s “What is Epic Theatre?” (1939). 23. Cf. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1953]). 24. Eyal Weizman, “Open Verification,” Becoming Digital, e-flux Architecture (June 2019), accessed January 28, 2022, https://www​.e​-flux​.com​/architecture​/

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becoming​-digital​/248062​/open​-verification/. Cf. also Eyal Weizman (in conversation with Jacob Lund), “Inhabiting the Hyper-Aesthetic Image,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, nos. 61–62 (2021): 230–243, 236ff. 25. Cf. for instance Oliver Marchart, “[A]rtistic practices have emerged for which it is more important to be connected to political practices than to art institutions themselves, which in turn, necessarily changes our concept of the public sphere – and of the institution as well.” Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere (Berlin: Sternberg, 2019), p. 144. 26. Kim West, “Concepts for the Critical Study of Art Exhibitions as Media,” in Theater, Garden, Bestiary, eds. Garcia and Normand, pp. 45–55: 45. West’s observations are based on Jean Davallon’s L’exposition à l’œuvre: Stratégies de communication et médiation symbolique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), p. 11. 27. Cf. Tristan Garcia, “Neither Gesture nor Work of Art: Exhibition as Disposing for Appearance,” in Theater, Garden, Bestiary, eds. Garcia and Normand, pp. 181–194: 183. 28. Jacques Rancière, “The Pensive Image,” in The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 107–132. 29. Cf. Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg et  al. (London: Routledge, 1996). 30. Bruce W. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics: Material speech and utter sense,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Greenberg et al., pp. 175–190: 176. 31. West, “Concepts for the Critical Study,” p. 45. 32. Cf. George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). 33. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics,” pp. 183–184 and Peter Osborne, “9 Points,” Manifesta Journal – Journal of contemporary curatorship no. 7, The Grammar of the Exhibition (2009/2010): 14. 34. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics,” p. 184 35. Cf. Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruktur der Texte. Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa (Konstanz: Verlag der Druckerei und Verlagsanstalt Konstanz Universitätsverlag, 1970). 36. Cf. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture, 14:1 (2002): 59–90. 37. Cf. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974 [1972]), p. 274. Iser refers to Roman Ingarden, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks (Tübingen, 1968), pp. 49 ff. and Das literarische Kunstwerk (Tübingen, 1960), pp. 270 ff. Cf. also Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge, 1980 [1976]). 38. Iser, The Implied Reader, p. 275. 39. Cf. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), and Juliane Rebentisch, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst – zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2013); Juliane Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, trans. Daniel Hendrickson with Gerrit Jackson (Berlin: Sternberg, 2012); and Juliane Rebentisch, The Art of Freedom: On the

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Dialectics of Democratic Existence [2011], trans. Joseph Ganahl (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). These and the following points are heavily influenced by Rebentisch’s work. 40. For an analysis of autonomy and contemporary aesthetic practices, cf. also Sven Lütticken, Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (Berlin: Sternberg, 2017). 41. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997 [1970]), p. 355. 42. Cf. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, pp. 1–23. 43. Tania Bruguera, “Notes on Political Timing Specificity,” Artforum, 57:9 (2019), accessed January 28, 2022, https://www​.artforum​.com​/print​/201905​/notes​-on​ -political​-timing​-specificity​-79513. Cf. also Claire Bishop, “Rise to the Occasion,” Artforum, 57:9 (2019), accessed January 28, 2022, https://www​.artforum​.com​/print​ /201905​/claire​-bishop​-on​-the​-art​-of​-political​-timing​-79512. 44. Cf. Rebentisch, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst, pp. 40–57, and Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. 45. Cf. Fuller and Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics, p. 221.

Chapter 11

Aesthetics and Art Education Paul Duncum

The term art education can be applied very broadly, but this chapter is exclusively focused on K-12 art education. It was long informed by the Kantian tradition of modernist aesthetics most notably during the aesthetic movement of the 1970s and its further development during the 1980s during the heyday of discipline-based forms of art education. Aesthetics was conceived primarily in terms of appreciating fine art exemplars and thereby enriching student lives. Research was directed at understanding the developmental ability of students to respond aesthetically, which was frequently conceived in purely formalist terms. The term aesthetics was also used in a wide variety of ways that echoed its original socio-political proposal and its subsequent complicated history. More recently, art educators use aesthetics in its original sense of aesthesis, meaning sense data that includes both the uplifting and the diminishing, and applying it to a wide spectrum of visual culture including material specifically excluded from modernist consideration. The author discusses his own use of aesthetics as a highly seductive sensory-cum-emotive lure in service to many diverse ideologies. This chapter relies for its examples mostly on the literature of art education in the United States, but over the past sixty or so years covered here, developments in many parts of the world followed similar trends. The chapter is organised in terms of a historical sequence, but in reality, many of the issues discussed below were sometimes foreshadowed years ahead of when they became common, and similarly, some ideas continue even now long after they have been overtaken by others.

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CONTEXT The introduction of aesthetics into K-12 art education must be understood first in terms of what had proceeded it. In art education practice and much of its literature, until the 1970s art education was dominated by romantic notions of the artist as model.1 Art was self-expression; students were conceived as graphic virgins and expected to invent everything out of their own heads. Although lone voices argued for aesthetic education,2 art education remained firmly child, not subject, centred. Realising the visual results of the artistas-model were not only lamentable but the history of fine art, as well as its critique, were being ignored, efforts were made during the 1960s to reverse course.3 Consequently, during the 1970s, the emphasis shifted to aesthetics as both a study of fine art and a form of appreciation. KANT AND THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT OF THE 1970S At the time, it was modernist aesthetics that dominated. As principally derived from Kant, aesthetics was understood to be about beauty and the sublime, although mostly beauty; and being equated with truth and goodness, it was conceived as entirely uplifting.4 It was nothing short of quasi-spiritual, though in Schiller’s view, also nothing short of possessing the power to bring divided societies into harmony with themselves.5 Schiller’s vision for aesthetics, like the related concept of high culture, was to bind the middle class together and, effectively, exclude the democratic aspirations of the working class. But overlooking the reactionary side of this legacy, highly influential art educator Read declared that he wanted nothing more than to make Schiller’s vision a reality in art education.6 Ostensibly, the purpose of teaching aesthetics was to enrich student’s lives. As such, it was set against the driven impetus of a materialistic society and a utilitarian view of education. Teaching aesthetics was a matter of developing refined, discriminating taste, mostly meaning a taste for fine art. As Smith, a prime advocate of the approach, wrote, aesthetics was to develop ‘respect for the finest creative achievements of man’.7 Alternatively, aesthetics could also be, in Flannery’s phrase, ‘the study of the keyboards of human feeling’, by which he meant responses to everyday experience as well as fine art.8 Finest achievements versus human feeling is a critical distinction. On the one hand, some proposed aesthetics as an intellectual inquiry into the nature of fine art; on the other hand, aesthetics was understood as the appreciation of feelings or emotions aroused by artworks though also non-art works.

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Aesthetics could be the study of fine art, or, alternatively, attention to the sensuousness of experience and not conceptual at all. However, it was the more intellectual approach that was normally adopted by art educators, translated as understanding artworks by means of reflecting upon them in appreciative and evaluative terms.9 It was not only no doubt easier to teach concepts than about feelings but also more consistent with the intellectual orientation of formal schooling. The aesthetic could be located in an artwork or in the environment as a special kind of value, or it could be located in the viewer as a unique response, a particular emotion, or a specific attitude or approach, which again echoed something of the spectrum of theorising about the aesthetic.10 But wherever it was located, its importance to students and society was never in doubt. For Broudy, aesthetic education was ‘enlightened cherishing’.11 DEVELOPMENTAL ABILITY OF STUDENTS As defined in such modernist terms, aesthetics informed a number of developments. First, many projects, some of them well-funded, were undertaken with the general aim of understanding students’ developing comprehension of, and preferences for, fine art.12 When did young children grasp the idea that paintings were created by artists and not by god? When did they begin to enjoy abstraction, if ever? Could children consistently sort pictures according to style? And so on. Using structured interviews rather than pre- and post-tests, the most developed of these studies came a decade later with Parsons’s five-part sequence, influenced by Piaget’s stage-by-age approach.13 Parsons’ sequence began with favouritism – a liking for a particular subject matter – after which students developed a preference for a realistic style, an appreciation for expression, an appreciation for composition, and finally the development of reflexivity on their own preferences. This sequence was frequently reproduced in teacher-based texts, but like Piaget’s approach, it suffered from universalism. Parson’s14 subsequent efforts to describe style sensitivity were based on a culturally sensitive, multiple pathways approach that became common among art educators during the 1990s.15 Secondly, textbooks appeared lauding aesthetics as the study of fine art.16 But it is worth noting that the study of fine art was not considered a true meta discipline; it was never conceived to address aesthetics as the philosophy of criticism. Whatever study was undertaken to understand the nature of art and its history, the lens through which the study was conducted was a highly honorific aesthetic of emotion aroused by form. Studying art as a discipline was never a helicopter enterprise. Rather, the many theories of art that could

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have been studied if it had been considered a meta discipline were narrowed to just one theory; art as aesthetic experience. Thirdly, many research and development programs investigated how best to teach students to better appreciate fine art.17 They were aided in this endeavor with the development of strategies for teaching an appreciation of individual artworks. Chapman developed deductive, inductive, and dialogical approaches.18 But the most notable was Feldman’s19 four-part inductive sequence of description, interpretation, formal analysis, and evaluation, though it was frequently amended by additions and subtractions.20 A common addition was to allow students an initial comment on their first impressions. Among projects aimed at teaching aesthetic appreciation was Day’s ‘Effects of Instruction on High School Students’ Art Preferences and Art Judgements’.21 Day and his colleagues were concerned that ‘qualities of greatness in works of art are often overlooked by the perceptually unsophisticated’, and they set out to teach ‘aesthetic awareness’, meaning students ‘more able to learn and appreciate and more cognizant of the roles of the arts and artists in our culture’.22 Of particular concern was student preference for realism and a consequent rejection of abstract, modernist art styles. The study used a pre- and post-test in which students began by ranking four styles – Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Op Art, and Kitsch – the latter defined as inexpensive, mass produced images purchased from department stores. With the high/low culture hierarchy firmly in place, the students were broken into four groups, with three groups taught about one of the fine art movements and one, as a control, not taught. Among those taught, the post-test showed increased awareness of the three fine art movements over the control – mostly for Impressionism – but each group still preferred the kitsch work. The researchers concluded that much work had yet to be done. This kind of study was popular for decades, even into the twenty-first century where aesthetic education could still be conceived as teaching students to appreciate the beauty in fine art23 and to be innovative meant using computers to analyse data that had long been established about student responses.24

DISCIPLINE-BASED ART EDUCATION During the 1980s the aesthetic movement morphed into Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE) with the diverse understandings of aesthetics carried over.25 Aesthetics played a major, if highly problematic role, in which there remained the slippage, mentioned above, between aesthetics as a selfevidently honorific value and/or experience and aesthetics as the study of fine art. DBAE was conceived to include studio, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics. Ostensibly defined as a philosophical inquiry into the nature of

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art, its purpose, and how to evaluate it, as before, aesthetics was frequently reduced to one particular kind of theory, namely aesthetic value and/or experience, thus ignoring all other theories about its nature, function, and evaluation. Compounding this narrowed focus, aesthetics was often further reduced to an appreciation of formalist qualities. In practice, since aesthetics was operationalised as only value/experience, the theoretical framework for DBAE, studio, criticism, and history was driven by a highly parsimonious view of aesthetics.26 In some cases, art history and criticism were reduced to an appreciation of the so-called elements and principles of historical works. However, there was a backlash, in which some art educators like Lanier,27 Chapman,28 and McFee and Degge29 argued for the inclusion of an aesthetic appreciation of material and popular culture. They rejected the idealism and universalism of modernist aesthetics in favour of the contextualist epistemology undergirding an anthropological approach to culture. Even so, their examples tended to be on the high end of material and popular culture so that effectively they remained in the grip of aesthetics as ennobling with fine art still held high on a pedestal. It would take the introduction of critical theory to make the transition to a postmodern aesthetic discourse.

