Aesthetics: The Key Thinkers 9781350085558, 9781350085565, 9781350085589, 9781350085541

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Aesthetics: The Key Thinkers

BLOOMSBURY KEY THINKERS The Key Thinkers series takes a central topic in philosophy and introduces you to the people behind the ideas. Each book brings to life the arguments of a group of influential individuals with potted biographies and sophisticated discussions of their work and reception. They explain why these figures still matter and reveal how their thinking has changed the direction of a subject and the course of philosophy. Key Thinkers in Philosophy available from Bloomsbury: Aesthetics, edited by Alessandro Giovannelli Epistemology, edited by Stephen Hetherington Ethics, edited by Tom Angier Philosophy of Language, edited by Barry Lee Philosophy of Mind, edited by Andrew Bailey Philosophy of Religion, edited by Jeffrey J. Jordan Philosophy of Science, edited by James Robert Brown

Aesthetics: The Key Thinkers Second Edition Edited by Alessandro Giovannelli

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2012 This edition published 2021 Copyright © Alessandro Giovannelli and Contributors, 2021 Alessandro Giovannelli has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Maria Rajka Cover image © wujekjery / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-8555-8 PB: 978-1-3500-8556-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-8554-1 eBook: 978-1-3500-8557-2 Series: Key Thinkers Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Introduction  Alessandro Giovannelli 1 1 Plato (c. 427–347 BCE)  Robert Stecker 9 2 Aristotle (384–322 BCE)  Angela Curran 21 3 Medieval Aesthetics  Gian Carlo Garfagnini 33 4 Shaftesbury (1671–1713)  Garry L. Hagberg 45 5 Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746)  Garry L. Hagberg 59 6 Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (1670–1742) and Charles Batteux (1713–1780)  James O. Young 73 7 David Hume (1711–1776)  Alan H. Goldman 81 8 Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)  Elisabeth Schellekens 93 9 G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831)  Richard Eldridge 107 10 Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848)  Paisley Livingston 117 11 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)  Scott Jenkins 129 12 Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and Robin G. Collingwood (1889–1943)  Gary Kemp 141 13 Roger Fry (1866–1934) and Clive Bell (1881–1964)  Susan Feagin 153 14 John Dewey (1859–1952)  Thomas Leddy 165 15 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)  Kelly Dean Jolley 177 16 Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)  Ingvild Torsen 183 17 Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969)  Gerhard Richter 191 18 Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)  Robert E. Innis 203 19 Monroe Beardsley (1915–1985)  Noël Carroll 217 20 Nelson Goodman (1906–1998)  Alessandro Giovannelli 223 21 Frank Sibley (1923–1996)  Emily Brady 237 22 Richard A. Wollheim (1923–2003)  Malcolm Budd 247 23 Arthur C. Danto (1924–2013)  Sondra Bacharach 255 24 Stanley Cavell (1926–2018)  Malcolm Turvey 263 25 Peter Kivy (1934–2017)  James O. Young 271

Contents

vi 26 27 28 29 30

Kendall L. Walton (b. 1939)  David Davies 279 Noël Carroll (b. 1947)  Deborah Knight 289 Peter Lamarque (b. 1948)  Filippo Contesi 301 Jerrold Levinson (b. 1948)  James O. Young 309 Some Contemporary Developments  Alessandro Giovannelli 317

Notes on Contributors Index

341 345

Introduction Alessandro Giovannelli

Aesthetics, the discipline aimed at the study of beauty and art, is flourishing within anglophone, analytic philosophy.1 In the past forty years or so, there has been a boom in publications, an expansion in the scope of the discipline’s interests, and a widening of the range of questions it addresses. Some of the reasons for this rapid growth have to do with the evolution of philosophy as an academic discipline within the English-speaking world. Most notably, analytic philosophy has expanded into all areas of investigation, well beyond its original focus on language and the sciences, and beyond its more traditional subfields of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Additionally, aesthetics has benefited from contemporary philosophy’s opening up to the idea that language is only one of the loci of meaning, and that truth and knowledge need not be found only in literal descriptions of the world. Hence, aesthetics has become a privileged place for investigations of the conveyance of meaning and truth by means of metaphor, fiction, or expression, brought about by both linguistic and nonlinguistic means. Further, like analytic philosophy in general, analytic aesthetics has become eclectic, open to the ideas and methods of other disciplines and programs, especially scientific ones: psychology and anthropology, as well as cognitive science and evolutionary biology for example. Other reasons for the good health of contemporary analytic aesthetics are more specific. First of all, some of the developments of contemporary art call for theoretical reflection. Whether it is through environmental or urban art, experimental theater or conceptual architecture, contemporary art continues to prompt philosophical thinking on such concepts as “art,” “art form,” and “medium.” There is also increasing attention, within academic circles and society at large, for more broadly construed artistic phenomena—including those that belong to the popular or mass arts—and for their possible impact on society (e.g., TV shows, music videos, graphic novels, fashion design, and even commercial advertising are considered art forms by many; and debates on their various effects on audiences are quite frequent). Further, the invention of new media, especially of various digital technologies, has brought with itself great potential for changing traditional art forms, introducing new forms of art, and expanding access to artistic phenomena. In sum, as the

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world of art has changed and expanded, contemporary aesthetics has become more and more inclusive, with the consequent proliferation of the questions it addresses. Finally, it should be mentioned how changes within other disciplines that target the arts, especially literary and film theory, have also contributed to the flourishing of analytic aesthetics. As many scholars working in those disciplines directed themselves toward a cultural studies approach, they left room for philosophers to address issues regarding the nature, value, and experience of art in its different forms. Hence, today it is mostly within philosophical aesthetics that such questions as, say, the role of narrators in literary works or the importance of the medium in art cinema are asked. Whatever else could be said about aesthetics today, an approach to the discipline should closely look at its historical development. This collection aims at providing an overview of philosophical aesthetics by looking at the main thinkers who shaped the discipline throughout its history. As the chapters here collected prove, the philosophical interest for matters regarding the arts and the aesthetic experience of both art and nature has accompanied the history of Western philosophy since its origins. That should not be surprising, given the existence of artistic practices throughout human history and of a natural propensity, in humans, toward the aesthetic appreciation of objects as found in nature, art, or ordinary experience. As a unitary philosophical discipline, however, aesthetics is a fairly recent product. The contemporary use of the term “aesthetics” (from the Greek aisthētikos for “of sense perception”) is due to Alexander Baumgarten (1714– 1762), who adopted it in his 1735 dissertation on poetry (1954), to designate the science of knowledge acquired through the senses. It was Kant who in 1790, in the Preface to his Critique of the Power of Judgment, called “aesthetic” those judgments that “concern the beautiful and the sublime in nature or art” (2001, 57). Prior to finding unitary treatment within an identifiable discipline—in the eighteenth and indeed more fully in the nineteenth centuries (see Chapter 9, on Hegel)—aesthetic questions were addressed either as part of broader philosophical projects devoted to metaphysical, epistemological, or political issues, or in treatises dedicated to the individual arts.2 It should be noted that nowadays “aesthetics” is most often used interchangeably with “philosophy of art” (a use that dates back to Hegel). The term “aesthetics” in its etymological sense is both broader and narrower than “philosophy of art.” The scope of aesthetic issues exceeds that of questions having to do with art, in so far as beauty and other aesthetic qualities can be found outside the realm of art, in natural objects and environments as well as nonartistic human products. On the other hand, so many issues regarding

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the arts have nothing to do with aesthetic properties or experiences, not even when the latter are understood most broadly (on the aesthetic, see Chapter 30, Section 1). What is art, what is the essence of the different art forms, which values can artworks have, what does the interpretation of an artwork entail, which roles can art play in society or in an individual’s personal moral growing, and so on and so forth, are all philosophy of art questions, which do not appear to be immediately aesthetic. Indeed, attempts to reduce the philosophy of art to aesthetics (see, e.g., Chapter 19, on Monroe Beardsley) or the aesthetic appreciation of nature to art (see Chapter 22, on Richard Wollheim, and Chapter 30, Section 1) presuppose a distinction between aesthetics and philosophy of art in the first place. These important qualifications notwithstanding, and keeping in mind the divergence from the etymology of “aesthetics” and the existence of aesthetic questions beyond the realm of art, the identification of aesthetics with the philosophy of art is harmless enough not to raise worries in the following. Going through the history of aesthetics also means encountering different conceptions of art: as not distinguished, for the ancient Greeks, from other technical activities (say, carpentry) or from what we now refer to as “crafts” (weaving or pottery for example); or as mostly bound to religious institutions and rituals in medieval times. It is only in the first half of the eighteenth century that the notion of the “fine arts” emerges, thanks to such thinkers as Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (1670–1742) and Charles Batteux, who, in his 1746 Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (trans. The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle), offered the first unified system of the fine arts (see Chapter 6).3 And, as mentioned, the notion of the popular or mass arts has become quite crucial in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The thirty chapters that make up this book, now in its second edition, cover thirty-three key thinkers, to which a chapter or portion thereof is dedicated; they also comprise two broad surveys, one on medieval aesthetics (Chapter 3) and one on some contemporary developments (Chapter 30). Although this edition includes essays on thirteen new additional key figures, aiming at historical comprehensiveness would have been unrealistic; hence the list of thinkers covered is necessarily selective. Some sacrifices were imposed by the achievement of two worthwhile goals. On the one hand, room was made for some notable twentieth-century figures who are rarely on the radar of analytic philosophers, because they fall within the province of what is called “continental philosophy”: Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. On the other hand, the collection dedicates substantial space to contemporary analytic-oriented aesthetics, by adding a chapter on Ludwig Wittgenstein, one on the too-often-neglected Susanne Langer, and eleven (from the five of the first edition) chapters devoted to post-1950

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aestheticians: Monroe Beardsley, Nelson Goodman, Frank Sibley, Richard Wollheim, Arthur C. Danto, Stanley Cavell, Peter Kivy, Kendall Walton, Noël Carroll, Peter Lamarque, and Jerrold Levinson. Finally, this edition also includes a chapter that, it is to be hoped, will help rediscover the overlooked contributions of Bernard Bolzano to aesthetics. The final essay comprises a (necessarily incomplete) overview of some of the themes and continuing debates within contemporary analytic aesthetics. Several of the thinkers mentioned therein also have dedicated chapters (to wit, Sibley, Walton, Carroll, and Levinson). Among the many who could not be included in the book, the essay addresses, if to a very limited extent, the work of George Dickie (1926–2020). The book contributors were asked to combine, in their chapters, clarity to rigor and sophistication, hence allowing readers with different degrees of acquaintance with the norms of philosophical scholarship to have access to the main ideas of the thinkers covered. The chapters they produced prove that this was not just desirable but also achievable. Hence, the audience for this book can reasonably range from the beginner who wants to learn about the field of aesthetics to the reader who is better versed in the discipline and seeks insightful perspectives on these key thinkers. Naturally, the book can also be used as a companion to the primary literature. Accordingly, the bibliographies appended to each chapter list the primary sources and suggest opportunities for further reading. Each chapter is self-contained and can be read independently of the others. Of course, the most natural way of approaching the chapters is by following the chronological order. The traditional historical division would be as follows: ancient aesthetics (Chapters 1 and 2, on Plato and Aristotle); medieval aesthetics (Chapter 3); the early modern period broadly construed (Chapters 4–8, on Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Du Bos, Batteux, Hume, and Kant); the late modern period (Chapters 9–11, covering Hegel, Bolzano, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche); and the contemporary period, divided between the early part of the twentieth century (Chapters 12–18, from Croce through Langer) and the second half of the twentieth century through our times (Chapters 19–30). Overall, the current edition better reconstructs the trajectory of Western aesthetics. For instance, the chapters that go, at least, from Shaftesbury to Kant bring to the surface many facets of the complex relationship of aesthetic thinking with Plato, and Platonic forms of thinking found in the Middle Ages, and more generally with so-called rationalism, on the one hand, and empiricism on the other. Likewise, through such chapters, we are given an opportunity to reconstruct the emergence of the notion of aesthetic attention and appreciation as non-practical or, in Kant’s terms, “disinterested.” Further, the (however incomplete) history of ideas emerging

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through those chapters, unsurprisingly, often sheds light on to many of the themes that appear in the chapters dedicated to twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury figures. The chapters and parts thereof can also be looked at in thematic clusters, according to one’s specific interests, with informative connections, comparisons, and contrasts thereby emerging. Perhaps the most obvious of such clusters is one that concentrates on the role of representation in art, the notion of realism, and more generally art’s symbolic relation to reality. To that effect, the reader might want to look at the chapters on Plato and Aristotle, at the medieval discussion on iconoclasm (Chapter 3, Section 2), and— for the contemporary approaches—at the chapters on Langer, Goodman, Wollheim, Danto, and Walton especially. A nice contrast could be achieved by adding the chapter on Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Naturally, all the abovementioned authors are particularly relevant to addressing the relationship between art and knowledge, although in that respect it is also significant to look at Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Cavell, Carroll, and Lamarque. Finally, an interest in representationality with respect to, especially, the relationship between art and nature suggests looking at the chapter on Du Bos and Batteux together with Shaftesbury, but also (for a view that takes the aesthetic appreciation of nature to be dependent on that of art) Wollheim. An emphasis on nonartistic aesthetic interests is found, of course, in Kant but, also, in Sibley. For the relation between art and emotion, an equally ambitious route as the one on representation would comprise Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Croce, Collingwood, Fry, Bell, Dewey (who, with the chapter on Croce and Collingwood, also constitutes a small cluster on art as expression), and Section 5 of Chapter 30. For the more specific interest in tragedy and the emotions it elicits, it would be pertinent to combine Aristotle to Du Bos (Section 2), Hume (Section 6), and Nietzsche (and, again, to Section 5 of Chapter 30), but also, to look at the chapters dedicated to Carroll (Section 5) and Levinson (Section 2), in regard to our enjoyment of works (be they in literature, cinema, or music) that produce negative, seemingly painful emotions. Naturally, two of the above-mentioned chapters, those on Kivy and Levinson respectively, are nicely compared for those authors’ different responses to the question of musical expression. The place and role of art in society can be addressed by concentrating on Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Dewey, Benjamin, and Adorno. The intertwining between art and culture and the importance of art history are instead central to Hegel’s system of philosophy, but also to Langer’s and Danto’s views, as well as the institutional and historical definitions discussed in the essay about Levinson and in the concluding chapter (Section 2).

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The theme of beauty is especially dominant in medieval aesthetics, in Shaftesbury, and, in different ways, Kant and Bolzano. Yet, the relevant chapters would be best referred back to the chapter on Plato. A broader cluster on the notion of aesthetic experience could comprise the relevant parts in the essays on medieval aesthetics, Kant, Fry, Bell, Dewey, Sibley, Beardsley, Levinson, and in the concluding chapter (Section 1). The role and nature of interpretation and art criticism are emphasized in the essays on Hume, Dewey, Benjamin, and, in different ways, in all the chapters on contemporary analytic aesthetics from Beardsley onward. Additional smaller clusters can be identified. The issue of creativity in art is differently addressed by Plato, on the one hand, and Dewey, on the other, although, of course, the issue emerges, if in different ways, in Shaftesbury and Kant, as well as Langer and Goodman. Intriguing connections can be established between Heidegger and Goodman, for the view that art can construct worlds, and perhaps the medieval conception of the world as God’s work of art (cf., also, Shaftesbury). The categorizations of the fine arts offered by Batteux and, later, Bolzano are nicely compared to each other, while the interest in the fine arts is nicely contrasted to the notions of art and crafts as found in Plato and Collingwood, the expansion of aesthetic interest to ordinary objects, for example, in Sibley, and the interest for the popular arts central to Benjamin, Cavell, and Carroll. As for the definition of art, of course, Danto’s and Levinson’s are the most obviously prominent ones, and the respective essays (specifically, the first section in each) are nicely read together, and compared to Beardsley’s approach. In regard to the specific art forms or genres, besides what already said above about tragedy, the reader interested in music will find Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dewey, Adorno, Langer, and, in contemporary times, Kivy, and Levinson especially relevant. Poetry—not in the broader sense of the term, as found in Plato and Aristotle—is addressed in the chapters on medieval aesthetics (in regard to Boethius and Dante), on Batteux, Hegel, Croce, Collingwood, and especially Heidegger. Discussions regarding photography are found in the essays on Benjamin, Cavell, and Walton, while an interest in cinema should lead one to look carefully at the chapters on Cavell, again, and Carroll. *** For all the work on the book’s first edition, I am thankful to Sarah Campbell and her staff at Continuum. This second edition owes its existence to Colleen Coalter, whom I thank for promoting and supporting the project, with the most valuable assistance of her Bloomsbury colleague, Becky

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Holland. Thanks also to Lafayette College for supporting the project through its Excel Program, which allows students to assist with scholarly work. Indeed, the contribution of Jonathan Cohn, Cara Cordeaux, and especially Eric Henney to the first edition was invaluable. Again at the time of the book’s first edition, I greatly benefited from the advice and careful comments of Jerrold Levinson—to whom, here as throughout my career, I am forever in debt. Many thanks, also, to Peg Brand Weiser, Stephen Davies, Theodore Gracyk, Murray Smith, and especially Brandon Cooke for their generous suggestions on the second edition. Most of all, I am thankful to the twenty-five philosophers and friends who have accepted to lend their expertise and time to this project. I am honored to have had the opportunity of gathering a diverse group of scholars from eight different countries. The final phases of the work on this book occurred between March and May 2020, during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The book owes much to the unconditional support and patience of my wife Gisella and of our daughter Matilde Sheng-Ya. To them I dedicate it.

Notes 1 Analytic philosophy is no longer exclusively anglophone. Yet, it remains dominant only within the English-speaking countries and Scandinavia. 2 Paradigmatic of the inclusion of aesthetic questions within broader frameworks are the examples of Plato and Aristotle, and of the medieval thinkers (Chapters 1–3). The approach to single artforms is somewhat exemplified, again, by Aristotle, and by Hume in his essay on tragedy (Chapter 7, Section 6). More paradigmatic examples would be, however, such works as Vitruvius’s first-century BCE Ten Books on Architecture (2001) or Leon Battista Alberti’s 1436 On Painting (1966). 3 The classical account of the emergence of the notion of “fine arts” and of a system of the arts is Kristeller (1951 and 1952).

References Alberti, Leon Battista. 1966. On Painting. John R. Spencer (ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. 1954. Reflections on Poetry, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullus ad poema pertinentibus. Karl Aschenbrennen and William Holter (trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Kant, Immanuel. 2001. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. 1951 and 1952. “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” parts I and II. The Journal of the History of Ideas, 12: 496–527 (1951), and 13: 17–46 (1952). Vitruvius. 2001. Ten Books on Architecture. Ingrid Rowland and Thomas Howe (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1

Plato (c. 427–347 BCE) Robert Stecker

With respect to the arts, Plato is most famous for purportedly banning one particular art form—poetry—from the Republic, his ideal state. Another very common attribution is that he defines art as representation. Often enough, overviews of the history of aesthetics leave matters there. So we should start by clearing the decks. Plato never did these two things for which he is most famous. First, there is no total ban on poetry. He did give several important criticisms of poetry, which people still grapple with today, did exclude poetry from many of the functions it had in the Athens of his day, and that the representational arts still have for us today. He advocated the censorship of much poetry but at the same time gave poetry a crucial role in the early education of the leaders of the state. Second, Plato never defines art as representation nor in any other terms. Mimēsis, a Greek word that is sometimes appropriately translated “representation,” but at other times should be translated as “imitation” or “image-making,” plays a crucial organizing role in his thinking about the several art forms, but the issue of defining what we now call the fine arts was not one Plato took up. He never asks, “what is art?” in the way he does ask, “what is justice?” or “what is piety?” His interest with respect to the arts lay elsewhere. Plato’s main interest in the arts concerns the closely related issues of their effect on people, their value, and, in the light of these, the role they should play in society. In Plato’s Athens, poetry was thought to be a repository of both knowledge and wisdom. Plato questions not only whether this reputation is deserved but also whether poetry in particular, and art in general, might in fact create a barrier to the acquisition of these goods. Second, Plato recognizes that poetry and other arts are both expressive of states of mind and have a powerful emotional effect on their audience. But he wonders whether this is a good or bad thing. Finally, a theme that runs well beyond Plato’s thinking about the arts is whether we should count all pleasures as goods. Included in

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this thinking are the pleasures of sights and sounds—what we might today call aesthetic pleasure. Plato recognizes that “lovers of sights and sounds” truly enjoy those things but he questions whether this pleasure is always something of positive value (Republic, Book V, 476b). Plato’s thinking on these matters—what one might call his critique of artistic value—will occupy the bulk of this chapter, but we should first become clear about the concept of art he brings to the table.

1  Plato and the Concept of Art Plato wrote about individual art forms such as poetry, music, and painting, but there is some controversy as to whether he had a concept under which he could think of these forms as art forms. Part of this controversy derives from the now widely held view that the concept of fine art, which groups together poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, only arose in the eighteenth century and hence before that there was just no concept that closely enough corresponds to our concept of art or the fine arts. The Greek word that is the best candidate for translation as “art” is technē, which covers all sorts of activities and their products that can be practiced or produced skillfully by learning a set of rules or procedures. Hence, such human activities as navigation and saddle making are both instances of technē. On the other hand, in the dialogue Ion, Plato has the character Socrates question whether poetry is really produced by skill or knowledge, or instead by inspiration. If the only concepts available to Plato when thinking about the arts were derived from the meanings of technē, he would be in a poor position to think about art in the relevant sense. But there is no reason to think Plato in particular or the ancient Greeks in general had such limited conceptual resources. In Book III of the Republic, Plato links together poetry and music with painting, sculpture, architecture, embroidery, weaving, and furniture making—arts and crafts that produce items all capable of grace, rhythm, and harmony, or of course their opposites (401a). It is true that there is no sharp line here between art and craft; yet it is at least as important that the principle organizing the items mentioned in this part of the Republic is not that of item produced by skill or according to rules but rather item capable of expressing or exemplifying states of the psyche. Even before Plato, there is a tradition of grouping together a collection of “both musicopoetic and visual arts which . . . had come to be considered mimetic” (Halliwell 2002, 43). It is this concept, which Plato adapts for his own purposes, that approximates to our own concept of the arts. In its

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breadth, it is probably closer to our twenty-first-century concept of art than is the eighteenth-century concept of fine art. It is plausible that conceptions of art or the arts vary over time with respect to the range of things they cover and the crucial properties the conceptions ascribe to those things. This does not prevent us from seeing these varying conceptions as conceptions of art that carve off roughly equivalent practices and forms—poetry, painting music, and so on—from others.

2  Art and Education Plato discusses poetry and other arts in many dialogues, but the richest source of his aesthetics is the Republic, which contains two extended discussions of the arts. The first is found in Books II and III, and the second and most famous of all of Plato’s writings on this topic is in the final chapter, Book X. The relevant stretches of Books II and III are concerned with the early education of the guardians, the ruling class of the state. (The guardians will eventually occupy two different tiers—the actual rulers of that state and the soldiers who protect it—but at this stage they all receive the same education.) The discussion begins with the role of poetic stories in this education and eventually goes on to discuss music and the other arts and crafts mentioned above. The import of this discussion goes well beyond the role of art in the education of children, but it is a good place to begin. Regarding poetic stories, the question is never whether they have a role in education, but which stories ought to play this role and which should be excluded. So issues of censorship are definitely in the foreground, but equally important is the power of stories to shape character and the way we perceive and emotionally react to the world. Some stories do this in a harmful way, but others are beneficial. Stories can be harmful in several different ways. First, they can express falsehoods about important matters such as the nature of the gods, the behavior of heroes, and the kinds of lives that can achieve happiness or well-being. That stories can do this is not merely a theoretical possibility. The preeminent literature of ancient Greece—the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, the stories of gods and heroes in the poetry of Hesiod, or the tragedies of Aeschylus—is rife with passages, which need to be eliminated if their works are to be read at all. Second, stories can be harmful in the attitudes and dispositions that they instill. For example, in the works just mentioned, death—both of those one loves and one’s own—is portrayed as a great misfortune, and grief is often expressed with wailings, lamentations, and even more excessive behavior, at least as Plato would see it. This is

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precisely the wrong attitude toward death, according to Plato, if one is to live courageously and put the fact that we die in proper perspective. There is more than one way in which poetry can instill such attitudes. It does so by representing role models such as heroes who possess just such attitudes and who exhibit such behavior. But even more insidious is the kind of dramatic representation where the characters in a story express such attitudes for themselves, and where, in reciting a poem or performing in a play that tells the story, one will naturally be prompted to take on those roles and identify with the characters. In taking on such roles one adopts the attitudes, and this leads to actually acquiring them. This brings us to the last way that stories harm: in allowing us to adopt the character and personality of all types of humanity in acting out dramatic representations, it hinders the formation of the right character and disposition for guardians. Plato’s remedy for avoiding such harm is not to eliminate poetic stories from early education, but to limit stories to those that are beneficial: those that express truths rather than falsehoods about the gods, the heroes, and the type of life that leads to happiness; those that express appropriate attitudes toward life and death, or at least that put misguided attitudes in the mouths of characters who are not role models—that is, men and women of “low character.” What can and cannot be dramatically represented is even more strictly limited. Here only the representation of people of high character is permitted, lest one identify with vicious characters or, just as bad, become facile at adopting the attitude of almost anyone. The more one does this, the more one tends to become a person of bad character or of no particular character at all. (A person of bad character acquires dispositions to feel emotions, desire things, and act in ways that are harmful to oneself and others. A person of no character does not have firm dispositions one way or the other but is ruled by external circumstances such as the expectations of others or the role one happens to occupy.) The same goes for music, which in ancient Greece accompanies the recitation of poetry, and even for painting, weaving, embroidery, architecture, and so on. Some of these items may not have an obvious representational content as poetry (and painting) do, but for Plato they all have an expressive character. In virtue of this, they fall under the concept of mimēsis, at least as Plato sometimes uses the term. There were a variety of modes of music in ancient Greece, and each mode has a characteristic expressive content. Music expressive of lamentation and grief is as undesirable as poetry and tragic drama that is expressive of those emotions, especially since they would accompany each other. Equally bad are compositions that have a great variety of expressive content, just as the dramatic representation of a great variety of characters is bad. The appropriate kind of music possesses a rhythm and grace

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of form expressive of the good moral character represented in appropriate poetry. The artifacts that make up the visual environment created by painting, architecture, sculpture, and other arts and crafts are capable of having similar expressive qualities. At their best, they are expressive of a grace and harmony that, as we discover in Book IV, is characteristic of the soul of a just person. We can learn a good deal about the nature of the arts as Plato conceives them from this discussion of their role in early education. First, although he characterizes the poetic stories he mentions as pseudeis logoi, which might be translated either as false discourses or as fictional stories, he believes that they are capable of expressing both truths and falsehoods about important matters, just as we think that fictional literature can tell us something important, or instead mislead us, about the actual world. Second, these stories can express attitudes—some harmful, some beneficial—toward significant aspects of life, and children can easily be influenced to adopt those attitudes. (When we turn to Book X, we will see that adults can be so influenced as well.) Third, the very form of a work can be expressive of a character or a state of mind— some admirable, some contemptible—and this can affect the character and states of mind of those who encounter the works, for good or ill. This permits art forms like music and architecture, and even crafts like embroidery and weaving, to have an expressive character. Even when such works lack what we would regard as representational content, their expressiveness counts as a kind of mimēsis. Most of us would agree that the three characteristics just outlined are important, if not universal, features of artworks. They imply that artworks can be both beneficial and harmful, which seems to be precisely the message of Books II and III. (What I leave out for now is our likely disagreement with Plato about which works are beneficial, which harmful.) Given this implication, it is surprising that Book X gives a much harsher assessment of the value of poetry and painting. We should then try to understand such a critique and why it is so harsh.

3  Art and Knowledge Book X criticizes poetry and, more generally, representational art on two fronts: as a source of illusion and false belief and as a powerful force capable of corrupting the psyche with harmful emotions and attitudes. These criticisms should not surprise the reader of Books II and III, since something similar was already said there. The difference is that in those earlier parts of the Republic, these charges are directed at some works of art and poetry, and some parts of a given work, while allowing for other works and passages that

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not only escape the criticism but are positively beneficial. Not so in Book X. Most poetry, with the exception of that which praises the gods and good men, is banished. Representational art more generally is not banished, but, again unlike what occurs in the earlier books, only its failings are under discussion. Let us focus first on art’s failure as a source of knowledge. Plato’s conclusion is that art is incapable of being such a source. In fact, he seems to go further and argue that art is incapable of even expressing truths or of representing reality. This radical conclusion again is in tension with his earlier discussion in Books II and III. Plato famously reaches this conclusion about poetry by way of an argument based on an analogy with painting. The reasoning regarding painting begins with another analogy: that of the images produced by a mirror. Socrates asks Glaucon, his interlocutor, to imagine a craftsman who can make anything and suggests that the simplest way to do this is to imagine someone who takes a mirror and turns it around in all directions. “With it you can quickly make the sun, the things in the heavens, the earth, yourself, the other animals, manufactured items, plants, and everything else mentioned just now.” “I could make them appear, but I couldn’t make the things themselves as they truly are” is the correct reply given by Glaucon (596e). Paintings, like mirror images, give the visual appearance of things. Plato develops this idea further with a discourse on the “three beds.” The bed with which we are most familiar is the material artifact made by a craftsman. But there is also, according to Plato, the form of the bed—that in which all material beds participate and in virtue of which they are beds. According to the metaphysics Plato develops in the middle books of the Republic (Books V, VI, and VII), the forms are what is most real, that which has the highest degree of reality. Compared with the form of the bed, even the bed made by a carpenter is a “shadowy” thing. But literal shadows, images, and other “appearances” are even less real, and the first moral of the discourse on the three beds is that paintings are to be put in this category. “Imitation,” Socrates says at this point referring to painting, “is far removed from the truth” (598b). This is a metaphysical conclusion. It is one that can certainly be disputed. Paintings are material artifacts, it can be argued, just as beds are. Representing is a property of the painting, which, if it is a painting of a certain type, shows us how things look. It’s a mistake to think of the painting itself as a look or an appearance. The discourse on the beds also has epistemic implications, which for our purposes are more important. The middle books of the Republic develop an epistemological doctrine that claims genuine knowledge is knowledge of the forms. To understand the nature of justice, one may start with examples of just actions, people, or states, but until one knows what makes these instances just, one’s understanding falls short of knowledge. What makes them just

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is their participating in the form of justice; so, to know what justice is, one must have knowledge of the form. Once one has that, one may even reject some of the initial examples as things that appeared to be just but in fact were not. Now go back to paintings. Whatever their metaphysical status, they represent appearances and hence grasp “only a small part of each thing and a part that is itself only an image” (598b). Paintings do not even give us true beliefs about the material objects they represent, much less knowledge of the form that makes the object an instance of its kind. So it is not just that many paintings give us false beliefs, but that they are constitutionally incapable of giving us knowledge. What is true of painting is true of poetry. It too represents appearances. To do that one needs neither knowledge nor true belief. We may “conclude— Socrates suggests—that all poetic imitators, beginning with Homer, imitate images of virtue and all the other things they write about and have no grasp of the truth” (600e). Poetry too, on this account, is constitutionally incapable of being a source of knowledge.

4  Art and Emotion Both painting and poetry represent the way things appear, and this renders both incapable of providing knowledge or even, by good luck, representing things as they really are. However, poetry has a subject matter that potentially makes it far more dangerous than painting. It represents what human beings do, as well as their beliefs that, “as a result of these actions, they are doing either well or badly and . . . experience either pleasure or pain” (603c). In short, drama in particular, but other kinds of poetry as well, represents people acting and reacting in the face of what life throws their way, their motives, the emotions they feel and their often emotion-driven assessment of their behavior and its outcome. Painting, at least in Book X, represents the surface of things, while poetry represents human beings with inner lives and human actions as components of psychological chain reactions. Poetry does so, however, without real knowledge of human excellence, and furthermore with the aim of pleasing its audience. The behavior of excellent human beings— the behavior recommended by reason, which consists in moderation and restraint, “unvarying calm” in the face of misfortune (or good fortune for that matter)—is highly recalcitrant to effective dramatic representation. If it were represented, it would not be appreciated by the majority of the audience to whose experience such reactions are quite foreign. Rather it is the reactions suggested by the unreasonable part of the soul that are dramatic and easily appreciated by the majority. Hence it is action and emotion antithetical to a

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life of virtue and happiness that dramatists and other poets naturally tend to represent and that audiences desire. But it is often the protagonists, such as tragic heroes, who are represented as so acting. So poetry will nearly always express an attitude toward life, a conception of how human beings should live, which is in fact incompatible with living an excellent life. This provides a basis for, but is not in itself, the gravest charge against poetry. That charge is that the work has a tremendous power to transmit precisely the emotions it expresses, and the attitudes to life implicit in them, to its audience: “with a few rare exceptions, it is able to corrupt even decent people, [and] that’s surely an altogether terrible thing” (605c). That poetry has the power to infect its audience with the emotions it expresses is not new to Book X. We saw something like this discussed in Books II and III. It goes further back to the early dialogue, the Ion. What is new to Book X is the idea that poetry is not merely sometimes harmful, but that (with the exception of poetry that praises the gods and good men) it is always and inevitably harmful. This is why most poetry is banished from the Republic.

5  Art and Pleasure The arts may be valued or condemned on many grounds, some of which we have discussed above, but perhaps the most common standard of value for an artwork is that it is aesthetically pleasing or, more simply, it is enjoyable. Plato was keenly aware that the arts are a source of pleasure, and often an intense one. He was also aware that many people took this capacity to please as a standard of artistic value. In Book V of the Republic, he refers to lovers of sights and sounds who “like beautiful sounds, colors, shapes, and everything fashioned out of them” (476b). Plato himself, through the character Socrates, confesses to the great enjoyment he finds in the very poetry he banishes in Book X. “When even the best of us hear Homer or some other tragedian imitating one of the heroes sorrowing and making a long lamenting speech . . . we enjoy it, give ourselves up to following it, [and] sympathize with the hero” (605c–d). And “there is a definite gain in doing so, namely pleasure” (606b). However, Plato rejects this as the right standard for evaluating art works, even though he might admit that it is the right internal standard. That is, he understands that many artworks are made with the aim of giving pleasure, and that those lovers of sight and sounds are doing no more than employing criteria implicit in artistic practice. But there are more important external standards that we should bring to objects we find pleasing, and this is as true for aesthetic pleasure as any other. He finds two problems in the stance of the lovers of sights and sounds. One is that in being wholly focused on

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sensory experience, they are incapable of achieving genuine knowledge, which, according to Plato, requires reasoning to a non-sensory realm of the forms. Second they are equally incapable of an encounter with the best and truest kind of beauty, which is beauty itself—the form of beauty. The two deficiencies are clearly closely connected. In Book X as well as elsewhere in his writing, Plato brings forward another external standard by which to judge pleasing things, namely whether they are beneficial or harmful. He has no objection to harmless pleasures, which early in Book II are counted among things good in themselves. In Republic, Book IX, Plato mentions pleasures of smell that are sometimes “very intense” (584b). He commends these, but they do not carry the baggage created by the mimetic nature of poetry. When a pleasure brings about serious harm, such as the corruption of character, that takes precedence over whatever intrinsic value it has in virtue of being enjoyable. That is also the conclusion of the Book IX discussion, which asserts that the actual worth of some pleasure should be determined by reason. We don’t disagree with Plato in believing that one should forgo harmful pleasures. If we find Plato’s use of this standard surprising in connection with the arts, it is either because we disagree with his assessment of the harmfulness of pleasures derived from art, or because of complex attitudes regarding artistic autonomy. Plato would not buy into any version of the latter idea, and it is a nice question whether he is wrong to reject it. The previous paragraph raises the question of whether, like harmless pleasures, all pleasures are intrinsically good or whether there are pleasures that simply are not good at all. Consider the pleasure of the torturer as a possible example of the latter. Whether or not Plato thought that the pleasures of poetry have intrinsic value (albeit outweighed by the harm it does), it is interesting that the Book X discussion of poetry ends with an invitation to dramatic poetry to give a defense of itself by answering the question why it should exist in a well-governed society. Perhaps Plato’s own regret at banishing something so enjoyable motivates him to give it a chance to show its worth.

6  Reconsidering Art There are several important discussions of mimēsis and art in Plato’s later works. The most extensive is the discussion of art in the Laws, which revisits issues of political philosophy covered in the Republic. In the Laws, dance and poetry sung to musical accompaniment are again keystones in education, and again it is important to choose the right kind of dance and poetry and exclude the wrong kind. In society at large, poetry and drama are performed. Comedy is explicitly permitted, where it was banned in the Republic, because, it is said,

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without the comic one cannot understand the serious. The performance of comedy is restricted to slaves and other non-citizens, suggesting that there is something dangerous about actually adopting the role of ludicrous people, a danger that does not equally carry over to the audience. Unlike comedy, tragedy is still banned. What is also forbidden is any innovation in the arts. There are certain forms that are expressive of good character or that, like comedy, are in some way useful, and artistic activity is to stick with those. Poetry has a somewhat more extensive role in the society represented in the Laws than it does in the Republic, and that raises the question whether later in life Plato changed his view about it and the other arts. If there is change of view, it might concern the possibility that mimēsis in some instances is a source of knowledge or at least of some value in the acquisition of knowledge. This is suggested by the comment on comedy mentioned above (without it one cannot understand the serious) and an extensive discussion of mimēsis in the Sophist, in which different kinds of the latter are distinguished. However, part of the reason why poetry is given more leeway in the Laws is that, unlike the Republic, it does not represent an ideal state. The presence of more poetry in the society of the Laws may in part be a recognition that in actual society, it will have a greater presence than is ideal. The discussion in the Laws is also valuable because it helps bring into focus some abiding views about poetry and other arts that may be obscured by the more sweeping condemnation of Republic, Book X. Of all types of poetry, Plato thinks tragedy, which includes the epics of Homer just as much as the plays of Aeschylus, is the most dangerous. In tragedy, one’s happiness is a matter of fate, out of one’s control. Emotions are portrayed as quite appropriately overwhelming reason in the face of misfortune. Death is among the greatest of evils. These attitudes about life and death—virtually an alternative philosophy to Plato’s—are so seductive when represented in tragic poetry, yet so wrong-headed, that they must not even get a hearing. Tragedy is not only unable to convey knowledge about serious matters, it undermines the possibility of acquiring such knowledge. What is equally dangerous is variety and innovation in all the arts because Plato thinks that this invites the imaginative adoption of many different points of view, something that, by Plato’s lights, can only confuse one who pursues the truth.

7  Plato and Us Plato has a conception of the arts as a collection of activities and media that, in its explicit extension as well as its open-endedness, bears much similarity to our own. He saw that the arts have a great capacity to provide what we would

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call aesthetic pleasure. He recognized not only the representational but also the expressive properties of the arts. Plato also understands that those who participate in the arts, even simply as its audience, tend to imaginatively adopt the emotions and attitudes individual works express. The main difference between Plato and us is in our evaluation of these capacities. We tend to think that aesthetic pleasure is for the most part morally unproblematic. It fulfills a human need for the stimulation of our senses and imagination. Plato would question both whether this is really a human need and whether, given the representational and expressive capacities of art forms, it is ever morally innocent. We may agree that that there are some artworks, especially narrative or dramatic ones, that ask us to identify or sympathize with morally flawed or positively evil characters. Some of us have qualms about this, but many among us think this is actually a good thing. Just as one needs comedy to understand the serious, imaginatively occupying the perspective of morally flawed beings might help us understand the good. In fact, we tend to think that one of the great things about art is the many alternative conceptions of things and points of view that it offers. This is precisely the variety and innovation that Plato thinks is harmful. One could say with some justice that he fears almost pathologically such variety of perspective. Alternatively one could say he offers arguments for the epistemological incapacity and the corrupting power of the arts, arguments that defenders of our more accepting view of them must answer.1

Note 1 I thank Alessandro Giovannelli, Nickolas Pappas, Nick Smith, and David Worldsdorf for helpful comments.

Primary Sources Plato: 1997. Plato: Complete Works. J. M. Cooper (ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. (Other Platonic dialogues besides The Republic that discuss art and poetry include: Ion, Apology, Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Laws.)

References and further reading Denham, Alison E., ed. 2012. Plato on Art and Beauty. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Halliwell, Stephen. 2002. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Janaway, Christopher. 1995. Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Moravcsik, J. M. E. and Temko, P., eds. 1982. Plato on Beauty, Wisdom and the Arts. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld. Nehamas, Alexander. 1999. Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Part III, “Plato: Questions of Beauty and the Arts,” 252–99. Stecker, Robert. 1992. “Plato’s Expression Theory of Art.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 26: 47–52.

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Aristotle (384–322 BCE) Angela Curran

The Poetics by Aristotle is the first and most important work of a philosophical account of an art form ever written.1 In the Greek, the title means “On the poetic [craft]” (Peri poētikēs). But the Poetics focuses on a specific genre of poetry: ancient Greek tragedy, specifically Greek tragedy performed in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The meaning of its key ideas—especially the concept of katharsis—has been hotly disputed. The recommendations for plot and character in the Poetics have been both widely influential on playwrights—and, more recently, screenwriters—and chastised by others for its rigid prescriptions for tragic plots and characters. But whether embraced or criticized, Aristotle’s views on tragedy still hold sway today, and philosophers often take his ideas to have implications for other forms of narrative fiction, such as the novel or film. Many scholars think the works of Aristotle that have survived are, in fact, notes he made for himself or his students, not polished works prepared for public distribution. Aristotle’s writing style is often cryptic, compressed, and challenging to follow, with many terms in need of clarification. The Poetics is especially challenging in this respect due to its poor state of preservation. Internal and external evidence (specifically Politics, 1341 b38–40) suggests that there was a lost second book of the Poetics that discussed comedy and the concept central to the work, katharsis. What remains is the first book, and there is a great deal of scholarly disagreement about what overall arguments this book contains. What is clear is that the work is not an instructional manual aimed at advising playwrights. For Aristotle, poetry, like speech-making, is a “productive” science. As such, it involves a technē (translated as “art” or “craft”), a practical skill that embodies an underlying knowledge put to the service of some goal. The poet need not know what the principles of good poetry making are to make good poems and plays. Still, the student of

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philosophy can study these works to uncover the knowledge that is implicit in the successful production of the poetic craft. This is what Aristotle does in the Poetics. To be sure, the work has implications for the practice of poetry. However, Aristotle’s goal is not practical, but philosophical, and he draws on the views he has developed in other areas of his philosophy, especially metaphysics, psychology, and ethics. What is the philosophical framework that Aristotle is operating with, then, in the Poetics? His account of the genre of poetry and related arts like painting and music is broadly teleological. In essence, poetry came into existence to establish a specific end or goal (telos), and the features we find in poetry are there in the service of this larger end. But to what purpose or end does Aristotle think poetry and tragedy aim? Aristotle never directly tells us his answer (cf. Shields 2007). But leading explanations include pleasure, learning, and the ability of poetry to give the audience an emotional experience that enables them to respond appropriately to events inside and outside the theater as well (see Curran 2016, Chapter 11). To better understand Aristotle’s answer, we need to investigate carefully two notions central to his work: mimēsis and katharsis. The reader of the Poetics will find the book structured as follows: (1) Chapters 1 and 2 analyze the grounding concept of mimēsis; (2) Chapter 4 deals with the origins of poetry; (3) Chapter 6 presents Aristotle’s definition of tragedy; (4) Chapters 7–19 discuss tragedy’s various parts, especially the elements of the plot; (5) Chapters 23–6 address epic poetry and the poet’s use of wonder, surprise, and the impossible.

1  Mimēsis 1.1  The Meaning of Mimēsis Aristotle says that some arts use the medium of color and shape, others use the medium of the voice, but poetry uses the medium of language, and more specifically the combination of rhythm, language, and melody in order to produce a mimēsis (1447 a13); he also says that painting, music, and poetry create “mimēsis of character, emotions, and action” (1447 a25). Some scholars translate mimēsis as “imitation,” “representation,” or “depiction,” but none of these terms is a perfect rendering of Aristotle’s meaning. Using “imitation” suggests that poetry is a copy of some preexisting things. Yet, Aristotle makes clear that the subject matter of poetic mimēsis is not limited to things that have occurred. Indeed, there was no Antigone who defied her uncle, King Creon. The subject matter of poetic mimēsis is

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either the actual (1451 b29–32) or the possible (1451 b5): that is, the objects of mimēsis can include those the poet makes up. Nor does the poet need to adhere to historical or scientific fact, provided that the mimēsis he produces is still plausible and true to life (1460 b30–2; see also 1460 b15–20). So, Aristotle’s mimēsis is not that of a copy or imitation of some preexisting reality. “Representation” or “depiction” might be better translations, since a representation need not be of some existing object. However, a representation—say, a depiction of a subway stop on a map—might bear no likeness to the thing it represents. Yet, in one context, Aristotle uses “likeness” (homoiōma) as a synonym for mimēsis. He says that music can be a likeness or mimēsis of a character trait or emotion in that it can have the same effect on one’s soul, as would experiencing the emotion or developing the character trait in real life (Politics 1340 a20–5 and a38–9). A mimēsis might then be a likeness of some object or set of events—either possible or actual—one the poet makes to produce some of the same effects as those that would be experienced were these things witnessed in real life (cf. Paul Woodruff ’s essay in Rorty, ed. 1992). Crucially, the responses that poetic imitations evoke are distinctive emotions: tragedy, for instance, evokes “the pleasure that comes from pity and fear through mimēsis”(Poetics 1453 b12–13).