AESTHETICS IN TRANSITION During the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, art educators responded to calls by cultural theorists to recall that far from a quasi-spiritual enterprise, modernist aesthetics was from its inception deeply political.30 They also responded to calls to expand beyond fine art to include everyday experiences,31 including popular culture.32 Art educators began to attack modernist aesthetics as elitist, Hamblen characterising it as ‘cash aesthetics’ and arguing for a postmodern, culturally pluralist ‘ethnoaesthetics’.33 Aesthetics became multicultural. In rejecting a high cultural view of culture and adopting an anthropological view of culture, the previous hierarchy of high and low aesthetics was flattened. Art educators began considering young people’s aesthetic preferences, no longer with pre- and post-tests or with controls but with small ethnographic studies, often as part of teaching practice. Examples included student preferences in shopping malls,34 department stores,35 artifacts of surfing culture,36 and their bedroom posters and paraphernalia.37 For Tavin, however, such studies only further exacerbated an already outof-control use of the term aesthetics.38 So, varied was its use, he argued, the term had ceased to have meaning. It was used in art education to describe specific cultural sites and categories like ‘African aesthetics’, ‘green aesthetics’, and ‘industrial aesthetics’. Secondly, it was used as a framework to study the features of artworks as, for example, their sensory/emotional qualities.

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Third, it was used to refer to ‘heightened awareness’, ‘radiance of mind’, or ‘aesthetic consciousness’. Fourth, it referred to philosophical inquiry into the nature of art. And finally, it was used to denote forms of teaching as in ‘aesthetic development’ for ‘an aesthetic frame of mind’.39 Furthermore, he argued that the use of aesthetics in art education obscured its origins and continuing use in often reactionary politics. Irrespective of the rightness of Tavin’s claims, he was blowing in the wind. Postmodern cultural critics were reconfiguring the long-overlooked sublime in non-spiritual terms40; Cultural Studies, which had previously ignored aesthetics in favour of representation and semiotics, took an aesthetic turn41; and manufacturing was increasingly reliant upon aesthetic styling for economic survival.42 As long ago as 1976 Williams had noted that beyond the specialised areas of art and literature, ‘aesthetics is now in common use to refer to questions of visual appearance and effect’.43 As confirmation, it was possible in 2010 to type in the word aesthetic into Amazon Books and be offered over sixty book titles using the word for everything from dentistry to parking. Consequently, I anthropomorphised aesthetics as highly promiscuous and argued that to ignore aesthetics in art education was to sever the field from these developments.44 And it did not.

VISUAL CULTURE AND AESTHESIS Art educator Efland argued that it was impossible to avoid aesthetics: neither fine art nor popular visual culture was reducible to representation and social issues; aesthetics was invariably entwined with both.45 For Efland, aesthetics as sensation cum emotion wrapped ideology in pleasurable forms, and its study developed discrimination. In this spirit, art educators sought to reconfigure aesthetics for an art education of visual culture in which aesthetics, as a study, involved many theories46 and sensuousness embraced ‘notions of beauty and ugliness’ that served to promote consumption.47 Aesthetics was considered to involve individual preferences in dialogue with social values. Aesthetics as sensation cum emotion had indeed come to help cement society, though not as Schiller or Read had envisaged. Aesthetics was now acknowledged as the seductive means by which consumer goods were marketed and thus first-world, capitalist economies were maintained.48 At a more grounded level, art educators not only continued to use the term aesthetics to refer to various cultural sites but greatly expanded their range. For example, they included, the Build the Bear Workshop,49 TV wrestling,50 the ‘peculiarities of computer graphics’,51 and the style of chairs, cars, and bridges.52 Additionally, aware that visual culture was both multimodal and

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multisensory, the sensorium was introduced to consider how visual culture not only commonly involves the auditory sense but how it is frequently used to evoke taste, touch, and smell.53 Effectively, art educators were using aesthetics as aesthesis, that is, in the original, ancient Greek sense that meant sensation or sense data. Aesthesis pertained to things perceptible by the senses, things material, as opposed to things only thinkable or immaterial. It was used to distinguish between those things that could be perceived through the senses and those things, like dragons, that could only be imagined. And as Williams had earlier pointed out, aesthesis referred to both pleasant and unpleasant sensations.54 It could mean dulling, lulling, or boring. Its opposite was anesthetic, the lack of sensation. Thus inspired, all kinds of cultural sites were taken up by art educators, including the grotesque, kitsch, and everyday55 in which contemporary fine art often appeared not only to challenge but go beyond popular culture in its ability to shock and even disgust,56 the latter being specifically called out by Kant as impossible to be regarded as aesthetic. Examples included stalk and slash movies, grotesque monsters like zombies, and actual abnormalities like severe human disabilities. AESTHETICS AS SEDUCTION As noted above, some art educators have attacked aesthetics for its elitism and reactionary politics, but others have defended its use because of its socially progressive values.57 My own approach is different.58 I see aesthetics serving a wide range of ideologies, socially progressive, conservative, and reactionary alike. I focus on aesthetics as sensation cum emotion with its role being to seduce, and I understand these pleasures to be aroused equally by fine art and popular visual culture. I regard the high/low distinction to have imploded, leaving us not with art as an honorific category but with pictures, which, depending on skill and context, can be ordinary, extraordinary, and everything in between. With pictures, aesthetics delivers ideas, values, and beliefs, in a word, ideologies, in mostly pleasurable forms that make the acceptance of ideologies easier and their rejection more difficult because that would be to reject the pleasure in which the ideologies come wrapped. At best, aesthetic pleasure and unacceptable ideologies create cognitive dissonance. Aesthetics and ideology work hand-in-glove, handmaidens to each other. In terms of Aristotelian rhetoric, aesthetics is the equivalent of what Aristotle regarded as the sensory eloquence of the delivery, the sensory cum emotional means by which ideas, beliefs and values are offered as if in the nature things.59 For Aristotle, the only difference between rhetoric and the arts was that rhetoric and artistic forms showed; that for success, they equally relied upon aesthetic pleasure.

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Although fine art and popular imagery have operated differently in society, and continue to – institutionally and functionally – they appeal to much the same aesthetic lures. Furthermore, many of the aesthetic pleasures most people enjoy when watching television, at the movies, playing video games, and so on, are the very same pleasures people have enjoyed since ancient times. As illustrative of these positions, I sketch below just a few aesthetic lures that are to be found in both fine art and popular visual culture. They are drawn from my 2021 book Popular Pleasures: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Popular Visual Pleasure, which examines fifteen aesthetic lures; a realistic style, the illusionistic, the highly emotional, the sentimental, the spectacular, the bright and busy, the erotic, the exotic, the violent, the horrific, the vulgar, the miraculous, the formulaic, the narrative, and the humorous. These aesthetic lures are also briefly sketched in Picture Pedagogy: Visual Concepts to Enhance the Curriculum.60 Each is highly pleasurable and each is also deeply problematic, but with limited space, I briefly describe only a few examples. First, consider the pleasures of using a realistic style. They include the ability to make comparisons, appreciating the skill involved, and the ease with which anyone can evaluate. People also enjoy pulling back the curtain to observe the process of making pictures. Delight in realism was evident in ancient Greece and Rome, and ever since the twelfth century, there has been a search for higher levels or different kinds of realism in all visual media – painting, printing, and screen media. It was only with the invention of photography and later film that artists turned their back on realism, relinquishing its pleasures to mass culture. Yet despite the pleasures realism offers, it is the style with which consumerism and totalitarian states alike appeal to the largest number of people because it is not only the most easily understood, it offers high believability. Consumer capital uses realism to sell products and services to create resource shortages that are endangering the planet, totalitarian regimes use it to lie and oppress, and both state and non-state actors use it today to help pedal fake news. Secondly, emotional imagery helps viewers escape unpleasant circumstances, allows identification with characters, and facilitates identity formation. Emotional images locate authenticity, assist human bonding, and allow audiences to participate in scenes. Yet while art is lauded for its emotional expression, popular culture is often dismissed as mired in emotionalism, in exaggerated, unwarranted displays of emotion. Popular culture is condemned for dealing with only generalised, predictable, and easily accessible emotions. Fine art is associated with nuanced emotional expressions by individual artists as they respond to specific situations. But retrospectively validating the history of art prior to the nineteenth century primarily as an emotional expression by individual artists wilfully ignores the many utilitarian interests served by most fine art throughout history as well as the often highly theatrical

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displays of emotion in the history fine art, which, while highlighted by the Baroque, are hardly confined to it. Third, while not everyone enjoys violent entertainment, many people do. Intentional physical harm has long been an attractive aspect of entertainment. Consider all the scenes of crucifixion, rape, and torture to be found in art galleries around the world. People are drawn to violent entertainment because they enjoy making moral judgements about characters, it enables them to master fear, and it provides stimulus in an under-stimulating society. Violent amusement also offers many accompanying factors such as movement, energy, and novelty. But this is not to deny that repeated exposure to violent amusements is unproblematic. Apart from a numbing effect, violent entertainment is part of a cycle of violence in which regular exposure causes viewers to frame real life in terms of threat that, in turn, leads to allowing authorities to use violence on their behalf. Fourth, some people abhor horror entertainment but, again, many people do not. They are thrilled by terror and dread. Images of abject bodily deterioration, death, and dismemberment, engage primal, personal, and perennial fears. Social fears are also confronted like nuclear war; social anarchy; and since 2001, the vulnerability of ordinary living and working places. The basic tropes of horror were established by the first-century BCE, developed by the medieval church’s depictions of hell, redeveloped by Restoration tragedy, reworked again by the Gothic stage, and are mediated today in horror and destruction movie genres. Aestheticians distinguished between terror as a form of the sublime and horror; one being transcendent, the other being low and vulgar, but when examined as psychological states, the distinction falls apart. Horror allows viewers to escape from ordinary life like no other, indulge in the wish fulfillment of breaking social taboos, and enjoy the joy of transgression. On the other hand, the tropes of horror can unleash hatred, as illustrated by Nazi propaganda and today’s terrorist videos. In short, the aesthetic lures of today’s popular culture have been employed time and again in the history of fine art. While aesthetic theorists and art historians have sought to distinguish these pleasures from one another, when examined, their binaries are often revealed to be distinctions without a difference.

AESTHETICS AND AESTHESIS From considering aesthetics in Kantian terms as privileging fine art as the best that has been created, many in art education now view aesthetics in terms of its seductive power manifest in all kinds of cultural sites. And instead of viewing aesthetics as highly laudable in and of itself, akin to the divine, it

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is understood to serve vested interests in the inculcation of ideologies. What remains is an acknowledgement that aesthetics is vitally important to both appreciate and understand the social roles of imagery. Tavin’s points about the confusing use of aesthetics in art education are well taken, but its continued use, confused or not, seems assured. NOTES 1. Victor Lowenfeld, and W. L. Brittain, Creative and Mental Growth, 4th ed. (New York: Prentice Hall, 1964). 2. Harry S. Broudy, “Some Duties of a Theory of Educational Aesthetics,” Educational Theory 1 (1951): 190–198. 3. Manuel Barkan, “Curriculum Problems in Art Education,” in A Seminar in Art Education for Research and Curriculum Development, ed. E. Mattil (University Park, PN: Pennsylvania State University, 1966): 240–255. 4. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1952). 5. Fredich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (London: Penguin, 2016). 6. Herbert Read, Education Through Art. 3rd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1958). 7. Ralph A. Smith, “Art and Aesthetic Statesmanship in American Education,” Art Education, 23 (1971): 2. 8. M. Flannery, “Aesthetic Education,” Art Education, 26, no. 5 (1973): 21. 9. Ralph A. Smith, “Aesthetic Education: Questions and Issues.” in Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education, ed. E. W. Eisner and M. D. Day (London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004) 163–185. 10. Munro Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1958), and George Dickie, Aesthetics: An Introduction (Indianapolis, IN: Pegasus, 1971). 11. Harry Broudy, Enlighted Cherishing (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972). 12. Howard Gardner, “The Development of Sensitivity to Figural and Stylistic Aspects of Painting,” British Journal of Psychology, 63 (1972): 605–615. 13. Michael Parsons, How We Understand Art: A Cognitive Developmental Account of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 14. Michael Parsons, “Endpoints, Repertories, and Toolboxes: Development in Art as the Acquisition of Tools,” The International Journal of Arts Education, 1, no. 1 (2003): 67–82. 15. Anna Kindler and Bernard Darras, B. (1997). “Map of Artistic Development,” in Child Development in Art, ed. Anna. M. Kindler (Reston, VA: National Art Education Association): 17–44. 16. Eliot Eisner, Educating Artistic Vision (New York: Mcmillian, 1972) and Edmund Feldman, Varieties of Visual Experience (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972).

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17. Stanley Madeja and S Onuska (1977). Through the Arts to the Aesthetic (St Louis: CEMREL, 1977), and Eisner, Educating Artistic Vision and E. Feldman, Varieties of Visual Experience (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972). 18. Laura Chapman, Approaches to Art Education (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). 19. Feldman, Varieties of Visual Experience. 20. Tom Anderson, “Defining and Structuring Art Criticism for Education,” Studies in Art Education, 34, no. 3 (1993): 199–208. 21. Michael Day, “Effects of Instruction on High School Students Art Preferences and Judgements,” Studies in Art Education, 18, no. 1 (1976): 25–39. 22. Day, “Effects of Instruction,” 43. 23. Kathy Danko-McGhee (2006). “Nurturing Aesthetic Awareness in Young Children: Developmentally Appropriate Art Viewing Experiences,” Art Education, 59, no. 3 (2006): 20–24, 33–35. 24. Alan Cunningham and Diana Kendall, “Computer Assisted Data Analysis in the Development of an Aesthetic Response Model,” Australian Art Education, 21, no. 1 (1998): 35–42. 25. Dyane Greer, “A Discipline Based View of Art Education,” Studies in Art Education, 25 no. 4 (1984): 212–218. 26. Stephen D. Dobbs, The DBAE Handbook: An Overview of Discipline-Based Art Education (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Centre for Education in the Arts, 1992). 27. Vincent Lanier, The Arts We See: A Simplified Introduction to the Visual Arts (New York: Teachers College Press, 1982). 28. Laura Chapman (1978). Approaches to Art Education. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 29. Junce King McFee and Rogena Degge (1977). Art, Culture, and Environment: A Catalyst for Teaching (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth). 30. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 31. Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 32. Richard A. Shusterman, Pragmatic Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989). 33. Karen A. Hamblen (1990). “Beyond the Aesthetic of Cash-Culture Literacy,” Studies in Art Education, 31, no. 4 (1990): 219, 223. 34. Mary Stokrocki, “Going to the Mall and Get It All: Adolescents’ Aesthetic Values in the Shopping Mall,” Art Education, 54, no. 2 (2001): 18–23. 35. William Wightman, “Making the familiar “unfamiliar;” Kmart, consumer aesthetics, and art education, in Visual Culture in the Art Class: Case Studies, ed. Paul Duncum (Reston, VA: National Art Education Association, 2006): 126–134. 36. Kristin Congdon and N. B King, “Teaching About Surfing Culture and Aesthetics,” Visual Arts Research, 28, no. 2 (2002): 48–56. 37. Kit Grauer, “Teenagers and Their Bedrooms,” Visual Arts Research, 28, no. 2 (2002): 86–93. 38. Kevin Tavin, “Eyes Wide Shut: The Use and Uselessness of the Discourse of Aesthetics in Art Education,” Art Education, 60, no. 2 (2007): 40–45.

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39. Tavin, “Eyes Wide Shut,” 41. 40. Jean-Frances Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1984). 41. M. Bérube, ed. The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). 42. Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). 43. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976): 28. 44. Paul Duncum, “The Promiscuity of Aesthetics,” Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 30 (2010): 16–22. 45. Arthur Efland, “The Entwined Nature of the Aesthetic: A Discourse on Visual Culture,” Studies in Art Education, 45, no. 3 (2004): 234–251. 46. Freedman, K (2003). Teaching Visual Culture: Curriculum, Aesthetics, and the Social Life of Art. New York: Teachers College Press. 47. Mary C. Carter, “Volitional Aesthetics: A Philosophy for the Use of Visual Culture in Art Education,” Studies in Art Education, 49, no. 2 (2008): 99. 48. Paul Duncum, “Aesthetics, Popular Visual Culture and Designer Capitalism,” The International Journal of Art & Design, 26, no. 3 (2000): 285–295. 49. You-Jin Lee, “Build-the-Bear Workshop: Its Aesthetic and Ideology,” Art Education, 61, no. 6 (2008): 20–24. 50. Paul Duncum, “Aesthetics from Mars: TV Wrestling as Visual Culture,” Journal of Gender Issues in Art and Education, no. 3 (2003): 41–51. 51. Kerry Freedman, Teaching Visual Culture: Curriculum, Aesthetics, and the Social Life of Art (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003):140. 52. Robin Vande Zande, “Chairs, Cars, and Bridges: Teaching Aesthetics from the Everyday,” Art Education, 60, no. 1 (2007): 39–43. 53. Paul Duncum, “An Eye Does Not Make an I: Expanding the Sensorium,” Studies in Art Education, 53, no. 3 (2012): 182–192. 54. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977). 55. Jozef Kovalcik and Max Ryynanen, ed. Aesthetics of Popular Culture (Bratislava: Academy of Fine Arts and Design, 2014). 56. Kevin Tavin, Mira Kallio-Tavin and Max Ryynanen, eds. Art, Excess, and Education: Historical and Discursive Contexts (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 57. Terry Barrett, Interpreting Art: Reflecting, Wondering, and Responding (New York: McGraw Hill, 2002) and Freedman, Teaching Visual Culture. 58. Paul Duncum, Popular Pleasures: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Popular Visual Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 59. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, 2nd ed. trans. G. A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 60. Paul Duncum, Picture Pedagogy: Visual Culture Concepts to Enhance the Curriculum (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

Chapter 12

Aesthetics and Musicology Lisa Giombini

Music seems to have a firm footing and a promising future in the philosophical discourse surrounding aesthetics. Starting from the 1980s, a multitude of books and articles have been published under the banner ‘Philosophy of Music’, understood as a subcategory of aesthetics or the philosophy of art. Concurrently, a significant number of philosophers have devoted their careers primarily to writing about aesthetics and music. The resulting body of work has given rise to a scholarly tradition that transcends the barriers of philosophical methods and styles, blurring the analytic-continental divide.1 Theoretical investigations into musical aesthetics, however, tend to be restricted to the philosophical realm, often lacking reference to broader musical scholarship and practice, which limits their accessibility to individuals beyond the field of philosophy. Meanwhile, despite the extensive research on the aesthetics of music pursued by philosophers, particularly in Europe and the United States, the role of aesthetics within musicology has become increasingly uncertain. Until recently, musicologists have had only limited engagement with philosophers. On the one hand, it is a fact that musical aesthetics is often excluded from the syllabi of music schools and conservatories worldwide, with courses in the aesthetics or philosophy of music being mainly confined to philosophy departments. On the other hand, wherever aesthetics is included, it typically involves approaches that focus more on the history of the discipline (who said what and when) than on the application of philosophical methods to music. This differs significantly from the work pursued in the aesthetics of music by philosophers, which tends to focus on developing thematic and conceptual arguments rather than pursuing historical reflections. An outcome of this situation is that no clarity has yet been achieved on the complex question of the relationship between musicology and the aesthetic 183

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of music, with many potential avenues for exploration largely left uncharted. And yet, the separation between musical scholarship in the narrower sense, oriented by historical inquiries, and the aesthetic of music, drawn by philosophical analyses, is detrimental to both fields. While abstract philosophical approaches are hardly connected with contemporary musical practice and often have little impact on music scholarship,2 purely musicological surveys tend to overlook the vast realm of aesthetic thoughts and ideas that musicians have employed to create musical works historically and thus reduce music to a mute object of historical inquiry. On the contrary, it is precisely in the mutual interchange between the two fields that the most productive questions of music as an art – its nature, significance, and impact on human experience, are to be found.3 My goal in this chapter is to establish a foundation for a possible reapproach between the two disciplines. Specifically, I aim to explore potential motives for the separation of musical aesthetics and musicology through an examination of some common objections that each discipline has voiced against the other. One principal reason for this communication gap, I propose, depends on what might be called a ‘fear of aesthetics’ on the part of musicologists, which is largely the result of a biased and anachronistic understanding of the idea of ‘the aesthetic’. At the same time, a philosophy of music that prioritises theoretical generalisations over the direct experience of music evidently holds little appeal for music scholars. Fostering a more balanced and collaborative discourse between musicology and aesthetics, I contend, implies finding a balance between philosophical abstraction and musicological accuracy, which enables the writing of musicological accounts that do not diminish the aesthetic value of music by reducing it to a mere document of techniques or ideas. Prior to commencing, it is imperative to make a last terminological clarification. Within this chapter, the expressions ‘aesthetics of music’ and ‘philosophy of music’ are utilised interchangeably to denote the philosophical subfield that is concerned with the nature of music and the experience it elicits. Clearly, however, not all aesthetics of music need to be strictly philosophical. For example, one could argue that while the aesthetics of the music is concerned with exploring the musical experience, particularly music reception, and appreciation, the philosophy of music is concerned with the final product of the musicians’ artistic activity – the musical work. In the same way, aesthetics is based on the phenomenology of artistic experience, while the philosophy of art examines the artistic endeavour and result. Although this distinction is partly justified, the concept of musical aesthetics has assimilated so much with the philosophy of music, and the problems of these two fields are so closely intertwined that it appears impossible to separate them. To a similar extent, by the term ‘musicology’, my reference here is to a

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field of study whose concerns and methods are primarily historical–analytical and thus cannot be fully encompassed by or equated to approaches such as cultural studies, social history, anthropology, sociology, or cognitive science of music. While musicology is connected to all of these areas, it resists being reduced to any one of them.

MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY Throughout history, music has occupied a vital place in the work of philosophers, playing an important role in the development of Western philosophical tradition. At the same time, philosophical theories and reflections have contributed significantly to shaping the study of music, helping to frame the way we think about and analyse the musical experience. It is not just that philosophers have always considered music as an important subject of contemplation, along with other entities in the world. In fact, in numerous instances in the history of our culture, music has been instrumental in molding the very essence of philosophical thinking. As is well-known, ancient philosophers such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle placed great emphasis on music’s relationship to human emotions and discussed its influence on behaviour in their moral theories. For medieval thinkers like Boethius and Agustine of Hippo, music was a powerful means of connecting with the divine and a way to understand the universe’s order. Modern philosophers such as Kant and Hegel saw music as a model for the aesthetic experience of the beautiful, while Schelling considered musical rhythm an example of how philosophy could unify cognitive structure with sensory experience. Schopenhauer regarded music as a symbol of the cosmic force underlying reality – the ‘Will’ – linking the world of appearances to the metaphysical realm, whereas Nietzsche famously viewed music as an expression of the Dionysian impulse. In fact, the list of philosophers who have shown an interest in music since ancient times is extensive and encompasses many notable thinkers, including for example, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, Spinoza, Rousseau, and numerous others. The examples given here are merely a small fraction of the total.4 Each of these philosophers highlighted a different aspect of the musical experience, emphasising its various potential significance; yet none of them treated music independently, as a stand-alone topic of philosophical inquiry. Their different accounts share a similar way of thinking about music, what we could call a ‘transcendental’ theoretical approach. In this approach, music is subordinated to preconceived metaphysical ideas and subservient to an extrinsic and transcendent system that uses it for its own purposes, as is the case with Plato’s ethos theory and Schopenhauer’s irrationalist voluntarism,

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along with many other metaphysical frameworks. Take, for example, the Romantic era, which is widely acknowledged to have been characterised by a deep fascination with music. However, the approach taken towards music during this period was always all-encompassing and holistic, as music was viewed as just one of the many pursuits that reflected the whole of the human spirit. Even idealist thinkers like Hegel or Schelling, who extensively discussed music within their aesthetic works, considered it essentially as a starting point for their metaphysical theory, its elements – sound, tone, rhythm, dynamics – construed as parts of a larger system that incorporates them and determines their meaning.5 This explains why they did not even try to establish a distinct discipline for the philosophy of music. The birth of a theory of music as a separate field of philosophical and aesthetic investigation can only be traced back to the late nineteenth century. This development is closely linked to the emergence of the new concept of ‘absolute music’, which was made possible by changes in the historical connection between music, Church, and Court after 1789.6 The rise of new bourgeois institutions, such as concert halls and state conservatories, created a setting where instrumental music could take centre stage and be performed as the primary focus, rather than serving a specific religious or social function. This led to a greater emphasis on music’s formal and structural aspects and sparked debates about the relationship between music and language, as well as the ability of music to convey meaning without the use of explicit narrative content. Music started to be viewed as a self-referential system, separate from any practical or utilitarian function it might serve, beholden to no purpose but its own, and endowed with intrinsic value. It was ‘absolute’ – loose from external ties and complete in itself.7 Importantly, the notion of absolute music also engaged a range of broader beliefs about music aesthetic autonomy, the idea that music can be appreciated, evaluated, and analysed based solely on its aesthetic qualities, independent of any contextual factors such as social, historical, or cultural. Famously, Eduard Hanslick was the first writer to establish a comprehensive and impactful theory for the new concept of absolute music. His seminal work, Vom musikalisch Schönen (The Beautiful in Music), first published in 1854, went through nine editions by 1897.8 The crucial aspect in Hanslick’s analysis was the new recognition of instrumental music as a well-defined, unambiguous art with its independent set of aesthetic principles, requiring its own scientific discipline. Music, Hanslick claimed, has its only content in the ‘tonally moving forms’ (tönend bewegte Formen) it consists of: ‘The material out of which the composer creates, of which the abundance can never be exaggerated, is the entire system of tones, with their latent possibilities for melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic variety’.9 This system exists for its own sake and does not have any other subject matter beyond the rules that determine its

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‘grammar’. In this sense, the musical value was for Hanslick specifically musical, confined within the limits of its own medium, and independent from any relation to any concept derived from extra-musical reality. The elements of music only play a functional role in the tonal system to which they belong, and this is what gives them significance. The very idea of music as a separate and special realm of human activity has its roots in the idea of the aesthetic autonomy of the musical elaborated by Hanslick. His formalist arguments about music’s essence being exclusively musical played a significant role in elevating music to the most abstract and philosophical of the fine arts, which in turn resulted in a narrowing of the definition of what qualifies as music and the delimitation of the scope of music theory and aesthetics. The theoretical revolution heralded by Hanslick gained further traction with the emergence of the brand new academic discipline of ‘musicology’, in the late nineteenth century. Initially designated as the ‘science of music’, the field was given a new name in 1885 when the German term Musikwissenschaft was modified to become Musikologie.10 In the same year, the inaugural edition of the journal Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft was published, featuring music theorist Guido Adler’s famous article ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft’ (Scope, method, and aim of the science of music), where the shape and scope of the new discipline were outlined for the first time.11 In this way, the notion of a ‘scientific’ approach to music, which had been implicit in Hanslick’s writing, was ultimately actualised. Interestingly, Adler included musical aesthetics as one of the four essential components of musicology in his definition, with general aesthetics serving as a supplementary field. Adler believed that the role of musical aesthetics was to assess and contrast ‘the highest law in the individual branches of tonal art’, considering both the perceiver and the standards of musical beauty.12 In 1898, Adler founded the first Musikwissenschaftliches Institut (Musicological Institute) at the University of Vienna.13 By the early twentieth century, musicology had already established itself in academia as a legitimate scholarly discipline applying rigorous scientific methods to the study of music in terms of history, acoustics, psychology, and physiology. In the early years, musicology primarily substantiated a positivist view of music as a phenomenon that could be examined objectively and systematically through the analysis and classification of musical structures and the study of scores, manuscripts, and historical documents. This traditional view of musicology involved researchers mainly becoming familiar with and analysing musical works according to their history of creation, performance, and reception, to reconstruct the performance practices, social contexts, and stylistic conventions of different musical eras.14 Later on, in the mid-twentieth century, musicology began to expand beyond the original confines of historical research to encompass other areas, such as ethnomusicology, cultural studies, cognitive

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psychology, and more. The advent of new technologies, such as sound recording and electronic music, also prompted musicology to explore new avenues of research. Meanwhile, as musicology gained ground in the humanities, a new perspective on music also began to develop in philosophy, which gradually paved the way for the emergence of the contemporary ‘philosophy of music’. Unlike the prior two millennia of philosophical inquiry, this novel approach did not view music as tethered to science, religion, anthropology, or ethics. Instead, in keeping with Hanslick’s formalism, it acknowledged music’s singular and remarkable qualities, without seeking to unravel the mysteries of the universe or furnish proof for an all-encompassing metaphysical system, as Pythagoras, Boethius, and Schopenhauer once sought. Theodor W. Adorno’s influential writings had a key role in popularising the notion of the new rigorous (and relatively insular) philosophy of music.15 After Adorno passed away in 1969, his reputation continued to grow in academia as his writings on music became a point of reference for scholars grappling with issues of aesthetics and politics in the context of modernism. Nevertheless, it took several decades for the philosophy of music to establish itself within academic circles, especially in the Anglo-American context.16 Writing in the Fifties, Morris Raphael Cohen noted for instance that despite the influence of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, only very few American philosophers had written about music, leaving other philosophers notably absent in this area.17 Peter Kivy also commented on the state of musical aesthetics at that time, reporting that, back in the 1960s, there was hardly any philosophical discourse on music in U.S. philosophical circles, except for Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and Leonard B. Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956).18 The situation changed swiftly, though, and in a span of a few years, analytic research in music philosophy spawned a remarkably intense debate, with questions of music ontology, expression, and meaning becoming a prominent focus in the work of philosophers such as Kivy himself, Jerrold Levinson, Stephen Davies, Nick Zangwill, among the many.19

THE FEAR OF AESTHETICS By the half of the past century, musicology and the aesthetics of music had already developed in two distinct and separate fields with different methodologies and approaches. Even though they had shared a common origin and close interconnection in the nineteenth century, the two disciplines have grown apart in the process of institutionalisation, as new fields often gain independence through separation from previously related disciplines.