1.2  The Origins of Mimēsis In Poetics 4 and 5, Aristotle gives two related causes for poetry: (1) it is a distinctive feature of humans that they, more than any other animal, learn by engaging in mimēsis: for example, a child might learn how to speak by imitating the words of her parent; (2) all human beings take delight in exactly executed imitations since they can learn from these imitations, and learning is naturally delightful (1148 b4–24). The pleasure we take in contemplating a portrait is not due to its craftsmanship, aesthetic qualities, or even subject matter. For we can also enjoy contemplating precise images of repulsive and vile corpses and animal forms (1448 b8–10); it is that we understand (manthanein) and infer what each element is, for instance, that “this is so-and-so” (1448 b15–17). Just what we do when we “understand and infer” what each element in the portrait means is not precisely clear. However, Aristotle’s example suggests some kind of process of cognition in which the viewer assigns meaning to the elements in the portrait and deduces the corresponding features in the subject (Halliwell 1998, 74–7; Heath 2009, 62–73). Since human beings are by their essential nature curious, it is natural that they would seek

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out and take pleasure in any activity that exercises their nature. Aristotle implies in the Poetics 4 passage that our central pleasure in mimēsis relates to how poetry exercises and satisfies our natural capacity for knowledge. But is the process of “understanding and inferring” from the elements in a portrait “cognitively trivial” (see Jonathan Lear’s essay in Rorty, ed. 1992)? Or does the Poetics 4 passage show us how we can learn nontrivial truths, even philosophical truths about human life and behavior from mimetic art (Halliwell 2003)? The answer to these questions is a subject of major debate among Poetics scholars. The worry may be that mimetic works draw on our understanding of the world, rather than transform it, in that to recognize a statue as representing Socrates, one must be already familiar with him. How does a work that presupposes an understanding of the world alter that knowledge in a nontrivial way? What Aristotle says about metaphors is relevant here. Metaphors also involve reasoning out of the similarities between two distinct things (“Old age is like a withered stalk”), facilitating recognition of a likeness’ “lost bloom” (Rhetoric 1410 b18). The reader of the metaphor may mobilize a previously acquired concept’s “old age,” but her understanding of the idea is transformed. Poetics 4 suggests that even a simple portrait provides the viewer with the opportunity to exercise natural capacities such as sense perception, reasoning, and understanding. And the natural exercise of these capacities is pleasurable, as Aristotle explains in Nicomachean Ethics (1153 a10). In Poetics 4, Aristotle examines the elementary processes of recognition involved in grasping the subject of a portrait, to better understand the cognitive underpinning that are the basis for a range of mimetic works: from the simple portrait to the more sophisticated forms of recognition that narrative works mobilize. With works of more complex forms of mimetic art, which call for more complex forms of recognition, there is the possibility of a more profound understanding. Indeed, poetry—tragedy, comedy, epic—involves the spectator or reader in a complex kind of recognition. The poet constructs the plot with events that are linked by probability and necessity (Poetics 1431 a37–8 and 1451 b9). This means that the plot constructs the actions and interactions of the character in a larger pattern, a universal, “what a certain kind of person will say or do in a specific situation, according to probability and necessity” (1451 b8). It is this grasping of this universal pattern of human action embedded in the plot that has the potential to give the viewer an altered understanding of her situation. The mimetic art form that Aristotle thinks has the best claim to provide such an understanding is tragedy.

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2 Tragedy As the instinct to make mimetic works developed, Aristotle says, more complex forms emerged, branching into a more serious side of poetry— tragedy and epic poetry—and a less serious branch of poetry, comedy (1448 b20–5). Comedy imitates the actions of people who are socially and morally inferior to the average human being. In contrast, tragedy and epic imitate superior people (leading some to speculate that in the lost Book Two of the Poetics Aristotle espoused a “superiority” theory of comic pleasure). Epic poetry differs from tragedy because the latter typically proceeds in a more limited time frame, allowing for a greater concentration of pleasure (1462 a18–b1). Tragedy also employs different methods of making verse. In epic, a narrator tells the story, while in tragedy, the story is acted out by the characters. Also, tragedy, but not epic, makes use of tune and rhythm (1449 a5–b12). Aristotle’s general practice throughout his investigations is to seek a definition, since a sound definition helps us understand what a thing is in its essential nature. So, in Poetics 6, he pulls together his earlier remarks and offers us the following definition of tragedy: Tragedy, then, is a mimēsis of an action that is elevated, complete, and of magnitude; in language embellished in distinct forms in its sections; employing the mode of enactment and not narrative; and through pity and fear accomplishing the katharsis of such emotions. (1449 b24–8)

The most central aspects of the definition are: 1. Tragedy is a mimēsis of an action that is serious or admirable (spoudaios); 2. The action must be complete and whole and have magnitude; 3. Tragedy brings about a katharsis (root meaning “purification” or “purgation”) through pity and fear. Tragedy is a mimēsis of action and life (1450 a19), but especially of action that is serious or admirable. This requirement on tragic action refers back to Chapter 2, where he contrasts the worthy characters of tragedy with the inferior characters in comedy (1448 a2). Tragedy features larger-than-life characters who are “better than most,” in terms of both their moral standing and their social status (1448 a3; also a15–20). But tragedy often shows good people going from good fortune to bad, a circumstance that could provoke

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moral confusion or outrage, rather than pity and fear, which are the proper responses to a tragedy. To evoke pity and fear, the plot must have a specific sort of structure: it must imitate an action that is “complete and whole.” That is, a narrative must have a beginning, middle, and end (1450 b22–3). The beginning gives the audience all it needs to know about how the action of the play gets started. The middle follows from the preceding events in a way that conforms to the audience’s expectation of how things are likely or probably going to go. The ending must not occur at an arbitrary point but bring the action to some kind of narrative closure (1450 b25). Tragic action must not only have well-ordered parts: it must have a sufficient magnitude or length. Sufficient size is what gives the plot its beauty (1450 b35). A plot must be long enough for one to be able to allow for the change of fortune to occur and be explicable, but short enough to hold all the events in memory. It is ideal for tragedy to have a “complex” plot with two components: a reversal (peripeteia) of fortune and a recognition (anagnorisis) (1452 a12–15), that is, a shift from ignorance to knowledge on the part of the tragic character. Now, an essential aspect of a well-ordered plot is that it does not merely thread one event after the other; instead, it should proceed as a “probable or necessary sequence of events” (1451 a14–15 and 1460 b12). The success of the emotional impact of tragedy depends on the audience seeing the plot as unfolding in a way that is believable and true to life. The point, then, of having a well-ordered plot is that this is the best means of evoking pity and fear in the audience. The question remains, however, of what is the poet’s goal in evoking this emotional response.

3  Katharsis To answer this question, scholars often appeal to Aristotle’s notion of katharsis. For the idea that tragedy offers a katharsis of pity and fear occurs at the end of the definition of tragedy, the place Aristotle often reserved for the goal or ultimate purpose of the thing defined. But just what Aristotle means by katharsis is hotly contested. The term katharsis occurs in only two places in the Poetics, at the end of the definition of tragedy (Chapter 6) and in Chapter 17, where Aristotle makes an incidental reference to a ritual of purification or katharsis in a play by Euripides. In Politics 8, Aristotle discusses katharsis in the context of ritual purification ceremonies and refers to a more explicit discussion of the concept in his work on poetry (1341 b38– 9), something that the existing text of the Poetics does not provide. Although

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we cannot be sure what Aristotle means by katharsis, this has not stopped commentators from offering numerous interpretations of this central notion. Of the many explanations offered, some emerge as leading contenders (cf. Halliwell 1998, Appendix 5, for a helpful survey; also, for a summary, see Curran 2016, Chapter 9). The most influential accounts have followed the two primary root meanings of katharsis, as either purgation or cleansing and purification. The purgation theory, proposed by Jacob Bernays in the mid-nineteenth century, argues that katharsis is a purgation or removal of the emotions of pity and fear analogous to a medical purgation of some harmful substance from the body. Tragedy is therapeutic, for it helps the spectator rid herself of unhealthy pent-up emotions and, in doing so, provides her with a sense of enjoyable relief. Support comes from Politics 8: there Aristotle says the spectator’s tendency to experience emotional excess is relieved by listening to certain kinds of music that first excite and release the excess emotion, producing a calm that helps keep one’s emotions to a manageable level (1342 a7–15). The point of tragic katharsis is then the purgation of noxious emotions that threaten physical and psychological well-being. The purgation theory, however, as it stands, is open to a strong objection (but see Curran 2016, 219–22 for a modified purgation account). Aristotle would agree that emotions can be felt in excess or improperly. But he does not think of emotions as unhealthy items in need of discharge. Emotions on Aristotle’s view are an essential part of fully human life, and they should not be discharged or purged, but retained and refined, so that—as Aristotle explains in his Nicomachean Ethics—we feel the right emotion at the right time. Looking at Aristotle’s theory of tragedy in light of his ethics prompts, then, the other main trend in the interpretation of katharsis, the clarification theory offered by Martha Nussbaum (e.g., 1986, 388–90) and also propounded by Stephen Halliwell (see his essay in Rorty, ed. 1992, 254). Pity and fear for the characters are possible only if the audience can believe that what happens to the characters could happen to them. Fear is for someone “like us” (Poetics 1453 a5–6), and we feel pity for someone when we believe that the misfortune that has befallen the person we pity can happen to us (Rhetoric 1386 a24–7; for an excellent discussion of tragic emotions see Munteanu 2012, especially 72–95). By responding to worthy tragic characters and their predicaments, the spectator can then “clarify” as well as improve her understanding of what sorts of things are valuable in everyday life (cf. Nussbaum’s essay in Rorty, ed. 1992; for the view that Aristotelian katharsis is an intellectual rather than emotional clarification, see Golden 1976). One advantage of the clarification account is that it can explain Aristotle’s remark that the definition of tragedy in Poetics 6 is a summing up of his earlier

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discussion in Poetics 1–5. Katharsis appears to be the one item that does not correspond to anything in the previous discussion. On the clarification account, katharsis picks up the discussion in Poetics 4 about the pleasure of learning that poetry offers. But others remain unconvinced that katharsis involves the pleasure of learning (see Lear’s essay in Rorty, ed.​1992; Ferrari 1999; Destrée 2013). How can tragic katharsis provide an ethical education for those who already understand how to experience pity and fear in the right way at the right time? In numerous places (especially Poetics 26), Aristotle suggests that tragedy should appeal to just such an audience. But how does the ethically well-educated person benefit from her experience at the theater? Because of the problem in understanding the broad emotional benefits of tragedy, others argue that in the katharsis clause—“the katharsis of such emotions (toiauta pathēmata)”—pathēmata refers not to the emotions of pity and fear, but the events in the plot. This interpretation finds support in Aristotle’s claim in Poetics 6 that the events and the plot are the goals of tragedy (1450 a20–3). A coherent plot that resolves all the narrative questions raised earlier in the play is the goal of tragedy and the point of katharsis (cf. Alexander Nehamas’s essay in Rorty, ed. 1992). A coherent plot that resolves all the narrative questions raised earlier in the play is the goal of tragedy and the point of katharsis. It is drastic to take the emotions out of the experience of tragedy, especially since later chapters make clear that the well-ordered plot is there to facilitate a feeling of pity and fear (see especially Poetics 13 and 14). Yet, an even more radical interpretation proposes that the katharsis language was not Aristotle’s own, but a later addition, and so concludes that it is advisable to drop talk about katharsis altogether (Scott 2003; Veloso 2007). However, even if we dropped all attempts to understand the notion of katharsis in the Poetics, the problem of needing to understand the emotional benefits of tragedy would not go away. For in many places, Aristotle appeals to the emotional effects of tragedy to distinguish it from comedy and epic (e.g., Poetics 5 1449 a34). He also makes clear the central place of the arousal of emotions in tragedy (e.g., Poetics 6, 9, 13, and 14). It follows that we need to understand why Aristotle thinks it is beneficial for everyone—the virtuous and less virtuous folk alike—to experience the emotions in the context of tragedy. There are two key aspects of Aristotle’s answer to this question: (1) the experience of emotions in the setting of theater makes these emotions more manageable in real life; and (2) pity and fear facilitate a grasp on the universal truths embodied in the particulars of the plot (see Curran 2016, 283–91). Typically pity and fear are experienced as painful emotions, according to the account of them Aristotle offers in the Rhetoric. Yet experiencing these emotions in response to the characters’ predicaments gives rise, Aristotle

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says, to some sort of pleasurable relief. These observations—that in the context of tragedy the painful feelings of pity and fear can give rise to a sense of pleasure—lead to what has become known as the paradox of tragedy: how can viewers of tragedy take pleasure in that which would in everyday contexts be unpleasant and painful to experience? Aristotle does not indicate that he thinks that the typically painful emotions of pity and fear somehow get “converted” by tragic mimēsis into pleasant feelings, as David Hume proposed when he considered the paradox of tragedy. But a skillful plot puts the pitiful and fearful events of everyday life into some kind of a coherent whole. It thereby gives the spectator a pleasurable understanding of these incidents that are not available when we experience these emotions in ordinary life. Pity and fear are not discharged or necessarily clarified or refined in a virtuous person who experiences these emotions in the right way, at the right time. For such a person, the pain felt in experiencing pity and fear in response to the character’s suffering remains. Still, we might reasonably say that her emotional engagement with them calls forth a pleasurable understanding that helps to make the experience of pity and fear in real life easier to bear. What is transformed or altered, then, is the overall experience of pity and fear in the context of tragedy, and not the feeling of pain associated with pity and fear, as Hume proposed. This association of pleasurable understanding and painful emotions helps a person regard pity and fear and the real-life incidents that call them forth differently.

4  The Philosophical Nature of Poetry and the Goal of Tragedy The pleasures of tragedy, for Aristotle, are diverse. In essence, they involve both a practical component, that of helping to make our experience of painful emotions in everyday life more manageable, and an intellectual or philosophical one, that of offering an understanding of the wreckage and rubble of the incidents from our daily lives. In Poetics 9, Aristotle expands further on the quasi-philosophical nature of poetry, helping us better understand how emotional engagement with tragic characters facilitates some kind of intellectual insight (see Carli 2010). Poets write stories about what happens to particular individuals in specific circumstances. Yet, in grasping the plot, the audience understands a universal truth embedded in the particulars of the narrative that explains how the character comes to suffer the fate she does (1451 b5–10).

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Combining Poetics 4 and Poetics 9, we might then conclude that artistic activity is on a par with other knowledge-seeking endeavors such as scientific inquiry (cf. Shields 2007). But here we should be cautious in what we conclude Aristotle is saying. He says that poetry is “more philosophical and more elevated” than history (1451 b3–5), but this does not mean that the poet is doing the work of the philosopher. A good tragic plot, Aristotle suggests, organizes the pitiful and fearful events of everyday life into some kind of coherent whole, and this has implications for how an audience member can come to understand things better in her own life. But to do so, the poet need not impart philosophical knowledge, which for Aristotle is knowledge of essences, of the necessary and defining features of kinds (e.g., “God,” “human being,” “lion”). What the spectator grasps in making sense of the tragic plot may be some empirical generalization regarding how certain types of human beings respond in certain kinds of situations, say, “Virtuous people have a noble response to misfortune.” Such a generalization may be new to the spectator or be a truth that she grasped previously; yet, by her emotional response to the characters, this generalization comes emotionally alive as it was not before. What the audience takes away from tragedy, then, is the ability to emotionally respond in discerning ways inside as well as outside the theater—helping the virtuous and non-virtuous alike manage their emotions in daily life. In short, the spectator at the theater gains emotional understanding (Curran 2016, 285–9).

5 The Poetics and Aesthetics The Poetics has inspired significant developments in aesthetics. One trend concerns the relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic. Aristotle recommends plot patterns based on the audience’s moral evaluation of the characters. Viewers feel pity and fear for good and decent characters who err but are not morally vicious. They experience moral confusion when a perfect person suffers due to no fault of her own. They feel repulsed when a vicious person triumphs. Wayne Booth (1988) has developed Aristotle’s suggestions by arguing that, with literature, the reader’s ability to engage with the characters in a fiction emotionally is based on the ethical esteem they hold for them. Nussbaum (1986, among other works) has developed her clarification account of katharsis into a more general argument that literature is an important adjunct to philosophy, for it provides the opportunity to refine our “moral perception” regarding ethical concepts like justice and virtue. And recently, philosophers have debated the “puzzle of imaginative resistance”—

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one aspect of which is the idea that readers imaginatively “resist” characters whose moral viewpoints strongly differ from their own. These discussions are indebted to Aristotle’s psychological observation that ethical regard forms an important basis for the reader’s reaction to dramatic characters. Another Aristotelian tendency in aesthetics concerns the identification of certain literary and film genres—suspense, mystery, comedy, melodrama, and horror—by reference to the intended emotional effects on the audience. Noël Carroll, for example, explains horror as a genre that evokes the emotions of fear and disgust in the audience. He identifies mystery as the genre intended to produce suspense in the audience, and melodrama as intended to invite pity for the melodramatic protagonist. Following Aristotle, philosophers of film and literature argue that sympathy plays an important role in our affective engagement with characters in fiction movies. They have sought to understand the nature of this engagement, how it differs from empathy (or “shared feeling”) with characters, and whether or not “identification” is the best way to explain Aristotle’s requirement that the tragic characters must be “like ourselves” to feel pity and fear for them (1453 a5–6). We can see, then, that the Poetics has inspired several important trends in aesthetics and promises to continue to do so. Perhaps the most significant debates the work has engendered focus on what role tragedy plays in ethical improvement, and on whether it is the essential goal of art that we learn from it. Regardless of the answers to these questions, Aristotle makes it clear to us that artistic activity and aesthetic appreciation are essential parts of a fully human life. For this reason, aestheticians will continue to turn to the Poetics for a valuable defense of the relevance of art today.2

Notes 1 For Aristotle’s works, I used the translations listed under Primary Sources. 2 I thank Alessandro Giovannelli for his many helpful comments and editorial advice on this chapter.

Primary Sources Aristotle: 1926. Rhetoric. J. H. Freese (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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1932. Politics. H. Rackham (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1934. Nicomachean Ethics. H. Rackham (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1995. Poetics. S. Halliwell (ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

References and Further Reading Belfiore, Elizabeth. 1985. “Pleasure, Tragedy, and Aristotelian Psychology.” Classical Quarterly, 35: 349–61. Booth, Wayne. 1988. The Company We Keep. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carli, Silvia. 2010. “Philosophy Is More Philosophical Than History: Aristotle on Mimēsis and Form.” Review of Metaphysics, 64 (2): 303–36. Curran, Angela. 2016. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics. New York: Routledge. Destrée, Pierre. 2013. “Aristotle and the Paradox of Tragic Pleasure.” In Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Suffering Art Gladly: The Paradox of Negative Emotion in Art, 3–27. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ferrari, G. R. F. 1999. “Aristotle’s Literary Aesthetics.” Phronesis, 44 (3): 181–98. Golden, Leon. 1976. “The Clarification Theory of Catharsis.” Hermes, 104: 437–52. Halliwell, Stephen. 1998. Aristotle’s Poetics. London: The University of Chicago Press. Halliwell, Stephen. 2003. “Aristotelian Mimēsis and Human Understanding.” In Øivind Andersen and Jon Haarberg (eds.), Making Sense of Aristotle: Essays in Poetics, 87–108. London: Duckworth. Heath, Malcolm. 1996. Aristotle’s Poetics. London: Penguin Books. Heath, Malcolm. 2009. “Cognition in Aristotle’s Poetics.” Mnemosyne, 62: 51–75. Munteanu, Dana La Course. 2012. Tragic Pathos: Pity and Fear in Greek Philosophy and Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1986. The Fragility of Goodness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Amélie, ed. 1992. Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, Greg. 2003. “Purging the Poetics.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 25: 233–63. Shields, Christopher. 2007. “Rhetoric and the Arts.” In Aristotle, 375–97. New York: Routledge. Veloso, Claudio William. 2007. “Aristotle’s Poetics without Katharsis, Fear, or Pity.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 33: 255–84.

3

Medieval Aesthetics Gian Carlo Garfagnini

During the Middle Ages aesthetics never was an autonomous discipline. Treatises that specifically address matters regarding the arts and beauty are rare and, when they exist, are framed within a theological and metaphysical investigation. Indeed, the medieval aesthetic discussion occurs all within the context of a rational investigation of the Bible, aimed at one’s eternal salvation and at the acquisition, from the pagan tradition, of any conceptual tool that could help achieve that ultimate goal. Views on the beautiful were first developed by the so-called Fathers of the Church (from which comes the term “patristic”) as they sought a synthesis between biblical texts and Greek philosophy. Their ideas were to be passed on to subsequent medieval thinkers, but always informed by the same fundamental concerns. Despite their differences, medieval authors ultimately agree on the connection between the beautiful and the good, and on the claim that beautiful is what arouses pleasure. Such pleasure derives from contemplation, in Latin a visio, which can be either of sensory, worldly beauty or, more fundamentally, of a non-sensory, moral and divine, beauty. Worldly beauty is nothing but a reflection of the solely true beauty, eternal and immutable: that of God. And the attempt to access such a beauty within the created world is meaningful only within the ampler project—by means of a rational understanding of the laws governing the universe—of getting closer to God.

1  From Sacred Scriptures to Patristic School The Old Testament appears to have a dual attitude toward the issue of beauty. On the one hand, according to the Vulgate, that is, the Latin translation of the Bible accepted by the Church, “beautiful” is the term God uses to comment on His own creation (Gen. 1: 31). Further, the Book of Wisdom describes the divine creation as ordered according to “measure, number, and weight” (Wisdom XI: 21). On the other hand, the transience and vanity of material

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beauty are emphasized. The New Testament, too, lends itself to different interpretations: while it insists on sensory beauty being just a manifestation of spiritual beauty, it also suggests the possibility that the autonomous value of the beautiful be grasped as a feature intrinsic to a created thing as such. These are different, but not contradictory, claims; contrasts between them will arise only later, because of biblical interpretations emphasizing one claim at the expense of the other. The interpretations emerging from the Jewish tradition concentrate on the derived nature of the sensory beautiful and the importance of a subjective appreciation of it. The interpretations that were more open to Greek and Roman culture underline the immediate and objective value of beauty, considering it first and foremost as proportion and harmony between the parts. The Greek Father Basil of Caesarea (329–379), in his Homilies of the Hexaemeron, defines the beauty of the created world as pankalìa, that is, as (i) beauty deriving from the arrangements of the parts that constitute the universe; (ii) simplicity, insofar as such parts comprise a harmonic whole; and (iii) light, propagating directly and making everything it reaches shine. To these concepts, which had Stoic and Neoplatonic origin, Basil adds the idea of beauty as (iv) a relation, emphasizing the importance of its reception by the subject and of the correspondence between the object and its intrinsic goal. Hence, the world is beautiful because of the harmony between its parts, of humans’ capacity to enjoy its overall arrangement as a way to get to the Creator, and, finally, of its perfect correspondence to the goal for which God created it. Just as an artist manipulates the existing matter to realize the idea he has in mind, so God is an artist, one whose raw material is nothingness. The same conception reappears in the Dionysian Corpus, the set of writings medieval thinkers attributed to a disciple of St. Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, but that are actually by a fifth-century anonymous writer, now known as the Pseudo-Dionysius. One of such writings, the De divinis nominibus (trans. On the Divine Names), affirms a spiritualistic and theocentric aesthetics that is more abstract than Basil’s. It combines characteristics of the biblical God with those of the first being of Neoplatonic philosophy; that is, it equates the beautiful to the good, which at an absolute level is Being as such, the One. Another Neoplatonic theme found in the work of the Pseudo-Dionysius is the theory of emanation, which identifies the beautiful with the light that propagates from the One and that, shining on all things, brings them into existence. There is here, then, a transition from Basil’s somewhat empirical conception of the beautiful to a metaphysical conception that inevitably devalues the sensory dimension. Within Latin patristic thought, the foundations for a reflection on aesthetics are laid by Augustine (354–430). He expresses his views on the

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subject in De pulchro et apto (On the Beautiful and the Fitting), now lost, in De vera religione (On True Religion), in De ordine (On Order), and in the three treatises on Genesis. After asking “whether things are beautiful because they please or whether they please because they are beautiful,” Augustine responds that “they please because they are beautiful” (De vera religione, XXXII, 59), hence affirming the objective, autonomous character of sensory beauty, despite its non-divine nature. In defining such beauty, Augustine appeals to the criterion of proportion: the beautiful (pulchrum), which is distinguished from both what is appropriate or fitting (aptum) and what is merely enjoyable (suave), is an objective quality of things, insofar as their makeup results from a harmony between the parts, governed by measure and number. Such an aesthetic objectivism is nonetheless accompanied by an emphasis placed on the role of the subject who “sees” the beautiful and defines it, through an understanding that is possible only when the encounter of the subject with the object is characterized by disinterestedness and tranquility of mind. These novel elements notwithstanding, Augustine’s aesthetics is still inspired by a theocentric vision, since the properties that make things beautiful ultimately exist only as traces of the divine beauty.

2  From Boethius to the Twelfth Century Boethius’s (c. 480–526) aesthetic reflections, found in De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy) and De institutione musica (Fundamentals of Music), are part of his program for spreading Greek thought in the West and codifying a new philosophical-theological vocabulary. Inspired by the Pythagorean conception of the beautiful as form, proportion, and number, Boethius ends up emphasizing, in accordance with a spiritualism that had its origin in the East, the nature of worldly beauty as just an “appearance,” a remote trace of the true Beautiful and true Good. Worldly beauty is inescapably bound to the senses and hence to the human inability of going beyond a thing’s surface, to the thing’s essence: “It is not your nature, but the weakness of the eyes of the onlookers that makes you appear beautiful” (De consolatione philosophiae, III, 8). Art is approached more theoretically than practically, for its capacity of facilitating understanding and transmitting knowledge. Boethius introduces a distinction, which would last throughout the Middle Ages, between two kinds of activities: those that depend on a set of rules, principles, and skills, which belong to art, and the artificia, the products of manual labor, which instead belong to the sphere of technology. Boethius’s aesthetics, which is almost exclusively dedicated to music, can be described as mathematical in its foundation, intellectual in

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its consequences, and metaphysical in its perspective. Music, which for him comprises poetry, can be seen as deriving from the cosmic music that stems from the universe’s perfection. The so-called Carolingian Renaissance,1 that is, the intellectual rebirth that grounded the attempt to construct a Christian identity that would be capable of culturally unifying the West, had an impact on aesthetics, too. Alcuin of York (735–804) especially, with his strong interest for the classics, tried to combine the scripture-based religious point of view with the ideas articulated by the ancient thinkers. For him, beautiful things reflect the divine plan—beautiful by definition—that was at the basis of the creation. Accordingly, the value of a work of art amounts to the work’s being a representation of the truth. For this reason, literature, which among the arts is best able to express the concepts needed to reach the truth, has for Alcuin a privileged position. Regarding the relationship between object and subject, Alcuin strengthens the distinction between the exterior form (dulcedo) of a work and the expression of an interior harmony (ordo), giving primacy to the latter of the two. The question of the aesthetic is explicitly addressed by John Scotus Eriugena (c. 810–877). Eriugena’s deep knowledge of Greek had allowed him to introduce Neoplatonism to the West, through his commentaries on the Corpus Dionysianum. Eriugena advances a philosophical view that centers around a unitary conception of the cosmic process, from the creation of the universe to its final resolution in God. The universe is the manifestation of the Divine (teofania) and must be understood as a complex symphonic unity, within which matter and sensory beauty play a role comparable to that of spiritual entities. The fundamental characteristic of beauty, which must be enjoyed in a completely disinterested way and out of neither material nor spiritual need, is that of being essentially ineffable: “God realizes Himself in the creation, manifesting Himself in wondrous and ineffable manner; though invisible, He becomes visible, and though incomprehensible, He becomes comprehensible” (De divisione naturae [The Division of Nature], III, 17). Indeed, since all things derive from prototypes within the inscrutable divine reason, the higher we get in considering them, the more beautiful they are for being closer to their creator, and the harder it is for human reason to understand them and for our limited vocabulary to express them. Between the eighth and the ninth centuries, the only moment when an aesthetic issue takes the center stage in medieval philosophy occurs; it is regarding the value of sacred images. The dispute on their value started within the Eastern Empire of Byzantium, but it resonated strongly in the West, too. At stake, besides some rather concrete political motivations, were two of the most fundamental theological positions, affecting the entire

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contemporary understanding of reality. On the one hand, the iconoclasts firmly denied the possibility of representing the Divine; on the other, the iconophiles were persuaded that as humans can perceive the truth only by means of the senses, so sensory representations are a necessary means to unite with God. Charlemagne himself took a middle-ground position, sympathetic to the iconoclasts’ position, but opposed to the destruction of the sacred images. The other period of major intellectual flourishing prior to the full Middle Ages is the twelfth-century “renaissance.” Together with a growth in population and trades, and the rebirth of the city, this century saw the establishment of cultural centers aimed at the study of the sacred scriptures as well as the liberal arts, law, and medicine: most notably, the centers at the Saint Victor Abbey in Paris, the Abbey of Clairvaux, and the Cathedral of Chartres. One of the protagonists of this period is Hugh of Saint Victor (1096–1141), who dedicated the seventh book of his Didascalicon to an analysis of both divine, invisible beauty and sensory beauty. Hugh emphasizes the importance of the latter, describing its fundamental characteristics and declaring its relative autonomy. Although defending a sort of panaestheticism of all created reality, he does not embrace the traditional pankalìa; rather, he insists on the possibility for earthly things to be beautiful, and on such beauty to be a means for humans to overcome their limits. Hugh distinguishes the products of mental activity between things that are appropriate, convenient, and liked, pointing to a process that has at its apex the production of what is beautiful. He pays great attention, then, to the human capacity to create things, albeit always within the limits of a reality that has itself been created and in strict agreement with nature. Hugh’s descriptive approach to aesthetics, however, was to be abandoned by his successor at Saint Victor, Richard (d. 1173), who reverted to a mystic approach centered on the aesthetic contemplation a subject could have of the invisible, divine beauty. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091–1153) holds a view that is quite close to the theses of Hugh’s school. His Sermones in Cantica Canticorum (Sermons on the Song of Songs) conveys the canonical view for the order of the Cistercian Fathers with respect to beauty. The beauty Bernard is interested in is moral beauty, which derives from the harmony of a soul and its accordance with the word of God. Aesthetics, then, is for him a sort of philosophy of spirit, within which the dialectic between spiritual and sensory beauty is resolved all in favor of the former. Given his view that what is beautiful is simple—so as to match the essential uniqueness of the Creator—among the arts Bernard favors architecture and music, for which he proposes an aesthetic model characterized by harmony and precision.

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Architecture occupies an equally central place within another great cultural center of the twelfth century—that of the school of the Cathedral of Chartres. The Chartres masters claimed that the divine revealed word of God ought to be consistent with the fruits of logical reasoning as found in the works of the ancient thinkers. Accordingly, they conducted their investigations by reading the Bible together with the first part of Plato’s Timaeus, in the translation and commentary by Calcidius. They considered beauty an attribute of the world itself and God an artist who had acted according to unchanging rules and categories, such as form, figure, number, relation, and as accordance between the parts. God gave the initial creative impulse (creatio) to a living work that was then capable of developing autonomously according to its own structure (exornatio). To understand the beauty of the cosmos, then, one must adopt a mathematical approach, so as to consider the things of the world for what they are in themselves, not as symbols of realities beyond them. Architecture—the most significant art form because image, however imperfect, of the divine creative activity—ought to be evaluated, then, not according to moral or ascetic criteria but according to aesthetic considerations.

3  The Thirteenth Century: Franciscan and Dominican Thought The thirteenth century is the apex of medieval philosophy. It is the century during which the best-known figures are active, the most major institutional and religious transformations occur, and the national states become selfaware, bringing the universalism of the Empire and of the Church to an end. Most important, it is the century of the return of the Aristotelian corpus into the West, bearer as it was of a global vision of the world and of a new vocabulary to express it. It is the century during which the first universities and the scholastic way of elaborating and transmitting knowledge are born. It is also the century of the mendicant orders. The scholastic masters raised new questions with respect to aesthetics, addressing the essence of the beautiful and aesthetics’ relation to art and other disciplines. They abandoned a theocentric and mystic approach as well as a merely descriptive one, and attempted a conceptual approach, starting from such questions as “What is beautiful?” and “How do you define its essence?” The Franciscan school is especially interested in the beauty of the world, according to the view of the school’s founder, Saint Francis of Assisi (c. 1181– 1226), that the universe shines of the divine beauty in each of its parts, even the lowest. The first relevant philosophical formulations, yet still ones that follow

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the tradition preceding them, are found in the work of William of Auvergne (d. 1249) and in the Summa fratris Alexandri attributed to Alexander of Hales (c. 1180–1245). Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) also addresses the aesthetic question within his metaphysics of light. The novelty in Grosseteste’s approach lies in considering the beautiful as harmony between the parts not qualitatively but quantitatively, so as to open the discourse to mathematical and geometrical proportions. To such a view Grosseteste adds a conception of light as a primary element within which proportions are perfect because they are grounded in identity: light is indivisible and hence always identical to itself. Combining his views on the mathematical-geometrical proportions to the thesis that light is the primary condition for the existence of things, Grosseteste claims that the world can be described as beautiful because it is the work of its creator, because of its perfect form, and because of the accordance between the parts, which are governed by the linear precision of light. Finally, this mathematical understanding of aesthetics is combined to a characterization of human action as not just aimed at knowing but also at doing. Hence, all arts are conditioned by logic, music, and mathematics, and have a practical outcome. In a similar way, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221–1274) begins with the assumption that beauty derives from light, which is proportion, congruity, and perfect identity; yet, he adds to this metaphysical approach an interest for the empirical and psychological dimension, concentrating on a subject’s capacity to be in harmony with the object one perceives thanks to the senses and the intellect. Such a state does not reflect just a universal harmony but the subject’s own sensibility—that of someone who is capable of recognizing in things that same divine spark that is also within oneself. Because of the emphasis he places on the importance of the subject, Bonaventure can attribute the artist a certain degree of creativity, conceiving of the artwork not just as a representation of something external to its creator, but rather as a projection of the artist’s inner states. It is no coincidence, then, that Bonaventure develops an understanding of formal beauty within a more general reflection on what is beautiful, and grants an important role to the imagination in the creation of a work of art. Bonaventure’s reflections on aesthetics, albeit framed within his attempt to explain the dependence of the created world on the Creator, refer back to the distinctive feature of Franciscan thought, of attributing value to the intrinsic beauty creatures have and to the capacity of an individual—religious believer or artist—to express it. The issue of beauty is also addressed by the major representatives of the Dominican order. Albert the Great (1193–1280), in the lectures he held in Cologne on the De divinis nominibus, defends his position by first explaining

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the views that preceded it. He begins with the distinction between absolute and sensory beauty, defining the latter according to the criteria of proportion, measure, and color. Then, he goes back to the issue of sensory beauty’s participation in divine beauty and presents a rather original theory of light. He likens the Neoplatonic notion of light to the Aristotelian notion of form (that for which anything is what it is): as form gives individual existence to matter, so the light emanating from the first Being realizes a possibility for being which all sensory things have; as form indicates the essence of something, so an object hit by light is more or less beautiful according to how much of its essence can be seen in the shape through which the object is perceived. This leads Albert to maintain two theses: (i) relativism regarding beauty, which becomes a sort of shared background from which the individuality of a beautiful thing emerges, insofar as each form is distinct from every other form and hence its full realization implies a perfection that must be different from that of every other form; (ii) the distinction between substantial beauty, which relates to the essence of things, and accidental beauty, which results from the simultaneous presence of different contingent features. Ulrich of Strasbourg (d. 1287), a pupil of Albert, is one of the few authors who dedicate a treatise to the topic of beauty and ugliness. In De pulchro, Ulrich uses a synthesis of Neoplatonic and Pseudo-Dionysian ideas, of Aristotelianism, and of Albert’s theory of light to defend a mystical aesthetic transcendentalism: God is not just supreme beauty but also efficient, formal, and final cause of every beautiful thing. The peak of scholastic thought is reached with Thomas Aquinas (1225– 1274). Like the other medieval thinkers, he never addresses aesthetics explicitly. Nevertheless, he shows awareness of the views prior and contemporary to him: Albert’s thesis of light as form; the distinction between sensory and spiritual beauty; the thought that imperfect beauty is the reflection of perfect beauty, and that the former naturally tends to become one with the latter; the conceptual, but not actual, difference between the beautiful and the good; and the definition of beauty as proportion and clarity. Though he embraces all these notions, Aquinas is primarily interested in those that have to do with sensory beauty, and stays away from any form of mysticism. Aquinas defines the beautiful as what a subject perceives with pleasure: “that which seen is liked,” “that the perception of which delights.” The two statements are compatible, since seeing, linked to the most important and noble organ, subsumes any other perceptual capacity. According to such a definition, then, the cause of pleasure produced by beauty does not trace back to an absolute ideal; rather, in Aristotelian fashion, it is found in the dialectic between subject and object, that is, in the subjective recognition of the

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objectively beautiful and good qualities of an object when observed. Among other things, that allows him to state that the object—once perceived—can be known by the subject through a combination of senses and intellect: the subject, by one’s sensory capacities, captures the external object and assimilates it, scrutinizing through the senses the object’s inherent qualities, forming a precise image of it, and expressing a judgment about it. Regarding the relationship between the good and the beautiful, Aquinas maintains that good is that which we desire, while beautiful is that which we contemplate. While conceptually distinct, the two values nonetheless coincide in things, for everything that is good is beautiful and vice versa. Elaborating on Augustine’s view, Aquinas claims that the aesthetic sentiment must be disinterested. Yet, Aquinas’s interest in concrete cases brings him to acknowledge that not all aesthetic pleasures can be fully disconnected from what is necessary or helpful to the satisfaction of human needs. The aesthetic sentiment has nonetheless its own individuality, between the pleasures that are primarily sensory and biological, on the one hand, and those that are purely intellectual and moral, on the other. To define the beautiful, Aquinas appeals to the notions of proportion—in a broad sense, which includes qualitative and quantitative relations—and of transparency (claritas). To these, he adds the criterion of the integritas; yet, since that is for him nothing but the perfection of an object according to its nature, it in fact reduces to the concept of proportion. Much space is dedicated to the definition of art and to distinguishing it from science and morality. Aquinas concludes that (i) art is the capacity of producing according to the commands of reason; (ii) the making of the artistic product is the true criterion for evaluation of an artwork; and (iii) the aesthetic pleasure is legitimate to have, provided that it is within the limits of rational moderation.

4  From the Thirteenth to the Fourteenth Centuries As the beginning of the thirteenth century had seen the emergence of the universities and the progressive introduction in their curriculum of the works of Aristotle and of his Greek and Arab commentators, the last years of the century marked, not so much a decadence of scholastic thought but a change in the theological and philosophical approach and the beginning of a new cultural era. At the end of 1200, Church authorities started reacting against a mode of philosophical investigation that had increasingly become reluctant to comply with the limitations imposed by religious orthodoxy. On the other hand, those interested in rational investigation began to reconsider

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the results of adapting Aristotelian thought to the values of Christianity. Paradigmatic of the Church’s reaction were the formal condemnations, by the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, of the teachers of the Faculty of Arts, who had demanded more autonomy for their disciplines. The results of the rational reconsideration were instead the strong contrasts that emerged, between the Franciscan and the Dominican teachers, on the authority that the thought of Aquinas ought to be given. Starting with the end of the thirteenth century, the attention to the role of the subject in perceiving, recognizing, and defining what is beautiful— which Bonaventure, Albert, and Aquinas had emphasized—received a sharp acceleration. Significant in this respect is the view of Witelo (b. 1220), a Polish scholar contemporary of Aquinas who wrote a book on optics and perspective (Perspectivorum libri decem seu Optica). Such a work is evidence of an increasing interest in empirical observation regarding perceptual knowledge, rather than in formulating views grounded in metaphysical or theological assumptions. Witelo aims at analyzing vision in terms of its real, physical data, turning its investigation into a psychological one. And it is this empirical foundation that allows him to list the most common errors in visual and aesthetic perception. John Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308)—a Franciscan teacher who is one of the most prominent figures within philosophical investigation subsequent to Aquinas—writes in his Opus Oxoniense that “beauty is not an absolute quality of a beautiful body but the combination of all of its properties, that is, size, shape, and color, as well as the combination of all the relations between these properties and the body, and of such relations with each other” (Opus Oxoniense, I, d. 17, q. 3, n. 13). Going back to the traditional definition of beauty, he defends a view of beauty in which the concept of relation has a primary role. Scotus makes a similar shift to tradition regarding the concept of form, which he understood both in Aristotelian fashion and as figure, “external arrangement of a thing.” Form also becomes that part of an artwork that, once realized, resembles the idea the artist had in one’s mind while producing the work. In that perspective, Scotus is open to an approach that emphasizes the role of subjective creativity, and presents an idea of art as not merely aimed at understanding but also at making: art, he writes, amounts to “the right concept of what must be done” and in one’s being able to realize it with appropriate techniques and materials. William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), while rethinking the philosophical foundations of the previous century, takes distance from aesthetic objectivism even more than Scotus does. Indeed, to Ockham, terms of form and figure stand only for the disposition of actual objects, and hence ought to be understood in relation to actually existing substances. The idea of an entity exists only in

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the mind of the artist, not in reality, and it is only from reality that anything real can be produced. As for the union between the good and the beautiful, Ockham maintains that what is good/beautiful is an object of desire that must be disciplined according to justice, that is, by moderation and the application of the rules of reason. Finally, Ockham analyzes the concepts relevant to art and nature, claiming that the former is characterized by the freedom of the artist while the latter is governed by necessary laws. Even the term imago, used to refer to art, must then be connected to what we could call the freedom of the artist’s fantasy, independently of any objective model. In sum, although neither what Scotus nor Ockham say ever amounts to an explicit and comprehensive treatment of aesthetics, their efforts in defining the relevant concepts and the value they both place on the subjectivity of the artist undoubtedly represent a break from tradition and the beginning of a modern approach to aesthetics. The last contribution to aesthetics that is here worth considering is that of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), who, without being either a teacher or a clergyman, wrote some of the most significant literary works ever written. For quite some time, philosophically Dante has been considered simply a follower of Aquinas. Yet, more recent studies have brought to light his curiosity for and acquaintance with the intellectual debates of his time, “within the religious schools and regarding the discussions between philosophers” (Convivium II, XII, 7). In his Divine Comedy, in Vita nova (The New Life), and in the Convivium (The Banquet) alike, he presents a view of love that, as a sentiment of an individual human being, is source of both natural and artistic beauty. Dante reaches this conclusion by merging the Neoplatonic view of love as cosmic energy with the spiritualization of the loving sentiment typical of the troubador poems and the Italian Dolce Stil Novo (literally “sweet new style”). For Dante, poetry, because of its deriving from the inner sphere—from the ideas, emotions, and inspirations springing from the poet’s soul—needs no external justification. That is all the more true considering that the poet, with his art, does not aim at producing mere delight or at being useful, but rather at explaining the highest human values: truth, goodness, and beauty. Poetry, which finds justification in its beauty, is then a vehicle for truth: it is, accordingly, theology—discourse about God and anything that from God derives.

5 Conclusion Although marginal to the great theological and philosophical questions that were at the core of the scholars’ intellectual work, the medieval investigation of aesthetics left a noteworthy legacy to modern thought. It preserved and

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passed on to subsequent philosophers views from antiquity that would have otherwise been lost. Yet, that is not its most significant accomplishment. The modern era is rooted in the Middle Ages, and it is during that period of time that some of the questions that still inform our way of reflecting upon the world emerged.2

Notes 1 So-called because it occurred under the reign of Charlemagne (742–814). 2 Many thanks to Serena Masolini for her invaluable assistance in editing this chapter. Translated from the Italian by Alessandro Giovannelli. Translator’s note: whenever possible, for quotations from the original texts, the translations found in Tatarkiewicz (2005) were used.

Primary Sources Alighieri, Dante. 1909. Dante’s Convivio. W. W. Jackson (trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aquinas. 1981. Summa Theologica. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trans.). New York: Benziger Bros. Augustine. 1953. Augustine: Earlier Writings. J. H. S. Burleigh (trans.). Philadelphia, PA: Westminster. Boethius. 2008. The Consolation of Philosophy. P. G. Walsh (trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eriugena, John Scotus. 1987. The Division of Nature. Montreal: Bellarmin/ Dumbarton Oaks.

References and Further Reading Benson, R. L. and Constable, Giles, eds. 1982. Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eco, Umberto. 2002. Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. H. Bredin (trans.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jaeger, C. S. 2010. Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tatarkiewicz, W. 2005. History of Aesthetics, Vol. 3: Medieval Aesthetics. R. M. Montgomery (trans.). London: Continuum.

4

Shaftesbury (1671–1713) Garry L. Hagberg

It is in the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, that we find the origins of eighteenth-century English writings on aesthetics. As we shall see in the following chapters, this is a rich century of aesthetic reflection, and the origins we find in Shaftesbury are in a sense bifocal: they look not only forward to the contributions of Joseph Addison, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume, and even to some elements of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of art, but also back, to Plato’s aesthetic position, and particularly to its expression in the writings of Plotinus and, more recently for Shaftesbury, the Cambridge Platonists (cf. Patrides 1980 and Hutton 2002). Thus the legacy Shaftesbury provides for the subject is simultaneously historical—very much unlike the other eighteenth-century aestheticians, Shaftesbury resists the pervasive influence of John Locke’s new empirical philosophy, the new “way of ideas” (Locke 1975; cf. Chappell 1994)—and progressive; it reframes and restructures the subject in terms of the problems of taste and aesthetic perception.