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Recent musicological literature has bemoaned the lack of philosophical competence among musicologists.20 ‘It is fair to say’, writes music scholar Julian Johnson in his contribution to the newly published Oxford Handbook of Western Philosophy and Music, ‘that until quite recently historical musicology’s engagement with philosophy has been patchy in the extreme and generally bracketed away as a further subdivision of the discipline’. Within historical musicology, the category of the aesthetic, Johnson concludes, is ‘an idea whose status is fragile today’.21 This resonates with musicologist Stephen Downes’ somber reflections in the editorial preface to Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Perspectives, published in 2014. Downes suggests that, in recent musicology, “the notion of an ‘aesthetic’ seemed to be neglected, rejected, even pilloried.” Consequently, even when philosophers and musicologists appear to be discussing the same subject matter, they struggle to comprehend one another, which impedes the potential for future interdisciplinary cooperation.22 On the other hand, it is also true that most contemporary philosophers writing about music tend to disregard the work of musicologists, and reference it only rarely, if at all – which however makes their own contribution uninteresting to musicologists. In sum, as music professor Michael Spizer put it, the situation today resembles that of a painful ‘divorce’ between the two fields, which limits the scope and depth of analysis in both musicology and philosophy.23 Given the common origins and long-standing relationship between the two disciplines, one may question why the aesthetics of music is so frequently omitted from conventional musicological studies (and vice versa). Certainly, it would be simplistic to assume that scholars are merely uninterested in engaging with non-disciplinary literature, although this may occasionally be the case. Rather, it is likely that a communication gap impedes the establishment of a productive dialogue between the two fields. Multiple factors may have contributed to this situation, including differences between the disciplines’ academic statuses, as well as current trends of hyperspecialisation within the humanities. Nevertheless, there may be some more fundamental reasons for this mutual disengagement. In regard to musicologists’ apparent reluctance to involve themselves with philosophical works pertaining to musical aesthetics, my contention is that this could be considered an occurrence of what art historian Sam Rose has recently termed ‘fear of aesthetics’.24 According to Rose, the origins of this wide-ranging anxiety towards aesthetics, which unifies scholars in music, literature, art theory, and cultural studies more broadly, can be traced back to Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s Adieu à l’ésthetique25 and Steven Connor’s highly polemical essay ‘Doing Without Art’.26 While Schaeffer criticised the claim that aesthetics can achieve objective validity in its judgements, Connor’s argument targeted the possibility of a clear idea of ‘the aesthetic’ that could

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serve as a foundation for art and its power. Both essays highlighted the negative reputation that aesthetics has garnered over time, eventually proclaiming its obsolescence and proposing its abandonment. In fact, the prospects for aesthetics seemed gloomy as far back as the 1980s, with Pierre Bourdieu’s La Distinction27 marking the start of the decade, and Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic28 echoing the criticism towards the decade’s end. In music scholarship, the 1980s witnessed the rise of the ‘New Musicology’ movement, which is distinguished by the adoption of a postmodern perspective entailing a prevalently dismissive attitude towards the aesthetics of music.29 (See e.g. the collection of essays edited by Adam Krims in 1998, with the provocative title Music and Ideology. Resisting the Aesthetic.30) The movement has arisen in response to the previous dominance of ‘internalism and formalism’ in musicology (as American musicologist Gary Tomlinson phrased it31), and its excessively narrow focus on Western art music. Proponents of New Musicology believe that aesthetic categories such as ‘work’, ‘art’, ‘the aesthetic’, and even ‘music’ are cultural constructions with limited historical and geographical relevance. In contrast, they argue that music has to be interpreted in its broader connections to human society, gender, cultural traditions, locations, dissemination technologies, commercial interests, and market situations. This perspective supports the claim that musicology’s subject matter is changing to the point where an aesthetic perspective is no longer applicable.32 Instead, other disciplines should take its place: semiotics, structural analysis, or the sociology of music. These and other similar appraisals underlie the contemporary distrust of musical aesthetics in musicology. At the heart of such critiques lies the conviction that ‘aesthetics’ primarily refers to the study of some special kind of experience, often characterised by beauty, rooted in sensory perception, and wholly separate from cognitive processes. These positions often associate aesthetics with a particular type of authoritative aesthetic judgement based on a version of music formalism. In this sense, the ‘fear’ of aesthetics mainly involves a rejection of the claim that music represents a self-contained, isolated realm that is self-sufficient, as postulated by formalist theories like Hanslick’s – an idea that is regarded as politically and ideologically suspect. The late twentieth-century backlash against aesthetics in musicology represents a response to this tradition. This criticism, however, can easily be refused. The anti-aesthetic stance in postmodern musicology is a result of an outdated understanding of aesthetics that illegitimately subsumes the discipline to an unvarying, historically uninformed nineteenth-century ideal. Such a viewpoint stems from a confusion between the broader notion of ‘aesthetic’, which describes our response to certain formal and sensory properties of objects in the world, with the narrower conception of ‘aesthetic autonomy’, which refers to music considered

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in and of itself. However, the link between contemporary aesthetics of music and the Hanslickian tradition that gave birth to it is limited at best, as its key notions are often very distant from, if not completely unrelated to present-day concerns. As practiced today, both in the continental and in the analytic tradition, the philosophy of music has undergone several significant breaks with the nineteenth-century model. While general or universal ideas of the aesthetic are not entirely dismissed – ‘the work’, ‘disinterest’, and ‘autonomy’ – their use often precludes any grand claims made on behalf of music. To confine my investigation to the analytic tradition alone, current discussions on the aesthetics of music either highlight how limited these notions are when analysing the variety of musical genres or experiences33 or defend the aesthetic experience of music as broad enough to encompass cognitive, moral, and other properties.34 Moreover, debates rage fiercely over the aesthetics of music without implying that analysis pursued under this heading could ever be reduced to a narrow conception of beauty or aesthetic experience. What is currently referred to as the ‘philosophy of music’ includes an expanded study of music that abandons the unquestioned tie with aesthetic formalism, thus debunking the ideology of absolute music with its prized assets of autonomy and disinterestedness.35 However, the ‘fear of aesthetics’ in musicology can also originate from positions that are far removed from postmodernism. For example, according to musicologist Ivo Supičić, some music scholars may fail to recognise the importance of philosophical aesthetics because they understand musicology primarily as a science, a perspective that has its roots in the lasting influence of positivism on the discipline.36 For this reason, they give primary relevance to technical and historical details, neglecting more evaluative or normative kinds of issues. Although these scholars may acknowledge that the aesthetics of music should be studied historically, they do not consider its practice a valuable addition to a serious music scholarship concerned with recording musical facts. The varying views and interpretations within aesthetics may also create confusion, hesitation, or discomfort to the musicologist, as they introduce an unwelcome and even alarming element of subjectivity in a field that seeks to achieve a scientific status. Responding to this type of objection is not very hard, either. While positivism was useful in the early days to provide musicology with its own academic dignity, it cannot be considered a requirement for conducting serious research on music. Despite its claim to absolute objectivity and the attempt to exclude all forms of subjectivity from the analysis, the positivist approach to musicology (as to any other field) necessarily relies on implicit or explicit evaluations that extend beyond a strictly objective analysis. Indeed, similar to philosophy, history is abundant with interpretations. Just as there are multiple aesthetic attitudes and understandings that can confuse historians of music, there are

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also numerous historical explanations and viewpoints that require interpretation. Moreover, although documental research is important, studying musical techniques and historical details alone cannot fully elucidate or help one comprehend music in its entirety. It is possible to accumulate knowledge about music without understanding it intrinsically or appreciating its meanings and essential implications. And how can a strictly historical approach disregard the vast realm of ideas held by composers themselves, which were intricately intertwined with the creation of numerous invaluable musical works? Consider for instance how heavily influenced Beethoven was by the philosophy of Schiller, particularly his ideas about freedom, brotherhood, and the power of human will, when writing the Ninth Symphony; or Schopenhauer’s impact on Wagner’s operas such as Tristan and Isolde or Parsifal. As musicologist delves deeper into the complexities of musical phenomena, they will inevitably encounter profound philosophical issues that require consideration. Thus, it seems essential that the musicologist has a clear and explicit understanding of aesthetic concepts related to music, art, and humanity. Only with a solid philosophical and aesthetic foundation can one effectively navigate the intricate issues that arise in the study of music. These considerations suggest that the ‘fear of aesthetics’ is an anachronistic way to see things. Both the postmodern and the positivist criticism against the aesthetics of music and its scholarly relevance are questionable. The theoretical, aesthetic, and philosophical conceptions that have accompanied music over time are significant not only to the history of music but to musicology in general. Therefore, an aesthetic approach to music studies is necessary, whereby the objective is to investigate music production not just as a historical fact, but as a human creative product in various contexts, including cultural, philosophical, and spiritual.

DISTINCT METHODS Despite the potential for mutual exchange, a fundamental challenge persists that obstacles musicologists’ and philosophers’ attempts at communication. Indeed, whatever the concept of musicology and the aesthetics of music one subscribes to, the problem of methods between the disciplines inevitably arises, and with it that of the approach of the scholar towards the subject of their research. In this understanding, the divide between aesthetics and musicology is largely a result of the tension between aesthetics’ aiming for general, universal truths and musicology’s trying to pin down historical particularities in regard to musical works. By definition, the aesthetics of music, as a philosophical discipline, aims to understand the broader principles underlying music creation and experience, focusing on general notions or concepts,

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and providing conceptual arguments for their adoption.37 Philosophers of music are often abstract musical pieces from their context of production, focusing on generalisations driven by conceptual categories that are taken to apply to all types or genres of music. Moreover, they tend to assume that such categories are normative or ahistorical, based on the common practice of tonality in Western classical music from Bach to Mahler. On the other hand, musicology is largely characterised by a focus on singular works of art, which it seeks to understand in their context of creation. This is supported by the fact that music studies are mostly case-based, with standard publications in the field being focused on a single theme, period, author, or work. The methodological mismatch is especially evident in the case of two harshly discussed philosophical questions in the aesthetics of music, the controversial problem of the ontological status of musical works, and the complex issue of the relationship between music and expressiveness. Debates about the ontological nature of musical pieces represent perhaps the most ‘characteristic thematic focus’38 of the analytic philosophy of music, with the question of what kind of entity a musical work is being the primary concern. As has been noted, current discussions retrace the controversy over the so-called ‘problem of universals’ in Medieval philosophy, centring mainly around technical issues in fundamental ontology, for example, notions such as property, instantiation, or grounding.39 Drawing from a range of traditional metaphysical theories, including idealism, nominalism, and Platonism, some philosophers believe that musical works are eternal entities or ideas in the mind of the composer, others consider them to be natural or norm-kinds, classes, or sets of classes.40 Nevertheless, all participants in the debate assume that musical works are determinate and identifiable objects with inherent value that can be treated ahistorically, that is, independently of our perceptions or interpretations. Against this approach, various scholars in both musicology and philosophy have argued that given the cultural nature of musical works, a different methodology may be necessary, as opposed to that standardly employed in fundamental metaphysics.41 In this perspective, ontological accounts are seen as misguided and potentially harmful as they misconstrue the nature of entities, such as musical works, that are essentially historical, by treating them as eternal and unchanging. Notions such as work, score, authenticity, and the like, have emerged in a particular historical and geographical moment and cannot be applied universally. This is evidenced by the cultural variability of the practices of composition, performance, and listening, as well as by music theory, criticism, and interpretation. In particular, musicologists widely subscribe to the assertion that the central concept of ‘musical work’ is not a transcendental ontological entity, but rather a historically contingent category, which was born at some point in Western history.42 Other musical

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‘things’, such as versions, arrangements, transpositions, variations, compositions, improvisations, and the like, are subject to the same historical principles. Currently, we can clearly differentiate between these different musical activities, but it is a fact that in the past, musicians did not perceive them in the same way as we do today. Only at some point in time, did this extensive range of musical practices begin to be recognised as separate musical genres, and criteria of inclusion and exclusion were established to define these classes more distinctly and accurately. The process of categorisation continues today and has led to the creation of numerous distinct musical genres, each with its own set of conventions and characteristics. These considerations testify to the fact that music is mainly the product of dynamic interactions that take place between various extra-musical dimensions such as history, politics, and ideology. For example, British musicologist Nicholas Cook has suggested that the concept of music as an opus absolutum – an everlasting work detached from its sounding realisation in the present – only emerged in early nineteenthcentury Europe, a period that saw the establishment of the modern ‘bourgeois subjectivity’ and the capitalist mode of production, distribution, and consumption in Western society.43 Therefore, the idea that there is an objective and timeless standard for evaluating music is simply wrong. In this sense, as music scholar Daniel Martin Sáez has argued, philosophers’ exclusive interest in the ‘musical work’, a kind of object that they ‘usually understand outside any other institution except those involved in its production (composers, scores, concert halls, performers, and so on)’ is a major shortcoming of their approach.44 This, along with the fact that they ‘devote most of their time to musical works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ justifies the claim that they cannot be called “philosophers ‘of music’, but philosophers of a very specific kind of musical work, from a very specific viewpoint.”45 Musicologist Andrew Bowie’s opinion in this regard is even more severe. Bowie posits that the analytical approach is essentially a sterile metaphysical exercise that, by failing to connect conceptual questions to real-world actions and events, is disconnected from the actual practice of music as a historically embedded activity. Such an approach, he argues, has therefore limited value for philosophy and the humanities at large.46 Similar reservations have been raised with respect to the debate regarding musical expressiveness. Discussions on the topic have mainly centred on the emotional responses that listeners have to music, the value of such reactions, and why we often choose to listen to music that elicits negative emotions, like sadness or melancholy.47 Although emotional responses are a crucial aspect of certain music genres, many have noticed that there are issues with treating music solely as an expression of emotion. For example, as Johnson points out, for a musicologist, questions such as ‘What does it mean to hear this music as sad?’, are comparable to asking ‘What does it mean to read

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Kant as pedantic?’ or ‘What does it mean to read Wittgenstein as difficult?’48 Such questions ignore the complexity and specificity of the musical text in terms of its unique structure and characteristics, which is instead a crucial aspect of historical/musicological analysis, and therefore misses a significant part of what music accomplishes. Inquiries into the sadness of a piece such as, for example, Brahms’s Intermezzo, Op. 118 no. 2, overlook the infinite nuances that make it a unique work of art and not just a common stimulus for feelings of loss or pensiveness, thus failing to capture the richness of the music’s material play. In fact, when listening to a musical piece, we are moved by the momentary experience of an affective and cognitive being outside of language, rather than by a common emotion that we can denote by linguistic labels such as sadness, melancholy, etc. The value we accord to our experience of music derives from the gap that opens up between the material particularity of the musical pieces and the paucity of our ordinary language, which touches on one of the reasons we have music in the first place.49 This, Johnson concludes, helps explain why musicologists and musicians: ‘tend to have little interest in a philosophy of music that neither seems to address itself to the particularity of music nor to emerge from it. If speaking about music does not begin with the music, it can never do anything more than reproduce an understanding of the world already embedded in habitual ways of speaking. That is the solipsistic circularity of all philosophy of music that begins and ends with philosophy rather than music’.50 Also for Spitzer, analytic philosophers have mostly overlooked the importance of the formal aspects of music, such as harmony, melody, rhythm, and timbre, in their work about musical expressiveness. The discourse, Spitzer writes, is focused “mostly about emotion, passing over musical structure, as Wittgenstein might say, ‘in silence,’” which, he implies, makes it ultimately unappealing to music scholars.51 In contrast to both these approaches, musicologists underline that the meaning and significance of musical works, including the ways in which music shapes our emotional responses, are deeply influenced by the social and cultural contexts in which they are produced and received. Focusing on the singular, unrepeatable nature of individual pieces is seen as key to addressing the historical and cultural contexts in which music is created and experienced.

A SHARED GOAL While some of the objections raised against the philosophy of music are legitimate, they do not suffice to obviate the need for an interdisciplinary dialogue between musicology and musical aesthetics. For example, the relevance of philosophical and ontological questions about music is independent

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of the way these questions have been treated in recent literature. Issues about the nature of musical pieces, their identity over time, and their relationship to texts, performances, and recordings are central features of music’s artistic and social significance. Similarly, the ability of music to convey emotions, tell stories, and communicate cultural values – whether through its harmonic, melodic, or rhythmic features – has been debated for centuries. Discussions on these topics are therefore of crucial importance for a deeper understanding of music and cannot simply be dismissed based on past debates. There remain, of course, structural differences between the two fields that cannot (and perhaps should not) be reconciled. Aesthetics and musicology can be regarded as distinct languages dealing with the same object, shedding light on different facets of the subject matter. These languages are often mutually untranslatable. The philosophy of music explores ‘immanent’ problems related to music and musical products. Instead, musicology in general, and the history of music in particular, do not only explore relevant musical facts in their mutual connexions and relationships but also investigate all the surrounding extra-musical context which can lead to a better knowledge and understanding of music. It is to this extent that we categorise some works, such as for example, Kivy’s The Corded Shell as ‘philosophy of music’ as they focus specifically on providing an account of the musical medium and how this medium can be used in different instances to convey meaning and emotion. In contrast, we classify other works, like for instance Lawrence Kramer’s Music as Cultural Practice: 1800–1900 as ‘musicology’, as they are concerned with investigating a specific musician, musical work, and musical period, in light of the contemporary cultural practices, ideologies, and social hierarchies. However, the boundaries between the two disciplines are actually blurrier than they may seem. Just as aesthetic experiences can serve as starting points for historical investigations, historical knowledge can be incorporated into aesthetic analyses without contradicting itself. For example, a musicological analysis of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that did not include an aesthetic interpretation of the ‘immanent’ aesthetic aspects of the Ode to Joy would lack all salience. Similarly, while analysing musical works as social, intellectual, or technical documents may go against the aesthetic purpose of music as an art, this does not mean that historical findings cannot inform our interpretation of the aesthetic nature of these works. Aesthetic and documentary observations are not necessarily based on mutually exclusive facts, and which types of facts to use for a musicological or aesthetic interpretation must be decided on a case-by-case basis. To this extent, books in the musicology category are likely to depend on some theory that they aim to actualise. For example, Kramer’s Music as Cultural Practice provides a strong theoretical basis and practical approach

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to applying Gadamers’ hermeneutics to both instrumental and text-based music. Similarly, Foucault’s genealogic methodology has influenced the pursuit of much contemporary musicological research, where musical procedures are considered in light of historically-constituted ideas of gender, sexuality, and the body. Tomlinson’s Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others and Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera, for instance, are both exemplary of this Foucauldian approach to musicology.52 In these works, aesthetics plays a critical role, not just as an abstract concept but also as an essential driving force of musicological theoretising. In fact, entire understandings of music historical periods can be based on particular readings of philosophical and aesthetic theories. On the other hand, contemporary writers in the aesthetics of music have increasingly directed themselves towards engaging with individual musical works or genres in sophisticated, historically informed ways, often using them as examples in dialectical arguments. The aesthetics of music literature today includes works such as Scruton’s Aesthetics of Music,53 which stands out for its extensive use of musical examples and terminology from music theory and analysis; Theodore Gracyk’s Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock54 which makes extensive use of grunge music and particularly Nirvana’s albums; or discussions that are highly attuned to the emotional responses evoked by musical works, like Levinson’s ‘Music and Negative Emotion’, which considers the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in examining the relationship between music and emotions like sadness or fear.55 The purpose of these, and many other works of this kind, is to depict our encounters with a musical piece, exploring the relationship between certain combinations of tones and rhythm and the emotions and thoughts that arise within us as we hear them. This process is indicative of an aesthetics that centres on the music more than on theory, emphasising the importance of direct engagement with musical objects in their historical context rather than in isolation. There is an extensive body of publications in the contemporary philosophy of music that explores music in this way, including topics such as improvisation and performance.56 In recent years, the field has continued to diversify, covering subjects ranging from evolution to feminist musicology, among many others.57 In all these approaches, the philosophy of music is conceived of as emerging from musical practice, rather than trying to reconcile past ideas and systems of thought on music.

CONCLUSIONS To attain a complete understanding of music and its profound impact on human experience, it is imperative that we bridge the gap between music’s

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artistic nature and its historical significance. In this sense, disregarding the significance of aesthetics in modern musicology as outdated or ideological is short-sighted. Aesthetics provides a space for exploring and experiencing music beyond the confines of the social sciences, preventing musical works from being reduced to mere documents or empty symbols of societal values. Consequently, any musicology that fails to appreciate the importance of aesthetics lacks comprehension of the exceptional character of the musical experience, which encompasses not only intellectual but also profound sensory and emotional aspects. It disregards the vast array of ideas and thoughts that musicians employ to craft their art. The study of aesthetics is indispensable for addressing broader, critical questions that fall outside the approach and methodology of music history and musicology. As long as these queries remain unexamined, the relevance and necessity of an aesthetic approach to music will endure. At the same time, there exists a pressing requirement for a reorientation of musical aesthetics, one that involves a more earnest engagement with the historical particulars of music, driven by an impetus to evaluate and explicate the claims about music that are embodied in individual works. Within such a conception, aesthetic analyses would not begin interpretation with a preconceived notion of what music ought to be but instead strive to develop a theory that emerges directly from a dialogue with the work itself. This would entail a dialectic of theory and critical engagement with the work, where philosophy becomes inextricably intertwined with music history and music criticism, and aesthetics is intended to encompass not only a concern with universal concepts but also an engagement with the unique and specific aspects of music. These observations yield a crucial outcome – individuals engaged in the study of musical aesthetics must possess a comprehensive grasp and practical knowledge of music. Indeed, philosophers who possess a profound understanding of the history of music can also possess a greater comprehension of the aesthetics of music. Likewise, while aesthetics writers should be encouraged to utilise their critical awareness and practical knowledge of the arts to the fullest extent possible, this argument can also be flipped: musicologists should also bring in as much philosophical insight and critical awareness as they can in their study of music. Only through the fusion of critical thinking and practical knowledge, can we gain a more profound and nuanced understanding of the intricate and multifaceted nature of music as an artistic expression. These ideas were already expressed in the work of musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, particularly in his Esthetics of Music (1982) and other essays.58 Dalhaus attempted to redefine the role of musical aesthetics in the face of postmodern criticism, highlighting the role of aesthetic theory in clarifying the intentional dimension of music through a hermeneutic-phenomenological interpretation.