1  The Inner Sense and Transcendent Beauty A number of themes central to Shaftesbury’s work can be stated fairly directly. There is, first and foremost, a deep theological strain in his thinking; specifically, he sees God as the ultimate artist and the world as a continually developing work of art with which that creative God is continually engaged. This position elevates Nature to the highest possible aesthetic level, and in seeing Nature and natural beauty as an evolving work of creation, paves the way, as we shall also see, for the nineteenth-century’s conception of nature in terms of a fully developed romanticism. Indeed, it is Shaftesbury who emphasizes the significance of the sublime in art and aesthetic perception as he

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retrieves and passes on the concept from neo-Platonism and pseudo-Longinus (Beardsley 1975), and this becomes a central topic in late-eighteenth-century aesthetic thought as the transition is made into early romanticism, moving beyond a fairly widespread exclusive focus on beauty. Shaftesbury also argues for the existence of an “inward eye” and indeed a “moral sense”; this concept becomes central to the “moral-sense school” (Raphael 1991; Darwall 1995) of ethical philosophy. He also argues, however, for the transcendental nature of aesthetic value: although he posits the existence of an inner moral sense that gives us our comprehension of both ethical and aesthetic values (which as we shall see for Shaftesbury are intimately linked), he insists that no reduction of these values to purely sensory properties is possible. Goodness, in either ethical or in aesthetic form, is not (here positioning himself against the Lockean influence in epistemology and perception) a sensory property, and with this claim Shaftesbury clearly sounds a theme deeply resonant with Plato’s most fundamental position. Shaftesbury, here also squarely in the tradition of Platonism, clearly perceives the threat of relativism in both moral and artistic judgment, and argues forcefully in favor of absolutism. And he also, in a fashion consistent with the theological underpinnings of his position, sees the work of the creative artist as itself a kind of mimetic representation, in microcosm, of divine creativity: the artist fashions matter and gives it expressive life. This is a conception of artistic creativity that, like most of these themes, has a long life extending well into and even beyond the nineteenth century, and it too constitutes a development of Platonism, in that mimesis, here of a rather grand scale, is central to our understanding of artistic creativity. Yet it would be incorrect to impute too great a Platonism to Shaftesbury’s writings, suggesting that all of these themes fit together into a philosophical system. Like many of his eighteenth-century British philosophical compatriots, Shaftesbury employs the essay as the foundation of his investigative methodology, and his essays, although brought together and published uniformly, in 1711, under the title Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Shaftesbury 1964a; cf. Savile 2002), must be understood—in a manner far closer to Lockean empiricism than to Platonism—as separate, individual forays into multifarious, if still conceptually related, topics. It is in the piece entitled “Freedom of Wit and Humour” of the Characteristics that Shaftesbury draws out his link between aesthetic beauty and ethical value, and specifically between natural beauty and moral truth: “And thus, after all, the most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth. True features make the beauty of a face; and true proportions the beauty of architecture; as true measures that of harmony and music” (1964a, 241). Yet, even though the fundamental similarity between the awesome creative power of God and the microcosmic creative power of

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the artist is mimetic—again in that the human practices of artistic creation reflect the divine creativity of the ultimate work of art, the criterion of truth in the work of art itself is not exact mimetic accuracy. On the contrary, it is a distinctively artistic truth of coherence, of design, and of wholeness as these aesthetic properties exist independently from the exact depiction, or re-creation of the appearance, of the world, that makes great art. Shaftesbury writes: A painter, if he has any genius, understands the truth and unity of design; and knows he is even then unnatural when he follows Nature too close, and strictly copies Life. For his art allows him not to bring all nature into his piece, but a part only. However, his piece, if it be beautiful, and carries truth, must be a whole, by itself, complete, independent, and withal as great and comprehensive as he can make it. So that particulars . . . must yield to the general design, and all things be subservient to that which is principal. (1964a, 241–2)

Thus the wholeness of the work of art is not identical to the wholeness achieved by an exacting duplication of what is given in nature. Shaftesbury identifies an interesting paradox here, noting that, because nature is of such a distinctive, peculiar, and original character, if these distinctive particularities of nature are represented with too great a mimetic fidelity, “the subject” will “appear unlike to anything extant in the world” (1964a, 243; and following quotations). One can easily detect the Platonism just beneath the surface of this idea: the good painter will “hate minuteness” and be “afraid of singularity,” and it is in this context that Shaftesbury refers, in the most glowing terms, to “the great Master,” the author of the Poetics, who taught us that “Poetry is both a more philosophical and a more real thing than history; for poetry tells rather the universal, history the particular” (1964a, 243). For Shaftesbury, the “mere face-painter” has little in common with the poet, but much in common with the historian, who is here denigrated in Aristotelian terms for merely copying reality as he sees it, “minutely trac[ing] every feature and odd mark.” The truth rests in universals that transcend particularity, and the true artist will learn “from the many objects of nature, and not from a particular one”; artistic geniuses form their ideas from abstracted universals, not from individuals. Like a good number of his eighteenth-century successors, Shaftesbury employs the dialogue as well as the essay form, and it is in a dialogue entitled “The Moralists” that he advances the position that most clearly set the stage for the later-eighteenth-century development in the subject. But he is concerned to sound his Platonic themes here as well, particularly the need in

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aesthetic experience for the transcending of the sensory into the realm of the intelligible. Likening the pursuit of aesthetic value within the purely sensory realm to the pursuit of the shadow in place of the substance (Shaftesbury 1964a, 246 and following quotations), he states explicitly that “if we may trust in what our reasoning has taught us”—and he means distinctly Platonic reasoning—then “whatever in Nature is beautiful or charming is only the faint shadow of that first beauty,” the first beauty being that beauty “as it really is in itself ” and as it is accessible exclusively to the contemplative mind versus that lower manifestation of beauty that “appears imperfectly in the objects which strike the sense.” How, Shaftesbury asks in this dialogue, “can the rational mind rest here, or be satisfied with the absurd enjoyment which reaches the sense alone?”

2  The Pragmatic and the Aesthetic But with this dichotomy between the sensible and the intelligible established, he quickly turns to a topic—or a distinction—that will extend through the century and indeed, in the form of a debate over “the aesthetic attitude,”1 into recent years. The distinction is, roughly, between practical and aesthetic (which will, in subsequent aesthetic theory, become “disinterested”) perception; the question is whether our pragmatically detached or pure contemplation of the beauty of the ocean is not a satisfaction, indeed a kind of mental engagement, very unlike the satisfaction we would take in our seeing how to command the ocean, like a “mighty admiral” able to “ride master of the sea.” Indeed, he now imagines a Venetian doge who floats upon the water in a stately Bucentaur and takes enjoyment in his ownership of it; this enjoyment is quickly identified as one of a very different kind “from that which should naturally follow from the contemplation of the ocean’s beauty.” And now distinguishing two varieties of “ownership” as well, Shaftesbury adds, most significantly, that a poor shepherd who takes in the beauty of the water from a promontory has in fact more “possession” than the doge, because of the distinct psychological state in which he views the scene. Emphasizing the removal of any practical considerations from the aesthetic, Shaftesbury tells us explicitly that the shepherd is “stretched at his ease” and forgets his feeding flocks, while he “admires her beauty” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 247; and following quotations), and he has one participant in the dialogue admit quickly to the absurdity of the idea of needing to own a tract of country as a precondition to enjoying its prospect. Indeed there may be a distinct kind of pleasure one takes, like the doge, in such ownership, but it is not aesthetic pleasure, and the implication in Shaftesbury’s text (not surprisingly,

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given the Platonic influences) is that these pleasures are hierarchical: one is decidedly lower than the other.2 He observes that we live by “tasteful food,” and “feel those other joys of sense” in common with animals, but it is not in such pleasures that we “place our good” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 248; and following quotations). Indeed echoing Plato, we who are rational, we who have minds, should transcend the enjoyments of the objects of sense, and derive pleasure from the contemplation of the beautiful and the good, and these are, for Shaftesbury (and now more directly under the influence of Plotinus), “one and the same.” An obvious question arises at this stage for Shaftesbury, and it is a bifocal question, in that it connects back to the argument for innate knowledge in seventeenth-century France (a view which will be very greatly contested in Locke and his successors), and it connects forward to the moral-sense school of eighteenth-century English philosophy immediately following Shaftesbury. The question is stated clearly and with compact brevity by Shaftesbury: “Are there senses by which all those other graces and perfections are perceived, and none by which this higher perfection and grace is comprehended?” Is there, indeed, an inner sense that perceives the higher, intangible beauty that transcends the world of sensory pleasures? Does this “higher scene,” these “nobler representations” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 249), have its or their own perceptual faculty? To understand Shaftesbury’s affirmative answer to this question, we need to exercise caution over the word “perceptual” in the phrase “perceptual faculty.” It is this, but again in a broadly Platonic sense; it is an inner sense that gives us access to, or allows us to apprehend, the beauty of the higher kind. But then, is this perception not at its foundation sensory perception, and as such does it not cast Shaftesbury into a contradiction, namely, the position claiming that we have to fully transcend the level of sensory pleasure by fully engaging it? Here Shaftesbury’s answer, implicitly given within the conversational context of his philosophical dialogue, is intricate, and it is in a more than passing way—somewhat surprisingly, given his formal allegiances to Plato, neo-Platonism, Cambridge Platonism—reminiscent of Aristotle’s theory of the relation between form and matter. Asking the philosopher Theocles to lower the pitch of his theses, to not take the matter in “too high a key,” to “talk in a more familiar way” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 250), Philocles asks for a clarification of the thesis being advanced concerning the mind’s ascent above the mere perception of “terrestrial beauties” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 249). Theocles thus begins with reformulation of his (and of course Shaftesbury’s) central point by observing that Philocles is not the sort to allow much beauty in wealth, particularly in a “rude heap or mass” of it. He continues, “But in medals, coins, embossed work, statues, and well-fabricated pieces of whatever

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sort, you can discover beauty and admire the kind” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 250 and following quotations). The dialogue continues: “True, said I, but not for the metal’s sake.” Cinching the conclusion that resonates with Aristotle on matter and form and at the same time with Plato on the transcendence of matter, Theocles says: “’Tis not then the metal or matter which is beautiful with you?” “No.” “But the art?” “Certainly.” “The art then is the beauty?” “Right.” “And the art is that which beautifies?” “The same.” “So that the beautifying, not the beautified, is the really beautiful?” “It seems so.”

As this exchange continues with the interlocutory acquiescence characteristic of the original Socratic dialogues, it is quickly concluded that body or matter cannot be the cause of beauty itself, nor can it govern or regulate itself. Nor does brute matter have, as Shaftesbury neatly interweaves into this dialogue, any intentional capacities: it can neither “mean nor intend itself.” Indeed, the power or element that must give beauty to inert body or matter must be able to cause, to govern, to regulate, to mean, to intend. “‘And what must that be?’ ‘Mind, I suppose, for what can it be else?’” Moving implicitly closer to the Aristotelian position on the inseparable embodiment of form in matter but nevertheless where form is the shaping force over matter, Shaftesbury summarizes and concludes this part of the dialogue: Here then, said he, is all I would have explained to you before [had he not lowered the philosophical key]. “That the beautiful, the fair, the comely, were never in matter, but in the art and design; never in body itself, but in the form or forming power. Does not the beautiful form confess this, and speak the beauty of the design whenever it strikes you? What is it but the design which strikes? What is it you admire but mind, or the effect of mind?” ’Tis mind alone which forms. All which is void of mind is horrid, and matter formless is deformity itself.

It is precisely this formal, matter-shaping, yet matter-transcending, beauty that is perceived, or perhaps more accurately, “perceived” with the special faculty, or inner sense, that provides access to it.

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3  Beauty, Form, and Forming Powers We have already seen that Shaftesbury houses theistic claims within his aesthetic theory, and it is in his doctrine of the three degrees, or orders, of beauty—which he developed as an extension of his analysis of form and matter—that this becomes most pronounced. The first and lowest order exhibit a “low and despicable” form that, while it may prove attractive to the uncomprehending, shows no signs of formal intelligence. The second order of beauty is of the “forms which form,” that is, those that show intelligence and action. At this order we experience, as perceiver, a “double” beauty, for in such cases we see “both the form (the effect of mind) and mind itself.” Note that the emphasis on the perceivability of intelligence, of the creative mind within the work itself, is growing; the double beauty is not just the low inert form along with the presence of mind, it is rather the work exhibiting the active intelligence along with our recognition of the presence of the aesthetically empowered forming intellect. It is at the third order that the theistic element becomes apparent: above the double-recognition of the intelligently formed work of art, be it painting, architecture, statuary, or any other art and its corresponding forming intelligence, we ascend, much like the move upward to the Form of the Good on Plato’s line, to the “form which forms” the creative intelligences as manifested in the works. Shaftesbury thus describes a third order of beauty, which forms not only such as we call mere form but even the forms which form. For we ourselves are notable architects in matter, and can show lifeless bodies brought into form, and fashioned by our own hands, but that which fashions even minds themselves, contains in itself all the beauties fashioned by those minds, and is consequently the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty. (Shaftesbury 1964a, 251–2)

This, in its approximation of a kind of aesthetic pantheism, claims every instance of beauty of a second order as evidence for the third; all artistic manifestations of human invention are themselves, Shaftesbury believes, a sign of the existence of this higher artist, the “former of forms,” and it is in this sense that in Shaftesbury’s aesthetic theory we move beyond the realm of the artistic to what one might call the omni-aesthetic, the perception of the world as the grandest, and continually evolving and continually intelligently re-forming, work of art. But Shaftesbury has a few strands remaining to weave fully into the larger pattern: he has not yet settled the question concerning innate aesthetic

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values. Does the internal sense of beauty come with pre-experiential aesthetic preferences or judgments?

4  Innate Aesthetic (and Ethical) Values In answering this question Shaftesbury settles into a metaphor of pregnancy, suggesting that at birth the human mind is already pregnant with ideas, indeed conceptions, and that his role of dialogical direction-finder (not unlike Socrates) is to serve as midwife for what he calls, with an ambiguity vacillating between the literal and the metaphorical, “the labouring mind” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 253 and following quotations)—thus the “mental children,” which include both moral conceptions of fairness, justice, and honesty, and aesthetic conceptions. These are implanted in the mind, as he says, like eggs in the body (“being formed already in the foetus before the birth”) by Nature or, as he says at the outset of the extended metaphor, by the forming “mind . . . which formed it [the particular human mind] at the beginning,” and that great forming mind, he reminds us, is “original to all mental as well as other beauty.” Here again an implicit analogy is being drawn between the creative mind of God in Nature and the creative artist (an idea that we see developed throughout the subsequent history of aesthetic thought), just as an explicit analogy is being drawn between child rearing and the having of ideas. But Shaftesbury does not let the matter rest exclusively on analogical foundations. As the dialogue continues, Philocles expresses doubt as to whether he finds within himself, or rather would have found within himself prior to Theocles’s philosophical instruction, anything like the aesthetic ideas, indeed the pre-conceptions, of the fair and the beautiful as Theocles discusses them. Theocles responds, again like Socrates, with a hypothetical question: “How then . . . would you have known that outward fair and beautiful of human kind, of such an object (a fair fleshly one) in all its beauty had for the first time appeared to you, by yourself, this morning, in these groves?” The essential conditions, for Theocles’s—and of course Shaftesbury’s—point are that the fair person is seen (1) for the first time— and thus without the possibility of prior instruction, (2) by himself—thus without the possibility of the rapid learning of aesthetic predicates from another present, and (3) instantly, in a wholly unmediated way, as beautiful, without the mental importation or application-by-rule of any mediating concept, for example, “chiseled features, ergo beautiful,” “air of mysterious refinement, ergo beautiful.” The reaction to the appearance of the beautiful individual (unfortunately described as a perceptual object in the dialogue)3 is instantaneous and

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unmediated, and Philocles cannot but accept the argument of Theocles’s rhetorical question: “Or do you think perhaps you should have been unmoved, and have found no difference between this form and any other, if first you had not been instructed?” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 254; and following quotations). Sounding now rather more like his eighteenth-century empirical colleagues, Shaftesbury moves to simplify the matter, explicitly avoiding the complicated forms of beauty that involve matrices of complex sensory perceptions, a complexity that understandably leads people to speak of “the unexpressible, the unintelligible, the I-know-not-what of beauty.” He says that at bottom there need be no lingering mystery; we need only concern ourselves with—now sounding indeed like his empirical followers, as one sees in an examination of subsequent eighteenth-century English aestheticians— what “plainly belongs either to figure, colour, motion, or sound.” Taking what he assumes is the simplest of these, he inquires into figure, and again simplifying—like moving to ever-higher degrees of magnification in a microscope—suggests that we leave even sculpture, architecture, and design behind for a moment and ask if a round ball, a cube, or a die is preferred by an infant. Why, he asks, is the first preferred, why is the sphere or globe, or the cylinder and obelisk preferred to irregular or unevenly or asymmetrically shaped figures, which are, in comparison with the former figures, “rejected and despised”? Philocles has now, inside this dialogue, triumphed over any skepticism concerning innate aesthetic ideas, and announces that he is ready to admit that there exists “in certain figures a natural beauty, which the eye finds as soon as it is presented to it.” At this juncture Theocles simultaneously summarizes, concludes, and advances his argument to move from aesthetic perception to moral perception (returning to the link between beauty and goodness forged earlier): No sooner the eye opens upon figures, the ear to sounds, than straight the beautiful results and grace and harmony are known and acknowledged. No sooner are actions viewed, no sooner the human affections and passions discerned (and they are most of them as soon discerned as felt) than straight an inward eye distinguishes, and sees the fair and shapely, the amiable and admirable, apart from the deformed, the foul, the odious, or the despicable. How is it possible therefore not to own “that as these distinctions have their foundation in Nature, the discernment itself is natural, and from Nature alone”? (Shaftesbury 1964a, 254–5)

With its unambiguous reliance on an inner sense or “inward eye” that immediately distinguishes the fair from the odious, this position promotes an aesthetic objectivism of a rather strict—indeed Platonic—kind. This

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needs to be stated clearly, because while it is true that the inner sense is a faculty held subjectively within the individual, the unmediated judgments rendered by that faculty will be objectively binding, and if correct identical to every other judgment of inner sense. This will be true of both moral and aesthetic judgment, which function in identical ways and indeed employ the same inner faculty. But there is a glaring empirical problem that any such theory must face squarely: how do we explain a world full of judgmental or evaluative disagreement? Shaftesbury’s answer, in the voice of Theocles, does not attempt to explain away the diversity of moral and aesthetic judgment; he accepts it, but repositions this diversity so that it can reveal what it might otherwise obscure: a deeper universal consensus concerning the operative moral and aesthetic concept in each case of disagreement. Theocles thus answers: “Even by this . . . it appears there is fitness and decency in actions; since the fit and decent is in this controversy ever pre-supposed. And whilst men are at odds about the subjects, the thing itself is universally agreed” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 255). He continues by observing the disagreements commonly encountered over “the finest pile” and the loveliest shape and “the loveliest shape or face,” but insisting that there is behind all such disputes an implicitly agreed-upon conception of fineness or beauty. This, he says—here incorporating points from an earlier stage of his argument—is neither taught nor learned: it is simply “confessed by all.” All persons, Shaftesbury claims, hold inwardly the “standard, rule, and measure,” but it is in the application of these to particular cases in ethics and aesthetics that disorder manifests itself.

5  The Response to Skepticism But the dialogue is not over. Shaftesbury is every bit honest enough a philosopher to acknowledge that there is a residual threat of skepticism that he has not directly answered. What of a person who asserts, against his central theses, that “All is opinion,” that “’tis opinion which makes beauty, and unmakes it” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 256 and following quotations). This skepticism, to identify its exact location, would assert that there neither is nor can be any such theory that construes the beautiful, the valuable, or the worthy, or on the other hand the odious, or the shameful, or the ugly, as real properties; they exist only in the projective eye of the beholder. “What,” asks Shaftesbury, “shall we say to such a one?” In fact it is not one, it is many who assert this very point, and Shaftesbury’s answer to those who insist that it is “the reign of fashion” and “the ascendant power of education” that determine value and preference is to show the “absurdity and extravagance” of their claim.

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As his prime example Shaftesbury fixes on the experience of shame, arguing that those who assert that absolutist aesthetic claims are shameful are themselves not merely employing, but in hidden truth individually experiencing, the very concept of shame that is in question. Such persons, as his philosophical opponents, will then have acknowledged both the experience of shame and its force as a moral concept, as well—and most significantly—as its strongly negative value in a way that is unavoidable for them and that thus shows that shame is not merely a contingent or relative or arbitrarily consensual matter. The only dispute, he observes, concerns the application of the concept to a particular case, and this moves the argument back to its previous step, safely beyond the reach of any blanket skepticism or relativism. Indeed it is here that Shaftesbury refers to a “sense of wrong [that is] natural” (1964a, 257; and following quotations) to all humanity, and he suggests that this sense intrinsically motivates “a desire to prosecute that wrong.” This is perfectly analogous to the natural aesthetic preferences he believes humanity naturally experiences through the activation of its inner aesthetic sense or faculty.

6  Art and the Mind’s Eye Shaftesbury’s position, toward the end of the dialogue that expresses so much of his aesthetic vision, returns to the themes of the very tight intertwining of the good and the beautiful (thus again emphasizing in more general terms the close relations between the ethical and the aesthetic sense), and the fundamental need for the transcendence of the literal or five physical senses in aesthetic experience, and in doing so reaffirms not just the conceptual and experiential proximity of the aesthetic and the ethical, but of the ethical force in all human affairs involving aesthetic experience.4 If brutes be incapable of knowing and enjoying beauty, as being brutes, and having sense (the brutish part) for their own share, it follows “that neither can man by the same sense or brutish part conceive or enjoy beauty; but all the beauty and good he enjoys is in a nobler way, and by the help of what is noblest, his mind and reason.” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 259)

And with a Platonism transfigured by both Plotinus and the Cambridge Platonists in such a way that the work of the artist is anything but banished, he adds: “Here lies his dignity and highest interest, here his capacity toward good and happiness.” Such happiness, for Shaftesbury, is available

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only to those who both exemplify the good and simultaneously possess an intellective grasp of the beautiful. This state, as any reader of Plato’s fundamental aesthetic theory knows, stipulates sensory transcendence as a precondition, and, conjoining human and artistic value, is indeed our “highest interest,” because, as we have also seen in terms of the theological dimension of Shaftesbury’s aesthetic theory, this mental condition, engendered by artistic experience, has its share of the divine: “there is nothing so divine as beauty, which belonging not to body, nor having any principle or existence except in mind and reason, is alone discovered and acquired by this diviner part, when it inspects itself, the only object worthy of itself ” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 260).

7  Shaftesbury’s Legacy So for this foundational author of the great aesthetic work of the British eighteenth century, it is always and only the mind’s eye that “sees” art, and it is here, along with (1) the questions of the universality and justification of judgments of taste, (2) the notion of an inner sense or moral-aesthetic faculty, (3) the emphasis on perceptual and judgmental immediacy, (4) the relevance of the new empiricism to aesthetics, (5) the distinction between practical and aesthetic or disinterested perception, and (6) the relation between moral and artistic value, that Shaftesbury passes an enriched legacy to his successors. It is the forming mind of the artist, shown in the work, and the properly prepared mind of the perceiver recognizing and appreciating the artistic manifestation of the mental, that are of the essence in genuine aesthetic experience: “For whatever is void of mind, is void and darkness to the mind’s eye” (Shaftesbury 1964a, 260). Art’s mental content will never be reducible, for Shaftesbury, to its physical or sensory properties,5 and if Shaftesbury’s aesthetic theory renders us in the end more mindful of this than we otherwise would have been, then a close consideration of that theory more than justifies itself. Shaftesbury is a fascinating figure in the history of this subject because of his remarkable amalgamation of Plato’s philosophy, later Platonisms, a surprising Aristotelian turn on form and matter, the partial resistance to and partial acceptance of the new eighteenth-century empiricism, and the setting of much of the aesthetic agenda for the rest of the century and beyond. But it is a mistake to read him only in these terms, or to see him exclusively as a slightly curious transitional figure in aesthetic history. In addition to everything else, it was with an original philosophical voice that Shaftesbury began to articulate a profound insight into the deep relations between

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ethical and aesthetic experience, and particularly the great contribution that aesthetic experience makes to the formation of moral character and to the development of human understanding.

Notes 1 The fundamental debate in recent years concerns whether or not there exists a distinctive mode of perception or mental attitude, one that is perhaps unique to the arts, that both defines the aesthetically perceiving mind and separates aesthetic perception from all other types or categories of perception. 2 See also, for a further elaboration of the separation of practical from aesthetic considerations, Shaftesbury’s presentation of his reasons that “a gentleman’s taste,” if governed by the practical, will “necessarily be false” (1964b, 271). 3 This is an unfortunate phrasing not only owing to the obvious objectification of persons, but also because it suggest that there is not a distinction of the most fundamental kind between the acknowledgment of the presence of a person, of humanity, and the mere recognition of an inanimate thing. (This is the difference that Wittgenstein marked with the phrase “an attitude towards a soul.”) 4 This is a theme that recurs throughout Shaftesbury’s Characteristics; see, for example, his compact observation, “Therefore as beauteous forms polish . . ., so ugly barbarise” (1964b, 267). 5 Shaftesbury provides a succinct formulation of this point in the form of a rhetorical question: “Who can admire the outward beauties and not recur instantly to the inward?” (1964a, 264).

Primary Sources Shaftesbury: 1964a. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Selections reprinted in A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns (eds.), Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, 241–66. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published 1711 and revised in a new edition 1714. 1964b. Second Characters or the Language of Forms. Selections reprinted in A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns (eds.), Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, 266–76. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. An unfinished work.

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References and Further Reading Beardsley, Monroe. 1975. Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Chappell, Vere, ed. 1994. The Cambridge Companion to Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darwall, Stephen. 1995. The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640– 1740. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutton, Sarah. 2002. “The Cambridge Platonists.” In S. Nadler (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, 308–19. Oxford: Blackwell. Locke, John. 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. P. H. Nidditch (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Patrides, C. A. 1980. The Cambridge Platonists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Raphael, D. D., ed. 1991. British Moralists, 1650–1800, 2 vols. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Savile, Anthony. 2002. “Aesthetic Experience in Shaftesbury.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 76: 55–74.

5

Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) Garry L. Hagberg

Like so many other writers in eighteenth-century England, Francis Hutcheson wrote under the clear and powerful influence of the empiricist philosophy of John Locke. In An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Hutcheson sets out to explain both the nature of the mind that perceives aesthetic beauty and the nature of the properties in objects that give rise to that experience. He notes, alluding to Locke, that philosophical inquiries of late have been very much concerned to cast light on the nature of the human understanding and the methods—the empirical methods—of obtaining truth. And like Aristotle, he identifies happiness as the end of human action, observing that with this as the universal end of action it is thus of no small importance to arrive at an understanding of that which gives us “lasting pleasures” (Hutcheson 1989, 223). This observation has the effect, of course, of placing aesthetics at the very center of the most significant human pursuits. And in so doing, Hutcheson also makes both his own allegiance to empirical methodology and his seriousness of purpose clear; he notes that among “modern philosophick Writings”—and he is likely alluding to the philosophical school of rationalism in general and the philosophy of Descartes in particular—we usually find nothing further than a bare differentiation of the Sensible from the Rational along with “some trite common-place Arguments to prove the latter more valuable than the former.” Sensible pleasures are thus, under the influence of Rationalism, far too easily passed over, and one of the significant achievements of Hutcheson’s aesthetic theory is to restore that experience to a position worthy of serious philosophical analysis.

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1  The Sense of Beauty and the “Very Frame of Our Nature” Setting into place a cornerstone of his theory, Hutcheson observes that our perceptions of pleasure and pain do not depend upon any action of the will; such perceptions are not subject to volition. The central empirical fact for him is simply that the presence of some objects pleases us, and the presence of others displeases us, and these experiences, in an empirical sense, are necessary; that is, they are not contingent upon any preferential consensus, decision, or ratiocination. Rather, such preferences are determined by “the very Frame of our Nature” (Hutcheson 1989, 224 and following quotations). Hutcheson quickly extends this point to cover other sorts of objects that, in his empirical sense of the term, necessarily please or displease; indeed there is scarcely any object about which our minds are employed that do not generate one or the other experience. Hutcheson’s analogy, at this early but foundational stage of his thinking, is this: just as physical objects operate upon our “organs of sense,” thus yielding pleasurable or displeasurable sensations, so less tangible objects operate upon our “Internal Sense” such that pleasure or displeasure is occasioned. Such objects may include a “regular Form, a piece of Architecture or Painting, a Composition of Notes, a Theorem, an Action, an Affection, a Character.” Some of these, it is undeniably true, have physical-object sensory properties, but Hutcheson is quick to note that it is not in virtue of these physical properties that the inner sense is pleased or displeased: And we are conscious that this Pleasure arises from the Contemplation of the Idea, which is then present to our Minds, with all its Circumstances, although some of these Ideas have nothing of what we commonly call sensible Perception in them; and in those which have, the Pleasure arises from some Uniformity, Order, Arrangement, Imitation; and not from the simple Idea of Colour, or Sound, or mode of Extension separately consider’d.

Thus the Inner Sense, unlike the five physical senses, perceives properties of things that are less tangible than the Lockean simple ideas of sensation, for example, color or sound. But such ideas, for example, uniformity, order, and arrangement, while they are less tangible, less like Lockean simple sensations, are nevertheless necessarily generative of experiences of pleasure or displeasure. And it is evident, along with the employment of Locke’s epistemology and attendant theory of perception, that Hutcheson—

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like many philosophers of art before him—is placing aesthetic experience proximate to ethical experience; it is indeed the “Determination to approve Affections, Actions, or Characters of rational Agents, which we call virtuous” that constitutes the analogous Moral Sense. Ever wary of what he regards, in concord with his empirical colleagues, as the threat of rationalism, Hutcheson makes it clearer that even though these relations to pleasure and displeasure are (empirically) necessary, that does not commit him to identifying them as innate. Innate ideas, part and parcel of Cartesian Rationalism, would move beyond—or behind—Locke’s fundamental principle of keeping all philosophical explanation within the bounds of experience, and would open the way to the denigration of sense experience that is, as Hutcheson has already indicated, antithetical to his entire project. Such necessary relations, he insists, are fixed in our experience. But, he asks, has he already gone too far in suggesting that human agreement about judgments of beauty is more uniform, and indeed universal, than it really is, as an empirical investigation might show? Hutcheson, replying to his own question, is quick to say that he has not overstepped the bounds of the empirically defensible. He is determined to claim, not that all judgments are universally uniform as a result of those necessary relations (that, to him, is demonstrably false), but rather “That there is some Sense of Beauty natural to Man; that we find as great an Agreement of Man in the Relishes of Forms, as in their external Senses, which all agree to be natural; and that Pleasure or Pain, Delight or Aversion, are naturally join’d to their Perceptions” (Hutcheson 1989, 225). With these preliminaries in place, Hutcheson thus moves to his more detailed argumentative task.

2  Pleasure in Perception Ideas, he reminds us, are raised in the mind by the presence of external objects, and we call these ideas—as we know from Locke—sensations. The mind, Hutcheson says, is passive, and it does not possess any power to prevent the reception of the idea nor to vary its content so long as the body is sensate. Different senses are marked by two perceptions appearing wholly different from each other (except that they share the general idea of Sensation); precisely, the differing powers of receiving those different perceptions constitute our different senses: “Thus Seeing and Hearing denote the different Powers of receiving the Ideas of Colours and Sound” (Hutcheson 1989, 226; and following quotations). Hutcheson here observes that, despite great variations within each sense—for example, a saturated blue is very

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much unlike a washed-out yellow—still any two colors are much closer alike than, say, any color and any sound. The sensory categories are thus, despite great diversity within each sense, extremely clear, and each sense (with the possible exception of feeling, which seems diffused over the entire body) has its “distinct Organs.” So far, it is clear that Hutcheson is working with the analytical clarity consistent with Lockean philosophical methodology, and he sees himself as restoring the analysis of sensation to its proper respectable place. Also like Locke, Hutcheson observes that the mind compounds ideas that are initially received separately (if simultaneously); once we perform this intellective act we are thus in a position to compare objects, scrutinize their relations to each other and to other objects, consider their properties and enlarge or reduce them in the mind’s eye, and abstract from compound ideas the separate ideas within each sense or sensory modality that may have been received simultaneously with many other sensory experiences. (As the work of this century unfolds, it is these capacities of the human understanding that become vital to Hume’s conception of the mental work of the good critic.) And also like Locke, Hutcheson makes a special point of saying that no definition is capable of giving rise to an “Idea which has not been before perceived by the Senses”; that central fact alone will keep all of Hutcheson’s (and as it will Hume’s) account of aesthetic perception within the strict empirical limits of Locke’s philosophy: in Locke’s phrase, it will not “extend one jot” beyond embodied experience. It follows, Hutcheson makes clear, that if a thing of beauty is desired by any person, that person must possess the requisite sensory ability, for example, if a thing of beauty is desired by one without the sense of sight, then the beauty so desired must have been experientially occasioned by “Regularity of Figure, Sweetness of Voice, Smoothness, or Softness, or some other Quality perceivable by the other Senses without relation to the Ideas of Colour.” Hutcheson also—and this point is foundational to the aesthetics of the eighteenth century extending into Kant’s philosophy—emphasizes that perceptions are pleasant or painful immediately, that is, without the mediating considerations of the object’s practical employments, or any other advantage or disadvantage to possessing the object. Nor, he insists, would the addition of accurate knowledge of the object determine, or augment or diminish, the immediate pain or pleasure given rise upon the perception of the object. Many may find this initially counterintuitive in the extreme: it seems patently obvious that the pleasures or pains we take in things are in part determined by our knowledge of them. But Hutcheson makes an important distinction here: such additive knowledge may well afford “a rational Pleasure distinct from the sensible,” or it may “raise a distinct Joy, from a prospect of farther

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Advantage in the Object,” but it will not affect the experience of Internal Sense, precisely because, in a way yet to be fully articulated, such knowledge cannot reach the Internal Sense. One might ask, quite reasonably, if there is not a quite clear, forceful, and simple obstacle to the position Hutcheson is advancing thus far: Is it not the case that two persons might well stand in front of the same art object, perceive the same thing, and yet one experiences pain and the other pleasure? Or to better focus the objection, might not a single person at one time experience pleasure before a given work, and at a later time experience pain in its presence? Hutcheson sees this potential threat clearly, and proceeds to examine its ramifications. The simple Ideas raised in the minds of the two persons, if they differ in their “Approbation or Dislike,” are “probably in some way different.” It is fairly clear that Hutcheson means “certainly in some way different,” and as to the same person initially liking and then disliking, Hutcheson finds similarly that, although the object itself may not have changed, the Idea most assuredly has. “This will appear from reflecting on those Objects, to which we have now an Aversion tho they were formerly agreeable: And we shall generally find that there is some accidental Conjunction of a disagreeable Idea, which always recurs with the Object.” The reliance on the Lockean notion of the association of ideas is clear—as is the analogy to experiences of Hutcheson’s Moral Sense. Indeed, an action or a person can change from dislike to approbation, from disagreeable to agreeable, and—perhaps regrettably—vice versa. And these inward metamorphoses—intuitively clearer in the ethical than in the aesthetic case, are the result, not of the inexplicably changed valuation of an unchanged Idea, but of an explicable valuation of a different—if similarly occasioned— Idea. At this point Hutcheson begins to provide hints of the answer to the question that his readers will already have found both urgent and fundamental, namely, What is the property, or what are the conjoint properties, in the object that give(s) rise to these important pleasurable aesthetic experiences that rank highly among the means to the end of human happiness? His hint, at this stage, concerns complexity. Noting that many philosophers have heretofore concerned themselves exclusively with those pleasures of sense occasioned by simple ideas of sensation, Hutcheson argues for the intrinsic value of greater complexity, particularly of the distinct and greater pleasure in humans empirically obtained from “complex Ideas of Objects, which attain the Name of Beautiful, Regular, Harmonious” (1989, 227; and following quotations). Because of this natural preference, “everyone acknowledges he is more delighted with a fine Face, a just Picture, than with the View of any one Colour, were it as strong as lively as possible.” Similarly,

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we are more pleased with a “Prospect of the Sun arising among fettled Clouds, and colouring their Edges with a starry Hemisphere, a fine Landskip, a regular Building, than with a clear blue Sky, a smooth Sea, or a large open Plain, not diversify’d by Woods, Hills, Waters, Buildings.” But those images, of lesser interest due to their lessened visual complexity, are still not simple in any empiricist’s terms, and not simply aesthetically inert: Hutcheson adds the remark “And yet even these latter Appearances are not quite simple.” Taking a musical case, he points out that no one single note, however “sweet, full, or swelling” it may be, can engage the aesthetic sense, can produce the same degree of “Pleasure of Sense,” as a fine composition. The criterion of complexity is again, however, only a hint. Even though he is acutely aware that a fuller elucidation of the pleasure-giving aesthetic property will have to be given—an elucidation that would identify the immediate occasion of the pleasant Ideas in determinate real qualities in objects that serve to excite them, Hutcheson’s aim at this juncture is to provide a defense of the central concept of the Internal Sense.

3  Aesthetic Power and Uniformity Amid Variety In this aesthetic project Hutcheson has identified three categories: the Senses, the Moral Sense, and the Internal Sense. The latter two are distinct from the former in that we may perfectly well perceive sensations of seeing and of hearing, and yet not have a “Perception of Beauty and Harmony” (Hutcheson 1989, 227; and following quotations). Hutcheson appeals to the empirical commonplace that an individual may well perceive all the simple Ideas separately, and distinguish them from each other, and relationally compare them (in terms, e.g., of the relative brightness of two colors or the contrasting timbre of two musical notes)—moreover, the same individual may well be able to see and hear “at great distances,” that is, possess highly developed and acute sensory faculties—and yet “find no Pleasure in Musical Compositions, in Painting, Architecture, Natural Landskip; or but a very weak one in comparison of what others enjoy from the same Object.” This greater capacity—receiving “pleasant Ideas”—we “call a fine Genius or Taste”; we do this in painting, denoting the possessor of this faculty the possessor of “a good eye,” and, as Hutcheson mentions, in music we similarly identify “a good Ear.” The essential point is that this perceptual capacity is not reducible to (outward) sensation: it may be functioning perfectly, and yet we remain “blind” or “deaf ” to the beauty of painting, architecture, or music. Hutcheson sees, on precisely these grounds, clear reason to identify a separate faculty,

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and to name it Internal Sense. And he adds further reasons—also compelling reasons—to his argument. One further reason is simply that in many cases we discern a kind of beauty that little involves external sensation, as in the beauty of theorems, or in what Hutcheson calls “universal Truths.” Another further reason is the great contrast between the experience of the poet who is transported by the beauty of a natural scene, so beautiful as to “ravish us even in his Description,” and the “cold lifeless Conception which we imagine in a dull Critick,” or for that matter, he suggests, in anyone without the aforementioned fine taste. Again, such persons may well possess all the technical knowledge of trees, herbs, minerals, metals, the form of every leaf, stalk, root, flower, and seed—of all of which the imagined poet is utterly ignorant—and yet see nothing, aesthetically speaking, in comparison to the transporting vision— indeed the internal perception—of the poet. External sense may teach us the “Situation of every Muscle in the human Body,” or the same external senses may instruct us in the properties of architecture “to the Tenth of an Inch,” and yet we remain insensitive to the “Beauty and Harmony” that persons of taste experience in plenitude. Hutcheson says of such cases, “there is still something farther necessary” to put us into a position of receiving the “highest pleasures” in contemplating these objects. Directly stated, “The Difference of the Perceptions seems sufficient to vindicate the Use of a different Name.” One may here inquire, again quite reasonably, even if the use of the term “Internal” in the phrase “Internal Sense” is justified, why then should we allow the word “Sense” in this case, where there is clearly such a stark contrast to sensation, and indeed where some forms of beauty—in a manner reminiscent of Platonism—transcend sensation? Hutcheson supplies a ready answer to the question. The superior power of perception to which he is referring is, he claims, justly called a sense, because—despite the differences he has just labored to enunciate—it shows one indubitable affinity to the other senses, namely, the pleasure we receive from or through the Internal Sense “does not arise from any Knowledge of Principles, Proportions, Causes, or of the Usefulness of the Object; but strikes us at first with the Idea of Beauty.” Hutcheson is here returning to his “immediacy” thesis mentioned earlier and situating this into his argument for the Internal Sense. Here too he observes that, however much rational pleasure may be added to our perception of any object due to its utilitarian or practical advantage to us, or its ability to increase our knowledge, no cognition of this kind increases the immediate pleasure of beauty. And here too, now in the context of arguing both the very existence of, and the accurate entitling of, the Internal Sense, he brings back the nonvolitional nature of such pleasure: no resolution we make, nor any act of

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will, can change the positive or negative charge, or transmute Beauty into Deformity or vice versa. Outward dissimulation is always a real possibility, but our sentiments given by the Object via the Internal Sense will continue without variation. All of the foregoing brings Hutcheson to his most succinct conclusion: “Hence it plainly appears that some Objects are immediately the Occasion of this Pleasure of Beauty, and that we have Senses for perceiving it; and that it is distinct from that Joy which arises upon prospect of Advantage.” But now the question, acknowledged briefly but postponed above, is: What is the nature of those objects, such that they occasion the pleasure of beauty? In moving into the part of his work designed to answer that pressing question, Hutcheson draws an encompassing distinction between Original and Comparative beauty, or, in alternative terms that he proposes, Absolute or Relative beauty. This distinction we will see Hutcheson elucidate with a good deal of empirical content, but it is the prefatory remark he makes before advancing to this project that reveals his deep and thoroughgoing reliance on the philosophy of Locke. Having made the preliminary distinction between Absolute and Relative beauty, he writes: Only let it be observ’d, that by Absolute or Original Beauty, is not understood any Quality suppos’d to be in the Object, which should itself be beautiful, without relation to any Mind which perceives it: For Beauty, like other Names of sensible Ideas, properly denotes the Perception of some Mind; so Cold, Hot, Sweet, Bitter, denote the Sensations in our Minds, to which perhaps there is no resemblance in the Object, which excite these Ideas in us, however we generally imagine otherwise.

With its removal of the belief in the possibility of a secondary quality, for example, beauty, being in an object in the way that only Lockean primary qualities can be, along with its corresponding articulation of the minddependence of secondary qualities like hot and cold, this is direct, undiluted Lockean empiricism. Next, however, even while remaining within the larger confines of the fundamental distinction between primary and secondary qualities, Hutcheson adds a wrinkle pertaining to the Internal Sense not found in Locke: “The Ideas of Beauty and Harmony being excited upon our Perception of some primary Quality . . . may indeed have a nearer resemblance to Objects, than these Sensations, which seem not so much any Pictures of Objects, as Modifications of the perceiving Mind” (Hutcheson 1989, 229; and following quotations). Thus it appears that the Idea of Beauty, even though a Lockean secondary quality, may to a greater extent, although not wholly, resemble (and the relation of resemblance between the idea in the perceiver’s mind and the actual object as it exists apart from the perceiving

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mind is the criterion for primary qualities in Locke’s philosophy) the object that occasions the Idea of Beauty. But despite this placement of the Idea of Beauty on a continuum somewhat between the primary and secondary poles, Hutcheson returns to the ineradicable reliance of beauty on the aesthetic mind: “and yet were there no mind with a Sense of Beauty to contemplate Objects, I see not how they could be call’d beautiful.” And now, finally, advancing to the articulation of his most important distinction, he says: We therefore by Absolute Beauty understand only that Beauty, which we perceive in Objects without comparison to anything external, of which the Object is suppos’d an Imitation or Picture: such as that Beauty perceiv’d from the Works of Nature, artificial Forms, Figures, Theorems. Comparative or Relative Beauty is that which we perceive in Objects, commonly considered as Imitations or Resemblances of something else.

Thus if the beauty we contemplate, and which we find intrinsically pleasurable, incorporates the element of representation, then the beauty is relative or comparative; if it elicits the idea of beauty without any such relation to an external thing, that is, without introducing the concept of representation into the aesthetic experience, it is original or absolute beauty. In facing the central question, which Hutcheson at this stage of his discussion now expresses as, “Since it is certain that we have Ideas of Beauty and Harmony, let us examine what Quality in Objects excites these Ideas, or is the occasion of them” (1989, 229), he proposes a general conclusion quickly, which he then goes on to elaborate throughout his discussion of the two kinds of beauty. Noting first that he is concerned only with that beauty which arises for people, and thus reemphasizing the empirical foundation of his philosophical labors (we see animals that are physiologically suited for every place on earth, and what appears as an environment for living “rude and shapeless, or loathsome” to us, may for them constitute “a Paradise”), Hutcheson pronounces that the simplest and most direct formulation of his answer to the fundamental question is: Uniformity amid Variety. It may be that there are other “Conceptions of Objects” which are “agreeable on other accounts, such as Grandeur, Novelty, and Sanctity,” but: “what we call Beautiful in Objects, to speak in the Mathematical Style, seems to be in a compound Ratio of Uniformity and Variety: so that where the Uniformity of Bodys is equal, the Beauty is as the Variety; and where the Variety is equal, the Beauty is as the Uniformity” (Hutcheson 1989, 230; and following quotations). Hutcheson extends this point, still under the heading of absolute, non-representational beauty, by considering the beauty given by nature. In it he finds “a surprizing Uniformity amidst an

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almost infinite Variety,” and he mentions specifically both the form and the motion of the heavenly bodies: the forms of the planets are nearly spherical, and their motions or revolutions are “generally elliptick, and without great Eccentricity.” We thus find in them formal uniformity beneath their individual variations, and we find them, naturally, “therefore pleasing to us.” Hutcheson also makes his point, quite compellingly, through a contrast, one drawn with regard to the absolute beauty of theorems and geometrical figures. We find, he says, the Forty-Seventh Proposition of the first book of Euclid’s Elements1 beautiful, because in informing us that however we may change the area of a right-angled triangle (be that change in the imagination or on paper), as one varies the proportion of the base to the perpendicular the theorem nevertheless holds, absolutely and uniformly throughout all such variations. With Hutcheson we can see that the charm, indeed the abstract beauty, is difficult to deny, and it clearly depends on uniformity amid variety. By contrast, if we consider that every whole is greater than its parts, “we shall find no Beauty in the Contemplation” (Hutcheson 1989, 231). For even though the proposition does, like Euclid’s theorem, encompass a vast multitude of individual cases, the unity—in which the beauty in this case should reside if it were similar to Euclid’s case—is negligible and vague, or as he says “inconsiderable,” since all cases agree only in an unspecified or “undetermin’d Conception of Whole and Part.” There is thus insufficient unity among the diversity to give rise to the idea of Beauty and its attendant pleasure. Hutcheson fully realizes that the definition of beauty he is carefully unfolding, and this distinct variety of abstract absolute beauty, is deeply compelling. Indeed it has been, he speculates, so compelling as to induce an overarching desire among various theoreticians to find it in sciences other than mathematics and geometry, efforts he labels, if somewhat uncharitably, “absurd” (Hutcheson 1989, 232). Here, always an empiricist at heart and hence always mindful of the threat of rationalism, he offers no less than Descartes’s attempt to derive all human knowledge from one isolated proposition, that is, cogito, ergo sum, as one such effort to uncover what would, if successful, constitute the stunning epistemological beauty of the greatest uniformity (a universally shared fact of consciousness) within the greatest variety (all of humanity).