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By linking musical aesthetics to music historiography, he aimed to prevent the dissolution of musicology into art sociology or psychology. In this way, he viewed musicology as an investigation of aesthetic concepts and ideas, with a focus on providing theoretical clarification. The following excerpt from his Foundations of Music History offers the best denouement to this concise inquiry, for it aptly captures its essence: The fundamental problem facing the music historiologist is the relation between art and history. This problem will not be solved by adhering to aesthetic or historiographical dogma, whether it be the assumption that art is revealed in its true nature only when separate, self-contained works are contemplated in isolation, or the premise that history consists entirely of causes and effects, ends and means, in endless concatenation [. . .] History and aesthetics exist in a reciprocal relation to one another.59

In conclusion, the intricate quandaries posed by music demand that both musicologists and philosophers be willing to challenge the fundamental assumptions of their respective fields, rather than regarding music as a passive subject for one-sided discussions. This chapter has outlined some critical factors that are required for this constructive and dynamic interrelationship to thrive. NOTES 1. In this chapter, the main focus will be on the analytic debate in the philosophy of music, but it is important to note that the continental philosophical tradition also has a significant presence in this field. Notable contributions to the discipline have been made by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Ernst Bloch, Hans Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Theodor W. Adorno. (For a comprehensive overview of the continental philosophy of music, the interested reader may refer to Christopher Norris, “Continental Philosophy and Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, eds. Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, and Jerrold Levinson (Oxford University Press, 2021), 89–113.) Although the analytic-continental distinction remains relevant in the methodology of musical aesthetics, there are encouraging signs that scholars from both traditions are starting to question the idea of a ‘dichotomy’ between the two approaches. See for example, Bowman, Wayne D., Philosophical Perspectives on Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Hamilton, Andy, Aesthetics and Music (London: Continuum, 2007); Arbo, Alessandro, The Normativity of Musical Works: A Philosophical Inquiry (Leiden: Brill, 2021), and Bertinetto, Alessandro, and Ruta Marcello, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 2021). This is also because Hanslick, the primary pioneer in the field, has left behind a multifaceted and occasionally challenging legacy that cannot be exclusively attributed to any particular tradition. Additionally, other influential sources in

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the discourse, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Susanne Langer, are recognised and utilised by both ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophers. 2. With some exceptions. Particularly, Lydia Goehr is regularly quoted and cited in the musicological debate. See: Goehr, Lydia, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 3. The recent formation and activity of The Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group (MPSG) has provided a platform for scholars in the fields to engage more fully and publicly in the desired dialogue. And yet, the 2022 MPSG conference listed just few philosophers among the many participants from the fields of musicology. 4. For a concise overview of the relationship between music and philosophy throughout history, see Ravasio, Matteo, “History of Western Philosophy of Music: Antiquity to 1800,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2021 ed., accessed April 6, 2023. https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/ fall2021​/entries​/hist​-westphilmusic​-to​-1800/. 5. For an in-depth analysis of Hegel’s and Schiller’s contribution to the philosophy of music, see: Schnädelbach, Herbert, “Hegel,” in Music in German Philosophy: An Introduction, edited by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and Oliver Fürbeth (University of Chicago Press, 2010); Wanning, Berbeli, “Schelling,” in Music in German Philosophy: An Introduction. 6. Sáez, Daniel Martín, “The Expression ‘Philosophy of Music.’’ A Brief History and Some Philosophical Considerations,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 52, no. 2 (December 2021): 206. 7. On the emergence of the notion of ‘absolute music’, see Bonds, Mark Evan, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 8. Hanslick, Eduard, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986). Originally published in German in 1854. 9. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 28. 10. Duckles, Vincent, et al. “Musicology,” Grove Music Online. Accessed April 6, 2023. 11. Mugglestone, Erica, and Adler, Guido, Guido Adler’s The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology (1885): An English Translation with an Historico-Analytical Commentary, Yearbook for Traditional Music 13 (1981): 1–21. 12. Mugglestone and Adler, Guido Adler’s The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology (1885), 1–21. 13. Randel, Don Michael, ed. The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), s.v. “Adler, Guido”. 14. Riethmüller, Albrecht, “Music, History of,” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition) (2001): 155–158. 15. Duckles, et al. “Musicology”, 837. 16. Peter Kivy offers a brief survey of the history of the dissemination of musical aesthetics in American university in “On the Recent Remarriage of Music to Philosophy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 429–438. In continental Europe, musical aesthetics has traditionally held a more prominent and

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explicit position than the United States. In fact, aesthetics has generally been considered a significant aspect of continental European musicology in Germany, France, and Italy. 17. Cohen, Morris Raphael, American Thought: A Critical Sketch (Glencoe: Free Press, 2009), 289. 18. Kivy, Peter, Sounding Off (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 19. Davies, Stephen, Musical Works and Performances (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); Kivy, Peter, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Levinson, Jerrold, Music, Art and Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Zangwill, Nick, Music and Aesthetic Reality: Formalism and the Limits of Description (New York: Routledge, 2015). 20. Spizer, Michael, “Introduction to the English-Language Edition,” In Music in German Philosophy: An Introduction, eds. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and Oliver Fürbeth, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), XVIIXLIII; Downes, Stephen, Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2014); Johnson, Julian, “Historical Musicology and Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, 11–26. 21. Johnson, “Historical Musicology and Philosophy”, 16–-17. 22. Downes, Aesthetics of Music, x. 23. Spizer, “Introduction to the English-Language Edition”, XVIII. 24. Rose, Sam, “The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory,” New Literary History 48, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 223–-244. 25. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie Adieu à l’ésthetique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000). 26. Steven Connor, “Doing Without Art,” New Literary History 42, no. 1 (2011): 53. 27. Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. R. Niche (Cambridge, MA: Harward University Press, 1984). 28. Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 29. Some important texts in the New Musicology movement include: Subotnik, Rose Rosengard Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Abbate, Carolyn Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991), and Kramer, Leonard Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), among others. 30. Krims, Adam, ed., Music and Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic (London–New York: Routledge, 1998). 31. Tomlinson, Gary, “Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer,” Current Musicology 53 (1993): 23. 32. See for example the collection edited by Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). 33. In recent times, there has been an increasing fascination with the ontologies of various musical genres like rock and jazz, resulting in conversations around the approach and significance of musical ontology. A comprehensive summary of these debates can be found in Matheson, Carl and Caplan, Ben “Ontology,” in The

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Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, eds. Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania (New York: Routledge, 2011), 38–47. 34. See: Higgins, Kathleen Marie, The Music of Our Lives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music; Kivy, Peter, “Musical Morality,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 238 (2008): 397–412; Levinson, Jerrold, “Popular Song as Moral Microcosm: Life Lessons from Jazz Standards,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 71 (2013): 51–66. 35. Wolff, Janet, “The Ideology of Autonomous Art,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, eds. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, 1–12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 36. Supičić, Ivo, “Contemporary Aesthetics of Music and Musicology,” Acta Musicologica 47, no. 2 (July-December 1975): 205. 37. Kivy, Peter, Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 38. Ravasio, “History of Western Philosophy of Music: Antiquity to 1800”. 39. Kania, Andrew, “The Philosophy of Music,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Spring 2023 ed., accessed April 6, 2023, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/spr2023​/entries​/music/. 40. For a systematic overview of the debate in musical ontology, see my Musical Ontology. A Guide for the Perplexed (Milan: Mimesis International, 2017). 41. For example: Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works; Davies, Stephen, “Ontologies of Musical Works,” in Themes in the Philosophy of Music, 34–51 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Thomasson, Amie L, “Debates about the Ontology of Art: What Are We Doing Here?” Philosophy Compass 1, no.3 (2006): 245–55; Kania, Andrew, “The Methodology of Musical Ontology: Descriptivism and Its Implications,” British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 4 (2008): 426–444. 42. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. 43. Cook, Nicholas Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 17. 44. Sáez, “The Expression ‘Philosophy of Music”, 204. 45. Sáez, “The Expression ‘Philosophy of Music”, 212 and 214. 46. Bowie, Andrew, “The ‘Philosophy of Performance’ and the Performance of Philosophy,” Performance Philosophy 1 (2015): 53. These claims are also elaborated in his Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 47. An overview on the debate over the expressiveness of music and the visual arts can be found in: Benenti, Marta, Expressiveness: Perception and Emotions in the Experience of Expressive Objects (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). 48. Johnson, “Historical Musicology and Philosophy”, 16. 49. Johnson, “Historical Musicology and Philosophy”, 16. 50. Johnson, “Historical Musicology and Philosophy”, 17. 51. Spizer, “Introduction to the English-Language Edition”, XVIII. 52. Tomlinson, Gary, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

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53. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music. 54. Gracyk, Theodore, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 55. Levinson, Jerrold, “Music and Negative Emotion,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 63: 327–346 (1982). 56. See for example: Alperson, Philip, “On Musical Improvisation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43(1): 17–29. doi:10.2307/430189, Brown, Lee B. 1996. “Musical Works, Improvisation, and the Principle of Continuity,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, no. 4 (1984): 353–369; Gould, Carol and Kenneth Keaton, “The Essential Role of Improvisation in Musical Performance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (2000): 143–148, Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music; Bertinetto and Ruta, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts. 57. See for example: Davies, Stephen, The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Zangwill, Nick, “Friends Reunited: Susan McClary and Musical Formalism,” The Musical Times (Winter 2014): 63–69. 58. Dahlhaus, Carl, Esthetics of Music, trans. William W. Austin (Cambridge University Press). 59. Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, transl. J. Bradford Robinson (Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 19–20.

Index

aesthetic experience, 3, 25, 27, 29, 31–33, 35, 37, 44, 57, 61, 66–69, 77, 82–83, 93–94, 99–105, 128, 161, 174, 185, 191 aesthetics of music, 183–84, 189–93, 197–98; history of, 185–88; methods of, 192–95 aisthesis, 94, 171, 176–77, 179 Alberti, Leon Battista, 46, 51–52, 114, 149 allegory, 118–19 anesthetic, 177 Aquinas, Thomas, 122n34 Aristotle, 51, 78–81, 83, 109–17, 120, 177, 185, 188 art: criticism, 20, 144, 150–51, 160, 174; education, 2, 4, 145, 171–77, 179–80; pedagogy, 146 Bätschmann, Oskar, 152 Batteux, Charles, 109, 110, 114–20 Baumgarten, Alexander G., 94–95, 109–16, 119–20 Beardsley, Monroe C., 120 beauty, 110, 112, 114, 115 Belting, Hans, 152 Berleant, Arnold, 25, 30, 32–36, 38 Boehm, Gottfried, 143–44 Boileau, Nicolas, 110, 115, 116

Brady, Emily, 27–30 Bredekamp, Horst, 152 Burckhardt, Jacob, 149 Burke, Edmund, 110, 123n36 Busch, Werner, 152 Carlson, Allen, 27–28, 30, 32 children, 13, 21, 173 Cicero, 110, 112–16, 120 cultural studies, 2, 62, 125–39, 176, 185, 187, 189 curatorial, 1, 159–62, 164–67 Danto, Arthur C., 150, 152 Darwin, Charles, 7, 12–13, 15, 17, 19– 20, 22n1, 23nn13–14, 23nn16–17, 34, 24nn40, 49, 56 de Duve, Thierry, 142–43 de Man, Paul., 100 descriptive aesthetics, 33–35 Dickie, George, 109, 164 Diers, Michael, 152 Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE), 174–75 disinterestedness, 97–98, 101, 103–5 Eagleton, Terry, 109 ecocriticism, 27 ecology (ecological), 26, 31 205