5  Our Sense of Beauty Uniformity amid Variety, fully elaborated, is, then, Hutcheson’s answer to that earlier centrally important question inquiring into the distinct nature of the object that gives rise to the mind’s idea of beauty and the intrinsic

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pleasure of that apprehension. Why, however, should we believe there to be a universal internal sense of beauty? Hutcheson’s first move in answering that question is to provide a further qualification to our internal sense of beauty. It is true, he observes, that many objects provide us with no pleasure. Yet there seems to be “no Form which seems necessarily disagreeable of itself ” (Hutcheson 1989, 234). Many objects are indeed displeasing to our external senses, just as others are agreeable, for example, “Smells, Tastes, and some separate Sounds.” But to our internal sense of beauty, the negative valuations we may give to particular things depend, not on the intrinsic positive or negative charge of the object in our perceptual interaction with it, but rather on comparison to something better that would provide positive pleasure to this internal sense. Thus he claims, in a manner almost reminiscent of medieval philosophy,2 that “Deformity is only the absence of Beauty, or deficiency in the Beauty expected in any Species.” For that reason, he suggests, “bad Musick pleases Rusticks who never heard any better,” and, more tellingly, he offers the example of the tuning of instruments. The sound is not particularly displeasing (providing it is “not too tedious”) in and of itself, but when we expect intonation, within the performance of music that follows the tuning of the instruments, a dissonance nowhere near as great as that heard while tuning is much more disagreeable, because it offends the circumstantial expectations of harmony as preserved by good intonation. Hutcheson concludes then, that “Our Sense of Beauty seems design’d to give us positive Pleasure, but not positive Pain or Disgust, any further than what arises from disappointment” (Hutcheson 1989, 235). The result of this qualification is that the universality of the Sense of Beauty need be defended only in positive terms, and not in relation to any negative aesthetic judgment.

6  Judgmental Differences and Hidden Uniformity Hutcheson’s next move further strengthens his argument for the universality of the Internal Sense of Beauty. It is not only the uniformity of particular aesthetic judgments and preferences upon which Hutcheson needs to depend, precisely because of the flexibility built into his central notion of Uniformity amid Variety. The thesis concerning the universality of the Internal Sense will always be found more plausible if we bear in mind that we will not find one distinct particular beauty in the aesthetic world, but rather countless different “Forms which may all have some Unity, and yet differ from each other” (Hutcheson 1989, 237). Different individuals may well display differing “Fancys of Beauty,” and yet nevertheless illustrate the very

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universality for which Hutcheson is arguing, since it is the abstract property of uniformity amid variety, and not any one particular manifestation of that aesthetic principle, that provides the universal content. This is thus in its surprising way—since Hutcheson’s philosophy is constructed upon explicitly empirical foundations—reminiscent of Platonism nevertheless, in that the property in common to a universal class of objects turns out to be abstract, and indeed (like Plato) available to the mind of the beholder. But then it is only reminiscent of Platonism: the empirical foundations of Hutcheson’s thought are vividly clear, and it is, after all, a universal human experience Hutcheson is defending, one that is grounded in matters of fact. It may well be true, Hutcheson asserts, that many assume that, while we clearly have external senses, our judgments in the aesthetic realm are merely matters of caprice, or determined by custom, habit, education, or some interest. But even though many give such matters priority in matters of external sense, this does not argue against the Internal Sense of Beauty. It only shows that philosophical misconception is both possible and frequent, and here Hutcheson offers an interesting diagnosis for this misconception that grants reality only to the external sense. “The Reason of this different Judgement,” that is, that only external senses really exist, “can be no other than this, That we have got distinct Names for the external Senses, and none, or very few, for the Internal; and by this are led, as in many other Cases, to look upon the former as some ways more fix’d and real and natural than the latter” (Hutcheson 1989, 237). This linguistic fact, loaded in such a way as to direct in an almost undetectable way our subsequent philosophical thought, is then conjoined to an idiosyncratic association of ideas, resulting in the false conclusion that judgmental diversity is everywhere, along with the unreality of any inner aesthetic sense. And these habits of misled thinking joined to prismatic misperception are culturally hard to break, and indeed even harder to see through in the first place. Hutcheson gives the powerful example of the “Effect in the Ideas of our Churches, from the perpetual use of them only in religious Exercises. The faint Light in Gothick Buildings has had the same Association of a very foreign Idea, which our Poet shows in his Epithet, a Dim religious Light” (1989, 238; and following quotations). The idea of “Deitys” and “something Divine” are indeed “foreign” to the idea of architecture, but through cultural habit, custom, and education, it has become difficult, Hutcheson observes, to separate out these distinct ideas and to not bias the judgment of one with the presence of the other. In short, it is “no wonder that [people] should often disagree in their Fancys of Objects, even altho their Sense of Beauty and Harmony were perfectly uniform.” The truth, which is hidden by the false conclusion concerning the unreality of the Internal Sense and anti-universal worldwide judgmental

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variance—as we have seen the false conclusion for which association and the linguistic problem conspire—is that when Hutcheson looks out upon the world of apparent aesthetic variety, he discerns uniformity. However different the particular instances may be, they are in fact instantiations, in the aesthetic case, of uniformity amid variety, a quality in things that gives rise to the experience of aesthetic pleasure. And in Hutcheson’s distinctive aesthetic vision, such pleasure is the natural concomitant exclusively of the Idea of Beauty, which, however variegated that idea may appear in particular cases and however variegated we may as persons individually be, we humans perceive with our universal Internal Sense.

Notes 1 Euclid, Elements, a mathematical treatise of thirteen books, attributed to Euclid, in Egypt c. 300 BC. It is the intellectually elegant proofs of its propositions to which Hutcheson is referring here. 2 I refer here to the definition of evil in late Roman (Augustine) and medieval philosophy as a privation.

Primary Sources Hutcheson: 1989. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Selection in G. Dickie, R. Sclafani, and R. Roblin (eds.), Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, 2nd ed., 223–41. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Originally published 1724.

Further Reading Guyer, Paul. 2002. “Beauty and Utility in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35 (3): 439–53. Kivy, Peter. 2003. The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 1975. “Relativism and Hutcheson’s Aesthetic Theory.” The Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (2): 319–30. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 1979. “The Two Beauties: A Perspective on Hutcheson’s Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 38 (2): 145–51. Townsend, Dabney. 1987. “From Shaftesbury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience.” The Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (2): 287–305.

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Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (1670–1742) and Charles Batteux (1713–1780) James O. Young

The French school of aesthetics dominated European thinking about the arts in the middle years of the eighteenth century. Jean-Baptiste Du Bos and Charles Batteux were the two most important representatives of this school. Du Bos’s 1719 Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting (Du Bos 2021) is one of the seminal texts of modern aesthetics and Batteux’s 1746 The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (Batteux 2015) was the next major French contribution. A central tenet of eighteenth-century French aesthetics was the belief that all of the fine arts imitate nature, and works of art are beautiful qua imitations of nature. The fine arts, according to these writers, are poetry (i.e., literature), painting, sculpture, music, and dance.

1  Du Bos on the “Striking Pleasure” Du Bos begins his Critical Reflections with an investigation of the “striking pleasure” that people receive from experience of works of art (2021, 1.1).1 His account of this pleasure depends on the hypothesis that the fine arts are imitative arts. According to Du Bos, the sentiments that people receive from imitations of nature are fainter versions of the sentiments that they receive from experience of the objects imitated. For example, if we would feel warm admiration when seeing Socrates bravely facing death, we feel something similar when we see a painting that imitates or represents Socrates bravely facing death. If experience of a work of art provides a sentiment akin to a pleasing sentiment provided by experience of something in reality, Du Bos has an explanation of the pleasure we receive from experience of artworks. According to Du Bos, we judge artworks by means of our sentiments. In adopting this position, Du Bos broke with a long-standing rationalist

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tradition of art criticism. This tradition was influenced by René Descartes. According to someone like Jean Terrasson, “Any man who does not think of any literary matter as Descartes prescribes to think about physical matters, is not worthy of the present century . . . . Nothing prepares better than mathematics to properly judge works of mind” (Terrasson 1715, lxv). According to rationalists, there are rules for the creation and evaluation of art. Critics can decide a priori whether a work of art is aesthetically valuable by determining whether the work has been created in accordance with the rules. Under the influence of his friend John Locke, Du Bos adopted the empiricist view that works of art are to be judged empirically. In particular, they are to be judged according to the amount of pleasure that they provide to audience members. According to Du Bos, the evaluation of art “is not left to reason. It must submit to the judgement that sentiment pronounces. Sentiment is the competent judge of this issue” (Du Bos 2021, 1.22). He compares the evaluation of a work of art to tasting a ragout. Reason does not inform us whether a ragout tastes good. Rather, “We taste the ragout and . . . we know that it is good. It is the same with works of wit and pictures made to please us by touching us” (Du Bos 2021, 1.22). By defending this account of the evaluation of art, Du Bos originated the view that beauty is a response-dependent property. That is, to say that an artwork is beautiful is to say that a person responds with pleasure to experience of it. As an adherent of the view that we judge artworks on the basis of our sentiments, Du Bos was an early advocate of subjectivism. A work of art is not objectively beautiful on this view; that is, it is not beautiful independently of how people respond to it. The standard of taste, that is, the standard by which works of art are evaluated, are the sentiments that an individual feels upon experiencing works. On this view, each individual has his or her or own standard of taste. Du Bos’s subjectivism gives rise to relativism about the value of artworks since people may respond differently to a given work of art. As Du Bos notes, one person may prefer French wine to Spanish wine, and another Spanish wine to French wine. Similarly, one viewer may like Poussin’s paintings but not Titian’s, while another is leased by Titian but not Poussin. Relative to the first viewer, Poussin’s paintings are beautiful and Titian’s are not, while relative to the second viewer, just the opposite is true. Du Bos seems not to have fully appreciated a problem to which this sort of relativism gives rise. It follows from his position that all disputes about taste are pointless. David Hume, who was influenced by Du Bos, grasped that there is a problem with saying that all such disagreement is pointless. This problem is apparent when we reflect that some reader may prefer the verses of a poetaster such as Ogilby to Milton’s Paradise Lost. However, as

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Hume observed, to say that Ogilby is as great a poet as Milton is as absurd as asserting that a molehill is as great as a mountain or a pond as large as the sea. That is, when two people differ about the relative merits of the poetry of Ogilby and Milton, their disagreement is not faultless. Hume, and other latereighteenth-century writers, tried to explain how it is possible to say that some judgments about beauty are mistaken. That is, subsequent philosophers of art sought a standard of taste that is not simply individual sentiment. Du Bos, however, had no such standard or a way to explain how some disagreements about the values of artworks can be mistaken.

2  Du Bos and the Paradox of Tragedy Du Bos’s account of the pleasure we receive from experience of artworks is plausible for cases in which artworks represent aspects of nature that would arouse pleasing sentiments in audience members. Du Bos is aware, however, that his account of the striking pleasure that we receive from experience of artworks faces a serious objection. He needs to give an account of why audiences enjoy experiences of artworks that represent scenes that, if they were actually viewed, would arouse unpleasant emotions. Du Bos takes as an example Le Brun’s painting of the Massacre of the Innocents. If we actually saw children being killed, we would certainly be filled with horror and anguish. It seems inexplicable, then, that we enjoy paintings of this sort and other artworks that represent tragic events. Here Du Bos is addressing what is known as the paradox of tragedy. It is paradoxical that we enjoy the experience of artworks, such as tragedies, that arouse unpleasant sentiments. Du Bos addresses this objection in two ways. In his first response to the objection he begins by noting that, although imitations of unpleasant things arouse unpleasant sentiments, they are not as unpleasant as the sentiments aroused by the things themselves. Even if this is true, however, Du Bos does not have a satisfactory solution to the paradox of tragedy. He is aware of this and goes on to argue that though the sentiments aroused by imitations of unpleasant things are unpleasant, these sentiments are preferable to sentiments that we would otherwise feel. Du Bos believed that humans are subject to a deep and abiding ennui. This ennui is a kind of weariness of the human condition and it afflicts us constantly. Experience of tragic works rouses us from this ennui. Although the sentiments aroused by imitations of unpleasant events may be rather unpleasant, these sentiments are preferable to the experience of ennui that we would otherwise have.

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Hume partially endorsed Du Bos’s solution to the paradox of tragedy. He quoted Du Bos as saying that “nothing is in general so disagreeable to the mind as the languid, listless state of indolence, into which it falls upon the removal of all passion and occupation.” Hume then added that if a work of art arouses a sentiment that is “disagreeable, afflicting, melancholy, disordered; it is still better than . . . insipid languor” (Hume 1757, 217). Edmund Burke says something similar about experience of the sublime and may have been influenced by Du Bos. He wrote that in a “languid inactive state, the nerves are more liable to the most horrid convulsions, than when they are sufficiently braced and strengthened. Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder, is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body” (Burke 1990, 122). Relief from languor makes us willing to have the pain associated with experience of the sublime. Among contemporary thinkers, Paisley Livingston (2013) sees merit in Du Bos’s approach, which he interprets as a response to a broader paradox Du Bos identifies—that of negative “artificial passions” that, being “less vivid or intense,” are sought after for the sake of various compensations, and most of all, an enjoyable relief from boredom.

3  Batteux and the “System of the Arts” Until recently, Batteux was widely believed to have been the first modern thinker to group together poetry, painting, music, sculpture, and dance as the fine arts. This perception of Batteux is attributable to Paul Oskar Kristeller (1951 and 1952), who held that Batteux developed the “modern system of the arts.” Kristeller held that, prior to Batteux, poetry, painting, music, sculpture, and dance had not been grouped together into a single category or system. In fact, Batteux simply popularized a view that was widespread and already adopted by Du Bos (cf. Young 2015). The “single principle” to which all of the fine arts can be reduced, according to Batteux, is the principle of imitation: the fine arts are imitative arts. At times, Batteux suggests, in a manner reminiscent of Du Bos, that the defining characteristic of the fine arts is that they provide pleasure. He divides the arts into three categories: the arts that serve humanity’s practical needs, the arts that provide pleasure, and a mixed class of arts that serve practical needs and also provide pleasure. In the first category we find mechanical arts such as agriculture and carpentry. The arts in the second category, which provide pleasure, are the fine arts. At one point he says that “The goal of poetry is to please and to please by arousing the emotions” (Batteux 2015, 73) and he would presumably say something similar about the other arts. Architecture and oratory are in the third category. Architecture, for example,

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serves a practical need by providing shelter. At the same time, buildings can be a source of pleasure when they are attractively designed and constructed. Batteux was not entirely consistent, but his considered position seems to have been that imitation, not the provision of pleasure, is the defining characteristic of the fine arts. He writes that “poetry consists solely in imitation. Painting, dance, and music are the same” (Batteux 2015, 10). Batteux saw himself as reviving an ancient conception of the fine arts. He writes that his “position is not novel. It was ubiquitous in the ancient world. Aristotle began the Poetics by stating the principle that music, dance, poetry, and painting are imitative arts” (Batteux 2015, 8). Aristotle is the primary inspiration for The Fine Arts, but Batteux also traces the principle of imitation to Plato and of the ancient Roman poet Horace. According to Batteux, the fine arts differ only in the media that they employ. He writes that “painting imitates belle nature by means of colours, sculpture by means of three-dimensional figures, and dancing by movements and attitudes of the body. Music imitates nature by means of inarticulate sounds, and, finally, poetry by means of rhythmic speech” (Batteux 2015, 19). (Belle nature literally means “beautiful nature.” The next section will indicate what Batteux means by this term.) Batteux excludes architecture from the list of fine arts on the grounds that it is not an imitative art.

4  Batteux and Belle Nature While Du Bos and Batteux held that the fine arts imitate nature, in important respects the views of Batteux differ from those of Du Bos. According to Batteux, the fine arts do not imitate the actual natural world. Rather, they imitate what Batteux calls belle nature. In introducing this concept, he writes that belle nature “is not the reality that is; rather, it is the reality that could be, the truly beautiful, which is represented as if it actually existed, with all of the perfections which it could have” (Batteux 2015, 13). This definition is a little misleading. Sometimes belle nature is an idealized version of reality. Batteux relates, for example, the story of Zeuxis, an ancient Greek painter, who, when he wanted to depict ideal feminine beauty, selected the best features of several lovely women. In this way, Zeuxis created an ideal and, consequently, belle nature. Belle nature is not, however, always beautiful. For example, Molière depicted belle nature when, in The Misanthrope, he collected in one character bleak characteristics that he had observed in a variety of people. This example demonstrates that when Batteux talks of belle nature, he speaks of archetypes rather than something ideally beautiful.

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Batteux needed to give an account of why experience of nature or belle nature is rewarding. In giving this account, Batteux imagines that at some point in history an extraordinary genius emerged who “cast his eyes on nature.” When he did so, this genius admired this magnificent system with its infinite variety, the fitting connections of means with the end, of parts with the whole, and of causes with effects. He felt that nature was essentially simple, but without monotony; richly adorned, but without affectation; regular in its processes, abundant in its resources, but without encumbering itself with planning and rules. (Batteux 2015, 35)

This passage indicates that Batteux believes that nature is inherently beautiful. Works of art are then, at least in part, beautiful when and because they imitate something beautiful. Batteux also believed that, by imitating belle nature, the fine arts could be an important source of knowledge. Here he differed from Du Bos, who explicitly denied that art was valuable as a source of knowledge. Batteux believed that works of art can be a source of moral knowledge. He writes that pastoral poetry, for example, can be “a summary of all moral precepts” (Batteux 2015, 114). Other artistic genres can also, he believes, provide knowledge. Unlike Du Bos, Batteux was a realist about aesthetic judgments. That is, he believed that works of art are beautiful independently of any perception of them. He categorically states that “There is good taste. This proposition is not problematic. Those who doubt it are not capable of appreciating the proofs that they request” (Batteux 2015, 29). Good taste, Batteux believed, is an innate sense. Artists with good taste are able to create beautiful works of art and audience members with good taste are reliably able to determine which artworks are beautiful. Batteux was able to be a realist about aesthetic judgments because he rejected Du Bos’s subjectivism. That is, Batteux denied that a work of art is beautiful when experience of it gives rise to pleasing sentiments. On Batteux’s view, an artwork is beautiful when it imitates the beautiful in nature and when it provides knowledge of nature.

5  Influence of the French School Under the influence of writers such as Du Bos and Batteux, the view that art imitates nature became widespread in the eighteenth century. French ideas about aesthetics were particularly influential in Germany. Under

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the influence of Du Bos and Batteux, the Berlin Academy of the Sciences adopted the view that the fine arts imitate nature. Later in the eighteenth century, Kant acknowledged the influence of Batteux and was typical of German aestheticians in holding that “art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it looks to us like nature . . . beautiful art must be regarded as nature, although of course one is aware of it as art” (Kant 2000, 185–6). A little later he adds that “A beauty of nature is a beautiful thing; the beauty of art is a beautiful representation of a thing” (Kant 2000, 189; emphasis in original). The influence of Du Bos and Batteux was also widely felt in Britain, particularly by Hume (Young and Cameron 2018). The view that the fine arts are essentially imitative began to break down toward the end of the eighteenth century. First, doubts began to be raised about whether music is an imitative art. Several late-eighteenth-century writers held that music is an expressive art rather than an imitative art. Other philosophers of music held that works of music are simply pleasing patterns of sound. Nevertheless, even in the nineteenth century, other writers continued to defend the view that music is an imitative art and other arts were also held to be imitative. Only in the early years of the twentieth century, with the emergence of abstract art, was the idea that imitation is an essential characteristic of the fine arts abandoned.

6 Conclusion Many philosophers of art have argued against the idea that an essential characteristic of the fine arts is that they imitate nature. Few of these philosophers have, however, been aware of the origins of the idea that the fine arts are imitative arts. In the modern world, this idea originated in the eighteenth-century French school of aesthetics. The two most important representatives of this school were Du Bos and Batteux. Before the suggestion that the fine arts imitate nature is dismissed, these writers deserve to have their writings considered. The view that art imitates nature is not, perhaps, quite so absurd as subsequent generations of philosophers of art have believed.

Note 1 References to Du Bos’s Critical Reflections are to its volumes and chapters. References are correct for the 1740 and all subsequent editions.

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Primary Sources Du Bos: 2021. Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting. J. O. Young and M. Cameron (trans.). Leiden: Brill. Originally published 1719.

Batteux: 2015. The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle. J. O. Young (trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published 1745.

References and Further Reading Burke, Edmund. 1990. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published 1757. Hume, David. 1757. Four Dissertations. London: A. Millar. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published 1790. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. 1951 and 1952. “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” parts I and II. The Journal of the History of Ideas, 12: 496–527 (1951), and 13: 17–46 (1952). Livingston, Paisley. 2013. “Du Bos’ Paradox.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 53: 393–406. Lombard, A. 1913. L’Abbé Du Bos: Un initiateur de la pensée modern (1670– 1742). Paris: Librairie Hachette. Terrasson, Jean. Dissertation critique sur l’Iliade d’Homère. Paris, 1715. Young, James O. 2015. “The Ancient and Modern System of the Arts.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 55: 1–17. Young, James O. and Cameron, Margaret. 2018. “Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’ Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting and Hume’s Treatise.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 58: 119–30.

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David Hume (1711–1776) Alan H. Goldman

David Hume never wrote a book on aesthetics, yet the nature of aesthetic judgment was a subject that he addressed intermittently throughout his philosophical career. His writings on the subject are scattered throughout several books and essays, concluding with the late essay, “Of the Standard of Taste,” published in 1757 (Hume 1987d). This mature piece is a classic in the field, culminating the eighteenth-century British tradition in aesthetics and setting the tone for the future history of the subject in its focus on the central question of the subjectivity or objectivity of aesthetic evaluations.

1  Early Writings From his earliest writing in A Treatise of Human Nature (orig. publ. 1740), Hume tried to steer a middle course between radical subjectivism or relativism and objectivism in regard to judgments of beauty or aesthetic value. He writes there that subjective pleasure constitutes the essence of beauty, aesthetic pleasure being a particular kind of pleasure (Hume 1961, 426). Reiterating the subjectivist stance in an early, 1742 essay, “The Skeptic,” he writes: “beauty and worth are merely of a relative nature, and consist in an agreeable sentiment, produced by an object in a particular mind, according to the peculiar structure of that mind” (Hume 1987c, 163). The sentiment in which beauty consists is calm as opposed to a violent passion according to Hume, which is why it is easily confused for a property of the object itself (1987c, 165). This view is endorsed again ten years later in An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (orig. publ. 1751), where he repeats that beauty lies in the sentiment produced by an object in a mind of a particular fabric or structure, and not in the form of the object itself (Hume 1957, 110).

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Yet in the Treatise he also says that beauty is an order of parts fitted to give one pleasure because of one’s nature or customs (Hume 1961, 271). Here, then, beauty is like a secondary quality in John Locke’s sense: a power an object has in virtue of its form to produce a pleasurable response in us (as, e.g., the color red is the power to produce a red sensation in appropriate responders). Certain forms naturally produce this response and therefore may be considered themselves beautiful. In this account, as opposed to elsewhere in the Treatise, where he writes of beauty as simply a sentiment, the focus is on the object and its properties, which cause the response. A beautiful object is one that causes a pleasurable response in a viewer in favorable circumstances in virtue of its form. To be beautiful is to be such as to cause such a response. Here beauty lies not just in a sentiment, but rather in the relation of an object or a form to the sentiment, its disposition to produce a particular response. Certain forms are “fitted” to produce pleasurable responses, although presumably they will do so only in someone endowed with the properly functioning sensibility and in favorable conditions. In the Treatise these two descriptions of beauty—one focused on the subjective sentiment and the other on the object and the formal properties that cause the sentiment—simply coexist in different places. At this stage, Hume seems unaware of this shift in focus between the subjective and the objective, though he will attempt its resolution in his later essay. In these early writings on the nature of beauty, Hume also makes an initial and partial attempt to spell out which formal properties in an object cause the pleasurable response that leads us to call it beautiful. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Hume’s most prominent predecessor in the British tradition in aesthetics, described such form as “unity amidst variety” (Hutcheson 1971). While following Hutcheson in seeing beauty as a relation between an object’s form and a subjective response, Hume nowhere endorses this description of the objective side of the relation. And he seems right not to. While some objects and artworks may be beautiful in virtue of their combined unity and complexity, there are also countless counterexamples. Instead Hume in the early works gives only a partial account of beauty, one that is very much in tune with his account of moral properties. Moral properties or virtuous character traits for Hume are those that are such as to prompt moral approval in normal and unbiased judges. And this “being such as,” the objective side of the relation, is analyzed in terms of utility, or usefulness, and immediate agreeableness. Benevolence, for example, is socially useful or beneficial, while good humor and modesty are immediately agreeable. Hume suggests that some ascriptions of beauty rest on these same criteria, as applied to formal appearances. Beauty in the bodies of people and animals, for example, derives from the appearance of utility, suggestions of

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strength and agility (Hume 1957, 69). The appearance of utility is central to beauty in architecture as well. Square windows and doors, for example, would not appear beautiful because they would not be conducive to use by us. The base of pillars should be broader than the top so as to suggest the idea of stability or security. This appearance of utility as a criterion of beauty applies even to paintings: imbalance is not beautiful in a picture because it suggests danger or falling. The idea of utility produces pleasure in us, as it also does in the realm of morals, because we are sympathetic to the interests of our fellow humans. Other features are beautiful not because they give rise to the idea of utility, but simply because they are immediately agreeable. These include the regularity of facial features in people, as opposed to bodily features suggesting strength or agility. But the parallel between aesthetic and moral properties even in the early writings is only partial. The properties are distinct for Hume, first, because the sentiments produced, while pleasing in the case of both goodness and beauty, are distinct. Second, while genuine utility is the source of moral approval, it is the appearance of utility that gives rise to the sentiment of beauty. These differences allow for a strong analogy between moral and aesthetic properties, but other disanalogies are more telling. While social utility is the basis for ascribing all the virtues that we recognize as specifically moral, Hume nowhere suggests that this is even close to an exhaustive ground of aesthetic value or beauty. Even more significant is the fact that reference to utility disappears entirely from the mature essay, “Of the Standard of Taste.” This may be explicable in part by the fact that his examples there are literary rather than visual. But the point remains that, unlike Hutcheson, Hume never attempts a complete specification of those objective formal properties that give rise to the pleasing sentiment of beauty, and the initial partial attempts become even more partial and less specific later on.

2  The Need for a Standard: Aesthetic Rules What we find at the beginning of the mature essay is a more explicit and self-conscious focus on the tension between the subjective and objective sources of ascriptions of beauty. Hume starts by attributing both views to commonsense thinking about aesthetics. Yet, while previously he was content to simply describe the aesthetic property of beauty in both ways, now he sees them in opposition. The subjective view in common sense is reflected in the ancient proverb “There is no disputing about matters of taste.” People recognize wide differences in tastes in art and literature both within cultures and, even more so, across them. And some apparent agreements mask what

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are in fact disagreements. People might agree that elegance in writing is always good, but this is because elegance is already an evaluatively loaded term. People agree that elegance is good, but they will disagree about which objects or artworks are elegant. (Here Hume may already be conceding too much to the objectivist in assuming that elegance is always good in an artwork. An elegant performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring might not be better for that; it might be too elegant so as to detract from its raw power.) Hume follows this observation of widespread disagreement in tastes and its recognition in common sense with a repetition of his original philosophical claim that responding to objects with ascriptions of beauty is a matter of sentiment and of feelings of pleasure. He now expands on this claim by pointing out that while factual judgments refer to states of affairs in the world and are therefore true or false, sentiments do not refer at all. They are self-contained, therefore neither true nor false. Thus it appears that tastes constituted by such sentiments are all on a par. As in tastes in foods, we like what we like, and that is the end of the matter. On the other side from these disagreements in tastes are widespread agreements in certain aesthetic judgments. Milton is better than Ogilby, Hume notes (which is why you have not heard of Ogilby), and he might have noted of his contemporaries that Mozart is better than Salieri. Those few who might prefer Ogilby to Milton (or Salieri to Mozart) have worse taste than their counterparts, and it certainly follows that some tastes are better than others. Hence there must be a standard that distinguishes worse taste from better. Hume takes his task in this essay to be that of making this standard explicit. While sentiments cannot be true or false, they can be appropriate or not, and Hume’s standard will distinguish the appropriate or fit reactions from the inappropriate ones. In the remainder of the essay, what we find are several, progressive attempts to specify such a standard. His first suggestion along this line is that, if there are standards, there must be aesthetic rules or principles that link objective properties of artworks or other objects to aesthetic properties like beauty. This point echoes in different terms his earlier claim that certain forms are naturally suited to cause pleasurable responses in viewers. Since causal relations require perfectly regular connections between causes and effects according to Hume, there must be rules linking these objective forms to the responses constitutive of beauty, if the forms cause the responses. We discover these rules as we discover any causal relations: through observation. But now the first real complication sets in. Hume claims that there are aesthetic principles and that these could comprise standards of taste, but he has great difficulty identifying any. The examples he offers are either easily counterexemplified or once more contain evaluative terms. We saw

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in earlier writings that he took the appearance of utility to connect to judgments of beauty, yet there is no mention of that here (perhaps again because his examples are from literature). Instead he first mentions the poet Ariosto and implies that we can abstract rules indicating goodand bad-making properties in his writing. On the negative side are his “monstrous and improbable fictions,” his mixture of comic and serious styles, his lack of coherence, and interruptions of narration. On the positive side are his natural pictures of “gay and amorous” passions (Hume 1987d, 232). None of these is remotely plausible as a suggestion of an aesthetic rule. Alice in Wonderland and Frankenstein both contain monstrous and improbable fictions; Shakespeare mixes comic and serious styles; many absurdist plays lack coherence; and George Eliot and Herman Melville constantly interrupt their narrations. Of course these works (except for those of Shakespeare) could not be known to Hume, but all of them provide clear counterexamples to his suggestions of aesthetic rules. His positive rule is even more ridiculous, since any piece of pornography will present natural pictures of gay and amorous passions without having aesthetic merit on that score. Later in the essay Hume again appeals to coherence, to the actions of fictional agents being in keeping with their characters, and to artworks achieving their intended ends as aesthetically good-making properties. The first criterion, as seen, fails to account for the value of absurdist plays. The second of these criteria is violated by Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, one of the great fictional characters. The third is not an appeal to utility in the earlier usual sense, but refers to aesthetic goals or ends. But these themselves can be evaluated, and not every intended end is worth achieving. Not every such achievement is aesthetically worthy.

3  Paradigm Works and Critics Hume himself seems to doubt his initial appeal to aesthetic rules, for he quickly changes the subject, first pointing out that such rules are not generally readily apparent and then suggesting another possible standard, those paradigm works in the canons of art and literature that have withstood the test of time. Once more, however, we cannot appeal directly to these works as our standard of taste since it is not clear how or even whether newer works must resemble them in their objective properties in order to have aesthetic value. Yet, Hume suggests that we can abstract the rules of art from these paradigm works. We need such an indirect method of identifying rules because, as noted, they will not be apparent to the average reader or viewer.

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According to Hume, we must seek to locate the rules of art in the properties of paradigm works, where these good- and bad-making properties are found “singly and in a high degree” (1987d, 235). Once we have located the rules by reference to paradigm works, we can dismiss as inadequate critics those who fail to appreciate the positive or negative value of these properties when these are present but not so intense or readily apparent. Once more his suggestion here is problematic. The problem is that properties of artworks are never isolated, even in canonical works. They always occur in combination with other properties that can affect their aesthetic values in the contexts of the works in question. It is clear at this point, however, that Hume has changed the subject again, at last approaching his final proposal for a standard of taste. What he discusses in the central part of the essay are the features that adequate or ideal critics must possess. These critics are the relatively few on whom the rules of art regularly operate. They are those in whom aesthetically valuable objective properties regularly cause pleasurable responses. Their judgments constitute, therefore, Hume tells us, the true standard of taste. Those aesthetic judgments or tastes that disagree with theirs can be dismissed. Some of the features of these critics are straightforward and unproblematic. Since fine works of art and literature contain many elements in complex relations, competent critics require first of all experience and sometimes training in how to appreciate them. They must be, as Hume puts it, practiced. They require multiple encounters with particular works and others of their kind. As pointed out, in earlier writings he noted that some objects immediately please and give rise to immediate judgments of beauty. But other aesthetic evaluations, similar to moral judgments based on social utility, require much reasoning to precede. The literary examples fall into the latter class. Thus competent critics must also, second, be adept at making comparisons. They must place the works being judged in the proper comparison classes in order to judge them accurately. Great works are excellent of their kind or style. Third, competent critics must be free from prejudice. For Hume this means more than not having a personal relation to the authors they judge. When judging works from other times and cultures, critics must be able to place themselves in the contexts of the originally intended audiences. They must disregard or correct for differences in cultural outlooks that might otherwise stand in the way of appreciating the works. The one exception noted by Hume is that of alien moral outlooks. Critics, he thinks, cannot be positively engaged by works that endorse objectionable moral views; nor should they. These features of ideal critics, as noted, seem relatively unproblematic, although there may be some inconsistency—not noted by Hume—between

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his requirements to place works in proper comparison classes and to place oneself in the historical contexts of original intended audiences. Adhering to the latter requirement would rule out comparisons with later works, which might nevertheless be relevant to aesthetic evaluation. But perhaps Hume would have denied this last claim. Or, he might have said that placing oneself in the intended audience’s position is essential to interpret a work, while a complete evaluation of the work might require comparisons that the original audience could not make. All these features of ideal critics are required in order to allow their central feature to operate properly: what Hume calls “delicacy of taste.” In an earlier essay, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” published in 1741, Hume describes fine taste as both an ability to finely discriminate all parts of a picture or poem and as the disposition to be emotionally moved by them (1987a, 4). In the mature essay he once more initially combines these abilities under the terms “delicacy of imagination” and “delicacy of taste” (Hume 1987d, 234–5). Later in the essay he distinguishes “strong sense” from “delicate sentiment” (Hume 1987d, 241). The ability to perceive all relevant parts of a work and their relations to each other is clearly required of competent critics. In fact, the articulation of such complex structures is the way we identify such critics. But the ability to react in the right way or with the right sentiments is more problematic as a means of identifying ideal critics. Here is where Hume is sometimes accused of circularity in his reasoning. Great works are those to which all competent critics react positively as the standard of taste, yet here competent critics seem to be the ones who react positively to the best works.

4  Questions Regarding Hume’s Critics In fact, three questions arise in regard to Hume’s final standard: (1) How do we identify the ideal critics? (2) Why are the judgments of such critics normative for us? (3) Will these critics agree in their judgments so as to settle aesthetic disagreements among us? Hume is aware of the first question and responds. The problem of identifying proper aesthetic judges is more severe than in the case of other response-dependent properties like colors, since most of us are not competent judges of artworks as opposed to colors. Aesthetic rules according to Hume are subtle and operate only on a small minority in special circumstances. We have seen that he holds that certain forms are naturally suited for pleasurable responses, yet the features of ideal critics are not natural, but the result of extensive experience or training. They are natural, if at all, only in the sense that such experience removes obstacles

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to their proper functioning. So how does Hume respond to this problem of identification? Hume can escape the charge of circularity if he can identify either ideal critics or great artworks and their properties independently of one another. He could identify the critics independently if he dropped the requirement that they be properly emotionally sensitive to works and maintained only the other requirements, including the ability to discriminate and relate all the parts of complex works. I suggested above that this latter ability is how we in fact identify competent critics (perhaps requiring also that they be otherwise emotionally normal). Yet Hume never considers this suggestion. He instead claims again that we can identify great artworks as those which stand the test of time, which are appreciated across different ages and cultures. We then identify competent critics by the way in which “they receive [such] productions of genius” (Hume 1987d, 243). We must use this circuitous route because, as noted above, we cannot specify the ways in which newer works must resemble older ones in order to have aesthetic value. We cannot specify rules of art despite Hume’s abstract claim to the contrary. (Earlier in the essay he claims that we can identify the rules by reference to the paradigm works and competent critics by their grasp of the rules [Hume 1987d, 237]. But if paradigms could teach us the rules, we would not need the critics.) As to our second question, why the judgments of ideal critics should take precedence over our more mundane tastes, the simplest answer is that these critics perceive complex works more accurately than we do. If such works are themselves of great aesthetic value, it must be their real properties that cause deep pleasurable responses, and ideal critics are better able to perceive these properties. Only if one is responding to correctly perceived properties of works can one expect or demand similar responses from others. Thus, if we are to assert our judgments at all, we must seek to perceive the works we judge as those with developed powers of discrimination do. Perhaps this is why Hume simply claims in the “Standard of Taste” that superior taste is universally acknowledged to be preferable (1987d, 242). But this last claim is questionable. While superior critics may get more pleasure than we do from complex works, they may get less pleasure from simpler and more obvious works. And finer discrimination and a larger comparison base do not always enhance appreciation. Those with perfect pitch may hear an orchestra as slightly off key, spoiling the performance, and comparing Karl Stamitz to Mozart only makes Stamitz sound worse. Hume could still claim (although he does not do so explicitly) that paradigm works in the canon offer deeper satisfactions than more superficial works, so that those who can appreciate these canonical works can best advise us how to derive such deeper pleasure from more recent creations.

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It is in earlier essays that Hume expands upon the benefits of superior taste. In “Of Eloquence” (orig. publ. 1742) he simply says that bad taste is due to ignorance, echoing what Plato said about morality and foreshadowing John Stuart Mill’s claim that those who experience both sorts of pleasure always prefer the higher (doubtful). In “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” Hume argues that superior taste, first, better enables us to control the pleasures available to us (1987a, 5), presumably by broadening the possible sources of pleasure. Second, it allows us to escape “the hurries of business.” Along these lines it can be claimed that more complex works occupy us more fully, offering a more complete escape from the messy affairs of our everyday pursuits. Third, people with superior tastes tend to associate with one another, forming close-knit minorities. Such groups tend to be strongly united by common feelings, and such social bonds are another benefit of good taste (Hume 1987a, 7). Finally, in his moral writing Hume suggests that serious attention to the arts develops finer emotions, softens one’s temperament, and so leads to virtue (1957, 170). This claim is far more subject to doubt: for every Verdi (good character), there seems to be a Wagner (bad character). Thus not only good taste, but artistic genius, seems to be independent of moral goodness. Deleting such hyperbole, Hume has still provided adequate indication of why we should prefer to have sophisticated tastes in art, of why the judgments of critics with such tastes should be normative for us.

5  Ultimate Relativity and Standards Turning finally to our third question, at the end of his mature essay Hume allows for “blameless diversity” in aesthetic evaluations, that is, disagreement even among fully competent critics. He is clear about the sources of such disagreements, but not so clear about their degree. The sources according to Hume are two: temperament that changes with age on the one hand, and cultural setting on the other hand. Young people might prefer romantic art; older people might prefer more reflective works (Hume 1987d, 244). Likewise, the preferences of Italians might differ from those of the English. At one point Hume says that these differences do not “confound all the boundaries of beauty,” but affect only the degrees of approval or disapproval of various works (1987d, 243). This implies that the same works should be judged good by competent critics, who should disagree only about how good they are. But later Hume notes that, unlike Italians, French and English critics might disapprove of a play by Machiavelli (Hume 1987d, 245). This implies deeper disagreements than those about degrees of positive response.

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In either case Hume must admit at the end that there are no absolute standards of taste, no single right evaluations of artworks or objective degrees of value that works possess. This means that, despite his explicit claims to the contrary, there are no strict rules of art either, no principles or laws that link objective properties of works with degrees of aesthetic value. In fact, despite these contrary claims, Hume himself indicates the two reasons why there are no such rules. The first lies in the ultimate differences in taste even among fully competent critics, which we have just seen Hume recognize. If evaluations are ultimately relative to different tastes, then there cannot be rules that objectively determine them. Second, in noting earlier that rules should be apparent only when objective aesthetic properties are found “singly and in high degree” (as they never are), Hume indirectly recognizes that combining properties in different contexts alters their aesthetic values. An objective feature of a particular work that makes it aesthetically better will not have positive value in the context of another work with different other features. A beautiful musical phrase in a Mozart symphony would sound awful in a piece by Stravinsky. This is another reason why there are no rules linking objective features with aesthetic values. Despite his admitted failure to provide an absolute standard of taste, Hume not only succeeds in providing standards or normative requirements on sound aesthetic judgments, but his account is also as plausible as any we have. If we are unfamiliar with the kind of work we are judging, if we lack knowledge of other works with which to compare it, if we are inattentive and so fail to discriminate the aesthetically relevant elements or relate them in a way that could best reveal their value, or if we are biased by idiosyncratic personal associations, then our aesthetic judgments will be unreliable. Certain judgments can therefore be dismissed even if there is no single correct one. We do in fact find disagreements even among our best critics, even different reactions to works in the canon. But the features exemplified by such critics are, as Hume claims, standards of taste. We must only seek out the judgments and explanations of competent critics whose tastes we generally share.

6  Postscript: Hume on Tragedy In one other essay not yet mentioned here, his “Of Tragedy” (orig. publ. 1757), Hume addresses another question in aesthetics that dates back to Plato and Aristotle. The question is why we feel positively, indeed seek out

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works that express and seemingly cause in us negative emotions such as sadness or fear. The answers that aestheticians have given are numerous, ranging from catharsis or release of negative feelings, to educating ourselves about our emotions, to learning to cope with negative emotions, to feeling good when in control of them, to the emotions themselves not being negative when they lack actual objects. Hume’s answer is unique, if not the most plausible of the set. Hume theorizes that when emotions combine, the stronger of the two dominates the weaker and transforms it. A negative emotion such as sadness turns positive when combined with a stronger positive feeling we derive from the perception of great beauty. Conversely, the positive feeling we get from beauty makes the emotion of sadness even stronger when it dominates the feeling of pleasure, as when a funeral speech is eloquent. Great tragic works of art are able to be experienced positively, while lesser such works are not. The problem with this theory is the lack of psychological evidence that emotions in fact combine in this way. Furthermore, the theory fails to explain why people seek out suspense novels and horror movies that frighten them without being very beautiful. Perhaps for these reasons this essay is not nearly so much discussed or so well received in contemporary aesthetics as is “Of the Standard of Taste.” That essay has clearly withstood the test of time and taken its place in the canon of seminal works in aesthetics.

Primary Sources Hume: 1961. A Treatise of Human Nature. Garden City, NY: Dolphin. Originally published 1740. 1987a. “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion.” In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Originally published 1741. 1987b. “Of Eloquence.” In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Originally published 1742. 1987c. “The Skeptic.” In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Originally published 1742. 1987d. “Of the Standard of Taste.” In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Originally published 1757. 1987e. “Of Tragedy.” In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Originally published 1757. 1957. An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Indianapolis, IN: BobbsMerrill. Originally published 1751.

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References and Further Reading Carroll, Noël. 1984. “Hume’s Standard of Taste.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 4: 181–94. Gracyk, Theodore. 1994. “Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52: 169–82. Hutcheson, Francis. 1971. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. New York: Garland. Originally published 1729. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 1976. “Hume and the Foundations of Taste.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 35: 201–15. Levinson, Jerrold. 2002. “Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60: 227–38. Mothersill, Mary. 1989. “Hume and the Paradox of Taste.” In G. Dickie, R. Sclafani, and R. Roblin (eds.), Aesthetics, 269–86. New York: St. Martin’s. Shelley, James. 1998. “Hume and the Nature of Taste.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56: 29–38.

8

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Elisabeth Schellekens

Kant’s aesthetic theory has a firm place within his “critical” philosophical project as a whole. In this respect, his account of aesthetic experience harbors explanatory ambitions far more extensive than any analyses of beauty and taste alone would appear to afford. Kant’s wider legacy is, in truth, an attempt to formulate a comprehensive system targeting not only the objects and subjects of experience in general but also the relation between them. This project, which includes examinations of the conceptual schemes at our disposal, the manner in which those schemes are applied to various aspects of the world, and how the subjective and objective features of reality influence one another, is developed mainly in his three principal philosophical treatises, or Critiques. The Critique of the Pvower of Judgment (Kant 2001) is the last work in this series, and contains an elaborate study of a kind of judgment—or, more specifically, a psychological process—that leads to a reflective act of judging. According to Kant, aesthetic judgment, conceived as one instance of “reflective judgment,”1 is to be understood in terms of a highly structured and sophisticated inquiry into a certain kind of perception, contemplation, and assessment.2 A distinctive feature of Kant’s theory is that the notion of the aesthetic employed is both broader and narrower than the concept we are familiar with today. On the one hand, it is narrower because Kant is exclusively concerned with beauty and the sublime. By “aesthetic,” Kant has a certain kind of experience in mind: an experience primarily linked to our awareness of the beautiful and the sublime as a matter of definition. His attention is therefore not directed at any of the other aesthetic qualities that contemporary philosophers tend to include in their investigations, such as being stylish, garish, dumpy, dainty, or even ugly.3 On the other hand, Kant’s use of the aesthetic is also broader than our current one, for it is derived from the ancient Greek aisthēsis and, as such, broadly refers to the “sensory” or that which is experienced through the senses. For Kant, aesthetic judgment

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centers around the pleasurable sensation that beauty gives rise to; and that subjective experience in turn reveals something important about the role of the sensory in our attempts to understand the world and our place in it.

1  Kant’s Project and Philosophical Aims While Kant is certainly not the first to examine beauty or aesthetic experience from a philosophical perspective, the approach adopted in the Critique of the Power of Judgment carves out a new area of conceptual analysis by introducing terms that significantly raise the philosophical stakes. Aesthetics, on the Kantian account, is first and foremost an investigation into the workings of our mind, and their epistemological reach into the external world. Aesthetic judgments are judgments of taste, where taste is defined as the “faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction” where “[t]he object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful” (2001, 5, 5:211). Now, for Kant, there are three general mental faculties, each with their own “faculty of cognition,” “a priori principles,” and “applications.” Whereas the understanding (Verstand) contains the constitutive a priori principles for  the faculty of cognition as applied to nature, and reason (Vernunft) contains the principles for the faculty of desire as applied to freedom, the power of judgment (Urteil) contains the principles of the feeling of aesthetic pleasure and displeasure. One of the main aims of the Critique of the Power of Judgment is to isolate those a priori principles—this, as we shall see, is no mean feat, especially in light of the claim that “[n]o objective principle of taste is possible” (2001, 34, 5:285). Generally speaking, Kant thus sets out to establish what we can have knowledge of or what there is “out there” for us to know: to what extent, if any, do the subjective aspects of experience delimit what we can legitimately say about the objective world? It is perhaps surprising, then, that Kant opens his third Critique by drawing a clear distinction between aesthetic and cognitive judgments, emphasizing that judgments of beauty do not share the cognitive aims of ordinary judgments and cannot yield knowledge in the same way. This is not to say that aesthetic judgment, already classified by Kant as a kind of reflective judgment in its own right, cannot exhibit some of the marks of cognitive judgments, as we shall soon see. Nor does it imply that aesthetic judgments, despite being judgments of taste, share all their features with other kinds of judgments based on sensation. As Kant writes: With regard to the agreeable, everyone is content that his judgment, which he grounds on a private feeling . . . be restricted merely to his own

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person . . . . It would be folly to dispute the judgment of another that is different from our own in such a matter, with the aim of condemning it as incorrect . . . [T]hus with regard to the agreeable, the principle Everyone has his own taste (of the senses) is valid. (2001, 7, 5:212)

However, [w]ith the beautiful it is entirely different. It would be ridiculous if . . . someone who prided himself on his taste thought to justify himself thus: “This object . . . is beautiful for me.” For he must not call it beautiful if it pleases merely him . . . [I]f he pronounces that something is beautiful, then he expects the very same satisfaction of others: he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone. (2001, 7, 5:212–13)

Aesthetic judgments are thus to be conceived as occupying some kind of middle ground between entirely objective cognitive judgments and purely subjective sensory ones. That is to say, while they are not straightforwardly objective ascriptions, neither are they limited to being individual reports of subjective states. Rather, aesthetic judgments capture something about the relation between the subjective and the objective that reaches beyond the restricted boundaries of either sphere. Understood from this perspective, the Critique of the Power of Judgment can thus be seen as an attempt to examine a very unique kind of judgment, one that by its very nature bridges the gap between mind and world.

2  Key Concepts 2.1  Aesthetic Experience: Freedom of the Faculties The starting point of Kant’s inquiry is the way in which our mental faculties interact in aesthetic experience. Developing the division with which he opens the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant offers us two models of how aesthetic judgments are made. In the case of ordinary cognitive judgments (e.g., “This is a rose”), our imagination (Einbildungskraft) provides a senseimpression which, although perceptually unified—or “synthesized” to use Kant’s terminology—lacks a particular label, so to speak (e.g., “rose”). That is to say, the imagination offers us the perceptual impression of a rose, even though we are not yet in a position to categorize or grasp it as such. In order for that to occur, we need the understanding to step in and apply the appropriate concept, rose, to the impression in question. The understanding

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thus “subsumes” the imagination’s sense-impression under the suitable “determinate concept” (e.g., rose), thereby rendering the cognitive judgment fully intelligible. With aesthetic experience, however, the psychology of judgment-making is different, for beauty cannot be, for Kant, a determinate concept in this sense. That is to say, when the focus of our experience is not something like “rosehood” but, rather, beauty itself (e.g., in “This [rose] is beautiful”), the understanding is unable to categorize our perceptual impression as beautiful, since there is no such concept for the understanding to apply to the sense-impression presented by the imagination. As a result, understanding and imagination enter into a harmonious state of “free play” in which neither of the faculties aim to subsume the material provided by the other. This state, Kant tells us, is pleasurable precisely in virtue of its freedom, and is what serves as ground for the aesthetic judgment.4 To use Kant’s words, [i]n order to understand whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of understanding to the object for cognition, but rather relate it by means of the imagination . . . to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The judgment of taste is therefore not a cognitive judgment, hence not a logical one, but is rather aesthetic by which is understood one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective. (2001, 1, 5:203)

Now, Kant’s commitment to the idea that there can be no determinate concept for beauty does not mean that there is no such notion in the first place, or that it is nonsensical. Rather, what Kant is eager to highlight is that there can be no rules by which the concept of beauty can be applied. In other words, there are no fundamental principles that serve as reliable guides to whether or why beauty can rightly be ascribed (or not) to our sense-impressions. Importantly, there can be no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful. Whether a garment, a house, a flower is beautiful: no one allows himself to be talked into his judgment about that by means of any grounds or fundamental principles. One wants to submit the object to one’s own eyes. (Kant 2001, 8, 5:215–16)5

Aesthetic judgments must thus always be based on firsthand perceptual experience (rather than, say, testimony) and cannot be reduced to any kind of regulated or inferential process.

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2.2  The Validity of Aesthetic Judgments: Universality and Necessity So far, we have established that Kant conceives of aesthetic judgment as crucially different from cognitive judgment in two respects: first, the mental operations underpinning the judgment-making process (i.e., the “free play” of the faculties); second, the evidential ground upon which the judgment is based (i.e., the sensation of pleasure). However, we also know that it would be wrong to assume that Kant takes these divergences to imply that the two kinds of judgment have nothing in common. Perhaps most importantly, inherent to aesthetic judgment (despite being a judgment of taste) is “a claim to the assent of everyone” (2001, 32, 5:281) since the beautiful is “the object of a necessary satisfaction” (2001, 22, 5:240). On Kant’s account, aesthetic judgments call for universal validity and are hence characterized by a powerful normativity. To say that “Everyone has his special taste” would be to dismiss the very possibility of aesthetic taste, and to deny that there could be aesthetic judgments “that could make a rightful claim to the assent of everyone.” (2001, 7, 5:213)

While we may agree with this, a question arises as to how the claim to universality and necessity can possibly be squared with the idea that pleasure is the evidential ground of aesthetic judgments. Kant’s response to this problem lies in his conception of a sensus communis (communal sense) or the idea that all, or nearly all, human beings are endowed with sufficiently similar mental abilities to ensure that we undergo suitably similar experiences—if I experience something as beautiful then you will, too. As far as justifying our aesthetic judgments is concerned, we can thus appeal to this commonality: if my imagination and understanding engage in “free play” in a certain context, then—all other things being equal—so will yours. Interestingly, this communal sense acquires a particularly significant dimension in light of the claim that there can be no rules for beauty (in contradistinction to ordinary cognitive judgments), no governing principles to support our aesthetic judgments. Kant himself points to the difficulty of his position in the “Antinomy of Taste,” where he calls attention to the fact that although we frequently do argue about taste and its “claim to the necessary assent of others,” we cannot establish a judgment’s appropriateness “by means of proofs” since “[t]he judgment of taste is not based on concepts” (2001, 56, 5:338–9), that is, on rules for beauty. As a result, the necessity in question here is “exemplary.” That is to say, rather than depending on principles or

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law-like regulations, aesthetic normativity is rooted in examples of beautiful things and our common experience of them. The absence of foundational principles on which to ground our aesthetic judgments is thus superseded by the shared psychological abilities that allow us, as human beings, to perceive, contemplate, and assess the external world with the same “aesthetic eyes,” so to speak. The explanatory power Kant places on this communal sense is thus of the kind we may expect from a universal predisposition to undergo similar experiences. But the experience in question here is still the sensation of pleasure that results from the harmony of the faculties—the only “evidence” we can have of being in the presence of something beautiful is still the feeling of pleasure. The challenge for Kant is, then, to secure the possibility of combining two seemingly incompatible ideas, namely, the objective ambitions of aesthetic judgments with their thoroughly subjective ground.

2.3  The Ground of Aesthetic Judgments: Pleasure and Disinterestedness Kant’s answer to that challenge is to qualify the kind of pleasure at work in aesthetic experience very early on in his account. Aesthetic pleasure, he tells us, is not just any kind of sensory enjoyment or gratification. In fact, it is fundamentally dissimilar to the enjoyment we may experience when we gratify our senses (such as when we scratch an itch) or when we do the morally right thing (such as help an elderly person cross the road). Kant distinguishes between the satisfaction of the good, sensory gratification, and aesthetic pleasure and adds that the pleasure occasioned by the harmony of the faculties is unique in being “disinterested.” By this Kant means that aesthetic pleasure is not focused on any function the object may fulfill. Instead, disinterested pleasure is pleasure in something merely for its own sake, or for the sake of its form alone. In consequence, aesthetic judgment is “indifferent with regard to the existence of an object” (2001, 5, 5:209) in the sense that it is not aimed at nor about the purpose the object in question may serve. For Kant, if the question is whether something is beautiful, one does not want to know whether there is anything that is or that could be at stake, for us or for someone else, in the existence of the thing, but rather how we judge it in mere contemplation . . . . Everyone must admit that a judgment about beauty in which there is mixed the least interest is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste. (2001, 2, 5:204–5)

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Disinterestedness thus differentiates aesthetic pleasure from other kinds of pleasure too idiosyncratic to ground universally valid judgments by detaching aesthetic contemplation from functional considerations, so to speak. In other words, any purpose that the object of aesthetic appreciation may serve does not enter into the reflective act of judging it beautiful.

2.4  What Aesthetic Judgments Capture: Purposiveness without Purpose We judge something to be beautiful when it feels “just right” or when it gives us the impression of having successfully met some end. However, as should now be clear, aesthetic judgments can be based neither entirely on purely private sensations nor on the notion of perfection, since such judgments not only lay claim to universal validity and enjoy a well-founded normativity but also cannot be reduced to rules or any application thereof. In Kant’s words, aesthetic judgments are not about “objective purposiveness” (or the purposiveness of objects) targeted at “the sort of thing [an object] is supposed to be” (2001, 15, 5:228). Having said that, there is room in Kant’s theory for another kind of purposiveness, one which, although it is felt (being based in the “free play” of the faculties), is nonetheless capable of underpinning Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment: “subjective purposiveness” or “purposiveness without a purpose.” Crucially, that which sets our faculties into free play is not the “matter” of sensation (i.e., the actual sense-impression) but, rather, its “form,” so that in enjoying something’s form what we grasp is, precisely, that the thing in question is suitable for inducing the imagination and understanding into harmonious free play. And this, for Kant, means that the forms that support the universal validity claim must be “final” or “ends” for perception and contemplation. Beautiful things can thus be said to have the “form of finality” since their purposiveness is one we ascribe to their form, and their form is such as to benefit from being “just right” for setting our faculties into free play. In that sense at least, they can be said to have met their end. Most importantly of all, this purposiveness constitutes “the principle of taste,” which in turn is “the subjective principle of the power of judgment in general” (2001, 35, 5:286), grounded in the feeling of pleasure and applied to art.

2.5  Aesthetic Judgments about Art: Aesthetic Ideas and Genius It should be clear, then, that according to Kant’s account, when we discern and contemplate beautiful form we are, fundamentally, engaging with one of

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our main mental faculty’s guiding principles. But what about when we create such form? What about the artists who seek to produce it? In addition to being endowed with the faculty of taste and sharing the common sense that grounds the universal and necessary character of aesthetic judgment, artists seek to improve their taste by examining and engaging with examples of beautiful form in both nature and art. The artist’s goal is therefore neither to reach generalizations about what most people find aesthetically pleasing nor to formulate some rule that could serve as some kind of a priori guideline. Rather, the artist examines exemplars of universally and necessarily pleasing form in order to be able to re-create it in art. To be aesthetically valuable, artworks must not only have beautiful form but also be capable of “animat[ing] the soul” or of conveying “spirit” (2001, 49, 5:313). That special something that certain artists can transmit through the creation of an artwork is what Kant calls an “aesthetic idea,” or a “representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for . . . language [to] fully attain or make it intelligible” (2001, 49, 5:314). Being expressive of aesthetic ideas shows a work of fine art to be a work of “genius,” which, in turn, is “a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given . . . [and] consequently originality must be its primary property” (2001, 46, 5:307–8). The aim of genius is thus to produce something that can serve as a paradigmatic example of what a work of fine art is and which can be followed (although not copied). In other words, genius really consists in the happy relation, which no science can teach and no diligence learn, of finding ideas for a given concept . . . and . . . hitting upon the expression for these, through which the subjective disposition of the mind that is thereby produced . . . can be communicated to others. (Kant 2001, 49, 5:317)

Artists of genius are thus those who can adequately express ideas in such a way as to animate our imagination and understanding without thereby relying on rules or other restrictions. Beautiful form infused with “spirit” can therefore engage us in a pleasurable (and extended) aesthetic contemplation, and it is this feature that endows some artworks with the stamp of genius.

2.6  Kinds of Aesthetic Judgments: Pure and Impure— Beautiful and Sublime The judgments of beauty characterized by the form of finality we have discussed so far are undoubtedly the main target of Kant’s inquiry. Yet, even

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though Kant would not, unlike most contemporary philosophers, classify judgments of the dainty or the dumpy as aesthetic strictly speaking, there is room in his account for at least some diversity. First, Kant draws an important distinction between judgments of “free” and “dependent” beauty, or between “pure” and “impure” judgments of taste. Whereas the “first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be, the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance with it.” Dependent beauty (e.g., the beauty of churches) is “ascribed to objects that stand under the concept of a particular end” (2001, 16, 5:229), and so there is a sense in which the object’s end or purpose does enter into the judgment of its beauty.6 Instances of free beauty (e.g., the beauty of flowers or birds), on the other hand, please merely “for themselves” and the corresponding judgments are not in any sense reliant on the object in question attaining some kind of perfection or on fulfilling its purpose. No less crucial is the division Kant outlines between judgments of beauty and another kind of reflective judgment that lays claim to universal validity, namely, that of the sublime. The beautiful and the sublime differ mainly in two respects: first, the sublime involves “ideas of reason” (i.e., those of cognition and morality) rather than aesthetic ideas; second, the sublime is not concerned with the form of finality presented by objects so much as with the representation of phenomena that seem limitless, and to that extent even formless. Thus for Kant, it is noteworthy here that even if we have no interest at all in the object . . . still its mere magnitude, even if it is considered as formless, can bring with it a satisfaction that is universally communicable, hence it may contain a consciousness of a subjective purposiveness in the use of our cognitive faculties: but not a satisfaction in the object, as in the case of the beautiful (since it can be formless) . . . rather in the enlargement of the imagination in itself. (2001, 25, 5:249)

The sublime invokes an impression of awesome grandeur, even enormity, and captures “that which is absolutely great,” such as the pyramids of Egypt (2001, 26, 5:252), “the dark and raging sea” (2001, 26, 5:256), and “the starry heavens” (2001, 29, 5:270). These are sublime in virtue of their size and force—they make us aware of our physical limitations in comparison to them.7 It is interesting to note that, of all the notions Kant introduces in his aesthetic theory, that of the sublime is one of the most difficult to grasp. At times, his conception of it seems almost to merge with the beautiful; at others, it seems to be of a different dimension altogether. Either way, Kant’s

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account is substantially enriched by the fact that, although his focus is always on a specific kind of experience—a particular form of interaction between mind and world—he imposes only the widest limits on what kind of form the object of this experience can take, be it a horse or the starry heavens.

3  Kant’s Influence In virtue of his developing an aesthetic theory so resolutely lodged within a broader philosophical project, Kant’s long-lasting influence has operated in two distinct ways. On the one hand, Kant’s theory has most probably contributed more than any other to positioning aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in its own right, albeit one that remains closely connected not only to the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics but also the philosophy of religion and moral philosophy. For Kant’s treatment of the sublime offers close connections with the sphere of religion, and, famously, beauty is said to be the symbol of morality (2001, 59). Aesthetics, conceived as an independent, although not isolated, area of inquiry, begins to form a significant part of the philosophical continuum largely due to Kant’s third Critique. On the other hand, Kant’s aesthetic theory has had a profound effect on debates within aesthetics in both the Continental and Anglo-American or Analytic traditions. Certainly in the case of the latter, Kant’s original treatment of the subject has shaped not only the questions we still ask today but also the manner in which they continue to be tackled—principally, the layered analysis of aesthetic experience, the concern for the epistemological reach of aesthetic judgments, and the ontology of aesthetic properties. Perhaps most importantly, Kant’s theory highlights three central ideas. The first is the scrutiny paid to the notion of aesthetic pleasure itself, and to the carefully delineated role accorded to it in the distinction between aesthetic judgments and cognitive judgments. The second is the insistence on the normative force of aesthetic judgments and their aspirations to universality. The third is the notion of aesthetic perception. This he takes to be not only the sole means by which we can acquire the appropriate grounds for aesthetic judgments, but also the concept through which aesthetic discernment is primarily to be understood. For the disinterestedness that qualifies aesthetic pleasure is more than a mere criterion for the kind of pleasure in question; it is a pointer to Kant’s conception of aesthetic experience as a particular way of engaging with the world and of grasping its full character.8 None of this is to say that these notions did not play key roles in earlier accounts of aesthetic experience. Hume, for example, emphasizes precisely these aspects of the

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aesthetic in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste.” What is remarkable in Kant, however, is the degree of systematic analysis of the concepts introduced in order to explain the phenomenon at hand, resulting in a considerably richer and more complex theory as a whole. While it is beyond dispute that Kant poses some of the most interesting questions concerning the aesthetic, the matter of whether we take Kant to have provided satisfactory answers to these questions is not. Generally speaking, the third Critique has met with controversy ever since its first appearance in 1790, and many readers have found its numerous loose ends and ambiguous terminologies to make for more trouble than truth. To twenty-first-century philosophers, some recurring difficulties have to do with the seemingly outdated and idiosyncratic definitions of, among other things, the main mental faculties and their interactions. Other problems arise from the vague formulation of obscure notions such as “purposiveness without purpose” or “form of finality.” Finally, internal inconsistencies appear to plague the very idea that, for example, dependent beauty might be a kind of beauty in its own right despite relying on the notion of perfection and function. Likewise, on these lines, Kant seems committed to the unlikely suggestion that genuinely negative aesthetic judgments are simply impossible. These factors notwithstanding, the philosophy outlined in the third Critique is possessed of a range and depth of thought about the aesthetic with which it is difficult to find comparison. It is also true that there are very few subsequent theories that have not made use of Kant’s theory in some way. Above and beyond the explanatory power held by the key concepts outlined in the final Critique, perhaps this is also a reflection of the evidence of profound concern on Kant’s part to link our aesthetic experience of art and nature to our lives as rational and moral agents. In other words, perhaps it is because Kant’s account of beauty is so ambitious both in its internal analytic rigor and in its possible application to the entire scope of what is valued by human beings, that we just do not seem able to stray very far away from the milestones he has laid out for us.

Notes 1 For Kant, a reflective judgment is a judgment that seeks to find “the universal for the given particular” (2001, Introduction IV, 179), as opposed to determining judgments that aim to subsume particulars under given universals. 2 The Critique of the Power of Judgment contains two main Parts: the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” and the “Critique of the Teleological

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Power of Judgment.” The common aim of these two parts is to shed light on the faculty of judgment in general. Kant further divides the first part into two Books: the “Analytic of the Beautiful” and the “Analytic of the Sublime.” I concentrate on the first of those two Books. Although some of these qualities are mentioned in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, they don’t fall within the category of the aesthetic for Kant. For more on this question, see the sections on to the agreeable and the charming (2001, sects. 3, 5, 7, 13, 29, 42, and 51). For a particularly clear exposition of this twofold structure, see Janaway (1997). For Kant, only firsthand perceptual experience can serve as starting point for aesthetic judgment. This idea, nowadays better known as the “principle of acquaintance,” has been widely adhered to in the twentieth century. Lately, however, there has been some discussion about its applicability. For more on this question, see Budd (2003) and Sibley (1965). We will briefly return to the notion of dependent beauty in the next section. As McCloskey explains, there are two phases to Kant’s judgments of the sublime: (i) negative phase (unpleasant and “contrapurposive”); (ii) positive phase (pleasant and purposive). Also, for Kant, there are two different kinds of sublime: the mathematical and the dynamical (Cf. McCloskey 1987, 94–104). Kant’s notion of disinterestedness, generally interpreted as a special kind of attitude adopted in aesthetic contemplation—aesthetic attitude—is characterized as a unique way of perceiving or grasping the aesthetic quality of a certain situation. For more on this notion, see Dickie (1964) and Stolnitz (1978).

Primary Sources Kant: 2001. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References and Further Reading Budd, Malcolm. 2003. “The Acquaintance Principle.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 43: 386–92. Dickie, George. 1964. “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 1: 56–65.

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Gorodeisky, K. 2010. “A New Look at Kant's View of Aesthetic Testimony.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 50 (1): 53–70. Guyer, Paul. 1987. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. New York: Cambridge University Press. Guyer, Paul. 2006. “The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited.” In Rebecca Kukla (ed.), Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Project, 162–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Fiona. 2007. Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology: Form and World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Janaway, Christopher. 1997. “Kant’s Aesthetics and the ‘Empty Cognitive Stock.’” Philosophical Quarterly, 47: 459–76. Kukla, Rebecca, ed. 2006. Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Project. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCloskey, Mary A. 1987. Kant’s Aesthetic. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Savile, Anthony. 1993. Kantian Aesthetics Pursued. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sibley, Frank. 1965. “Aesthetic and Non-aesthetic.” Philosophical Review, 74: 135–59. Stolnitz, Jerome. 1978. “The ‘Aesthetic Attitude’ in the Rise of Modern Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36: 409–22. Wenzel, Christian H. 2005. An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems. Oxford: Blackwell. Wenzel, Christian H. 2009. “Kant’s Aesthetics: Overview and Recent Literature.” Philosophy Compass, 4 (3): 380–406.

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G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) Richard Eldridge

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel lectured on aesthetics in Heidelberg in 1818 and then in Berlin in 1820–1, 1823, 1826, and 1828–9. The text that we know as Hegel’s Aesthetics was in fact compiled, edited, and published posthumously, in 1835, by the art historian H. G. Hotho, primarily from the last set of Hegel’s lecture notes, supplemented by notes taken by students and by Hotho’s own emendations. The earlier lecture notes were subsequently found and have now been published in German, though the Hotho edition remains the standard text in Hegel’s official Werke. This edition is the one translated into English as Hegel’s Aesthetics by T. M. Knox in 1975. It has been argued convincingly by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, the most important German scholar of Hegel’s philosophy of art, that Hotho in preparing his text distorted Hegel’s views, primarily by suppressing qualifications and revisions and by overemphasizing Hegel’s concern with artistic beauty at the expense of his actual engagement with the meaningfulness of art (beauty to one side), especially in modernity. While Gethmann-Siefert has done important work in pointing to the significance of the earlier lectures, it is also possible to read the standard text with her warnings in mind and to focus on Hegel’s account of the meaningfulness of modern works of art as it appears in the text prepared by Hotho.

1  Hegel as a Theorist of Modern Art Hegel approaches the philosophy of art as a distinctly modern theorist of the arts. First, he discusses the major modern, so-called fine arts—architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature (epic, dramatic, and lyric poetry, with brief references to prose fiction)—and not, for example, gardening, weaving, book illumination, or vase painting. (Hegel of course did not know

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film, television, video art, conceptual art, or performance art.) Second, the major problems about art that Hegel treats are the familiar problems of the significance of art within modern culture. In contrast with the successes of modern natural science in offering a person-independent representation of the physical world as a system of material substances undergoing changes according to laws, art traffics in imitations, or imaginatively constructed, often fictive representations that aim at involving an audience imaginatively and emotionally. In the modern world, art is also no longer firmly embedded in cult, ritual, or religion. Modern artists working in any medium are largely free to choose their subject matters and methods of artistic rendering, without subservience to the needs of religious representation. Hegel distinguishes between free art (freie Kunst) and subservient art (dienende Kunst) that serves aims extrinsic to art, as in industrial, technological, or practical arts such as the design of tools or useful machines. Only the former is the proper subject matter of the philosophy of art. Once the making and the reception of works of art are significantly free from either religious or practical purposes, and once it is clear that artworks represent subject matters for the sake of imaginative and emotional involvement, it is then all but inevitable to ask what the point of the practices of making and responding to art is. Is art a serious business or not, in comparison with, say, either science or religion? Or is it a matter primarily of entertainment or idle pleasure, so that no failure to know anything or to be committed to anything attaches to anyone who simply does not care about art? It may be thought that one likes or does not like certain works as one pleases, and the place of works of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature in a serious educational curriculum may come to seem questionable. And if works of art have no serious, extrinsic importance, practical or cognitive, then how can we tell which things are works of art at all? The piano works of Mozart, the paintings of Leonardo, and the novels of Goethe are all very different from one another, not to mention the millions of variations of medium, subject matter, and treatment found in the productions of more minor or amateur artists. If we cannot regard certain central works as addressing an important problem of human life in an especially successful way, then how, if at all, can we speak of works of art as members of a clear and identifiable kind? Perhaps the word “art” is nothing more than an honorific term that is empty of descriptive content. Though he addresses these central questions about the nature and value of modern fine art, or free art, Hegel’s approach to them is strikingly different from that of many modern philosophers of art. To begin with, unlike Hutcheson, Hume, and Kant, or in the twentieth century Monroe Beardsley, the problems of evaluation and of the justification of judgments of taste play

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no role in Hegel’s theory of art. Hegel takes it more or less for granted that there is a broad consensus, albeit with very rough edges, about what the most central media of art at various historical times have been and about what the most important achievements within those media are. It is simply out of the question, for Hegel, that anyone could deny the distinctive significance for their cultures of Homer’s epics, the Greek sculptures of Phidias and Praxiteles, the religious paintings of Giotto, Bellini, or Raphael, the music of Bach and Mozart, or the poetry of Goethe. Undertaking to settle borderline cases exactly by reference to some postulated procedure for decision is a fool’s errand. What is important for the philosophy of art is that certain works in certain media at certain historical moments have been important within their cultures, and the central task of the philosophy of art is to give an account of this importance. Second, Hegel locates the significance of art in its role in cultural life in general, not in relation to the psychological needs of individuals. Unlike Hutcheson, Hume, and Kant, Hegel treats art as an essentially historical and cultural phenomenon. Rather than talking of the needs of human individuals, without reference to any historical epoch or culture, for images of freedom, for “deep” pleasure, or for metaphysical reassurance, Hegel instead undertakes to characterize how different forms of art under changing historical and cultural conditions have satisfied collectively experienced needs in strikingly different ways. While Hegel offers a general characterization of the task of art as such for all human beings at all times— art is the sensuous appearance of Absolute Spirit—it is also integral to his view that Spirit develops itself historically in relation to human life. We may take Absolute Spirit to be, very roughly, the union of collective, human rational activity at a historical moment with its proper object, that is, with the forms of social and individual life at a given moment that that rational activity is essentially devoted to understanding, justifying, and sustaining. Because what human beings collectively find most worth doing changes historically—both as their technological situation changes and as their understanding of their own needs and interests develops (thus affecting their technologies)—what art is concerned to express changes. What is, for human beings, highest—the forms of life and activity that predominantly solicit and demand their allegiance—changes, as both social life and the understanding of values develop from the world of the early Mesopotamian civilizations to the worlds of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and medieval and modern Europeans. As a result, both what is to be expressed by art and the material media that are appropriate to artistic expression change and develop as well. Spirit “generates out of itself works of fine art as the first reconciling middle term between pure [but undeveloped, abstract, and empty] thought and what

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is merely external, sensuous, and transient, between nature and finite reality [on the one hand] and the infinite freedom of conceptual thinking [on the other]” (Hegel 1975, 8), as human beings seek to determine the appropriate uses of their rational powers to construct a way of life and to express their determinations in sensuous, material, artistic forms.

2  Art’s Function and the History of Art Given his social, collective, and function-oriented understanding of the nature and task of art as a historical phenomenon, Hegel proceeds, at once both normatively and descriptively, to characterize in more detail how specific media of art and how certain central works within those media have been historically salient in fulfilling art’s function. His treatment is neither “neutral” and purely descriptive—all philosophical thinking is bound up in the discernment of functions and values—nor purely prescriptive—it is not the task of philosophy to lay down rules for art a priori, without regard for how artists have historically discovered what will work at specific moments to fulfill art’s function. Instead he proceeds, as he puts it, lemmatically (Hegel 1975, 24), taking for granted art’s function in response to the development of Spirit, and then picking out various important works and describing in more detail exactly how they fulfill art’s function in their specific combinations of materials, forms, and subject matters. As a result, given both the selectivity of Hegel’s choice of examples and his extraordinarily broad-brush narrative of humanity’s developments, it can seem as though Hegel’s elucidations of art’s powers are arbitrary and heavy-handed: the product of his own less than well-founded version of an only semi-secularized Christian redemption story and of his own haphazard preferences and happenstance encounters with specific works. Two thoughts, however, can help to moderate this appearance. First, Hegel’s account of the functions that art serves historically is plausible enough in immediately anthropological terms, independently of his grand story about humanity’s development. As Hegel poignantly observes, [Man] has the impulse, in whatever is directly given to him, in what is present to him externally, to produce himself and therein equally to recognize himself. This aim he achieves by altering external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics. Man does this in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to

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enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself. Even a child’s first impulse involves this practical alteration of external things; a boy throws stones into the river and now marvels at the circles drawn in the water as an effect in which he gains an intuition of something that is his own doing. This need runs through the most diversiform phenomena up to that mode of self-production in external things which is present in the work of art. (1975, 31)

The claims that the making of works of art originates in impulses of this kind, that these impulses then develop as we change in relation to our social forms of life, and that audiences look to works of art in order to participate in the satisfaction of such impulses afford a compelling starting point for rooting the production and reception of works of art—something present in all cultures—in deep, shared, but historically evolving human needs. Second, by attending to central cases of historically important art, Hegel fills in the details of his account of the historical development of art in an illuminating way. Throughout his historical survey, Hegel emphasizes that an understanding of the work—perhaps less than fully articulated, but nonetheless present within practices of reception—is itself essential to the artwork itself. As the expression in sensuous form of what human beings hold to be highest as a way of life, the artwork is an essentially communicative phenomenon. It articulates—in sensuous materials—a historically salient sense of what it might be for shared rational activity to find satisfaction in a way of life. The artwork does this through inviting and sustaining a variety of responses, including awe, reverence, appropriation in cult, worship, and “freer” modern, individual audience identification with the artwork as a crystallization of attention and gesture. Although in modernity, where individuals are freer to choose more specific and differentiated courses of individual life than were available in more traditional cultures, there is considerable scope for an individual artist’s choice of subject matter, materials, and manner of working, and also for variations in individual audience response, the artwork remains in its essence, or successfully in its central instances, a vehicle of the articulation, expression, and communication of shared impulses and possibilities of self-recognition. It is culturally situated and culturally communicative; even where it is distinctively original, it is not the product of any arbitrary, chthonic, self-standing individual psychology alone. Combining technical mastery, internalization of the history of achievements in a medium, and awareness of the shape of rational activity in social life, the artist must find, more than arbitrarily invent, a way to speak in artistic forms to a historical present.

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Hegel divides the history of art into four distinct phases. Strikingly, these phases are distinguished from one another primarily by reference to which form of art, given its material possibilities of expression, is most appropriate to the stage of development and self-understanding that rational activity has reached. Though many forms of art exist simultaneously in many historical moments, only one is centrally suited in any epoch to the task of Spirit’s sensuous expression. Hegel finds the beginnings of art as the expression of Spirit within the cults and religious practices of ancient Persia. The Zoroastrians worshipped light as the absolute source of all growth and value, but were able to express this understanding only in the most abstract and indeterminate forms, in for example, towers oriented as sites of religious ritual. The towers of Babel and Bal in their undifferentiated verticality express unarticulated awe directed at the sun, while their labor-intensive physical construction for this end unites peoples in the activity of expression. The lingams and distorted figures of ancient India express a similar abstract and undeveloped understanding of a natural life force as what is to be revered. In giving vague, indeterminate expression in sensuous forms to an understanding of what is sacred, the works of the ancient Persians and Indians stand as forms of pre-art, highlighting the origins of all art in collective religious impulses. Art proper begins with the Egyptians, the first people to develop a conception of the immortality of the soul in relation to the body. In the Colossi of Memnon at Luxor, in the figures of the Sphinx, and finally in the pyramids as tombs in which the body is preserved for further life, one finds an essentially abstract understanding of continuing life and its value. In virtue of the abstract referentiality of these works to continuing life, Hegel dubs this phase of art Symbolic. Architecture, specifically the building of such abstractly referential works rather than, say, of dwellings or places of work, is the medium of art naturally suited in its heavy, space-occupying materiality to this abstract referentiality, and it is the dominant form of art in its symbolic phase. The transition to the subsequent phase begins when the artificers of such works become increasingly aware of the significance of their own labors in giving particularized shapes to the sculptural figures they created, initially as decorations and supplements to predominantly architectural works, but later as self-standing works on their own. The second phase of art proper is the classical phase of the ancient Greeks. Here the gods are presented as human figures fully realized in sculpture, the central form of art in its classical period. In the work of classical Greek sculpture, the god or, later, the hero or athlete or public figure, is fully sensuously present. Hegel compares the Greek sculpture in its living presence to a thousandeyed Argus (1975, 154) that manifests its sensuous meaningfulness to its

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audiences in their physical space, as it serves as a focus of worship and of the self-celebration of the Greek way of life. The understanding of the sacred that is expressed is no longer abstractly referential. Instead the sensuous presence of the sculpture as a living, meaningful unity of form and material expresses reverence for Greek achieved humanity. During this phase, and only during this phase, art is the highest, most adequate form of expression of the human self-understanding of the sacred. The third phase of art proper is modern or, in Hegel’s terminology, Romantic art. Greek self-confidence in the achieved humanity of the male Greek aristocracy broke down under the pressures of trade and increasing ancient cosmopolitanism. In the Roman form of life, both citizens and aliens came to live under forms of imperial law governing commercial transactions. As trade increased, individuals living under Roman rule found themselves increasingly forced to draw back from automatic immersion in any givens of social life, in order to ask themselves: what is expected of me in this transaction and by the law? How might I as an individual (rather than naturally, as a Greek) regulate my conduct in these circumstances? Christianity, as a religion of initiation through baptism and conversion, gave similar prominent expression to a sense of the powers of individuals to shape their courses of life. As a result of these developments in socially embodied self-understanding, modern or Romantic art takes inwardness as its proper subject matter. Inwardness—a sense within the person of revering or honoring something, which sense is to be expressed continuously in future action—and its proper objects are now what is highest for us. The artistic media properly suited to expressing this sense of the importance of inwardness in sensuous forms are, successively, painting, music, and poetry (lyrical and dramatic literature). In contrast with sculpture, the flat surface of a painting can show not only a single object or a local group of objects, but an object, in particular a human figure, in relation to a larger environment and horizon that might contain anything. Hence a painting can show a human figure devoted to or thinking about something of importance, preeminently the devotion of the Madonna to the child and the devotion of Jesus in his suffering to his task. The human sensuous beauty of Greek sculpture is abandoned in favor of the depiction of inwardness in relation to its surroundings and objects of devotion. In addition, the painting is made for a beholder, who must be conscious of his or her position and so of himself or herself as an individual. Instead of existing as a self-standing object in a public space that it inhabits on its own, a painting is essentially for a viewer. In many of its central instances, modern painting determines just one point of view (opposite the vanishing point) as primary for seeing the significance of what is presented. In the initial

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phases of the depiction of religious themes in Renaissance Italy, Giotto and Bellini picked up Byzantine motifs of reverence, but developed techniques of perspective, coloring, and the rendering of landscapes and multiple figures. Religious painting reaches its heights of technical accomplishment with Raphael, but begins soon thereafter to decline into Baroque mannerism as a result of the pursuit of increasingly dramatic effects oriented toward the painterly surface. A late phase of successful painting appears in Dutch and Flemish painting of everyday life, as in the Van Eycks and David Teniers, where the music of colors is used to celebrate and accept modern, domestic, independent life. Music develops the expression of inwardness even further, as it abstracts from all depiction. Its material is vanishing sound, organized into overall plots of “cadenced interjection” (Hegel 1975, 903) that represent abstractly the plights and possibilities of subjectivity. By organizing their acoustic material, composers invite audiences to follow and dwell in patterns of development, involving thematic statement, complication and resistance, and resolution. In its abstraction from definite depiction, music resembles architecture, but, unlike architecture, it is a form of art that is generated by and addressed to modern inwardness. Poetry combines the temporal development of music with the specific representationality of painting. It is the universal modern art, the art most adequate to rendering anything in its significance in relation to human life and feeling. Hegel discusses ancient epic, especially Homer, as a precursor to modern poetry, but differing from it in its orientation to collective, tribal values and to a cruder form of technological life, where inwardness was not of importance. Dramatic poetry reaches one pinnacle of development with Sophocles and his depictions of collisions of right with itself, as in the clash in Antigone between Creon’s insistence on public order and Antigone’s standing on the values of family and piety. Among modern dramatists, Shakespeare is preeminent in his ability to depict fully individualized, passionately ambitious, articulate characters whose ego-driven individuality sets them at odds with their social circumstances, leading often to their tragic downfall, as the rights of reasonable modern social life must be reasserted, but sometimes to their comic self-overcoming. Modern lyric poetry is able to take into view any subject matter whatsoever, from daffodils in a field to the French Revolution, with the aim of achieving through the presentation freedom “not from but in feeling” (Hegel 1975, 1112). Though his treatment of it is exceedingly brief, Hegel notes that modern fiction, as in Cervantes and Sterne, can develop the “prose of life” (1975, 1107), in such a way that an attitude of “objective humor” (1975, 609, 1235)—that is, bemused acceptance of the happenstances of life—can be expressed and cultivated for an audience.

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In each of the modern arts of painting (after its initial religious phase), music, and literature, and preeminently in literature, the task and achievement of modern, Romantic art is to express imaginative and emotional attentiveness to the particularities of modern life rather than, as it was with the Greeks, to embody the most adequate understanding of what is highest. That latter task is now allotted first to religion and then to philosophy. Hence “art, considered its highest vocation” as the most adequate form of human self-understanding “is and remains for us a thing of the past” (Hegel 1975, 11). We no longer worship art or worship by means of art; our attitude toward art involves more enjoyment, distantiation, and critical reflection. But this is neither to say that art disappears nor that it is insignificant for us. It is instead freed from direct subservience to (often inchoate) religious impulses, so that it may now explore and reconcile us to quite particular circumstances of life and feeling. As noted above, it is possible to find Hegel’s metaphysics of Spirit or rational activity—as essentially aiming at the achievable end of reasonable, freedom-embodying, and satisfying social life—to be heavy-handed: a lastgasp, implausible refiguring of a Christian theodicy. Hegel seems, moreover, insensitive to the interest of the forms of radical artistic experimentalism (already discernible in his lifetime in the writings of Jean Paul) that would lead to modernism and post-modernism. Hegel remains always concerned more with art as a social phenomenon involving communicativeness than as a form of iconoclasm that resists social life. But despite these difficulties, Hegel’s ability to organize the histories of the arts into a single overarching narrative, his connection of that narrative with the development of social life more broadly, and his detailed insights into the historical saliencies and material possibilities of meaning of individual forms of art are unmatched by any other philosopher of art. The works of other, later, function-oriented philosophers of art, art historians, and theorists of art (such as Gyorgy Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Erwin Panofsky, R. G. Collingwood, John Dewey, Theodor Adorno, and Arthur Danto) would be inconceivable in the absence of Hegel’s work, and his specific understanding of art in relation to modern life can stand comparison with the best of their insights.

Primary Sources Hegel: 1975. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols. T. M. Knox (trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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References and Further Reading Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie. 2005. Einführung in Hegels Ästhetik. München: Wilhelm Fink. Houlgate, Stephen, ed. 2007. Hegel and the Arts. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kaminsky, Jack. 1962. Hegel on Art. Albany: State University of New York Press. Moland, Lydia L. 2019. Hegel’s Aesthetics: The Art of Idealism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pippin, Robert B. 2008. “The Absence of Aesthetics in Hegel’s Aesthetics.” In F. C. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, 394–418. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, Robert B. 2013. After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rutter, Ben. 2010. Hegel on the Modern Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szondi, Peter. 1974. Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie I. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.

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Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) Paisley Livingston

If asked to say which philosophers did significant work in aesthetics in the nineteenth century, very few people—including experts in the field—would be likely to mention Bernard Bolzano, who is best known for his findings in mathematics and logic. This is unfortunate, as Bolzano also made important contributions to aesthetics. In an early sermon (Bolzano 1810), he eloquently defended the traditional thesis that in appreciating the beauty of nature we worship God and His creation. In the early 1840s, he planned to write a series of five interrelated studies on topics in aesthetics, yet a fatal pulmonary illness prevented him from realizing this ambition (Winter 1949, 46–7). He did manage to complete the first part of his planned series, an essay on beauty (Bolzano 2015) that was published in his native Prague in 1843 as Über den Begriff des Schönen. Eine Philosophische Abhandlung (On the Concept of the Beautiful. A Philosophical Essay; see also Bolzano 1972 and 2017). Bolzano also finished an essay on the fine arts, which was published posthumously in 1849 as Über die Eintheilung der schönen Künste. Eine ästhetische Abhandlung (On the Division of the Beautiful Arts. An Aesthetic Essay). These two published essays are the primary focus of this entry, although some of Bolzano’s other work will be mentioned where relevant.

1  The Explication of Beauty Bolzano claims that “the concept of the agreeable [das Angenehmen], or better, the concept of that which can be agreeable, has the same relation to the concept of the beautiful as a higher concept does to a lower one” (1843, 13). This means that while everything beautiful can be agreeable, not everything that can be agreeable is beautiful. The concept of the beautiful picks out those attributes or properties that can be agreeable when they are contemplated

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aptly. Attributes that can occasion non-contemplative pleasures belong, then, to the higher concept, but not to the lower one. Is the beautiful equivalent, then, to whatever can reward apt contemplation with pleasure? Bolzano raises what he takes to be a decisive counterexample to that thesis. In Joachim Heinrich Campe’s adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe finds an axe head on the island and enjoys contemplating his acquisition of this useful tool. Contemplating one’s ownership of something is not the same thing as contemplating its beauty. To rule such a case out, Bolzano introduces a restriction pertaining to the content of the contemplation: “when enjoying the beautiful, our minds are not directed towards a relation that the object has exclusively and only to us as individuals” (1843, 17; see also 1843, 31). Bolzano does not retract this condition in the course of the essay, but seeks to derive it from a more general condition regarding the nature of appropriate contemplative responses to beauty. Bolzano deems the successful contemplation of natural and other kinds of beauty to be similar to other cognitive achievements in that the contemplator must discover a concept that accurately covers the object’s relevant attributes. Successful contemplation of beauty differs, however, from successful cognition in general. To say how that is so, Bolzano notes that sometimes people can discern the pattern in a complex stimulus without going to the effort of distinct thinking and self-conscious reasoning. This is for Bolzano the key to how the contemplation of beauty can be distinguished from other kinds of cognitive achievements, such as painstaking and deliberate mathematical calculations. For example, to see and “grasp” the lovely curve of the spirale mirabilis is one thing, whereas to derive or comprehend its algorithm is something quite different. In his characterization of the appreciation of beauty, Bolzano follows Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten in emphasizing the important role played by “obscure” and “indistinct” ideas and judgments. Yet he assigns to these terms senses that he had elaborated upon in his 1837 Theory of Science (Bolzano 2014). Very briefly, for Bolzano an idea or judgment is clear when it is an intuition. And an intuition is an introspective singular idea that represents the particular mental event that causes it. More specifically, Bolzano holds that some x is an intuitive idea just in case x is an idea that represents a particular mental modification, y, by the thought, “this y,” where y is both the proximate cause and the sole object of x. With regard to the contrast between distinct and confused ideas or judgments, Bolzano holds, roughly, that an idea or judgment is confused if the subject does not know that it is complex, or has no thought on the matter, or, knowing that it is complex, does not know what its components are.

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Bolzano acknowledges that clear and distinct ideas are necessary to successful cognition, including our contemplative appreciation of beauty. Yet he maintains that the latter is characterized by a much greater reliance on obscure and indistinct cognition. Sometimes Bolzano expresses this point by saying that we experience beauty with Leichtigkeit (“lightness” or “ease”). He adds that in an apt contemplation of beauty, a suitably comprehensive conception of the object’s features can be formed in a manner that is neither too easy nor too difficult. Many stimuli are too simple to be beautiful in Bolzano’s sense, while others are so complicated or irregular that human beings cannot find them beautiful. For an object to have the capacity to occasion the kind of contemplative experience that Bolzano links to beauty, it must have a “regularity” that can be grasped by the observer in the right sort of way. This regularity can take many different forms, as various constellations of attributes are all capable of rewarding apt contemplation with pleasure (1843, 41). Bolzano explicitly rejects formalist accounts of beauty, squaring off against Johann Georg Sulzer (1792) and Lazarus Bendavid (1799) in this regard. One of his objections to their accounts is that the thoughts expressed in a poem are directly relevant to its beauty and are not reducible to any purely formal organizational pattern (1843, 72). More generally, Bolzano criticizes attempts to identify the essence of beauty in terms of such properties as harmony, unity in multiplicity, proportion, and perfection. The second half of the essay is devoted to a survey of the literature in which Bolzano criticizes the accounts proposed by over seventy philosophers. Why would an experience of beauty, as Bolzano describes it, occasion pleasure? Bolzano’s proposed answer to that question is that we experience pleasure with every increase in our abilities. When we learn that we have a particular ability, or when we are reminded that we have it, this too is a kind of increase, and so can also give us pleasure. Bolzano does not think that we are always aware that there is such an increase, or that we know that this is the source of our pleasure. Admiring something’s beauty, we may overlook the role played by our own cognitive powers in our enjoyment, or only have a very indistinct representation of our cognitive process. Bolzano’s proposed explication of die Schönheit is obviously quite broad and does not correspond to ordinary usage of the German term (or its various translations, such as “beauty”). His broad conception of beauty embraces significantly different subcategories, which he intended to discuss at length in the second part of his planned five-part series of essays (Svoboda 1954, 44–5). He mentions, for example, the difference between “pure” and “mixed” (or “concrete”) beauties, and the contrast between “easy” and “difficult” beauties. Bolzano also sketches an account of different species of ugliness.

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Indeed, he was far from thinking that beauty was the only aesthetic property, and sought to investigate a wide range of beauty’s “modifications,” as well as various properties, such as novelty and familiarity, which contribute to or detract from beauty and related attributes. He is also reported to have written and presented a lecture on the sublime, but this text has gone missing (Svoboda 1954, 46). Although Bolzano rejects attempts to reduce beauty to a single kind of response-independent property manifested by all beautiful objects, he also rejects all accounts that reduce beauty to divergent subjective associations or responses. John Locke and Henry Home are his targets in this connection. He asserts that “if there were only one human being on the planet earth, or if there were none at all, the beautiful would still be beautiful, and the nasty [Garstig] would still be nasty” (1843, 39, 67). Bolzano characterizes beauty as the power to give rise to a certain type of response among a category of observers if various circumstances obtain. And what is this category of observers? In this regard Bolzano refers to the abilities of persons whose cognitive faculties are “properly developed,” and he adds that the capacity to contemplate, enjoy, and judge beauty can only gradually be acquired, and depends on the training and development (Ausbildung) of our abilities, and especially our cognitive faculties (1843, 18). To sum up Bolzano’s proposed explication, something has the dispositional attribute (or power) of beauty just in case the following subjunctive conditional is true: For any observer, O, whose cognitive faculties are properly developed, if O were to contemplate x aptly, O would in normal circumstances experience pleasure caused at least in part by the increase of O’s cognitive capacities (where apt contemplation is the neither too easy nor too difficult formation of an accurate concept of the regularity of x’s attributes, in a cognitive process relying heavily on obscure, indistinct, and confused representations).