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Index

edification, 41–43, 45 Elkins, James, 142 environmental aesthetics, 25, 27–29, 31, 60, 66–67, 69, 131 environmental humanities, 25–27, 29–31, 35–37 ethno-nationalism, 86–87 everyday aesthetics, 60, 66–67, 69, 131 exhibition, 159–66 expression, 117–19

Kant, Immanuel, 3, 8–9, 30, 64–65, 93, 95–98, 101, 104–5, 109–10, 115, 117, 132, 160–61, 171–72, 177, 179, 185, 195 Kantian, 3, 9–10, 15, 99–100, 125, 129–30 Kantianism. See Kantian Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 46, 75–77, 114, 148 Kubler, George, 152–53

Fascism, 83–86 fear of aesthetics, 184, 188–92, 197 formalism, 188, 190–91 free-expression absolutism, 11 French Revolution, 99 function, 47, 48, 50–53

Longinus (Pseudo-Longinus), 110, 113–14

Gehlen, Arnold, 151 genius, 115, 117 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 42–45, 149 Goodman, Nelson, 53, 120 Gothic, 42–45, 51, 179 Guyer, Paul, 109 Halliwell, Stephen, 116 Hanslick, Eduard, 186–88, 190–91, 199 Hegel, G. W. F., 30, 51–52, 118, 185– 86, 188 Horace, 109–10, 112–16, 120 iconography, 144, 152 iconology, 144 ideology, 78, 83, 122, 138, 176–77, 191, 194 imagination, 48–50, 70, 97, 111, 114, 163 imitation, 110–11, 114–19 interactive aesthetics. See interactive theory of beauty interactive theory of beauty, 10–11, 13, 17 judgment of taste, 95–98

Meier, Georg F., 111 mimesis. See imitation Mirbach, Dagmar, 114 misogyny, 9–10 modernism, 8–10, 13 museology, 145 musical work(s), 184, 187, 189, 192–98 musicology, 2, 183–99 Nakonechna, Lada, 153–56 Nazism, 83–86 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 93, 103–5, 185 operative criticism (Tafuri), 51–52 ornament, 10, 12–21, 49 Panofsky, Erwin, 42, 44–45, 141, 157 philosophy of art, 144–45 philosophy of music. See aesthetics of music Piranesi, 48–49 Plato, 51, 79, 105, 109–10, 112, 116– 18, 120 Platonic, 9, 102 Platonic, Neo-, 45 Platonism, 193 play impulse, 100 pleasure, 7–11, 14, 19–22, 111, 132, 135, 177–79 Pliny the Elder, 149

Index

Plotinus, 110 Plutarch, 116 Poppe, Bernhard, 114 postmodern, 176 Potocka, Maria Anna, 155 Proclus, 118 Prum, Richard O., 7, 11–14, 16, 18–21 public, 159–66 Quintilian, 113, 114, 116 Rancière, Jacques, 65, 78, 100–101, 160, 164–65 rape, 17–19, 21 reception aesthetics, 159, 165 rhetoric, 177 Ruskin, 42, 44, 45, 52 Ryynänen, Max, 148 Schiller, Friedrich, 99–101, 172 scholasticism, 45 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 101–5 Scruton, Roger, 53 seduction, 177 sense-making, 159, 161–63, 166 sensory experience, 62, 65–66, 68–69

207

sexual selection, 12–14, 16, 17, 20–22 Shaftesbury, 80–83 Shusterman, Richard, 126, 131, 138 Simmel, Georg., 149 social history of art, 144 Socrates, 112 Stolnitz, Jerome, 109 subjective universal, 8–10, 15, 22n4 sublime, 176 sublimity, 110, 114 taste, 3, 7–13, 16–17, 21–22, 32, 46, 50, 61, 65, 93, 95–98, 104–5, 114–16, 172, 177 Trump, Donald, 86–87 Vasari, Giorgio, 147 Vida, Marco Girolamo, 116 Vitruvius, 146–47 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 42, 47, 148–49 Wind, Edgar, 151 Wood, Christopher S., 147 Young, James O., 120

About the Contributors

Mami Aota is a lecturer in the Department of Aesthetics and Art History at Gunma Prefectural Women’s University in Japan. Her professional interests include environmental and everyday aesthetics, community-engaged art projects, and IKEBANA (Japanese flower arrangement). She got her PhD degree at the University of Tokyo in 2018. She has published Critiquing the Environment: A Theory of Environmental Aesthetics (Tokyo: 2020 [in Japanese]), ‘On the Difference between Categories of Artworks and Nature’ (Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 12 (1), 2016), ‘The Artistic Value of “Community-Engaged Art Project”: From the Perspective of Environmental Aesthetics’ (BIGAKU 27, 2023). Karl Axelsson is an associate professor in Aesthetics at Södertörn University. He is the co-editor of Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics (2021) and author of Political Aesthetics: Addison and Shaftesbury on Taste, Morals and Society (2019) and The Sublime: Precursors and British Eighteenth-Century Conceptions (2007). Axelsson is also the Swedish translator and editor of the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s The Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody (2022). Paul Duncum is an emeritus professor of art education, at the University of Illinois. He is the author of over three hundred articles and book chapters in his areas of research interests that include art curriculum, children’s unsolicited drawings and YouTube videos, global culture, popular culture, and aesthetics, each informed by critical theory. He has been translated into nine languages. He is the recipient of the Manual Barkan Memorial Award and a life member of Australian Art Education. He is the author of Picture Pedagogy: Visual Culture Concepts to Enhance the Curriculum (2020), Popular Pleasures: An 209

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About the Contributors

Introduction to the Aesthetics of Popular Visual Culture (2021), and Images of Childhood: A Visual History of Stone to Screen (2023). Lisa Giombini is a research fellow in aesthetics at Roma Tre University (Italy), Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts. She is a member of various philosophical associations, including the Italian Society for Aesthetics (SIE), the European Society of Aesthetics (ESA), and the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA), and she is currently the secretary general of the International Association for Aesthetics (IAA). Besides a longterm interest in the philosophy and ontology of music, Lisa’s current research focuses on the philosophy of art conservation, the ethics of cultural heritage, and environmental aesthetics. She is the author of Musical Ontology: A Guide for the Perplexed (2017) and co-editor of Everydayness: Contemporary Aesthetic Approaches (2021). Oiva Kuisma (PhD, Docent) is a university lecturer in aesthetics at the University of Helsinki. In his research, Kuisma has focused on the history of philosophy and aesthetics. His publications include studies on Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus, Hegel, and the history of aesthetics, especially the history of Finnish aesthetics. Currently, he is working on various topics ranging from neoplatonism to modern and contemporary aesthetics. Jacob Lund is an associate professor in the Department of Art History, Aesthetics & Culture, and Museology at Aarhus University where he directs the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions, founded on an investigator grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. He served as editor of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics from 2007 to 2023. He is the editor, with Geoff Cox, of the book series The Contemporary Condition (Sternberg), and his most recent book is The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity (London: 2022). Tyrus Miller is dean of the School of Humanities and Distinguished Professor of Art History and English at the University of California, Irvine. Recent publications include Georg Lukács and Critical Theory: Aesthetics, History, Utopia (2023); Modernism and the Frankfurt School (2014); and, as editor/ translator, György Lukács, The Culture of People’s Democracy: Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition (2013). Max Ryynänen is a principal lecturer in the Theory of Visual Culture at Aalto University Finland. He is the former chair of the Finnish Society for Aesthetics and editor-in-chief of Popular Inquiry: The Journal of the

About the Contributors

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Aesthetics of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture and a former editor-in-chief of The Journal of Somaesthetics. His latest monography Bodily Engagements with Film, Images, and Technology (2022) deals with the role of vision and bodily reactions in, for example, film, contemporary art, and our interaction with robot cars. The forthcoming book A Philosophy of Cultural Scenes in Art and Popular Culture (est. 2023, with Jozef Kovalcik) deals with the role of ‘scenes’ in contemporary culture. Ryynänen is also the co-editor of Cultural Approaches to Disgust and the Visceral (with Susanne Ylönen and Heidi Kosonen, 2022) and Aesthetics in Dialogue: Applying Philosophy of Art in a Global World (ed. with Zoltán Somhegyi, 2020). See personal homepage: http://maxryynanen​.net. Mateusz Salwa is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at Warsaw University and the head of the Chair of Aesthetics. He graduated in art history and philosophy. His main fields of interest include gardening art and landscape aesthetics. He is also interested in everyday aesthetics and new forms of art. He has recently published two monographs: The Landscape: An Aesthetic Phenomenon (2020; in Polish), Garden Aesthetics: Between Art and Ecology (2016; in Polish), and a number of articles devoted to the artistic status of gardens, the aesthetics of their conservation, as well as landscape aesthetics and ethics in such journals as Aesthetic Investigations, Aisthesis, Contemporary Aesthetics, Estetika, Ethics in Progress, Popular Inquiry, Rivista di Estetica. He is a co-founder of the website dedicated to landscape studies: http://studiakrajobrazowe​.amu​.edu​.pl​/en​/home​-en/. Zoltán Somhegyi is a Hungarian art historian holding a PhD in aesthetics and a Habilitation (venia legendi) in philosophy. He is also an associate professor of art history at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. As a researcher, he is specialised in eighteenth–nineteenth-century art and theory, and besides that, his other fields of interest are contemporary fine arts and art criticism. He was the secretary general (2016–2022) and still is the website editor of the International Association for Aesthetics, a member of the Executive Committee of the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (since 2017), and consultant of Art Market Budapest: International Contemporary Art Fair. His recent books are: Reviewing the Past: The Presence of Ruins (London – New York: 2020) and Aesthetics in Dialogue: Applying Philosophy of Art in a Global World (Berlin, 2020; coedited with Max Ryynänen). Webpage: www​.zoltansomhegyi​.com. Wendy Steiner is Richard L. Fisher Professor Emerita of English at the University of Pennsylvania and founded the Penn Humanities Forum. She is the author or editor of thirteen books on visual art and literature, including

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About the Contributors

The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (2010), Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (2001), and The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (the New York Times 100 Best Books of 1996). Steiner’s cultural criticism has appeared in the Independent on Sunday, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, LRB, and TLS. She has lectured on six continents and is the librettist of six composed operas. Her multimedia installations have appeared in the 2019 and 2022 Venice Biennales. A recipient of Guggenheim, ACLS, NEH, Bellagio, Mellon, and New York State Council for the Arts awards, Steiner was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 2022. Joseph Tanke is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. He is the editor of the series for Global Aesthetic Research at Roman and Littlefield, and the author of books on Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière. His current research explores the intersections between neoliberalism and anxiety.