Bolzano makes the dispositional status of beauty explicit when he writes that beauty is “indisputably an object that could be agreeable, even if it is not agreeable in fact” (1843, 13). In a discussion of attributions of powers in Theory of Science, he explains the need for a hedging condition excluding “extraordinary circumstances” (1837, 147). As it is impossible to identify all of the circumstances that must be in place for the disposition to obtain, Bolzano rules out all unusual or extraordinary ones that could block its manifestation.

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2  The Definition of Art and Fine Art Bolzano accepted the traditional assumption that in its most general sense, the term Kunst [art] literally refers to an acquired and nontrivial set of skills, and only indirectly to the works that result from the exercise of such skills. The concept of art in this broad sense embraces skills as disparate as carpentry, archery, and medicine. Bolzano’s next step was to distinguish the subset of skills identified as die schöne Künste (les beaux arts in French, le belle arti in Italian, etc.) (literally “the beautiful arts,” but standardly translated in English as “the fine arts”). As most of his 1849 essay is about the classification of the fine arts, Bolzano does not write at length about the problem of defining “fine art” in general. One reason for this may have been that Bolzano does not find that concept to be of any great practical interest. He thinks it practically impossible for someone to pursue the schematic objective of making “a beautiful work of art” because far more specific intentions, such as the intention to make a sculpture with a specific subject and style, are required. Bolzano introduces a general condition on the making of fine art with reference to two examples. The first of these is Bolzano’s retelling of a legendary story about the ancient Greek artist, Apelles. Frustrated by his failure to paint the lather on the mouth of a charging horse, the artist accidentally achieves something similar to the intended effect when he angrily throws his sponge at the picture. This is lucky, but not a manifestation of artistry, so not actually the intended result. If Bolzano read Pliny the Elder’s version of the story (something that is not unlikely), he would have known that a legendary Neacles followed the master’s example and learned how to splash paint skillfully to achieve his desired results. Bolzano’s second example involves an apprentice who is charged with the making of a new print from a copper plate. This operation, which certainly requires the exercise of some skill, is a success, and the resulting print is quite beautiful. Yet this is not the sort of skill that could be taken as a paradigmatic instance of the art of engraving. Bolzano wants to distinguish between the art of making copies of a print and the artistry required by the making of a novel print. With these two cases in mind, Bolzano explicates what it means for someone to have the skills associated with a fine art by saying that this person has the ability to create certain objects that have beauty in his broad sense. The making or creation of these objects is brought about in a free and intentional activity, where this activity takes place in such a manner that the objects’ beautiful qualities are the result of a procedure or process organized to this end. Here is a translation of Bolzano’s formulation:

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We attribute to someone possession of a fine art or, what amounts to the same, the name artist, when this person has the ability through his or her free and intentional activity to produce objects that depend with certainty on the concept of beauty, such that their beautiful qualities are the direct consequence of a process of production arranged to bring about this anticipated end, in this and no other way. (1849, 5)

It may be objected that this conception of fine art is too narrow because it rules out works that are too simple or too chaotic to manifest the sort of regularity that could occasion the sort of enjoyable contemplation referred to by Bolzano. Are there no such cases, that is, works of fine art that are devoid of beauty—even in Bolzano’s very broad sense? One way for Bolzano to deny coherently that there are such cases would be to frame his account as a normative one that requires that at least some minimal threshold of skill be met in the creation of a work of fine art. To speak of wholly “artless” fine art, or, in other words, works manifesting no skill in the realization of beauty would, then, be oxymoronic. There is evidence that the threshold on what is classifiable as fine art was very low in Bolzano’s mind. In the context of his c. 1830 political treatise, On the Best State, Bolzano advocated the censorship of “poems that are completely dreadful” (2007, 319). This harsh proposal can be understood as entailing the possibility of very bad works of literature. Bolzano also says that people will “agree with Horace that the only fate a mediocre work deserves is oblivion,” which entails that there are such works of art (2007, 322). We may also refer to Bolzano’s contention regarding the possible, but not necessarily actual, value of the fine arts: “One must not forget that these arts, appropriately used, not only enrich our lives through the enjoyment they afford, but also can and should cultivate and ennoble our feelings and our hearts” (2007, 322). There is also a passage of the 1849 essay, where Bolzano considers whether there are monotone sonic works. There, he allows that an unchanging, continuous sound could be somewhat beautiful, but adds that in listening to such an artistic production we would be likely to compare it to more variegated and pleasurable compositions, raising the question whether it is not counterproductive to consider a monotone production to be a work of art. It would certainly not be “a genuine and successful work of art,” Bolzano remarks (1849, 21). It may be objected that the concept of fine art that Bolzano identifies is far too broad because it covers items, such as philosophical dialogues, that should not be classified as works of fine art. Bolzano does not address himself to such an objection. It would appear that he was quite happy to classify a philosophical dialogue as a work of fine art as long as it was written with sufficient attention to beauty. Bolzano indeed advocated a very broad

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conception of the fine arts, which is unsurprising given the breadth of his conception of what counts as “beautiful” or “fine.”

3  The Classification of the Arts Surveying the literature on the classification of the fine arts in the 1840s, Bolzano observed that there was widespread disagreement over the grounds of the classificatory distinctions, and surmised that he might therefore be “permitted” to set forth his own thoughts on the matter. The result was a remarkably foresighted work, as the scheme Bolzano developed allowed him to anticipate important art forms that would not come into existence until long after his death, such as moving pictures and conceptual art. This anticipatory feat might be taken as one of the great merits of the breadth of Bolzano’s conception, and as further reason to pay new attention to his contributions to aesthetics. Bolzano begins by drawing a distinction between the various arts of the external senses and what he calls the arts of “pure thought,” which comprise nonverbal works that are directly accessible only to the person thinking them (1849, 16). Even though he recognizes the existence of such private works, Bolzano goes on to say that they are “flawed by this great imperfection” (1849, 18). He identifies six of these “arts of pure thought (of propositional connections)” as follows: (1) works of fiction; (2) conceptual fine art, which includes conceptual truths of mathematics or philosophy sufficiently beautiful to be considered authentic works of fine art; (3) the art of description or of beautiful description; (4) the art of narration or of beautiful narration; (5) the art of establishing empirical truths; and (6) the art of giving rise to particular feelings, wishes, and resolutions by means of the allegation of certain truths (1849, 17–18). Bolzano turns next to the art of linguistically articulated collections of propositions. In Bolzano’s mind, the articulation of collections of thoughts as linguistically expressed thoughts is a difficult and valuable artistic endeavor that is itself another, distinct source of beauty. Bolzano refers here to the pleasant associations of sounds and sense that the choice of a word can arouse. An intentional and skillful organization of thoughts and words itself is an artwork of its own kind, which remains a pure thought, however, unless the words are spoken out loud or written down. Bolzano turns next to the arts of the external senses, by which he means those arts the products of which must have some perceptible reality in the external world. In what terms may such works be usefully classified? The most obvious answer, which Bolzano and scores of other philosophers accepted,

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was to identify the sense or senses involved in the perception of the artistic vehicle. Bolzano, however, had his own complicated reasons for espousing the traditional assumption that beauty is limited to the senses of sight and hearing. Very briefly, he denied that tactile, olfactory, and gustatory properties have the sorts of complex regularities that can occasion contemplative experiences of the right sort. Bolzano does not want to denigrate the arts of the table, but contends that the uses and pleasures of even the finest meals are not derived from the exercise of our capacity to engage in successful contemplation as he defines it (1843, 34). Bolzano embraces the corollary of that thesis: perceptible works of fine art are either visual, auditory, or audiovisual. In the production of a particular work, the arts of thought can be conjoined with arts in any of the three categories just mentioned. For example, calligraphy is identified as an “art for the eyes” combined with the art of thought and linguistic means. Under the rubric of arts for the eyes conjoined with the arts of thought, Bolzano mentions the possibility of a silent allegorical dance. Adding song, music, and/or speech to such a performance would yield yet other kinds of works. “Morpho-chromatic” works (manifesting changing or static depictive figures and color) can be combined with collections of ideas expressed linguistically and with music (vocal, instrumental, or both). At the time when Bolzano was writing, a prevalent way to draw distinctions among the imitative (fine) arts was to develop a contrast between spatial and temporal kinds of art. Bolzano was not satisfied with these distinctions. He proposed instead to ask whether it is essential to the work in a given art that its relevant attributes, that is, those manifested to the observer during an appropriate experience of the work, be meant to change or not during that experience. As Bolzano put it, when experienced appropriately (i.e., with apt cognition of their artistically essential features), some works are some works are “still and remain unchanged” (in Ruhe und unverändert bleiben), while others “somehow change themselves” (sich irgendwie verändern), (1849, 34). Bolzano applies this distinction to the “optical” arts by stating that some of these arts “present something remaining [etwas Bleibendes] (or which that does not change in a way that we can visibly observe),” whereas other optical arts “offer to our eyes an unfolding change [eine entfaltende Veränderung]” (1849, 28). When he applies this distinction to the category of works that combine one or more of the arts of thought with one or more optical art, Bolzano comments that some of these arts offer to the eyes something persistent [Beharrendes], while others present something “that changes [sich umwandeln] before the viewer’s eyes”; he also notes that the latter works consist in “changing appearances [veränderlichen Erscheinungen]” (1849, 39). Without trying to say quite how it could be done, he imagines various colors

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being displayed successively on the inside of segments of a glass hemisphere that would embrace an observer’s entire field of vision; this Augenmusik, or music for the eyes, could be beautiful, Bolzano conjectures (1849, 31). To recapitulate, Bolzano’s classification of the fine arts has two main headings: (i) the arts of the external senses, the products of which are perceptible actions and objects, and (ii) the arts of the inner senses, the products of which are collections of ideas or thoughts. These two kinds of arts are often conjoined in the making of particular works. Bolzano divides the external arts into three main kinds determined by the relevant senses: arts for the ears, arts for the eyes, and arts for both the eyes and ears. He introduces many additional distinctions within these external arts. Some are based on the intended expressive content and emotive effect, for example, arts aimed at stirring up sublime feelings versus those targeting different kinds of emotions. Other divisions depend on differences between the artistic means employed (e.g., vocal versus instrumental; linguistic vs non-linguistic). Bolzano also introduces a distinction between static and dynamic works. Under the rubric of the visual arts he introduces distinctions between figurative and nonfigurative works and between different sorts of depicted contents and modes of depiction.

4 Conclusion It is hoped that this brief presentation will serve to awaken the reader’s interest in Bolzano’s contributions to aesthetics. It would perhaps be fitting to conclude by endorsing an assessment articulated by the Austrian philosopher Maria E. Reicher: Bolzano may not only be considered a forerunner of analytic philosophy in general, but also a forerunner of analytic aesthetics. In sharp contrast to the bulk of writings on aesthetics in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, Bolzano’s treatises on art and beauty show a clarity and precision that easily meets the highest standards of what is called “analytic philosophy” today. (Reicher 2006, 294)

Primary Sources Bolzano: 1810. “Über denn Sinn für die Naturschönheiten.” (On the sense for natural beauty) In Erbauungsreden für Akademike (Exhortations for academics), 262–85. Prague: Widtmann.

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1837. Wissenschaftslehre. Versuch einer ausführlichen und grösstentheils neuen Darstellung der Logik mit steter Rücksicht auf deren bisherige Bearbeiter (Theory of Science. Attempt at a detailed and in the main novel exposition of logic, with constant attention to earlier authors), 4 vols. Sulzbach: Seidel. 1843. Abhandlungen zur Ästhetik. Erste Lieferung; Über den Begriff des Schönen. Eine Philosophische Abhandlung (Treatises on aesthetics. On the concept of beauty. A philosophical treatise). Prague: Borrosch and André. 1849. Über die Eintheilung der schönen Künste. Eine ästhetische Abhandlung (On the division of the fine arts. An aesthetic treatise). Prague: Haase. 1972. Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der Ästhetik (Investigations into the foundations of aesthetics). Dietfried Gerhardus (ed.). Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum. 2007. Selected Writings on Ethics and Politics. Rolf George and Paul Rusnock (trans. and eds.). Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2014. Theory of Science, 4 vols. Rolf George and Paul Rusnock (trans). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. “On the Concept of the Beautiful: A Philosophical Essay.” Adam Bresnahan (trans.). Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, 52: 229–66. A translation of the first half of the essay. 2017. Écrits esthétiques. Carole Maigné, Nicolas Rialland, and Jan Sebestik (trans. and eds.). Paris: J. Vrin.

References and Further Reading Bendavid, Lazarus. 1799. Versuch einer Geschmackslehre. Mit doppeltem Register. Berlin: Belitz and Braun. Livingston, Paisley. 2014. “Bolzano on Beauty.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 54: 269–84. Livingston, Paisley. 2015. “An Introduction to Bolzano’s Essay on Beauty.” Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, 52: 203–28. Livingston, Paisley. 2016. “Bolzano on Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 56: 333–45. Maigné, Carole, ed. 2013. Formalisme esthétique: Prague et Vienne au XIXe siècle. Paris: Vrin. Maigné, Carole. 2017. “L’exigence de clarté: les écrits esthétiques de Bernard Bolzano.” In Carole Maigné, Nicolas Rialland, and Jan Sebestik (eds. and trans.), Écrits esthétiques, 7–46. Paris: J. Vrin. McCormick, Peter J. 1981. “Bolzano and the Dark Doctrine: An Essay on Aesthetics.” In Barry Smith (ed.), Structure and Gestalt: Philosophy and Literature in Austria-Hungary and Her Successor States, 69–113. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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Reicher, Maria E. 2006. “Austrian Aesthetics.” In Mark Textor (ed.), The Austrian Contribution to Analytic Philosophy, 293–323. London: Routledge. Rusnock, Paul and Šebestík, Jan. 2019. Bernard Bolzano: His Life and Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sulzer, Johann Georg. 1792. Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste, 4 vols., 2nd ed. rev. Leipzig: Webmann. Svoboda, Karel. 1954. “Bolzanos Ästhetik.” Rozpravy Československé akademie věd: Řada SV, 64: 27–59. Winter, Eduard J. 1949. Leben und gestige Entwicklung des Sozialethikers und Mathematikers Bernard Bolzano. Halle: Niemeyer.

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Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) Scott Jenkins

Few philosophers have granted greater importance to the arts than do Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer maintains that aesthetic experience both makes possible a fundamental sort of knowledge of the world and serves the practical function of enabling us to cope with painful but ineliminable features of our lives. Nietzsche similarly opposes the view that the arts are little more than unnecessary but pleasant diversions—“a readily dispensable jingling of fool’s bells in the face of the ‘gravity of existence’”—and maintains that “art is the highest task and the true metaphysical activity of this life” (1999, 14). This affinity between the two philosophers is no accident. Nietzsche turned from classics to philosophy after discovering Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in a Leipzig bookstore in 1865, and Schopenhauer’s considerable influence on Nietzsche is visible throughout his writings. Though they do disagree on many points concerning individual arts, artistic production, and aesthetic experience, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both regard the arts as capable of playing a crucial role within human existence. In this chapter I examine the individual features of their aesthetic theories in light of this claim concerning the importance of the arts.

1  Schopenhauer on Metaphysics and Aesthetic Experience Schopenhauer was concerned with aesthetics throughout his writings, but the core of his aesthetic theory is located in his most famous work, The World as Will and Representation (orig. publ. 1819). As the title of this work indicates, Schopenhauer regards the world as a combination of will and representation, and these notions are essential to understanding his aesthetic

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theory. He borrows the notion of representation from Kant, who maintains that the world around us is a collection of appearances constituted by our subjective forms of representation. For Kant these are the forms of space and time, which are associated with sensibility, and a set of twelve basic concepts (such as cause and negation) that give structure to the sensations we receive in sensibility. Schopenhauer agrees with Kant’s theory of sensibility, but he maintains that Kant’s list of twelve concepts should be reduced to one intellectual principle. This is the principle of sufficient reason, which we might regard as a causal principle employed in cognizing the world around us. In addition to this knowledge of appearance, we are also acquainted with willing as our own inner nature. By way of a rather obscure argument that I will not consider here, Schopenhauer identifies the world in itself, behind our representations, as a kind of basic, primal will (1969, 105). Thus in knowing the world as representation, we are aware of the ways in which that primal will is manifest to us. Schopenhauer asserts that aesthetic experience is quite different from knowledge of representations. While our knowledge of the world around us is always knowledge of particular objects, related to other objects through causal relations of various sorts, in aesthetic experience the sole objects of awareness are what Schopenhauer, following Plato, terms “ideas” or “forms.” When looking at a painting of a tree, for example, we do not experience a particular tree, but rather the idea or form of a tree—what is common to all trees that do exist, or could exist. This knowledge is claimed to be completely free from the principle of sufficient reason. As Schopenhauer puts it, “we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what” (1969, 178). Thus Schopenhauer regards aesthetic experience as a certain kind of knowledge, which is distinguished from our day-to-day knowledge by having ideas and only ideas as its objects. This understanding of aesthetic experience has some obvious virtues. It sounds quite reasonable to say that when we have such an experience we are in touch with something universal. Aesthetic experience often feels like a cognitive state in which we gain knowledge of a very general sort. In addition, Schopenhauer’s view provides a compelling account of why we value aesthetic experience as much as we do. Many people agree with the Platonic thought that knowledge of the basic aspects of reality is most valuable for human beings. Thus if we accept Schopenhauer’s view that aesthetic experience provides us with such knowledge (a view that Plato himself certainly did not hold), we have an explanation of why it occupies a prominent place in human activity. Schopenhauer adds one very intriguing, original element to this account. On his view, aesthetic experience is not valuable only for what it makes

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possible, namely, a certain kind of knowledge, but also because it eliminates from our awareness the painful aspects of life that derive from our willing natures. In order to understand this element of the theory we must return to Schopenhauer’s account of willing. A central feature of Schopenhauer’s view is that “all willing springs from a lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering” (1969, 196). This means that all of our daily activities are rooted in the suffering we experience when we lack what we want. On this pessimistic view, all instances of getting what we want are actually cases of release from suffering. More accurately, they are partial releases, because “for one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten that are denied” (Schopenhauer 1969, 196). And even if a person’s wishes were somehow to become completely satisfied, her state would not be a pleasant one, since she would be left in what Schopenhauer terms the “fearful emptiness” of boredom (Schopenhauer 1969, 312). Thus within our willing lives there is no release from suffering. The nature of willing ensures that for any willing being, “its life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents” (Schopenhauer 1969, 312). This theory of willing certainly yields a bleak picture of human existence, but I will set aside worries about the theory to examine Schopenhauer’s account of the relation between aesthetic experience and the will. This account holds significant value even if it involves an overly pessimistic view of human life. Schopenhauer regards aesthetic experience as valuable in part because it temporarily frees us from the burden of having a will. When we engage with a painting or find ourselves in a setting of natural beauty, our apprehension of an idea takes place through our cognition of the object no longer being connected with our willing relation to it. As Schopenhauer puts it, “knowledge tears itself free from the service of the will” (1969, 178). We are no longer concerned with knowing how an object might satisfy a desire or potentially harm us (as we are when we see a tree as a capable of sheltering us or falling on us), but instead merely contemplate the object itself and find ourselves in touch with the form of that object. In this way, aesthetic experience is freedom from the pains of willing. The entire locus of willing, suffering, and boredom is no longer present to us when we have an experience of this sort: “we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object” (Schopenhauer 1969, 178). This understanding of the state of the subject in aesthetic experience can be understood as a radicalization of a feature of Kant’s judgment of taste, namely, its disinterestedness. For Kant a judgment in which a particular object is judged to be beautiful cannot be influenced by our interests or desires. To be sure, we do value beautiful objects and desire to engage with them. Kant’s claim is that an interest in consuming or owning an object

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cannot be the reason why we judge it to be beautiful. Similarly, Schopenhauer holds that aesthetic experience offers a kind of freedom from will by ensuring that the causal relation of an object to the will is no longer manifest to us. However this experience comes to be, whether from “an external cause or inward disposition”—say, the sudden appearance of a sunset or the state of mind that enables a person to engage with a piece of art—the result is that “the peace, always sought but always escaping us on that first path of willing, comes to us of its own accord, and all is well with us” (Schopenhauer 1969, 196). Schopenhauer’s description of the process by which a willing subject becomes a “clear mirror” of the object plays a crucial role in his account of the production of art. The ability to create art, which Schopenhauer, like many of his predecessors, terms “genius,” is the exceptional ability to enter a state that is objective in this sense. While all persons are able to apprehend ideas, the person of genius enters this state more easily and inhabits it for greater periods of time, thus becoming capable of reproducing an idea in art. The artworks that result from this process present ideas more clearly than natural objects do, and thereby facilitate our apprehension of ideas. Thus Schopenhauer regards the aesthetic experience of art and of nature as different only in degree: “aesthetic pleasure is essentially one and the same, whether it be called forth by a work of art, or directly by the contemplation of nature and of life” (1969, 195). Artists facilitate the objectivity already possible within an experience of nature. Schopenhauer’s identification of aesthetic experience and objective experience creates a close connection between beauty and truth. It also suggests that any object could be, in principle, beautiful. After all, any object we might consider is associated with an idea that could become an object of experience. Schopenhauer freely embraces this conclusion. But he also stresses that one object can be more beautiful than another insofar as “it facilitates this purely objective contemplation, goes out to meet it, and, so to speak, even compels it” (Schopenhauer 1969, 210). This view underlies Schopenhauer’s approach to the fine arts, which he sorts according to the kinds of ideas they present to us. This classification is not terribly compelling. It depends upon sorting ideas according to the ways in which they manifest the primal will underlying all things, and the order among ideas that Schopenhauer postulates is difficult to defend. In addition, by identifying the arts with particular kinds of ideas, Schopenhauer seems to eliminate what is most interesting about them. For example, his classification of the fine arts begins with architecture, which he sees as capable of presenting us with lowlevel ideas such as gravity, cohesion, rigidity, and hardness (Schopenhauer 1969, 214). Even if we admit that architecture presents us with such ideas,

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much of what is valuable in architecture goes missing if we seek its value in connection with these ideas alone. Similar points can be made about Schopenhauer’s treatment of other fine arts. Music is the one form of art that does not fit this scheme, and Schopenhauer’s account of music as fundamentally different from other arts is a defining feature of his aesthetics. On the one hand, he maintains that music does not present us with an idea, as the other arts do. But Schopenhauer also insists that music is not without content because it is a “copy of the will itself ” (1969, 257). That is, music is more closely related to the inner nature of the world than the other arts, which represent only the various forms in which the primal will is objectified. We can elucidate Schopenhauer’s view by considering the relation he sees between music and individual states of the human will: music does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without any accessories, and so also without the motives for them. (1969, 261)

Here Schopenhauer distinguishes between a particular pleasure or gaiety, which always occurs in a particular context, and the universal pleasure or gaiety expressed in a lighthearted piece of music. The latter is universal insofar as it copies a subjective state of the will but leaves out all elements of the particular context. Thus the gaiety of a piece of music applies equally well to all individual cases of human gaiety and expresses what is common in them. Schopenhauer’s view gains intuitive support from the fact the connection between hearing music and experiencing a particular emotional or motivational response is familiar to all of us. This connection, combined with Schopenhauer’s assertion that the world in itself is in some sense will, leads him to claim that through music we experience the most basic level of reality.

2  Aesthetic Justification in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), is clearly influenced by Schopenhauer. Like The World as Will and Representation, it maintains that the arts are a fundamental source of knowledge, and it aims to make

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an argument for the importance of music within the arts generally. That argument can be difficult to identify in Nietzsche’s wide-ranging account of ancient culture, Greek tragedy, the figure of Socrates, and the problems of nineteenth-century Germany (to name just some topics of the work). But all of these topics relate in some way to Nietzsche’s view that the arts offer us a way to see our lives as worth living. The central claim of The Birth of Tragedy, which appears twice within the work itself and also in a preface added to the second edition (1886), is that our lives can be “justified” (i.e., shown to be good, or choiceworthy) only in an aesthetic manner: our highest dignity lies in our significance as works of art—for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified— although, of course, our awareness of our significance in this respect hardly differs from the awareness which painted soldiers have of the battle depicted on the same canvas. (Nietzsche 1999, 33)

Nietzsche’s use of the present tense is important. While The Birth of Tragedy draws on extensive knowledge of ancient Greece and presents a novel theory of Greek tragedy, Nietzsche’s primary aim is to demonstrate that art forms like tragedy are of great value for his own time, and for human life generally. Nietzsche was particularly concerned with drawing attention to the operas of his friend and mentor Richard Wagner, which he saw as capable of playing the same role in nineteenth-century Germany that the works of Aeschylus played in ancient Greece. Nietzsche presents tragedy as a response to a problem encountered by the ancient Greeks, that of going on living in the face of the “wisdom of Silenus.” He recounts the story of King Midas learning from the forest daemon Silenus that “the very best thing is utterly beyond your reach not to have been born, not to ‘be’, to be ‘nothing.’ However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon” (Nietzsche 1999, 23). This pessimistic thought resonates with Schopenhauer’s claim that willing beings cannot avoid suffering. It also appears in a number of different contexts in Greek culture, some of which Schopenhauer catalogs in his account of the “vanity and suffering of life” (1969, 586). By placing this thought at the beginning of Greek culture, Nietzsche is claiming that tragedy originated in the need to deal with this unsettling knowledge. We can approach Nietzsche’s theory of the birth of tragedy through considering his account of the one feature of tragedy that modern viewers are likely to regard as mysterious, the chorus. This group of people, who stand to the side of the action on stage and comment on it in song, can seem

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completely superfluous to someone accustomed to modern theater. But Nietzsche insists that Greek tragedy originally consisted of chorus alone, with  no  actors  on stage, which requires that we accord to the chorus a central role within tragedy (1999, §7). Tragedy was born from the music of the chorus, Nietzsche claims, and an actor on stage is best understood as originally a vision of the singing chorus, one made possible by its song. In approaching tragedy this way Nietzsche is making use of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and aesthetics. First, he is taking the elements of tragedy to correspond to Schopenhauer’s notions of will and representation. The chorus through its song makes possible the appearance of an actor on stage, just as Schopenhauer’s primal will underlies and makes possible the world as representation. Second, Nietzsche distinguishes between music—the art form of the chorus—and the visual arts. Nietzsche’s description of this difference involves some terminology unique to his work. He uses the terms “Apolline” and “Dionysiac” (or “Apollinian” and “Dionysian” in some translations) to pick out two basic artistic powers present in nature and responsible for the arts (Nietzsche 1999, §2). The Apolline artistic power receives its name from the god Apollo, who is associated with the sun and light. Apolline arts are those that involve visual appearance, or images more generally. Examples include painting, sculpture, and epic poetry. The Dionysiac arts, such as lyric poetry and music, are associated with the god Dionysus due to their intoxicating effect on us. This division clearly derives from Schopenhauer’s description of the difference between music and the other arts (though Nietzsche is critical of Schopenhauer’s understanding of lyric poetry [Nietzsche 1999, §5]). We are now in the position to understand the importance of Nietzsche’s account of tragedy as “a Dionysian chorus which discharges itself over and over again in an Apolline world of images” (Nietzsche 1999, 44). He understands tragedy as unique among the arts both in its mirroring of Schopenhauerian metaphysics and in its ability to combine both aesthetic drives. These two features of tragedy are essential to its ability to offer the spectator a response to the wisdom of Silenus. First, the spectator sees in tragedy the deep truth of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. The character on stage is only a product of the chorus, just as the world around us is only a product of the primal will, and there is nothing that character can do to avoid the calamities of the tragedy. Consider the case of Oedipus, who attempts to avoid his fate of killing his father and marrying his mother but ends up doing exactly that. Such a case is a dramatic presentation of what Schopenhauer and Nietzsche take to be a basic fact concerning our existence—that life is defined by unavoidable suffering.

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This feature of tragedy would seem to make it unsuited to the task of providing a justification of existence. After all, the fact that our lives contain ineliminable suffering is the ground of the wisdom of Silenus. But tragedy does not simply state this fact, as a philosophical treatise would. Tragedy presents it aesthetically and transfigures this feature of our lives. Here Nietzsche’s account of the two aesthetic drives present in tragedy becomes relevant. The intoxicating force of Dionysiac music produced by the chorus separates the spectator from his particular point of view, resulting in an ecstatic state in which the spectator associates himself with the mass of the chorus. And from that point of view, the spectator regards the events on stage as beautiful, Apolline appearance. What appears in this way is no longer a particular actor, or even a character such as Oedipus or Dionysus, but rather the universal predicament of any willing being. Thus from the point of view of the chorus, a life of ineliminable suffering appears to be a good thing. Human life is justified aesthetically by appearing valuable from a point of view outside of it, one that Nietzsche somewhat fancifully envisions as that of a chorus of satyrs: “in this enchanted state the Dionysiac enthusiast sees himself as a satyr, and as a satyr he in turn sees the god, i.e. in his transformed state he sees a new vision outside himself which is the Apolline perfection of his state” (Nietzsche 1969, 44). This is why Nietzsche asserts that our awareness of our status as aesthetic objects is almost as rare as the awareness painted soldiers have of the battle depicted on the same canvas (1969, §5). The point of view from which our lives are justified shows up for us only when we engage with a tragedy, a Wagnerian opera, or some similar work of art. One might wonder whether this aesthetic justification of life is ultimately satisfying. If it is only by occupying a point of view different from our own that we can find our lives to be choiceworthy, the wisdom of Silenus appears to be untouched. Nietzsche’s claim that human lives are not worth living is directed at individuals who are the subjects of the suffering and frustration characteristic of human lives. Any such individual might ask, “Why should I care that my life is justified from some other point of view, one that I as a finite individual cannot actually occupy?” It may seem that tragedy merely covers up the fact that a human life is filled with suffering, and thus fails to redeem or justify the awful features of that life for the person who lives it. Nietzsche himself suggests this more pessimistic approach to his own position. In the final pages of The Birth of Tragedy he repeats his claim concerning aesthetic justification, but with the significant revision that it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world appear justified (1969, §24). Could it be that for Nietzsche our lives are never actually justified? This possibility gains some support from his remark that both beauty and the

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“metaphysical solace” gained from watching tragedy are forms of “an illusion spread over things” that motivates us to keep on living (Nietzsche 1969, §18). Even if Nietzsche did hold this pessimistic view, his admiration of tragedy—and of the arts generally—would still be understandable. His insistence that it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence can appear justified grants to the arts a preeminent role in our lives. He argues in The Birth of Tragedy and later works that other ways in which we might regard our lives as justified (such as by appeal to their moral features, or their orientation toward the truth) are all internally unstable. It is largely for this reason that Nietzsche had such enthusiasm for the work of Richard Wagner. He hoped that through Wagner’s operas a new tragic culture would emerge in Germany, and that the arts would be restored to their proper place within society. This did not occur. Nietzsche was disappointed to discover that most of the spectators at performances of Wagner’s works in the Bayreuth opera house (which was constructed specifically for these performances and opened in 1876) were bourgeois citizens and not the Dionysian throngs he had anticipated. Around this time Nietzsche’s friendship with Wagner came to an end, and he also gave up his allegiance to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. But his commitment to the importance of art and aesthetic experience did not wane.

3  Art, Artists, and Aestheticism in Nietzsche’s Later Writings The works that follow The Birth of Tragedy exhibit Nietzsche’s turn away from the Schopenhauerian claim that the arts put us in touch with the most fundamental features of the world in itself. In Human, All Too Human (1878) he denies both that these features are accessible to us and that knowledge of the world in itself is of value (Nietzsche 1996, §9). In later works Nietzsche goes so far as to deny that we can even make sense of there being features of the world radically independent of our knowledge (1976, 485–6). So why would we ever think that the arts disclose basic features of reality? Nietzsche accounts for this tendency by comparing aesthetic views like Schopenhauer’s to beliefs in religion and astrology, claiming that because such beliefs make us feel happy and secure we are strongly inclined to hold that art, religion, and astrology put us “in touch with the world’s heart” (Nietzsche 1996, 14). In reality, he asserts, they “belong only to the surface of things.” In The Gay Science (1882) Nietzsche expands upon this claim by asserting that objects in themselves are never beautiful or attractive (or, presumably, graceful, dumpy, ugly, etc.)

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(2001, §299). By this he could mean that nothing is really beautiful (though some things appear to be), or that while some objects are beautiful, beauty is a subject-dependent property of the object. Either way, Nietzsche is asserting that aesthetic experience does not put us in touch with fundamental features of reality. Related elements of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory also receive penetrating criticism. For example, Nietzsche denies that there is such a thing as an inborn, aesthetic talent that deserves the name “genius” (2001, §163), and he aims to debunk the claim that exceptional artists have “a direct view of the nature of the world, as it were a hole in the cloak of appearance” (2001, §164). Nietzsche now claims that such an understanding of artists derives from the vanity and desire for power present in individual artists (2001, §164). In this, artists have much in common with religious leaders (Nietzsche 2001, §150). These types act as they do, and possess the self-understandings they do, for the same human, all too human reasons. Perhaps surprisingly, these critical remarks aimed at Schopenhauer (and, to some extent, at his own early views in aesthetics) do not mark a turn away from aesthetics for Nietzsche. In later writings he insists that the arts are of foremost importance in the context of a human life. He discusses art, artists, and aesthetic experience throughout his works—both in the abstract and in connection with the many artists he admires (e.g., Stendhal, Beethoven, George Eliot, Wagner, Goethe, and Aeschylus). And Nietzsche finds the aesthetic qualities of his own works to be essential to them. He experiments with numerous different literary forms, writing short aphorisms, rhymes, treatises, a philosophical novel, and an autobiography, in each case pushing the limits of the genre. This emphasis on the aesthetic suggests a number of questions—What is Nietzsche’s new aesthetic theory? How does he understand the activity of an artist? What is it, on Nietzsche’s view, for something to be a work of art? There is no easy way to answer these questions. In his later writings Nietzsche moves away from the essentialism in aesthetics of The Birth of Tragedy. He no longer attempts to provide a general account of what an art object is, what an artist does, or how a person ought to engage with a piece of art, which suggests that he takes these questions to have little value. This shift explains why so many of his discussions concern particular artworks or artists. There is, however, one general point to be made concerning Nietzsche’s later interest in aesthetics, one that connects his later works to The Birth of Tragedy and to Schopenhauer. Nietzsche takes some artworks, and some instances of artistic production, to be worthy of our attention because they can guide the way we live our lives. He maintains that following what he terms the “death of God,” we can turn to art in order to find replacements

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for old, discredited moral criteria for the goodness of a life, action, or state of character. These replacement criteria are unabashedly aesthetic in nature. Nietzsche speaks, for example, of a process of giving style to one’s character through concealing what is ugly in it, reinterpreting some tendencies, and accentuating others (2001, §290). The result of this process is a coherent character shaped by a particular sort of taste—not merely an accidental collection of traits. This aestheticist criterion of style enables Nietzsche to regard particular characters as good independent of moral criteria. It is important to note that Nietzsche’s aestheticism is not simply non-moral, but also strongly opposed to the moral thought that there exists a single standard of value that applies to all lives, actions, or characters. Just as there are countless ways in which a piece of art can be a good piece of art, and a wide range of tastes that might shape an artwork, there are on this view countless ways in which a life, action, or character can be good. In a section of Daybreak entitled “To deploy one’s weaknesses like an artist” Nietzsche provides the example of how Beethoven, Mozart, and Wagner—three quite different composers—employ their own distinctive techniques for unifying the weaknesses and virtues of their works in such a way that the resulting whole accentuates the virtues unique to those works (Nietzsche 1997, §218). The process of giving style to one’s character takes precisely this form, and would likewise vary from person to person. Nietzsche gives this aestheticist standard of value a prominent position in his later work because he now holds that it offers the only stable approach to valuing ourselves and our lives. He states, for example, that “one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself—be it through this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold” (Nietzsche 2001, §290). Thus a project of self-fashioning modeled on the act of artistic production is a central element in Nietzsche’s later project of understanding the significance of human existence independent of a moral or religious context. It is through becoming the “poets of our lives” that those lives can appear choiceworthy (Nietzsche 2001, §299). This means that a core element in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy does not disappear as he distances himself from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Nietzsche reminds us of this common feature of his earlier and later views when he states: “as an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable to us, and art furnishes with the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make such a phenomenon of ourselves” (2001, §107). Life is still justified through art, but in Nietzsche’s later works that justification takes place within the point of view of the individual person who aims to construct himself in accordance with aesthetic values.

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Primary Sources Schopenhauer: 1969. The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols. E. F. J. Payne (trans.). Dover, NY. Originally published 1819.

Nietzsche: 1976. Twilight of the Idols. W. Kaufmann (trans.). In The Portable Nietzsche, 463–564. New York: Penguin. Originally published 1889. 1996. Human, All Too Human. R. J. Hollingdale (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published 1878. 1997. Daybreak. R. J. Hollingdale (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published 1881. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy. R. Speirs (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published 1872. 2001. The Gay Science. J. Nauckhoff (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published 1882.

References and Further Reading Jacquette, Dale, ed. 1992. Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nehamas, Alexander. 1985. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Neill, Alex and Janaway, Christopher, eds. 2009. Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Value. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Young, Julian. 1992. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and Robin G. Collingwood (1889–1943) Gary Kemp

What are artists most fundamentally trying to achieve? The average person today is likely to reply by saying that artists try to express themselves. From an historical point of view that might seem anachronistic. Although Michelangelo, for example, might have been willing to sign on to such a claim, his position can hardly be taken as representative of his time. Other artistic figures during the first half of the sixteenth century and earlier would have probably settled for a job description as a craftsman of beauty, blushing perhaps at the individualistic idea that one might “express oneself ” by such means. But perhaps they were being too modest. The eighteenth century saw the rise of the idea of genius, and in particular artistic genius; by the time Kant wrote the Critique of Judgment in 1790, the idea that a central task for the aesthetician was to explain or at least adequately describe the phenomenon of the individual artistic genius had definitely taken hold. At the beginning of the twentieth century came some of the most searching formulations yet of the idea that artistic genius is to be explained in terms of expression. First was the Italian Benedetto Croce’s Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (1902)—translated in 1909 as Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic—and then The Principles of Art (1938), by the Englishman Robin Collingwood (Collingwood translated and to some extent followed Croce). Despite the historicist point of view these two thinkers more or less shared, it must have seemed plausible that they were making manifest something that was always at work in art, even if the artists—for example, Michelangelo’s contemporaries—were not fully conscious of it. Both Croce and Collingwood were general philosophers with formidable systems on which they thought of their aesthetics as drawing. Yet, at least among philosophers, their ideas in aesthetics have won a good deal more attention in the past fifty years than their general ideas, especially in Croce’s

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case, whose overall system is nowadays seldom studied. This is partly because their central idea about art remains very much the thing, if not among professional aestheticians where the institutional theory and its variants are at present dominant. But it is also because the viability or at least the interest of either Croce or Collingwood’s ideas in aesthetics survives their being detached from the general theoretical context in which they were first articulated. In what follows, then, I shall attempt to discuss their aesthetic doctrines in their own right.

1  Intuition and Expression For both Croce and Collingwood, all reality outside the mind—ordinary things like tables and trees—is in some sense a construction of the mind. Reality, in a word, is ideal. But that is largely irrelevant to what they have to say about aesthetics. We can proceed as if they held commonsense views about the distinction between mind and matter. Indeed it will not ultimately matter if we think of them as dualists—so that mind and matter are categorically distinct—or as materialists—so that mind is in some sense made of or realized by matter. It’s worth separating the proposition that art is expression into two: (1) If something is a work of art, then it is expressive. (2) If something is expressive, then it is a work of art. That is, expression can be seen as necessary or sufficient for something’s being a work of art. For Croce and Collingwood, it is both. Expression is logically or linguistically a relation: if something is expressive, there must always be something that it expresses, even if what is expressed is obscure or ineffable. Thus we might think that the things expressed could in principle be expressed by different things, just as a person might have been called by a name other than their actual name. So the horror or terror of Edvard Munch’s The Scream could in principle be expressed by different paintings, or even by works of music, or poetry, and so on. Or that particular expressive content might never have been expressed at all. Munch himself might never have become a painter, yet might still have undergone the experience, which indeed he describes in his diary: I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun was setting— suddenly the sky turned blood red—I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence—there was blood and tongues of fire above the

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blue-black fjord and the city—my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. (Quoted in Heller 1973, 106)

So that moment was in his mind; luckily for us, he was a painter, and thus, later, he managed to transcribe the experience onto the canvas. This is perhaps the commonsense account of what expression is (and is found, e.g., in Tolstoy 1996), but Croce and Collingwood both claim that it is deeply mistaken. The key error in this account is to undervalue the process of expression, making it into a mere practical phenomenon. In particular, it misses the fact that the process of expression is one of becoming conscious of an emotion or of a feeling. One cannot really know, or be conscious of, what it is that one is going to express, and then set about expressing it; indeed if one is genuinely conscious of it then one has already expressed it. For in order to be conscious of something, one needn’t be able to name it or apply a concept to it. (That is a further act of the intellect.) Thus Croce distinguishes between intuitive and conceptual knowledge, and declares that “to intuite”— to become conscious of something—“is to express”; “intuitive knowledge is expressive knowledge” (1922, 11). Collingwood offers a more nuanced psychological account. He writes, of an artist, that he is conscious of . . . a perturbation or excitement which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is: “I feel . . . I don’t know what I feel.” From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. This is an activity which has something to do with the thing we call language: he expresses himself by speaking. It also has something to do with consciousness: the emotion expressed is an emotion of whose nature the person who feels it is no longer unconscious. It also has something to do with the way in which he feels the emotion. As unexpressed, he feels it in what we called a helpless and oppressed way; as expressed, he feels it in a way from which this sense of oppression has vanished. His mind is somehow lightened and eased. (1938, 109–10)

So the apparent separability of the work of art from its expressive content must be diminished accordingly. Indeed, if it is not possible to conceive of the latter except in terms of the former, then the two are really one. The creation of a work art—the expression—and the becoming conscious of what one is expressing are the same thing.

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This is likely to cause puzzlement. For it now seems to follow that one cannot become conscious of an emotion unless one creates a work of art! To address this worry, we must look at the particulars of the Croce–Collingwood theory of the work of art.

2 Ideality About the work of art—the thing doing the expressing—Croce and Collingwood give a surprising account. We say, of Munch’s The Scream, that it hangs in the National Gallery of Norway, that it weighs, say, five kilos, and that it expresses something like horror or terror. But for Croce and Collingwood, this is not strictly correct. The expressive thing is not a physical object at all, but rather what Collingwood calls the “total imaginative experience” that one has when perceiving the physical object. It is a mental thing, an ideal object, and not just in the sense in which all reality is ideal. That is, even if, as suggested, we think of our two theorists as having espoused a commonsense view of physical reality, they would still hold that works of art are not physical things, but things that exist only in the mind, that is, only when one perceives them. For Croce, the painting of pictures, the scrape of the bow upon strings, the chanting or inscription of a poem are only contingently related to the work of art, that is, to the expressed intuition. By this Croce does not mean to say that, for example, the painter could get by without actually painting; nevertheless what he is doing is always driven by the intuition. First, the memory of the intuition often requires—though only contingently—the physical work to sustain or further develop the intuition. Second, the physical work remains necessary for the practical business of the communication of the intuition, that is, of making it available to others. The process of painting is a closely interwoven operation of positive feedback between the intuitive faculty and the practical or technical capacity to manipulate the brush, mix the paints, and so on: the painter, who paints upon canvas or upon wood, but could not paint at all, did not the intuited image, the line and color as they have taken shape in the fancy, precede, at every stage of the work, from the first stroke of the brush or sketch of the outline to the finishing touches, the manual actions. And when it happens that some stroke of the brush runs ahead of the image, the artist, in his final revision, erases and corrects it. It is, no doubt, very difficult to perceive the frontier between expression and communication in actual fact, for the two processes

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usually alternate rapidly and are almost intermingled. But the distinction is ideally clear and must be strongly maintained . . . The technical does not enter into art, but pertains to the concept of communication. (Croce 1966, 227–8, emphasis added; see also 1922, 50–1, 96–7, 103, 111–17; and 1921, 41–7)

So Croce insists that the ideality of the work of art is fully consistent with the practical necessity of the physical work of art. Collingwood agrees, and provides some simple examples of works of art that exist purely in one’s head—a tune that is not played or sung, or a poem that is not written or said aloud; both things nonetheless do exist as works of art. In addition, the experience of a painting typically involves a great deal that no one would say is “in the painting,” which is, after all, a flat canvas with paint on it. Not only do we see things that are not really present, but we have impressions of space and mass, perhaps by means of what the art historian Bernard Berenson called “ideated sensations”—those involving imaginary kinaesthetic sensations (1954, 73–8). These phenomena are not literally features of the canvas, but they are in some sense features of the work. So our theorists include within the work of art proper all that would normally be ascribed to the experience of the artwork. That is, if aesthetic properties are essential to the work of art, and exist only in the mind of the perceiver, then the work of art exists only in the mind of the perceiver. (One may be reminded here of Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and of Berkeley’s criticism of that distinction.) What, then, of our earlier worry that, according to the Croce–Collingwood account, there are no conscious emotions independently of art making? Part of the answer is provided succinctly by Croce. We have “the illusion or prejudice that we possess a more complete intuition of reality than we really do” (Croce 1922, 9). We have, most of the time, only fleeting, transitory intuitions amid the bustle of our practical lives: “The world which as rule we intuite is a small thing,” he writes; “It consists of small expressions . . . a medley of light and color” (Croce 1922, 9). So part of the answer to our worry is that we are not as conscious of things—internal or external—as we like to pretend. On the other hand, we make more works of art than we realize; Croce writes: among the principal reasons which have prevented Aesthetic, the science of art, from revealing the true nature of art, its real roots in human nature, has been its separation from the general spiritual life, the having made of it a sort of special function or aristocratic club. . . .

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There is not . . . a special chemical theory of stones as distinct from mountains. In the same way, there is not a science of lesser intuition as distinct from a science of greater intuition, nor one of ordinary intuition as distinct from artistic intuition. (1922, 14)

For Collingwood, too, our conscious experiences are normally un-sustained, fleeting, and lacking in depth (1938, 307). They take place in a mind that is busy with other things at the same time, and which is dominated by other overarching purposes. Nevertheless, things that normally we would not say are “works of art” are in point of fact so, as proven by our acknowledging their aesthetic dimension. The way we talk to our intimate friends, walk beside the sun-dappled river, or eat a peach may have some aesthetic qualities. Life, then, is full of “artworks,” even if they are mostly shallow, unworthy of comment. And there are times when consciousness settles on something, such that the mental activity does approach the character of art, in the ordinary sense of the word. Sitting in a park, for example, we might dwell on the look of an oak tree, or suddenly think of an original stanza of poetry, or a snatch of melody. These are instances of what Collingwood calls imaginative expression, and are closer to what we should ordinarily call works of art. But they are likely to be lost, unless some record of the experience is made. The “artist,” then, is one who has these experiences more deeply than the average person, and who has mastered the practice of dwelling on and preserving them.

3  The Role of Feeling The doubts we have so far explored concerned (2) the proposition that all expression is the creation of works of art. But one may also doubt (1) the proposition that all works of art are expressive. Is that really plausible? It is easy to cite what seem to be counterexamples; unlike Munch’s The Scream, Mondrian’s famous Compositions of the 1920s are not things you would naturally say express an emotion, and they are not any the worse for that. However, that sort of thing—the stripped-bare, vulnerable exposition of intense emotion as in much of Tchaikovsky or Billie Holiday—is not what our figures mean by the thesis that art is expression. There are two elements to this. First, expression should not be confused with the venting or betrayal of emotion. One’s tears may be said to “express” one’s sadness, or stamping one’s feet one’s anger, but these can occur without the making lucid and intelligible of the emotion that is requisite for expression in Croce or Collingwood’s sense. Generally, we think of this sort of expressive behavior or gestures as

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being caused, at least paradigmatically, by the underlying emotion or feelings. Betrayal can even occur that is wholly unconscious; one can blush without noticing it. But for both Croce and Collingwood there is a sharp distinction between this phenomenon and artistic expression. The relation between expressive object and emotion is that of embodiment or realization, not of causation or inference. Whereas the former is the subject of aesthetics as just explained, the latter is a topic for the natural sciences, as for instance “in Darwin’s enquiries into the expression of feeling in man and in the animals” (Croce 1966, 265; cf. 1922, 21 and 94–7). In an article he wrote for the Encyclopedia Britannica, speaking of such “psychophysical phenomena,” Croce writes: such “expression,” albeit conscious, can rank as expression only by meta­ phorical license, when compared with the spiritual or aesthetic expression which alone expresses, that is to say gives to the feeling a theoretical form and converts it into language, song, shape. (1966, 219)

So long as we allow that pretending to betray an emotion is from an aesthetic point of view equivalent to the actual betrayal of the emotion—so that the outer form and not the inner causation of the phenomenon is what counts— some phenomena commonly termed artistic are surely cases of emotional betrayal. Indeed Collingwood singles out no less a musician than Beethoven, complaining that some of his music amounts to ranting, a display or betrayal rather than expression (Collingwood 1938, 123). Second—and here we touch on more general aspects of Croce and Collingwood’s respective philosophies of mind—the role, not precisely of emotion, but of feeling, is for both figures much wider than one initially suspects. Croce, like Kant, holds that mental states are always active, not reactive or passive, and he holds that each mental state is an holistic or organic whole, such that it can be analyzed—sliced up according to concepts—only by falsifying it to some degree. The engine, or the source of energy for this activity, is feeling. Thus feeling is necessarily part of any (mental) activity, including bare perception—indeed, it is nothing but the will in mental activity, with all its varieties of thought, desire, and action, its varieties of frustration and satisfaction (Croce 1922, 74–6). Art, since it is the expression of such mental states, cuts through the falsifying effects of analysis into concepts to deliver the mental life in its purity. The only criterion of “art” is coherence of expression, that is, of the movement of the will. Collingwood espouses a more down-to-earth conception of mental states that sounds a lot like those of Locke, Hume, and his contemporary Bertrand Russell, in that the basic materials of consciousness are sense-data. But his

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distinctiveness is that he holds that each datum—like a red-patch—comes with an “emotional charge” (Collingwood 1938, 228–34); feelings are not separate items on the mental screen, like dots in a pointillist picture that exist alongside others, but aspects of each sensory item. Much of the time we pass over such charges, but when we attend to them, we find them more pronounced; crimson is felt to be angry in comparison with green, and so on (Collingwood 1938, 161). The upshot is that for either figure, there is no such thing as consciousness without feeling. Thus neither Croce’s nor Collingwood’s theory is directly refuted merely by the existence of works of art that we would not ordinarily characterize as expressive. Assuming for the sake of argument that they are of equal merit, the distinction between Munch’s picture and, say, a Madonna by Raphael does not reside in the amount of feeling in the two pictures, but in the kind of feeling in them. Thus it not surprising that we speak of a feeling running through a work of art, and of a lack of feeling as a universal condemnation of a work. To say the latter is to say that the work lacks that heightening of mental activity, of conscious attention to every detail, that is distinctive of the best works. In addition, the expressive character of, say, a brushstroke, cannot be divorced from other aspects of it, such as its color or its size and shape. The attentive spectator, then, in attending to such aspects, necessarily becomes conscious of their expressive character.

4 Criticisms Both Croce and Collingwood were men of letters. The title of Croce’s first book on the philosophy of art was Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic—that is, the book presents not only a theory of art but also a theory of language. That is no accident: Croce believes that poetry is the foundation of all language, and that all language is expressive: “an emission of sounds which expresses nothing is not language” (1922, 143).1 Furthermore, he claims that drawing, sculpting, writing of music, and so on are just as much “language” as poetry; therefore “Philosophy of language and philosophy of art are the same thing” (Croce 1922, 142, emphasis in original). Collingwood essentially agrees. “In its original or native state, language is imaginative or expressive,” he writes; “It is imaginative activity whose function is to express emotion” (Collingwood 1938, 225). We can speak of the “totality of our motor activities” as a “parent organism,” of which every type of “language (speech, gesture, and so forth)” is an “offshoot” (Collingwood 1938, 246–7). Indeed, Collingwood holds that the proposition or cognitive meaning of a sentence is “a fictitious entity” (1938, 266). Every

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actual episode of thought is performed with its own particular degree and character of emotion; there is no such thing as the thought shorn of its emotional husk. Neither figure really provides an argument for this view; both are rather violently set against logic, linguistics, or the philosophy of language as we would recognize them today. And even if all language were to have something poetic about it, it would not follow that language is only poetry, or that the semantical dimension of language does not exist, or is a false abstraction. There must be something that distinguishes a scientific treatise from a tune— in fact it must be the same thing that serves to distinguish poetry from a tune (it has to have sound and sense, as we say). So to say that drawings and tunes are equally good examples of language seems, at best, strained. But I bring the view of language into the discussion for another reason. One could argue that poetry is actually a rather special case: it is unlike other forms of art in being language, and just because of this, one can readily imagine being the poet as one reads or hears the poem. With painting things seem to be quite different, and thinking primarily about poetry may well have blinded our figures to the difference. For, as the philosopher C. J. Ducasse pointed out, when we look at a vase full of flowers, it does not matter how much of an aesthetic experience we have in attending to it; in no sense do we create a “work of art” unless we draw or paint it (1929, 52–4). In the case of a poem, there is nothing analogous to the vase of flowers—the only thing to look to is the complete poem itself—and that may cause one to overlook the gap between artist and audience. Both Croce and Collingwood have lost sight of the ordinary distinction between passively contemplating and doing something—between looking and drawing, listening and playing, watching and dancing, but also between reading and writing. Of course there are important connections between the first members and the corresponding second members, but that is not to say that there are not philosophically crucial distinctions between them. The thesis that the work of art is an ideal object has been subject to severe criticism (see, most notably, Wollheim 1980, §23; cf. Kemp 2003). The problem concerns the question of the correctness, or at least the justifiability, of interpretations or critical responses. To say that the work of art is ideal is to say that it is necessarily private; it is inaccessible to any person besides whoever is having the experience. Thus, since one man’s experience of Munch’s The Scream is necessarily a different thing from anyone else’s, there is no such thing as Munch’s The Scream, understood not as a material painting but as a work of art; there is at most only Munch’s The Scream-for-me, Munch’s The Scream-foryou, and so on. These experiences cannot literally be compared or said to agree or disagree, since a point of view from which to adjudicate is impossible. But

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that would surely go too far in the relativist or indeed subjectivist direction; as Hume pointed out, it is unreasonable to deny that certain things are aesthetically better than others, even if the point is too often debatable. So, although an idealistic theory can seemingly be developed consistently, the view is nonetheless exceedingly unattractive; contrary to Croce and Collingwood’s intentions, it renders art a diversion away from reality. Although both figures disowned this consequence, it is hard not to conclude that, on this view, art becomes a domain of fancy, of daydreaming, without any check upon vanity. This problem evaporates if we withdraw the claim that the work of art is an ideal object, replacing it, in the case of painting, with the claim that the material painted object is the work of art. More generally works of art should be identified in some sense with something public, even if, in some cases such as music, it is a relatively vague matter exactly what constitutes the work. We can still insist that art is essentially expression; it is just that the things doing the expressing are what we ordinarily take them to be, namely, physical or otherwise public objects, not non-physical or ideal objects. And we can substitute for the ideal thesis something close to it, which we can call the experiential thesis. Croce and Collingwood speak as one in holding that the artistic enterprise is answerable only to the experience of the work of art. In particular, the aesthetic value of a work of art is precisely the aesthetic value of the experience of it. The experiential thesis, then, first, insists on the equation between the value of the work and the value of the experience, but does not make it into a tautology, as it would be according to the ideal thesis; second, it adds a constraint on what experiences determine the value of the work, requiring them to be “of those who understand the work,” or “of those who experience the work rightly,” or some such thing. Of course, it will have to be more flexible than that; we don’t want to imply that there is exactly one exact way to interpret or understand a work. If that is plausible, then much rests on what we said in Section 3, on the role of feeling. The problem being responded to there was that it is on the face of things implausible to say that art is expression—or, in keeping our substitution of the experiential thesis for the ideal thesis, that artistic value is expressive value—in the face of apparent examples of fine works of art that are inexpressive, or minimally so. Croce and Collingwood’s response was that this objection insists on too a narrow conception of feeling; if the matter is considered more carefully, we see that feeling actually comprehends a much wider domain. But that depends too heavily on their respective theories of mind, which, not to put too fine a point on it, are doubtful and have vanishingly few advocates. Is there some other way to maintain that all aesthetic value is explicable as the expression of feeling?

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To answer affirmatively, one would have to explain other apparent values (such as the value of formal arrangement in a painting), in terms of the expression of feeling, or argue that those apparent values are not really aesthetic. Both options appear on the face of it to beg the question: if one restricts the domain of aesthetic value to what is intuitively or naturally called expressive value—so that some of what we had thought were aesthetic values fail to be—then we are still owed an explanation of why we should accept that all aesthetic value is expressive value in the first place; if one widens the domain of expressive value to include all that is legitimately called aesthetic value, so that we lose our intuitive or natural sense of “expression,” then it is not at all clear that the technical term “expressive value” does not count as a synonym of aesthetic value, and the theory no longer has anything distinctive to tell us. Both figures have a good deal to say aimed at both targets—as well as on many things I’ve not discussed—but all the same the list of potentially troublesome phenomena remains long.2

Notes 1 Croce was here taking his cue from his great precursor, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744); see Croce (1922, 220–34). 2 This essay adapts parts of my Kemp (2009).

Primary Sources Croce: 1921. The Essence of Aesthetic. D. Ainslie (trans.). London: Heinemann. 1922. Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic. revised ed. D. Ainslie (trans.). New York: Noonday. 1966. Philosophy, Poetry, History: An Anthology of Essays. C. Sprigge (trans.). London: Oxford University Press.

Collingwood: 1938. The Principles of Art. London: Oxford University Press.

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References and Further Reading Berenson, Bernard. 1954. Aesthetics and History. New York: Doubleday. Ducasse, Curt John. 1929. The Philosophy of Art. New York: Dial. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Heller, Reinhold. 1973. Edvard Munch: The Scream. London: Penguin. Hospers, John. 1956. “The Croce-Collingwood Theory of Art.” Philosophy, 31/119: 291–308. Kemp, Gary. 2003. “The Croce-Collingwood Theory as Theory.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61: 171–93. Kemp, Gary. 2009. “Croce’s Aesthetics.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2010 edition. E. N. Zalta (ed.). URL = http://plato​.stanford​.edu​/entries​/ croce​-aesthetics/. Langer, Suzanne. 1942. Philosophy in New Key. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Neill, Alex. 1998. R.G. Collingwood: a Philosophy of Art. London: Orion Books. Paton, Margaret. 1985. “Getting Croce Straight.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 25: 252–65. Sclafani, Richard. 1976. “Wollheim on Collingwood.” Philosophy, 51/197: 353–9. Sircello, Guy. 1972. Mind and Art: An Essay on the Varieties of Expression. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tolstoy, Leo. 1996. What Is Art? A. Maude (trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Wollheim, Richard. 1980. Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Roger Fry (1866–1934) and Clive Bell (1881–1964) Susan Feagin

Roger Eliot Fry and Arthur Clive Heward Bell were widely read critics, art theorists, and champions of post-impressionist art at a time when it was highly controversial. Bell has received greater attention philosophically due to his definition of art as a significant form and his radical claim that representation is irrelevant to the appreciation and value of art. Fry is better known as an art historian, and it has been claimed that he, more than anyone else, helped to change the taste of his age. Literature, music, theater, and the visual arts were important to both theorists, professionally and personally. They were both part of the Bloomsbury Group, a loose affiliation of artistically minded intellectuals in London whose members included, among others, the writer Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, the painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (Virginia’s sister and Bell’s wife), the biographer Lytton Strachey, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Methodologically, they used their own experiences of individual artworks as the starting point for their theories, not because they took their experiences to be definitive, but because they believed that the value of art lies in the experiences it affords, in which case they need to be analyzed and explained. It is hard not to be struck by the passion with which they write about the arts.

1  Roger Fry and the Imaginative Life After graduating from Cambridge University, Fry traveled to Paris and Italy to study painting. Ultimately, he turned to writing art history, mainly on the “Old Masters,” which secured his professional reputation. He became familiar with the work of Paul Cézanne in 1906 while Curator of Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. After returning to London, he curated the groundbreaking exhibition “Manet and the Post-

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Impressionists” (1910), coining the term that is now used to describe French painting from 1886 to 1914. He founded the Omega Workshops (1913), a short-lived gallery that showed both art and craft in an effort to remove the distinction between them; works were unsigned and sold anonymously in an effort to break down the “cult” of the artist. “An Essay in Aesthetics,” originally published in 1909 and later republished in Vision and Design (1920), is a compact, systematic exposition of Fry’s ideas about the nature and value of painting and drawing, “the graphic arts.” He argues that realistic representation—imitation or verisimilitude—is not the goal of the graphic arts, for if it were, they would be valued only as curiosities or ingenious toys, which manifestly is not the case. It would also be a mystery why music and architecture, where representation plays little, if any, role, would be categorized as art along with painting and drawing. The true value of the graphic arts, Fry proposes, is to enhance our imaginative lives, where we can focus our attention on the perceptual and emotional aspects of the experience itself. Whereas our day-to-day lives are dominated by the need to take practical action and to assume moral responsibility for our actions, our imaginative lives are free from these demands. “It is only when an object exists in our lives for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it” (Fry 1920, 25). Mirrors provide a rudimentary path into the imaginative life because their frames serve to detach our attention from practical concerns, and hence they facilitate attending to the perceptual qualities of the images within them. Fry thus distances himself from Plato, who took the function of painting to be imitation, and hence of no more value than mirrors. In his later essay “Some Questions in Aesthetics” (Chapter 1 of Transformations, 1926), Fry advances a similar claim about documentary film footage: because we are sitting in a theater without any possibility of participating in the action, we are freer to attend perceptually and emotionally to what the film presents to us. Fry cleverly inverts the traditional view that the purpose of art is to copy external appearance in another way: “ordinary people have almost no idea of what things really look like, so that oddly enough the one standard that popular criticism applies to painting, namely, whether it is like nature or not, is one which most people are . . . prevented from applying properly” (1920, 25). This does not, of course, prevent people from thinking that they know how things look, even if “the only things they have ever really looked at [are] other pictures” (Fry 1920, 25, emphasis added). People unwittingly end up judging the realism of pictures by comparing them with the way their subject matter is represented in other pictures with which they are familiar, an idea developed in detail some sixty years later by Nelson Goodman.

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Fry’s views have much in common with the “art for art’s sake” movement, which originated in France with the poet and theorist Charles Baudelaire in the mid-nineteenth century, and the “aesthetic movement” in England, whose most famous advocate was Oscar Wilde. These two movements were criticized for being too sensual and insufficiently moral, a criticism that Fry dubs “Puritanical,” even though he seems to agree that a life dominated by the idea of art for art’s sake to the exclusion of other values would be fairly superficial. Since there is no evidence that appreciating art increases moral behavior or awareness, Fry remarks, defending it on moral grounds requires “some very hard special pleading, even . . . a self-deception which is in itself morally undesirable” (1920, 21). He similarly denies that religion should be praised for its effect on morality (Fry 1920, 21), asserting that both art and religion are more plausibly justified by the way they develop a spiritual capacity whose expression is good in itself. The distinction between the spiritual exercise of the imagination, with its clarity and fullness of perception and emotion, in contrast with the practical and the moral, is a central tenet of Fry’s view. Fry is specific about what qualities in a work provide the requisite clarity and fullness of experience. First and foremost, a work should exhibit order among variety. Some theorists have proposed order among variety as a formula for beauty, but Fry distinguishes two types of beauty. There is beauty that is merely “sensuous charm,” the sort of beauty derided by the Puritans, and which Fry seems to agree cheapens the notion of art’s value. In contrast with sensuous beauty is “supersensual” beauty, which is “concerned with the appropriateness and intensity of the emotions aroused” (Fry 1920, 31). These emotions are elicited not merely by individually pleasing elements, including representational elements, but by complicated networks of relationships that display order amid variety. Further, two types of unity can produce this order. The more familiar type ranges over elements of a painting or drawing that are seen simultaneously, as is typical when a work of graphic art is easel-sized or smaller. Less familiar but equally important is the unity possessed by music and literature that depends on temporal relationships between successively presented parts of a work. Fry points out that painting can have this type of unity as well, citing as examples Chinese landscape scroll paintings that are too long to be perceived all at once. The scroll is gradually unrolled, so that we visually trace, for example, the course of a river or a series of mountains, experiencing a pictorial unity through time. In addition to the two types of unity, Fry describes five “emotional elements of design” (1920, 33): rhythm, mass, space, light (and shade), and color. These elements are not merely objects of visual attention, but “connected with essential conditions of our physical existence” (Fry 1920, 34). This aspect of

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Fry’s view has been underappreciated, yet it provides a useful resource for those who wish to argue for the relevance of the body in perception and aesthetic experience. According to Fry, rhythms echo gestures; masses have momentum and resistance; space, such as represented by inclined planes, is experienced proportionally to ourselves; and light is so important that we are sensitive to the most minute changes in it. Fry writes that these four elements of design “play upon . . . the overtones of some of our primary physical needs” (1920, 35) and that they combine with representation to heighten and complicate our responses. Scientific research since Fry’s time has borne out his last claim about light, for example, establishing that a single photon of light can make a difference in one’s visual experience. However, Fry makes an unnecessary concession when he opines that the fifth element, color, is not very critical to our “physical existence,” and hence that its emotional effects are not so deep or clear as with the other elements of design. Even though the emotional resonances of particular colors are more variable, color vision in general has enormous practical benefits, as revealed by the difficulties faced by those with the rare condition achromatopsia, the absence of color vision. Fry breaks with much theorizing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that takes nature to be the major locus of beauty and the aesthetic. Of course there is beauty in nature, but according to Fry it is not distributed so as to provide sufficient enrichment to imagination, and nature contains a great deal of ugliness as well. Thus, so he argues, nature does not fulfill the perceptual and emotional needs of our imaginative lives. Further, our consciousness that an artwork is made with the intention that it is “to be regarded and enjoyed” (Fry 1920, 37) allows us to put aside our practical concerns and to experience it for its intended purpose: the enrichment of imaginative life.

2  Fry and the Relevance of Representation In “Some Questions in Aesthetics,” Fry expands upon many of the ideas first articulated in “An Essay in Aesthetics.” He reaffirms his method, examining his own experiences in response to art and inviting readers to examine theirs to see if they coincide. He distinguishes between appropriate attitudes to art and to ordinary life, and emphasizes that the aesthetic depends on responses to relationships within a work, rather than to individual elements within it. The case is the same for literature and tragic drama as for the graphic arts: it is “not the emotional intensity of the events portrayed,” but “the inevitability of their unfolding, the significance of the curve of crescendo and diminuendo” (Fry 1926, 10), in brief, a work’s overall structure or organic unity.

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Though Fry is sometimes grouped with Bell as a formalist, he in fact abhorred the distinction between form and content. Content may be “envisaged,” to use his well-chosen term, spatially or plastically so that there is a fusion between the two. That is, the expressive character of the plastic forms may not be identifiable independently of what they represent, and vice versa. However, Fry does distinguish between representational content and the way a painting or drawing may encourage a viewer to think about the psychological life of the persons depicted and the accompanying narrative, taking the latter to be a literary concern. An important question for him is whether the depiction of psychology or narrative is properly a function of the visual arts. Caricature, he proposes, as in the work of Honoré Daumier, provides a compelling case that it is. Nevertheless, Fry still questions whether psychological and plastic values can fuse as form and content can. He explores the possibilities by describing his own responses to an etching by Daumier and paintings by Breughel the Elder and Nicholas Poussin. These descriptions are rich and detailed, and worth emulating in any effort to develop a better eye for looking at art, independently of their role in the debate over psychology and representation. Fry finds that, in his experience, the plastic and the psychological do not fuse as form and content sometimes do, and that he is always shifting back and forth between the two. Realizing that no enumeration of cases will prove that the psychological and the plastic cannot fruitfully cooperate, he suggests a reason why such a conflict would be inevitable: since one aspect involves “the spaceless world of psychological entities and relations” and the other involves “the apprehension of spacial relations,” we are therefore “compelled to focus on the two elements separately” (Fry 1926, 23). Further, the discomfort induced by shifting our attention back and forth compromises the work’s organic unity. He concludes that paintings and drawings may serve psychological ends that are proper to literature and drama, but that the result will be a mixture of two distinct arts, “the art of illustration and the art of plastic volumes” (Fry 1926, 27). If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the psychological and the plastic do require a shifting of attention, does it follow that the psychological and the spatial cannot be aesthetically cooperative or mutually supportive? In “An Essay in Aesthetics,” Fry mentions one possibility that he here ignores, that is, that the relationship between the psychological and the plastic may be experienced through time, as with Chinese landscape scroll paintings. That is, even if it is not possible to experience the work’s unity at a single point in time, the overall unity of a work may be experienced in shifting one’s attention between and among various aspects of it.

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Fry might rejoin that the experience of scroll paintings, like theatrical presentations and reading literature, is guided systematically by the changing visual array, but the experience of a Rembrandt painting through time is not controlled in the same way. Therefore, the unity one attributes to the work may well not be present in one’s experience of it. Debates continue among philosophers of art over the extent to which a shifting of focus of attention should be seen as a precursor to a unified aesthetic experience, or whether the shifting of attention is a temporally extended way of experiencing the unity that inheres in the work. A recent example of such a debate is the exchange between Ernst Gombrich and Richard Wollheim over the shifting of attention between pictorial depth and surface composition.

3  Clive Bell and Significant Form Bell and Fry agree that any theory of art must be grounded in one’s personal experience while recognizing that no individual person’s experience is definitive. And both aspire to develop a theory of visual art that, with suitable modifications, has general application to other art forms such as music and poetry. Fry is less interested in defining art than in explicating its value and showing how favorable judgments of individual works may be defended. Bell, in contrast, takes a definition of art to be essential to a theory of art and argues that art includes all and only those objects that have significant form. In “The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” the first chapter of Art (1914), Bell claims both that theories of art must begin with the personal experience of a particular type of valuable emotion, the “aesthetic emotion,” and that the objects that produce this emotion are what we call “art.” The “central problem” of aesthetics is then to discover what property of artworks is responsible for producing this type of emotion. Bell opines that “only one answer seems possible”: significant form (1914, 17). By form he means the relations of lines, colors, and shapes. Forms are significant when, for example, the relationships of lines, move us aesthetically. If something is art it must have, to at least a minimum extent, significant form. We can agree on this much, yet disagree about how good any individual work of art is, since we may disagree about the extent to which any individual work has significant form. It is the job of critics to help us see the significant form of individual artworks so that we have aesthetic emotions when viewing them. Enabling viewers to have such emotions is the way critics “prove” their evaluative judgments. Bell’s fundamental assumption that it is necessary to define art—that is, that “either all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we

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speak of ‘works of art’ we gibber” (1914, 17)—has been repeatedly attacked by philosophers. Most obviously, works of art may share a particular set of qualities, not just one. In addition, different artworks may possess overlapping sets of features without there being any single feature common to them all, a possibility inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea that objects designated by the same term might display patterns of family resemblances rather than one or more essential features. Contrary to Bell’s claim, “art” used to describe a category of objects identified in one of these two ways would not be gibberish. Thus, we cannot conclude, simply because we use the term “art” meaningfully, that there must be a single quality that all works of art share. In defining art as significant form, Bell advances a “normative definition” of art, which entails that, to the extent that anything is art, it is good art. Thus, paintings that fail to have any degree of significant form are not bad works of art: they are not works of art at all. A painting that we ordinarily might take to be a work of art, such as William Frith’s Paddington Station, an example that Bell discusses, turns out not to be one. Some see this as a defect in his theory, since it is not how we would ordinarily use the word “art,” but Bell himself is not shy about advocating a revision of what we normally think of as art. It is also sometimes objected that, on Bell’s view, there cannot be any bad art. Indeed, he does require that all artworks are good to some extent—to the extent that they have significant form—but it is possible for a work to have so little significant form that it should be judged as a bad work of art overall. More pressing is what makes a form “significant” and hence capable of eliciting aesthetic emotions. If we had an account of what makes a form significant, we could, at least in principle, identify whether it is present in individual works without having to rely on having an aesthetic emotion or on the promptings of critics. Bell, as one might expect, does not think such an account is possible. Innumerable combinations and relationships of line, color, and shape will be significant, and there is no way to provide a definitive description in advance of what enables them to produce an aesthetic emotion. This is something of a letdown, but it is not clear Bell is worse off in this regard than any other theorist who attempts to identify what properties make an artwork aesthetically valuable. The history of aesthetics is littered with attempts to explain how a work can be good in virtue of its intrinsic properties when there is no independently verifiable description of what these properties are. Nevertheless, Bell ventures a hypothesis about why certain combinations of line, color, and shape move us emotionally while others do not: artists feel aesthetic emotions in response to such forms in the world, or, in other words, “ultimate reality” (1914, 46), and they communicate those emotions to perceivers via such forms in their work. Bell denies emphatically that

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this speculation is part of aesthetics proper, which is probably just as well, though it is a little odd that he would see such important claims about the nature of human value as not part of aesthetics. Roger Fry, in contrast, identifies many qualities as responsible for enriching our perceptual and emotional imaginative life, and he is less concerned about the boundaries of aesthetics per se, even referring to empirical psychological studies designed to identify factors that make unity in variety appealing (1920, 31–2). Bell resists using the word “beauty” to refer to significant form since aesthetic beauty is too easily confused with both natural beauty and the non-aesthetic beauty of something that serves its practical function well (1914, 20–1). Like Fry, he breaks rank with a whole host of theorists from the eighteenth century onward who take the beauties of nature to be paradigm cases of the aesthetic. Bell also claims that the non-aesthetic beauty of things that serve our personal, practical interests, including sexual appeal, is not the beauty of significant form. Fry, of course, allows that “supersensual” beauty of unity in variety can enhance our imaginative life and hence be a locus of value in art, a beauty that he thinks can be but only rarely is present in nature. Bell’s definition of art as significant form has also been attacked as circular or vacuous, as if he simply defines art, significant form, and aesthetic emotion in terms of one another. However, the lack of an independent description of what makes forms significant does not make Bell’s claims vacuous. Indeed, he makes a number of substantive claims that can be and have been critiqued: that particular aesthetic emotions vary but are all of the same recognizable type; that they are produced in the visual arts by a combination of lines, colors, and forms alone; that the one defining feature of art is significant form; and that the significance or valuable quality of form may be present to a greater or lesser degree. One may agree or disagree with Bell on any of these points, and some standard objections have emerged to the first three. One may deny that all aesthetic emotions are of a recognizable type, and hence that there is a particular type of emotion, an aesthetic emotion, at all. One may deny that lines, colors, and forms alone, independently of representation, are responsible for an artwork’s value as art. One may deny that the presence of significant form, independently of the intentions of the person who made it, is sufficient to make something art; and one may deny that an object that is intended to be a work of art fails to be one because the artist fails to endow it with significant form. The fourth claim, that the quality of formal relationships comes in degrees, as does the value of different artworks, has not received as much attention.

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4  Bell and the Irrelevance of Representation Next to his definition of art, the most controversial component of Bell’s theory is his view that representation is completely irrelevant to art. He is more extreme on this issue than Fry, who saw representation as enhancing the possibilities for variety and modes of unification, though he was at pains to draw the line at psychological values and narrative storytelling. Since Bell sought a defining property that all artworks share, regardless of medium, it had to be a property that would be present also in music and architecture, which typically lack representational elements. He claims that forms are to be apprehended stripped of any representational significance, with the exception that, “if the representation of three-dimensional space is to be called ‘representation,’ then I agree that there is one kind of representation which is not irrelevant” (Bell 1914, 28). Bell’s claim regarding the irrelevance of representation has been challenged on both psychological and philosophical grounds. As a matter of psychological fact, the human perceptual system cannot perceive anything without categorizing it in some way. However, it is possible to distinguish representational content of a thinner variety, involving two-dimensional forms and three-dimensional space, from representation of a thicker variety, where what is represented is identified using utilitarian or artifactual categories (such as tables and chairs), or roughly “scientific” or common sense categories (such as trees and fruit), or social or historical categories (such as battles and baptisms). If categorization of the thinner variety alone is psychologically possible, it is not clear that the psychological objection poses a real problem for Bell. The philosophical objection is more difficult to combat. The objection states that even though it may be possible psychologically to separate form from content or representation of a thicker variety, it is not desirable to do so if one is interested in appreciating an artwork. Ignoring the thicker representational elements impoverishes art because it eliminates so much of what we appreciate about it. Cézanne, for example, did not merely paint shapes and masses, but weighty, shaped pears; in his works, representation and form, as Fry puts it, “fuse” and are mutually transformed. Though Bell’s theoretical writing does not allow that representation and form can be conjoined, his art criticism, to his credit, often involves significant reference to representation. Bell is aware that his rejection of representation is a radical move. He acknowledges that virtually all works of visual art contain a “descriptive element” and he attempts to explain why representation is virtually ubiquitous if it is irrelevant to the value of a work of art. Once again, however, he takes

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the proffered explanations not as part of his aesthetic theory proper. He observes that, in the history of art, two sorts of single-minded projects have generally led to aesthetic failure: the pursuit of pure form, and the pursuit of verisimilitude or “naturalistic” representation. With regard to the former, he hypothesizes that if an artist concentrates on form alone, to the exclusion of some particular artistic problem related to subject matter, the project is likely to be “too vague” to be carried out (Bell 1914, 53). For example, suppose one is interested in the depiction of volumes floating weightlessly in space. Such a project is not doomed to failure, as demonstrated by Mark Rothko’s paintings, but Bell’s point is that a project has more specificity and is hence more manageable when it is carried out by painting, say, apples and pears, rather than by attempting to paint floating volumes per se. It is sobering that the champion of pure form was not convinced that totally nonrepresentational art had much of a future. It could be that Bell’s overemphasis of two-dimensional form and undervaluation of plastic or three-dimensional form led him to underestimate the potential of nonrepresentational art, for example, in the rendering of plastic form in counterpoint to total flatness, or in relation to representing spatial anomalies. Fry, in contrast, declines to attribute much aesthetic importance to two-dimensional design alone, where there are no plastic values. In any case, Bell at least acknowledges and addresses the bigger question as to why representation is virtually ubiquitous in the history of art, when on his view it is aesthetically irrelevant. Bell argues not only that the pursuit of pure form leaves the artistic problem too vague, but also that the pursuit of verisimilitude makes things “too simple” (1914, 53). Excessive concern with “naturalistic” representation was an important target for both Bell and Fry, for the post-impressionists, such as Cézanne and Matisse, were often criticized for their lack of verisimilitude. Bell notes that advances in photography (even in his day) make the replication of visual appearances obsolete as a goal for painting. He might also have mentioned that the ability to draw or paint a scene in perspective, if not “simple,” is still a skill that can be taught to virtually anyone. Finally, there is the point made by Fry that although people may claim to judge paintings by how closely they resemble what they depict, in reality most people spend little time looking carefully at the world and are hence not even good judges of painting as imitation. Viewers of paintings routinely fail to notice the specific ways they do or do not resemble the volumes, mass, and rhythms of objects in space. Bell has an additional way of deflecting the criticism that painters such as Cézanne are insufficiently realistic. He argues that reliance on realism is often “a sign of weakness in an artist” (1914, 29) and that it appeals to

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a similar weakness in perceivers who are insensitive to form in art and instead tend to “read in” the emotions of everyday life. Admitting that he himself does not have much understanding of musical form, Bell confesses that when attending concerts he tends to think about everyday human emotions, associated stories, and other “ideas of life.” He is thus more honest in admitting his inability to appreciate music than many who are no less deficient in their abilities to appreciate visual art. The purpose of art is not realistic representation, but to present us with significant form whose value is, as he puts it, “independent of time and place” (Bell 1914, 33–4) and hence at least in principle universally accessible.

Primary Sources Fry: 1920. Vision and Design. London: Chatto and Windus. 1926. Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art. New York: Brentano’s. 1939. Last Lectures. London: Cambridge University Press.

Bell: 1914. Art. London: Chatto and Windus. 1922. Since Cézanne. London: Chatto and Windus. 1927. Landmarks in Nineteenth-Century Painting. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

References and Further Reading Bell, Quentin. 1995. Bloomsbury Recalled. New York: Columbia University Press. Blocker, H. Gene. 1979. “Formalism.” In Philosophy of Art, 143–202. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Carroll, Noël. 1989. “Clive Bell’s Aesthetic Hypothesis.” In G. Dickie, R. Sclafani, and R. Roblin (eds.), Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, 2nd ed., 84–95. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Curtin, Deane W. 1982. “Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 40: 315–26.

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John Dewey (1859–1952) Thomas Leddy

John Dewey was arguably the major figure in American aesthetics and philosophy of art in the first half of the twentieth century. With Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, Dewey is widely considered one of the three great American pragmatists. His numerous publications cover almost every aspect of philosophy. He was also a public philosopher who had an influence that went far beyond the halls of academe. Although neglected from the 1950s through the 1980s, his philosophy underwent a significant revival in the 1990s, partly thanks to a renaissance of American Pragmatism. In everything he did, Dewey sought to overcome rigid dichotomies, for example, those between mind and body, subject and object, artworld and the world of everyday life, high and popular art, creative process and creative product, and artist and audience. Contemporary aestheticians sometimes oppose these dichotomies, but none are as thoroughgoing as Dewey. Although Dewey wrote on aesthetic matters from time to time over his long career, his views on these matters find their culmination in his masterpiece Art as Experience (1934). Here I will draw entirely from that work.

1  Continuity with Everyday Life Dewey believes that in order to understand fine art, one has to appreciate that upon which it is based. He replaces the idea that the work of art is a product with the notion that it is what that product does in experience. Unfortunately, contemporary culture routinely sees great works of art as isolated from both the conditions that brought them into existence and their consequences. For Dewey, this hinders us from understanding art’s nature. Hence, he opposes the idea that art belongs to a separate realm—what he calls the “museum” conception of art. Instead, the natural continuity between art and everyday life needs to

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be restored. This means knowing the soil out of which art grows. Thus, to understand the aesthetics of art one must turn first to aesthetics “in the raw”—to the fascination, say, the spectator has in baseball or the mechanic in his work. Theorists undermine the value of art when they separate it from ordinary experience. This separation is due to our culture’s commitment to the spiritual over the material and the mental over the physical. By contrast, people from “savage” cultures, not influenced by this dualist impulse, admire everything that intensifies their sense of immediate living. They take great care in making practical things such as rugs and spears. Also their dance, music, and painting are not seen as separate from religious celebration. In the same way, our ancestors saw the various arts as organically related to each other and to other aspects of their lives. In ancient Greece, the arts reflected the emotions and ideas associated with social life. Art only became separated from temple and forum through the modern rise of imperialism and capitalism. Imperialism called for museums as places to store loot, while capitalism encouraged the newly rich to surround themselves with signs of taste. Art objects became disconnected from their places of creation, turning into items for sale in the world market. Art came to be seen as a matter of subjective self-expression, and theorists saw aesthetics as merely contemplative. In contrast, Dewey sees art not as existing in a separate niche but as a celebration of everyday life. It develops, accentuates, and idealizes what is valuable in life. In order to understand art, we need to understand the full meaning of ordinary experience. We need to learn how everyday making of things grows into making works of art, and how everyday enjoyment grows into aesthetic experience. This should not be seen as a rejection of museums and concert halls but of their isolation from life.

2  The Nature of Experience To carry out this task we need to review the nature of experience itself. Like other animals, humans have certain needs and desires which are often frustrated. We respond to this frustration by means of defense and conquest, seeking to recover equilibrium. Such recovery is not just a return to a prior state, but is enriched by what it passes through. If life becomes fuller in significance, it does so by transforming the factors it has overcome into aspects of something higher, achieving a new harmony. At the nonliving level of existence, form comes when equilibrium is reached. When incorporated by nonhuman animals this state is met by harmonious feelings. In humans, the rhythm of losing and regaining integration with the environment becomes conscious. Disorder brings on emotion, which is then turned into an interest in objects

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that can bring new harmony. Following this, the artist focuses on moments of tension in life for their potential to be resolved in a unified experience. Aesthetics experience requires change: it could not happen in a world of total flux or in one that is finished and static. The rhythm of breaks and reunions in life makes aesthetic quality possible. The moment when we pass from disorder into harmony is the most intense: think of the hour when a paper you are working on suddenly takes on form and meaning. This moment of harmony is also a new beginning that has its own potential for new struggles and resolutions. Yet, such moments, in which past, present, and future are unified, are rare. When they fail to occur the past is a burden full of regret. Happiness, which Dewey defines as deep fulfillment, is the result of a harmony that has been preserved through various tensions. The past is absorbed into the present while the future has an aura of possibility. Art celebrates this. Dewey believed that art is valuable both as a means and as an end. It is not a means in the sense of being merely useful but in that it gives us a refreshed attitude toward ordinary experience. Animals and more primitive men are particularly apt at achieving the kind of harmony described. The tribal man, for example, is most alive when his senses prepare him for thought and action, as in hunting. Today, for Dewey, people fail to connect art and everyday life because our societal structures of work and consumption encourage compartmentalization. We separate sense and thought, both in practice and in theory. Dewey sought to overcome these separations. Some would argue that Dewey neglects the differences between humans and animals. But he held that humans are different in that they take the unity of sense and impulse in animal life and infuse it with conscious meaning. Human lives are more complex than animal lives because they offer more opportunities for resistance and tension, for invention, and for depth of insight and feeling. Human rhythms of struggle and consummation are more varied and long-lasting, and the fulfillments more intense. Art is proof that humans can consciously achieve the union of sensation, need, and action found in animal life, yet at a more complex level. This view leads Dewey to downplay the distinction between fine and applied art. What makes a work “fine” is only that the artist lived fully while producing it. Most utensils today are non-aesthetic only because of the “unhappy” (capitalist) conditions of their production and consumption.

3  An Experience Dewey’s theory of perception leads to a radically novel theory of experience. Experience is seen not as a passive collection of sensations but as something

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dynamic. Although there are experiences that have no meaning because incomplete or undeveloped, the true nature of experience is to be found in what Dewey calls “an experience.” He initially describes this as the kind of experience that has a beginning and an end, the end being a consummation or fulfillment of what was promised in the beginning. Later he suggests that it exemplifies the nature of the thing experienced, as for example a dinner that sums up all that food can be. An experience has a pervasive quality that gives it its character. Moreover, each of its parts is organically related to the whole, each flowing into the next without losing its identity. The unity of an experience is not simply intellectual, practical, or emotional: an experience, whether of art or of thinking, has all three features, although—after the experience—we might find that one of these modes is dominant. Another feature of an experience is that it contains no dead spots: even the pauses carry something from the past and project something into the future (this is most notable in music). Works of art are examples of an experience. However, Dewey’s theory of experience has a broader scope than art. It is a critique of earlier forms of empiricism. Contra John Locke and David Hume, Dewey holds that the ideas constituting “real thought” are not separate and independent entities linked by association, but are phases of a developing aesthetic quality. Thus scientific and philosophical thinking can also be an experience. Such thinking differs from art only in that its material consists of abstract symbols rather than qualities. As with art, the experience of this kind of thinking satisfies us emotionally when it is both internally integrated and aesthetic. Even practical action can have the quality of an experience, as when one engages in a courageous act that develops toward a consummation. By contrast, nonaesthetic experiences and non-aesthetic trains of thought involve loose or mechanical connection of parts. Dewey stresses that experience is emotional and that emotions are aspects of events and objects. It is emotion that gives an experience its qualitative unity and its aesthetic character. Yet emotions are not to be thought of as static: they are aspects of complex wholes that have their own development. An experience, for example studying for and successfully taking an exam, includes both a doing (taking the exam) and an undergoing aspect (studying), and requires a balance between the two. The undergoing aspect can be painful and yet can be incorporated into a larger pleasurable whole. Once we see conscious experience as including both doing and undergoing, we can see that the making and the experiencing aspects of art form an integrated process. Something is artistic when the qualities of the result control the process of production. Thus, the artist designs her work with the viewer in mind. Similarly, aesthetic experience should be linked to

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the process of production by creating one’s own experience in such a way as to include relations similar to those experienced by the artist. Identical experience is not required, however. The experiencer can bring the work alive for herself only through re-creating it in her own terms. Dewey’s emphasis on both making and experiencing art leads to his seeing art as expression.

4  Theory of Expression and of the Expressive Object For Dewey, every creative process begins with an “impulsion.” Impulsion, which is a movement of the entire organism, is the beginning of a complete experience. The organism, in trying to satisfy its needs, typically runs into resistance. It converts obstacles into something useful. In this process it becomes aware of itself, and this involves reference to the past. Expression is an ordering of the impulsion by way of incorporating past experience. Unlike emotional discharge, such as instinctive crying, expression brings inspiration to completion. The future is involved as well as the past, for future consequences are incorporated into the expressive object as meaning. Artistic expression involves interaction of the self and surrounding environment over time. For this to happen there has to be a medium. Musical tones, for example, express only within the context of other tones; hence they do not express unless they are in the medium of the other tones. Yet expression is not a matter of applying a pre-established idea to some material. The artist only understands what she was trying to do at the end of the process, when the meaning initially stirred up finally becomes conscious. The expression as act and the expressiveness of the product are organically tied: a graceful painting derives from a graceful act of painting. This view is contrary to that of later philosophers such as Monroe Beardsley who sought to disconnect the creative process from the creative product. Dewey, however, believed we should not view the art object in isolation from the vision of the artist who produced it, or from the aspects of the world that inspired it.

5  Representation, Form, and Rhythm Art is representational, not in the sense that it copies the world, but in that it tells people about the nature of their experience. Meaning is not something projected onto the world. The world has concentrated meaning that art brings out. Tintern Abbey, for example, expresses itself in Wordsworth’s famous poem about it. Art, then, does not just express the inner emotions

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of the artist. The artist gains passion from her relation to her chosen subject matter. The expressive object comes about only through the development of this passion in a medium. The painter, for example, gives the viewer a new object in which the scene portrayed and the emotion felt are fused in paint. For an object to be expressive, sensuous matter and prior experience must be incorporated together. Dewey’s analysis of form is strikingly different from that of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, whose formalist theory of art dominated the early twentieth century. Form, for Dewey, is a dynamic and temporal thing. It is an operation of forces that bring an experience to fulfillment. It is a matter of anticipation, tension, rhythm, accumulation, and consummation. Nor is consummation a static endpoint: there can be many consummatory moments in the experience of a work of art. Dewey divides aesthetic experience into three stages: rapturous seizure, in which an inclusive qualitative whole is first experienced; discrimination; and criticism. Discrimination, also called analysis, considers parts as parts of a whole, and cannot ultimately be separated from synthesis. Criticism attempts to achieve objectivity, which is based on two factors. First, works of art are parts of the objective world and they are conditioned by materials and energies of that world. Second, for an object to be the content of aesthetic experience it must satisfy objective conditions that belong to that world. This is why the artist shows interest in the world, and in her materials. The first and most important of these objective conditions is rhythm, which Dewey sees as crucial not only for music but for aesthetic experience generally. Rhythm already exists in nature: for example, the rhythm of the heartbeat, or that of dawn and sunset. Early humans saw these as having mysterious meaning related to their survival. This led them to create rhythms of their own. They brought the essences of animals and other natural phenomena to life in the rhythms of dance, sculpture, and painting. Reproducing the rhythms of nature generated a sense of drama in life.

6  What Is Common to the Arts Dewey rejects the possibility of defining art in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, for he thinks that definitions do not reveal some inward reality that is eternally fixed. There are essences, but only in the sense that there is the “gist” of a thing. That Dewey understands art as experience has often led people to think that he identifies art with experience, or with aesthetic experience. This is wrong, as there can be aesthetic experiences in science, philosophy, and practical life as well as in art. Neither does he define

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art as expression, although he sees the two as closely tied. He does tell us when there is a work of art, however. A work of art exists when the force of the object interacts in a positive way with the energies of the experience to produce a distinct reality that develops cumulatively toward a fulfillment. There are also things common between the various arts. Dewey mentions four. The first involves the creative process. Whatever the medium, the artist begins with a certain mood that is then gradually differentiated while a pervasive quality gives the work its unity. Dewey associates this with what he calls the “background” of a work of art. Experiences, unlike objects of experience, are not clearly bounded. The background of an experience, although unconscious, extends infinitely. If the sense of that background becomes intense, the experience is mystical. A painting or poem can heighten the sense that everything exists within a larger whole. A second commonality is that each art form has its own medium and its own sense modality. That different arts are in different media may seem to separate them dramatically. However Dewey held that the medium simply concentrates all of experience into one sense modality. A medium is a means, but not a mere means. It is a means that is taken up into the outcome and is contained within it. A third commonality is that each great work of art has parts that are capable of being perceptually differentiated indefinitely. This is in contrast to trivial works, from which we only get a kick. Great works give us something to dwell on. Observing how this happens sharpens our aesthetic perception. A fourth commonality is that space and time are found in the matter of each art. However, the mathematical approach to space and time does not apply here. In the arts, space and time are not empty containers or sets of relations. They are experienced qualitatively as changes of feeling.

7  What Is Different between the Arts Although rigid definitions may be useful in the sciences and in logic, they are not so when differentiating the various arts, since they neglect both transitional forms and historical development. In particular, Dewey objects to the traditional division between arts of vision and arts of sound. Although each art medium focuses on an organ of perception, it incorporates other aspects of perception in the final experience. Most theories fail to recognize that the artwork is an experience that has a temporal and cumulative nature. This is why Dewey opposes the idea of separating art into temporal and spatial forms. The seemingly spatial form of architecture has a temporal dimension: to appreciate a great cathedral

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one must explore it over time. He also opposes the idea of dividing art into representational and non-representational forms. A work of seemingly nonrepresentational architecture is representational both in the way it expresses such phenomena as gravity and stress and insofar as it represents the values of the culture that produced it.

8  Art Interpretation and Criticism A work of art is complete only when it is actualized in the experience of someone other than the artist. Even the artist working in isolation is thinking about the impact on the audience. To perceive a work aesthetically is to create something new, and therefore no two persons experience the same work. Indeed a work of art is recreated every time it is experienced, and changes as the viewer brings something different to it. Dewey thinks it absurd to ask what an artist meant by a work. What the work means is whatever you can get from it that gives it life. What makes a work universal is that different persons in different contexts can experience it in their own ways. The function of criticism is not to render a verdict or even to merely give an impression but to enhance perception. Good judgment requires background knowledge and discipline. The business of the critic is to analyze the impressions we receive from an artwork in terms both of what causes those impressions and of their consequences. Dewey believes that, although there are no standards for critical judgment in the sense that there are scientific methods of measurement, there are criteria. Also, unlike scientific matters, the subject matter in art is qualitative. The criteria of art judgment are not rules but rather means of discovering what the work of art is. They are found in the relation of form and matter, in the nature of the medium, and in the nature of the expressive object. For example, an artist is unsuccessful if she does not fill the work of art as experience with meanings from prior experience. The business of criticism is to deepen experience for others through reeducating perception. Criticism fails when irrelevant or arbitrary. It also fails when the whole is reduced to a single isolated element, or the work is reduced to a mere object of economic, political, or psychoanalytic analysis.

9  Art and Civilization Throughout his philosophical writing Dewey sought to reform society. This was no less true in his aesthetic theory. He saw his own time (the 1930s) as

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one in which relations between members of society were mechanical and external, and in which communication was constrained. Art, because it is a universal language, provides a partial escape from these conditions. The isolation of art in our society is a manifestation of social incoherence. It is also the product of the rise of science. Although science gives us a new conception of the physical world, we also retain views inherited from older moral and religious traditions. Thus, the moral and physical worlds are separated, resulting in philosophical dualism. Yet, although science strips things of their value, the world in which art operates remains the same. Thus, the death of art is not imminent since art is essential to civilization. Dewey defines civilization as instruction in the arts of life and the civilized person as someone who participates in the values of life by means of imagination. The main trouble art faces today is with the non-democratic nature of our economic system. That system entails a radical separation of the labor and leisure aspects of our lives. Like Karl Marx before him, Dewey believed that only a radical social change, one that would allow for more worker participation in the production and distribution of products, would improve the quality of experience in the lives of workers, giving them more aesthetic satisfaction in their work.

10  Dewey’s Reception Dewey’s aesthetic writings found a very wide audience. He was read by artists and art administrators in the 1930s and 1940s as well as by philosophers. He had a direct impact on Roosevelt’s WPA, New Deal project, which was, for a while, the dominant force in the arts in the United States. Many of the visual arts movements of the 1950s and 1960s, including Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, were consistent with Dewey’s ideas and were both directly and indirectly influenced by them. Environmental Art, Happenings, and Installation Art all owe something to Dewey. In philosophy, Dewey had two sorts of critics in his own lifetime. Followers of Hegel, such as Benedetto Croce, believed he overemphasized the material side of art. By contrast, fellow naturalists and pragmatists, notably Stephen Pepper, often argued (with little real understanding) that he had reverted to Hegelianism in this late work, especially in his advocacy of organicism. An organicist opposes philosophical reductionism, holding that there are some wholes, for example works of art, which are not fully understandable in terms of mechanical relations of parts. Dewey was an organicist, but he did not agree with Hegel’s more speculative position that all of reality is an organic whole. Finally, many writers from various schools had trouble with

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the continuities Dewey found between the aesthetic experiences of art and those of everyday life. In the 1950s aesthetics underwent an analytic revolution. A famous article by J. A. Passmore (1951) argued that traditional aesthetics was dreary because too vague and Hegelian. After this Dewey’s philosophy began to be neglected, although it still had influence on such figures as Monroe Beardsley, who adapted Dewey’s idea of experience, and Nelson Goodman, who shared with him the idea that art is a kind of language. The major thinkers of the 1970s and 1980s seldom mentioned Dewey by name, although some philosophers, notably Arnold Berleant and Marx Wartofsky, continued to be inspired by him. Joseph Margolis has Deweyan strands in his thought, in particular his pragmatism and his idea of works of art as physically embodied and culturally emergent entities. The most widely recognized figure of the time, Arthur Danto, could be said to be anti-Deweyan in his emphasis on the artworld as an entity isolated from the cultural world, the world of “mere things,” and in his tendency to downplay the role of aesthetics in art. Revival of interest in Dewey came with a renewed interest in pragmatism launched by the writings of Richard Rorty, who, unfortunately, had little to say about Dewey’s aesthetics. Also there was an increasing interest in applying aesthetics beyond the realm of fine art. Although Dewey did not always speak positively of popular art, the general tendency of his thought was to incorporate it into aesthetics. Thus he could be said to be an inspiration for all the efforts to talk about the aesthetics of such art forms as jazz and comics. The development of an aesthetics of nature, for example in the work of Allen Carlson, found inspiration in Dewey, as did the newer “aesthetics of the environment,” spearheaded by Carlson and Berleant. Dewey has been even more influential in the recent development of an “aesthetics of everyday life,” as in the work of Yuriko Saito. A particularly strong advocate of Dewey’s aesthetics has been Richard Shusterman, who has also developed his own theory of body-related aesthetics called somaesthetics. Those who wish aesthetics to be more multicultural can find many points of convergence with Dewey, as can feminist aestheticians. Also, those who wish to understand aesthetics in terms of evolutionary theory and neuroscience can find inspiration in Dewey’s naturalism. Finally, Dewey’s fierce love of democracy and his incorporation of liberal ideals into his theory make him a natural ally for political progressives. That said, the rediscovery of Dewey’s aesthetic thought is very much incomplete, as proven, for example, by the existence to date of only one major scholarly explication, that of Thomas Alexander. Three things are most remarkable about Dewey’s aesthetics. First is his vision of aesthetics as a series of connections and continuities: between

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everyday life and art, human and animal existence, primitive and civilized, and the rhythms of man and the rhythms of nature, among others. Second is his image of fully actualized experience as something that carries the past into the present and projects it into the future through development of a pervasive quality. Third is his attempt to move aesthetics from the periphery of philosophy to its center through emphasizing the role it plays not only in art but also in science and philosophy itself. These have been the insights most neglected since the analytic revolution, and the things most in need of revival.1

Note 1 Some passages here are adapted from Leddy (2016).

Primary Sources Dewey: 1989. Volume 19: 1934, Art as Experience. In The Later Works, 1925–1952. Jo Ann Boydston (ed.). Carbondale: Southern University Press.

References and Further Reading Alexander, Thomas M. 1987. The Horizons of Feeling: John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press. Jackson, Philip W. 1998. John Dewey and the Lessons of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Leddy, Thomas. 2016. “Dewey’s Aesthetics.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2016 edition. URL = http://plato​.stanford​ .edu​/entries​/dewey​-aesthetics/. Passmore, J. A. 1951. “The Dreariness of Aesthetics.” Mind, 60: 318–35. Shusterman, Richard. 1992. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, Oxford: Blackwell.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Kelly Dean Jolley

Ludwig Wittgenstein has no aesthetics—at least, not as philosophers tend to use that term. So, you might say, that’s that. Of course, it isn’t. Where, other than in philosophy, is that ever more surely not that? (Recollect Russell’s spindling of “this.”) There’s always more, so much more, to say.

1  The Aesthetic Life and Philosophy Anyone familiar with Wittgenstein’s life or even with any significant stretch of his writing knows of his absorption in the aesthetic life, his love of music, above all, but also of literature and poetry. It is far more accurate to say that Wittgenstein’s philosophizing is shaped by his absorption in the aesthetic life than to say that he has an aesthetics. In the lectures G. E. Moore attended in the 1930s, then published as Lectures and Conversations (Wittgenstein 1967a), Wittgenstein stressed this point: his method—such as it was—had much in common with aesthetics and with ethics (but not as philosophers tend to use these terms). That is a hard saying, but it means this, roughly: just as the critic or the moral teacher focuses on particular cases and their right appreciation, so Wittgenstein focuses on particular cases, particular concepts, and their right appreciation. Wittgenstein believed that examples are the go-cart of judgment—and he believed that very differently than Kant, the coiner of the phrase, did. Wittgenstein’s aim in philosophy can be understood as educating philosophical taste. The goal is not the assemblage of metaphilosophical generalizations—although reminders are assembled (Wittgenstein 1953, 127)—but rather the creation of an active, inward, and sympathetic capacity to recognize (to adapt a phrase from William James) a good human job in

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philosophy, a philosophical achievement that satisfies our real needs, and not fantasized, unsatisfiable needs.

2  Dismantling Obstacles: Quick Examples Because this is Wittgenstein’s aim, when he discusses art or the aesthetic life, he dismantles obstacles we erect, obstacles that impede our enjoyment of, and our reflection on, art. In Lectures and Conversations, the primary “source” of his “aesthetics,” he strains to show differences, for example, to show us that our use of one word does not indicate that we mean one thing, always the same, by it, to show us that particularizing clarifies as well as generalizing, if not better, if not much better. Consider an important word for our aesthetic lives, “appreciation.” The appreciation of a work of art is a variegated phenomenon. Imagine a faithful woman at Mass in the fifteenth century. She enters the cathedral near her home, and there she sees, as she regularly does, “paradise on the church wall” (to borrow a phrase from Ezra Pound), a large painting of a heavenly scene, adorned with angels. How different her confrontation with the painting, her appreciation of it, and ours, centuries later, in a museum, or, say, displayed in a private home—the property of a wealthy collector. She appreciates the painting, meaning one thing by the term, and we appreciate it, meaning another. There is no reason to think that the two meanings are wholly unrelated, a pure equivocation, but there is also no reason to think that the two meanings are the same, a pure univocation. They quite obviously are not univocal. The obviousness of this will, of course, hasten claims that one or the other appreciation, the medieval woman’s or ours, fails to count as appreciation. Likely it will be the woman’s putative appreciation that will be downgraded: it is “not truly disinterested.” But why should that be so? There is no more need for the shape of her disinterest to map exactly onto ours than there is for the shape of her appreciation to do so. No doubt, she has beliefs and habits of faith that will make what she does before the painting differ from what we do. And no doubt, she meets it in circumstances radically different, her cathedral circumstances, which are like, but not remotely identical to, our museum circumstances. Wittgenstein’s efforts are repeatedly directed to getting us to do something we have great difficulty doing when we take thought: bearing in mind the actualities of the two cases we are comparing. We want to look away from the

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medieval woman, and also from ourselves, and decide what we should say about both while not looking at either, or at anything in particular. Perhaps this expresses our conviction that what we need to know when taking thought is not anything that we would discover by looking, but something we can discover only by thinking, theorizing. We look away because we take what we need to discover to be hidden from our gaze—metaphysically, not merely physically (shielded from view by an interloper, say). We tend to buoy up when taking thought, to drift up, up and away from the very things that we claim to be thinking about. Wittgenstein restlessly contests our urge to close our eyes when thinking (1967a, 66). Related is Wittgenstein’s repeated reminder that the word “beauty” is not as omnipresent in our aesthetic lives as we imagine. Gottlob Frege once observed that “‘beauty’ points the way in aesthetics.” Wittgenstein, a lifelong Frege reader but never his echo, can be understood to have replied: “Not so much.” Not so much: Wittgenstein keeps noting that it is particular behaviors of ours that point the way, if anything does. Beauty has its interest, of course, but it is not as central as philosophers (or aesthetes) have made it seem. This interest in behavior needs to be properly construed. Wittgenstein emphasizes behavior to widen and not to narrow our focus. In this, what he does contrasts starkly with what so-called behaviorists do. They emphasize behavior to narrow our focus, to make us see or consider only the overt physical goings-on, as if the person behaving were suddenly floodlit and his or her surroundings thereby endarkened, and his or her behavior now reduced to the floodlit surface of his or her embodied goings-on. Nothing else matters, nothing extradermal or intradermal, so to speak. The dermal is all. Such a view is as facially crazy as it seems—but it is testimony to a certain terror of Cartesian souls and how far that terror can drive someone. In contrast, when Wittgenstein directs attention toward behavior, he, as I noted, wants to widen our view, to get us to see more, not less—and he wants us to take in the surroundings, as themselves “parts” of the goings-on, crucial to understanding. Psychological states are vulnerable in multiform ways to a person’s surroundings—what there is available to think or feel is partly a matter of where and when the thinking and feeling occur. Understanding another person ultimately requires knowing about his or her here and now; it requires more than a peek inside the head. Even if God were to peek inside our heads, if He had nothing else in view, He would not know what we were thinking or feeling. But that certainly does not make God Skinnerian. I have overstated behaviorism. I have done so to make what Wittgenstein is doing clear—not as an exercise in behaviorist criticism, now no longer a growth industry. Wittgenstein takes our aesthetic life to be open to view, if

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we take a wide view. And what we find when we take that wide view is that our aesthetic life centers itself in certain behaviors. Stoppage, contemplation, frequentation, expression (not necessarily expressed in words) of response— each and all directed toward a particular object, typically show our entry into and our uptake of that object into our aesthetic life. We may say “Beautiful!” “Delightful!” “Elegant!” but, again, typically, such words will not be straightforward descriptions but rather interjections: for example, my saying of “Delightful!” is typically my delight made audible, while it yet transcends a simple sigh. As such, it is neither straightforwardly a description of the object nor of my response to it, but is itself my response-to-the-object. Although I cannot develop the thought here, I note this is one source of the categorizing of such responses as “subjective,” although the categorizing is an ignoratio elenchi. It is also the source of the common idea that aesthetic testimony is impossible—another ignoratio. Each of these distends a halfunderstanding into a full misunderstanding of Wittgenstein’s view.

3  Final (General) Remarks For Wittgenstein, the problems of philosophy are the philosophical problems themselves. That is not a redundancy or an empty verbal twist. Wittgenstein tries to think the problems of the problems of philosophy: Why are there philosophical problems? What are they? Is philosophical puzzlement a distinctive form of puzzlement, or is it an instance of some more embracing form of puzzlement, like scientific puzzlement? Is the persistence of the philosophical problems, their apparent insolubility, testimony to their profound difficulty, to an exquisite subtlety required for their solution, or is it to be understood otherwise? Wittgenstein’s lectures and discussions of art and the aesthetic life aim to unclog our imaginations and to temper our expectations—as I put it earlier, to dismantle obstacles. Wittgenstein labors to make aesthetic objects available to us, ready to hand. We often impose on the objects with which we interact, the objects we seek to appreciate (in our sense of that term), making them unavailable to unblinkered response. Wittgenstein’s work negates, in a certain sense of that term, prunes, not plants. It is practical and negative, aimed at the hearer or reader, at changing his or her habits, and not at an abstractly conceived subject matter. Without becoming merely personal, Wittgenstein Socratically contests the impersonality of philosophy, our sense of what—and who—is at issue. He wants us to acknowledge that we succumb

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to sedimentation: we expect our aesthetic tomorrows to be a simple function of our aesthetic yesterdays—but we have no such guarantee. Let me finish by making something explicit. In the section of Lectures and Conversations that is devoted to “aesthetics,” we have an instructive example of a classroom tug of war. Despite Wittgenstein’s chiding and admonitions and reminders—his repeated question, “What makes you think I . . .?”—most of his auditors take themselves to be in a class on aesthetics. They aren’t, and Wittgenstein labors (quixotically, in this instance) to make them realize it. But the auditors’ questions and comments, the buried presuppositions, make it difficult for Wittgenstein, they keep trying to force him to move in non-mysterious or less mysterious ways. But the truth is, the feature of the lectures and conversations most fascinating is the collection of retorts, admonitions and reminders, their ability to throw us back on ourselves and our questions, whether they did so for the auditors or not. Wittgenstein’s auditors never seem to hear his repeated “What makes you think I . . .?” Had the auditors taken the question seriously, non-rhetorically, personally (“What makes you think . . .?”), they might have understood what Wittgenstein was doing, and come to acquire a degree of his live sense that the problems of aesthetics are themselves problems and that they have to earn their right to be asked. Wittgenstein is not an aesthetic quietist. He is not burking genuine questions with silence. He instead asks question about the questions, questioning whether they are genuine or not. Their genuineness has not yet been settled. This needs underlining. Wittgenstein doubts philosophical questions— but his doubt is funded not by metaphilosophical presumption but by lived experience, by his wrestling with the questions. He speaks, not from heights of metaphilosophical certainty, but from the eye of his own vortex. Insofar as he seems to speak from heights, the heights at best are relative, not absolute; the heights are, one could say, Emersonian. In Wittgenstein’s questioning, there is no presumption of finality, just as Ralph Waldo Emerson makes clear in his essay Experience: Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. (Emerson 1991, 241)

Similarly, Wittgenstein sees no end to the work, as he makes clear, ventriloquizing the despairing interlocutory voice, then correcting it: “—But

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in that case we never get to the end of our work!—Of course not, for it has no end” (1967a, 447). And Wittgenstein’s questions—as his work from the beginning of his time in philosophy until the end of his life shows—do not spare themselves. He keeps asking; he keeps asking about his asking; he keeps asking, upward and out of sight. What makes us think Wittgenstein offers only an answering silence to our genuine questions? Haven’t our aesthetic questions, our philosophical questions generally, interrogated everything but themselves? Don’t we think we get the problems for free?

Primary Sources Wittgenstein: 1953. Philosophical Investigations. G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees (eds.). New York: The MacMillan Company. 1967a. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. C. Barrett (ed.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1967b. Zettel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1980. Culture and Value. G. von Wright (ed.), P. Winch (trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

References and Further Reading Aldrich, V. 1963. The Philosophy of Art. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Cavell, S. 1969. Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Emerson, R. 1991. Essays: First and Second Series. New York: First Library of America. Wisdom, J. 1991. Proof and Explanation. S. Barker (ed.). New York: University Press of America.

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Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) Ingvild Torsen

Art becomes a central topic in Martin Heidegger’s philosophical writings in the 1930s. In this period he lectures on the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, writes a long essay called “The Origin of the Work of Art” (in Heidegger 2002), and reflections on art and aesthetics feature prominently in his important text Contributions to Philosophy (Heidegger 2012). In the following decades, Heidegger returns to the topic of art in various contexts. In addition to further lecture courses on Hölderlin, he writes several essays on poetry, publishes his lectures on Nietzsche and the will to power as art (Heidegger 1991), and takes an interest in modernist visual art, notably the work of Paul Klee and Eduardo Chillida, which occasions some shorter texts.1 Heidegger’s philosophy of art explicitly breaks with traditional aesthetics, and Heidegger’s most original idea is to put forth what one may call an event ontology. Art is best understood as something that happens, as the event of sense coming into the world. This means that art is historical, it cannot exist independently of its creators and preservers, and, further, that it has the potential to be incredibly important: art can change the world.

1  The Question of Being and Event Ontology The question that occupies Heidegger throughout his thinking, is that of being. This is the question of what it is to be, to exist, and Heidegger’s central insight, made famous in his analysis of human existence in Being and Time (1927), is that this should be understood in its verbal sense and not, as it is traditionally thought in metaphysics, as a question about a thing or entity. On such a thing-oriented approach, the question of being becomes “what is it to be an x?” rather than “what is it to be?”, and what we seek to understand— existence—remains unanswered while the inquiry is focused on the thing.

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In Heidegger’s approach to art the same central insight reoccurs, and this entails a different answer to the ontological question “what is a work of art?” than typically offered by the tradition. Again, Heidegger stresses the verbal dimension, that is, that artworks work, that they are in a particular way. Merely thinking of the artwork as a thing with properties, perhaps with some specific aesthetic or art properties, is not going to reveal how this entity works, in contrast to other human-made things. Heidegger’s alternative is instead to offer what we might call an event ontology of art. Art is something that happens, which means that art is an event that is made concrete and particular through the artwork. Such an event is incomplete and cannot be properly understood apart from its context, in which artists and audience, too, are necessary. This new ontological understanding also makes artworks geographically and historically dependent—as events are what they are always in a certain situation and context—and also depend on a hermeneutic practice: they need preservers to complete the work by taking up and confirming the meaning an artwork offers, so that it becomes a significant event. The place to start to understand these features of Heidegger’s work is with the most expansive and systematic text, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (in Heidegger 2002, hereafter “the art-essay”).

2  “The Origin of the Work of Art” The art-essay is the central text for understanding Heidegger’s philosophy of art. It is based on a lecture Heidegger gave for the first time in Freiburg in 1935, and was completed in the years 1935–6, before Heidegger revised it for inclusion in the 1950 collection Holzwege, translated as Off the Beaten Track (Heidegger 2002). It comprises an introduction, three sections—“The Thing and the Work,” “The Work and Truth,” and “Truth and Art”—and two postscripts. The art-essay has an unusual structure, in that it encompasses claims that sound like ontological definitions, analyses of phenomenological descriptions of examples of artworks, poetic use of language, guiding questions that are abandoned unanswered, as well as a postscript that claims it is still an open question whether art is in fact dead. In this sense, the art-essay requires quite a bit of interpretative work from its readers, if we want to establish what Heidegger’s own position is. Even if the essay is not systematic in any traditional sense, a few ideas appear to constitute the theoretical core of the text. One is that an artwork opens up a world, while also “setting forth” earth; another, that an artwork is the result of a strife between earth and world that is concretely made

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manifest as a figure; and third, that art is a “happening of truth” (Geschehnis der Wahrheit). In the next two sections, I will try to unpack these ideas. Heidegger claims that an artwork is not just a thing we encounter in the world, but something that opens up a world. For Heidegger, a world is not the sum of things, but rather the meaningful space held open by the relations that structure our being. A world is the lived world of someone and it is that in which our lives make sense. When an artwork opens up a world, “all things gain their lingering and hastening, their distance and proximity, their breadth and their limits” (Heidegger 2002, 23). This means that the work can be a kind of measure or standard, around which other practices and beings make sense. Heidegger’s example makes this idea easier to grasp: a Greek temple up on a hill over an ancient village is a concrete thing that anchors and opens up the world of the people living in the surrounding area. The temple first structures and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire for the human being the figure of its destiny. The all-governing expanse of these open relations is the world of this historical people. (2002, 20)

Heidegger’s claim is that this architectonic artwork is the being that makes the ancient Greek world come to be what it is. Heidegger further claims that, as it opens up a world, the work also sets forth the earth. A world cannot just “hang in the air,” but also rests in or on what Heidegger calls earth. It is clear that Heidegger plays on the literal meaning of “earth,” but still develops this into a more abstract concept. An artwork sets itself back in earth, and that means that it rests in something that is “essentially self-secluding” and closed off, which can be understood as a kind of material otherness (Heidegger 2002, 25). Earth can be understood both as that which carries the work and gives it material and depth; yet, it is clear that Heidegger thinks that the self-concealment characteristic of earth is also a dimension of being, of what is, as such: meaning and sense rests in something that it is not, and that is not itself open and available to sense-making. Artworks are special because they make us notice this. In a well-functioning tool the material disappears into usefulness, whereas in a sculpture, for example, we really notice the perceptible character of stone and color, but also their earthiness and depth—that which cannot be perceived. To return to Heidegger’s example: [T]he temple work, in setting up a world, does not let the material disappear; rather, it allows it to come forth for the very first time, to

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come forth, that is, into the open of the world of the work. The rock comes to bear and to rest and so first becomes rock; the metal comes to glitter and shimmer, the colors to shine, the sounds to ring, the word to speak. (2002, 24)

An artwork consists of these two opposing movements of earth and world. The relationship between the opening movement of world and the secluding movement of earth is a combative one, Heidegger calls it “strife” (Streit) and this strife shows itself as a “figure” (Gestalt). The earthy element of the work is what fixes the struggle, the material is in other words what contains and secures the artwork and a world-opening event, while the worldly movement of opening up marks out a difference or contrast in the material. The value of this account can be illuminated by contrasting it with the conceptual approach that, according to Heidegger, dominates our understanding of artworks, that of form and matter. If the artwork is thought of as formed matter, then the origin of the sense of an artwork is not in the work itself, but in the form, which in principle could be thought apart from the particular material substructure. Heidegger’s account instead makes it possible to understand artistic signification as something that starts in the particular concrete work and its figure, and that cannot be abstracted from this particular concreteness or be reduced to form.

3  Truth, History, and Art’s Transformative Power Art is a way truth happens, Heidegger claims. Because of its power to open up world and set forth earth, Heidegger describes art as a setting-to-work of truth. We can think of Heidegger’s truth as the precondition for all sensemaking (including claims about correspondence between statement and states of affairs, what most of us might typically mean by truth). Art is not the translation or expression of some preexisting meaning, but the very event of opening up a clearing for sense, while at the same time establishing itself as a work, a meaningful being, in that open clearing in which things can make sense. This is an enormously ambitious definition on behalf of art. Art can transform our way of being, for Heidegger, by opening up a new world for us, and thus lay the ground for new ways of making sense, of living and knowing. There are some striking parallels to Hegel’s philosophy of art here. First, art has a very important role to play. It makes possible and manifest our world and who we are (what Hegel would call “spirit”). Second, very much of what we call art would not live up to such a definition of great art. Heidegger seems to share Hegel’s conviction that working in this ideal or paradigmatic

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way is not possible for art at all times (and like Hegel, Heidegger considers classical Greek art to be (the best candidate for such truth-making art). In the postscript to the art-essay, Heidegger seems to share Hegel’s skepticism toward the relevance of art in late modernity, writing that the verdict is still out on Hegel’s so-called end of art thesis (Heidegger 2002, 51). In the 1930s, when art becomes a central topic in Heidegger’s thinking, he is interested in understanding being historically, that is, as something that comes to be and changes. The ancient Greeks thought of being as phusis (nature); in most of Western philosophy it is understood as a kind of entity, substance; and in Heidegger’s own century, a widespread conception of being is to think of what is as a kind of standing reserve or resource for technological manipulation (this historical analysis is undertaken by Heidegger in many different works, but important texts are Heidegger 1991, 2008b, and 2012). For Heidegger, thinking being historically is important in order to understand the contemporary situation of philosophy, but also for imaging a different future, both for philosophy and for our way of being. In this context, art is important because it can be a source of historical change—it is a way that “truth can happen,” that is, a way new paradigms of sense-making come to be. However, if the above-described definition of art as opening up world is importantly historical, it is not given that we can assume that art happens the same way today as it did in the ancient Greek world. In fact, the Greek temple is no longer working, Heidegger claims, since there are no preservers who live in the world opened up by that work anymore. For the people who live in Greece today, their practices or understanding of what is are no longer related to the meaning offered by the work at all. In this sense, the artworks of the past, which we encounter in museums or on journeys to historical sites, no longer open a world and no longer work. For Heidegger, the historical context puts several constraints on what kind of event art can be. In the twentieth century, the aestheticizing of art, which relegates art to an autonomous realm where it is detached from questions of knowledge or the good, undermines art’s importance (see especially Heidegger 1991). Heidegger targets the understanding of art as a source of aesthetic experience or of entertainment, as particularly constraining in this regard. In such a historical context, where the artwork is approached as an “experience generator” for a subject, art cannot work as it did in Sophocles’s Athens or Dürer’s Renaissance Europe. Still, one of Heidegger’s most famous examples is van Gogh’s painting of shoes. In the art-essay, Heidegger describes a painting by van Gogh (not specifying a particular one) as an artwork that reveals to us that the essence of tools like shoes is their reliability. Here, truth also happens, according to Heidegger, but the truth he describes is not one that sets up a world that we the audience can preserve.

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Rather, it teaches us something about the being of tools. The meaning and validity of Heidegger’s claims on behalf of van Gogh has been the topic of much controversy, initiated by the criticisms raised by art historian Meyer Schapiro (1994a, b) and further developed by Jacques Derrida in his essay “Restitutions” (in Derrida 1987). Heidegger’s continued reading of poetry, as well as his interest in contemporary visual art, most prominently the works of Cézanne, Klee and Chillida, might be understood as repeated attempts at attending to other ways of making sense, that can resist the domineering mindset of technology. In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology?” (Heidegger 2008b), Heidegger describes how a technical mindset, where all being is understood as resources for manipulation and utility, is characteristic of our understanding of being and also particularly constraining for us late moderns. Here, however, he suggests that art can be a way to confront technology and the utilitarian mindset that comes with it: “the confrontation with technology can only happen in a realm that is familiar with technology, but at the same time fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art” (Heidegger 2008b, 39). Heidegger describes sculpture in the catalogue essay to a Chillida exhibition in 1969 as showing us a different space and understanding of spatiality than that of technology (Heidegger 1973). Together, these later remarks on the art of Heidegger’s own time suggest that art still has the ability to work, but the meaning artworks offer seems to be of a more reflexive, critical kind.

4  Poetry and Poetic Thinking Poetry remains an important topic in Heidegger’s thought throughout his life. He returns to the poet Hölderlin on several occasions, but also writes about Georg Trakl and Stefan George; an important text is On the way to Language (Heidegger 1971), published in German in 1959. In the art-essay he declares that the essence of all art is poetry (Dichtung, sometimes translated as “poeticizing” to stress the activity therein). In the last decades of his life, Heidegger also distances his own thought from philosophy and instead calls it “poetic thinking” (dichterisch Denken). Why is poetry so important? Language can be used to communicate and share established meanings, to interpret, assert, and specify that which is, but what Heidegger means by poeticizing is a different kind of language use: what he calls “projective saying” (Heidegger’s own characterization of what poetry is, see Heidegger 2002). Such language use is a way of naming and pointing that makes something appear, clears a realm around itself, and thereby opens

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up a world. This is the potential of poetic language, but as we have seen in examples above, Heidegger also thinks other kinds of art can do this. It is worth adding that Heidegger’s continued interest in Hölderlin is partly due to his recognizing the latter as someone who raises the same question Heidegger is pursuing: How being happens and is instantiated anew, and whether and how it can happen in a late modern context. In Heidegger’s first lectures on the poet, Hölderlin’s river poems are analyzed as providing ground and opening up a future for the contemporary historical people of Germany (Heidegger 1989). Still, the poet’s projective saying so far has no preservers— no one has taken up and confirmed the world opened up by his poems and as such, the artworks of Hölderlin remain incomplete. It is clear that Heidegger is interpreting Hölderlin in light of Heidegger’s own philosophy, but Heidegger also characterizes his own philosophy as trying to think, in a philosophical manner, what Hölderlin is naming in his poetry. The concept earth, for example, is a central trope in Hölderlin’s poetry, so the introduction of this concealing movement to complement Heidegger’s concept of world might be understood as a sign of the poet’s influence on Heidegger’s philosophy. Heidegger insists on there being a difference between his philosophical thinking and poetry, but they both aim at making us notice that being is and at articulating a “new time” in a dark age (Heidegger 2000, 47).

Note 1 A description of Heidegger’s personal interest in art and artists can be found in Petzet (1993).

Primary Sources Heidegger: 1971. On the Way to Language. P. Hertz (trans.). San Francisco: Harper & Row. Originally published in German as Unterwegs zur Sprache 1959. 1973. “Art and Space.” C. Seibert (trans.). Man and World, 6: 3–8. Originally published in German as “Die Kunst und der Raum” 1989. Höderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” (GA 39). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Originally published 1980. 1991. Nietzsche. Volumes I and II. D. F. Krell (trans.). New York: HarperCollins. Originally published in German as Nietzsche I and Nietzsche II 1961. 2000. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. K. Hoeller (trans.). New York: Humanity Books. Originally published in German as Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung 1944.

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2002. Off the Beaten Track. J. Young and K. Haynes (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published in German as Holzwege, (GA 5) 1950. 2008a. Being and Time. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (trans.). New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Originally published in German as Sein und Zeit 1927. 2008b. “The Question Concerning Technology.” W. Lovitt (trans.). In D. F. Krell (ed.) Basic Writings. New York: Harper Collins. Originally published in German as “Die Frage nach der Technik” 1953. 2012. Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). R. Rojcewicz and D. VallegaNeu (trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Originally published in German as Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (GA 65) 1989.

References and Further Reading Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Truth in Painting. G. Bennington (trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1960. “Zur Einführung.” Introduction to Martin Heidegger. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 93–114. Stuttgart: Reclam. Harries, Karsten. 2009. Art Matters. Dordrecht: Springer. Petzet, Heinrich W. 1993. Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976. K. Maly and P. Emad (trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schapiro, Meyer. 1994a. “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh.” In Theory and Philosophy in Art: Style Artist, and Society, 135–41. New York: George Braziller. Schapiro, Meyer. 1994b. “Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh.” In Theory and Philosophy in Art: Style Artist, and Society, 143–51. New York: George Braziller. Thomson, Iain. 2011. Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, Julian. 2001. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) Gerhard Richter

The thought of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno has had a profound impact on the history, politics, and practice of aesthetic theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While the friendship between these two German-Jewish thinkers was often characterized by tensions and philosophical disagreements—especially over such issues as the applicability of aesthetic theory to media like photography and film, and over the methods of dialectical thinking—they nevertheless shared a deep intellectual connection. This notion is borne out not only by their extensive correspondence, which continued until Benjamin’s death, but also by such empirical data as the fact that Adorno taught the first university seminar on Benjamin as early as the 1930s and that he, in his 1933 book Kierkegaard: Constructions of the Aesthetic, relies heavily on Benjamin’s complex and farreaching notion of allegory as the latter had developed it in his 1928 Origin of the German Mourning Play. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who knew both thinkers personally, once even went so far as to call Adorno Benjamin’s only student. And after Benjamin’s suicide in 1940, committed while fleeing Nazi persecution, it was Adorno—while in exile in the United States and, after the war, again in Frankfurt—who, in cooperation with Benjamin’s other lifelong friend, the Jewish Studies scholar Gershom Scholem, played a central role in making Benjamin’s work known to what would become a dedicated worldwide readership.

1  Theoretical Background Benjamin and Adorno sometimes are referred to as members of the first generation of the so-called Frankfurt School, an influential transdisciplinary group of cultural theorists and philosophers working between the two world wars on projects that would transform their own conceptual roots (provided

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by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and others) into the concepts and strategies that came to be known as “Critical Theory,” a term employed for the first time in the 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” by their colleague Max Horkheimer, the sociologist and philosopher. In contrast to what they considered to be the traditional bourgeois paradigm of largely affirmative modern thought—supplied by the mathematical logic undergirding Cartesianism—this group set out to devise a critical theory of experience and of society that would take into account the political implications and transformative potential of a radically dialectical perspective on the world of phenomena as it presented itself to them in light of the two sibling political formations of fascism and capitalism. For all their differences in style, emphasis, and subject matter, Benjamin and Adorno, like most prominent members of the Frankfurt School, share a self-understanding of their work as inscribed within the modern aesthetic tradition that developed out of German Idealism (especially Kant and Hegel), German Romanticism (especially Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel), and aspects of Nietzsche’s thought. Like Nietzsche, Benjamin and Adorno view the artwork not simply as a pleasant diversion from more important matters but rather as a privileged embodiment of the highest form of reflection, that is, as the space in which the experience of thought can be exposed to its own potentialities, contradictions, and conditions of possibility. But unlike Kant, for Benjamin and Adorno the realm of the aesthetic no longer can be viewed as having a mediating function per se (as when Kant mobilizes it, in the third Critique, as the mediating force between the precepts of pure reason and the commitments of practical reason). Rather, the aesthetic becomes the very locus in which reason—and the thinking of different modes of reason that, following Kant’s Copernican turn, is indissociable from modernity— provides an account of itself to itself in terms that are not strictly bound by reason. What is to be gained from such an experience of the aesthetic is not so much an “aesthetic education” leading, as in the playwright Schiller’s early appropriation of Kant, to the aesthetically mediated form of a moral political state; rather, it is a rigorous interrogation of the very foundations of cognition and the knowledge claims that are based upon it. Insofar as the ceaseless interrogation of cognition that Benjamin’s and Adorno’s artwork may sponsor is a gesture toward the experience of freedom—among other things, the freedom from social injustice and needless human suffering—this liberatory potential is related to, but conceptually distinct from, the classical Marxian paradigm. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write: “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven . . . Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their

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corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence” (1985, 47).1 From the Marxian perspective, therefore, “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life,” and any analysis of both the life and the consciousness of aesthetic production would have to take this determination into account (Marx and Engels, 1985, 47). For Marx the artwork is, both in its modes of production and in the logic of its representation, the expression of a social determination— that is, it is part of a superstructure that stands in a tension-filled relation to what is not its own, the base structure. For Benjamin and Adorno, by contrast, the artwork simultaneously possesses a singular cognitive value apart from its material embeddeness in social determination. Its singularity and idiomaticity—namely, the multiple ways in which it refuses to be merely reflective of a reality external to it—evoke the experience of a certain autonomia (that which gives itself its own laws) rather than that of a mere heteronomia (that which receives its laws from elsewhere and therefore is, from the outset, unfree even when it advocates freedom). For Benjamin and Adorno, the question of the special cognitive status of this aesthetic autonomia deserves our attention. “This is not the time,” Adorno argues, “for political works of art; rather, politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art, and it has penetrated most deeply into works that present themselves as politically dead” (1992, 93–4). The genuine artwork can never be a mimesis of what already is the case, even as a negation of what is the case. As a form of non-synchronicity, its promise always resides in an unnamable elsewhere, an opening that is yet to be created. How, then, does the question of cognitive and conceptual specificity within the artwork pose itself to Benjamin’s and Adorno’s respective projects? In what ways do the two thinkers attempt to respond to Schlegel’s famous dictum that, when it comes to the philosophy of art, there is usually one thing missing, the philosophy or the art? As we will see, for both Benjamin and Adorno, albeit from different vantage points, the aesthetic cannot be reduced merely to cognition (in which case no artwork would be needed, because that cognition could be obtained through other means); nor does the aesthetic refuse itself to cognition outright (in which case it would remain merely unintelligible and therefore not an appropriate matter of sustained conceptual inquiry). Rather, the aesthetic is to be thought as the perpetually transitory space where the content of the artwork has not yet fully become cognition or knowledge, but rather provides, in the seriously playful realm of semblance, an intimation of conceptual and experiential possibility. This experience of possibility, along with its political potentiality, enacts itself across Benjamin’s and Adorno’s variegated aesthetic writings in multiple and heterogeneous formulations.

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2  Benjamin’s Potentiality The multiple loci of Benjamin’s sustained engagement with aesthetic questions encompass such diverse themes as the concept of art criticism in German Romanticism (the topic of his 1919 doctoral dissertation); the aesthetics of imagination and color; the German Baroque mourning play; his theories of translation and translatability; his work on literary authors such as Hölderlin, Goethe, Keller, Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust, and Brecht; his meditations on surrealism and on proletarian children’s theater; and his attempts to intervene in the aesthetic and conceptual specificity of such emerging media as photography, film, and radio. Subsequent to the German National Socialists’ ascent to power in 1933, his work also addresses questions of Hitler’s so-called aestheticization of politics, through which the fascist regime—for Benjamin the most aesthetically self-conscious in modern history—fatefully attempted to mobilize the sphere of art and semblance for its own political aims. Working to call into question the aestheticization of the political, Benjamin, in all his heterogeneous writings on aesthetic issues, wishes to respect the singularity of the aesthetic as the instantiation of conceptual and experiential possibility. He feels compelled not simply to apply a general aesthetic system or conceptual doctrine to this or that particular work of art—a process through which the individual work of art would be reduced to the status of mere example and, by extension, to something indifferent and ultimately replaceable. Rather, he attempts to reinvent his conceptual comportment toward the aesthetic experience each time anew. Self-consciously eschewing the predictable gestures of communicative transparency, his writing therefore requires its readers to embark upon the laborious task of learning how to follow the text's “own,” at times strangely idiomatic, logic, and to compare this writing, not with some external standard by which it could easily be judged, but first and foremost with itself. In a 1926 letter to Scholem, Benjamin refers to his own self-consciously elusive and figurative mode of argumentation as an unyielding desire to think and write in a style that is “always radical, never consistent with regard to the most important things” (Benjamin 1994, 300). Only this radicality, Benjamin suggests, can ever hope to do justice to the singularity of the artwork as artwork (rather than as pleasurable diversion or as mere illustration of a preexisting extra-aesthetic “meaning”) and to the very notion of a conceptually significant aesthetic experience in relation to the specific artwork. To approach an artwork in this way also means to engage the very language in which the encounter takes place, that is, the language of criticism, critique, and commentary. Here, the language of criticism not only functions as an

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instrument for the transmission of certain ideas about an artwork but also is called upon to provide an account of itself. Incapable of remaining unaffected by the logic and experience of a particular encounter with a singular work of art, the language of criticism is irrevocably altered by the experience for which no previous encounter could have prepared it. Benjamin’s own rigorous engagement with the language of criticism is encrypted in the first line of the epistemo-critical prologue to his study on the Baroque German mourning play, the so-called Trauerspiel book, as follows: “It is the property of philosophical writing to stand, with each turn [Wendung], once again before the question of presentation” (1998, 27). This relentless and aporetic insistence on the demands of a language that resists its author and its subject matter each time it performs another Wendung, turn or trope, a language that stubbornly refuses to become deceptively transparent, decisively inflects the entire trajectory of Benjamin’s engagements with the aesthetic. As if the discourse of aesthetic criticism were called upon to assume some of the artwork’s own characteristics—without, however, thereby becoming an aesthetic object itself—in the massive collection of notes and fragments that were to be his material for a general theory of modernity, The Arcades Project, Benjamin confesses: “I have nothing to say. Only to show” (1999a, 460). Aesthetic critique proceeds by “showing”—as opposed to merely saying, a saying that would ignore the logic and requirements of its own strategic operations. It is here, as Benjamin’s work in the realm of a specifically aesthetic mode of cognition and experience suggests, that the formal and the historico-political dimension of analysis and argumentation are dialectically intertwined and, indeed, are mutually saturated with the open-ended interpretive possibilities and unfathomable demands of the other. For the Benjamin of the 1930s, whose preoccupations focus ever more relentlessly on issues of aesthetics and mediality in the broadest sense, the radical and apodictic modes of thinking and writing that are his signature could be said to coalesce around a set of issues that concern the relationship between historical—that is, genealogical—models of analysis and more strictly formal and structural ones. In fact, we could say that Benjamin’s ways of thinking the aesthetic realm and medium-specific problems unfold according to a strategically unorthodox historicization. His groundbreaking approach to questions of media theory and mediality (although at the time there was no such thing as “media studies” in any formalized or institutional context) rely heavily on the genealogical mode of argumentation that is perhaps best condensed in the programmatic conviction, expressed in the “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” that during “vast historical spans of time the manner of human collectives’ perception changes along with the collectives’ entire mode of being-in-the-

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world. The manner in which human perception organizes itself—the medium in which it takes place—is conditioned not only naturally but also historically” (Benjamin 2002, 104). For the mature Benjamin, the question of how to postulate the changing relationship of consciousness and perception to a work of art or a medium must not be limited to the phenomenological study of its appearance in the object world, it also must take into account the ways in which any approach to that phenomenal appearance is inflected by the historical transformations of the prevailing manner in which acts of seeing, listening, reading, thinking, and even feeling are performed. The determination of these large-scale temporal and epistemological transformations, however, always also concerns the history and logic of their medial and aesthetic specificity. In keeping with this view, many of Benjamin’s writings on art and mediality in the 1930s fasten upon a specific aspect of their historical unfolding, propelling him to compose, among many other works, “A Small History of Photography,” “The Rigorous Study of Art,” his texts on the production and dissemination of painting and the graphic arts, as well as his meditations on such topics as film, Chaplin, Mickey Mouse, the radio, the telephone, theater, children’s books, journalism, newspapers, and the publishing industry (now conveniently collected in Benjamin 2008). According to the logic of this stance toward aesthetic phenomena, the critic’s task is to construct the relays between an artwork’s singularity and its universal conceptual demands by “erecting the great constructions from the smallest, sharply and cuttingly fitted building blocks,” and to “recognize in the analysis of the small singular moment the crystal of the total event” (1999a, 461). This act of aesthetic recognition must be mindful of its own mediatedness, that is, of Benjamin’s fundamental conviction—as he expresses in “Translation—For and Against”—that “there is no world of thought that is not a world of language, and one sees in the world only what is pre-conditioned by language” (2002, 249).

3  Adorno’s Resistance While questions of aesthetic theory traverse the orbit of Adorno’s entire oeuvre, they are most forcefully articulated in his unfinished opus magnum, Aesthetic Theory, posthumously published in 1970 (1997). For Adorno— the talented musician and erstwhile piano pupil of Alban Berg and Eduard Steuermann—music emerges as the most salient of the aesthetic realms in which philosophical questions may be posed. Yet, other arts such as literature and painting also lie within his work’s purview. Nonetheless, when Aesthetic

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Theory speaks of “art” (die Kunst), it typically does not simply mean the totality of the individual arts considered together; “art” rather becomes, as a cognitive category in its own right, the discursive placeholder within a larger philosophical project. From Adorno’s perspective, there can be no meditation within the realm of the aesthetic that is not also an enactment, even a determined negation, of the social and political structures in which the particular manifestation of the aesthetic—that is, the rigors of its form—are embedded. Departing, however, from a more conventional Hegelian-Marxian framework, what determines the political content of an encounter with the aesthetic is neither its transmission of this or that content, nor its revelation of a communicable message. Rather, the aesthetic remains to be understood in terms of the specific and formal ways in which it resists appropriation and instrumentalization. We thus encounter the aesthetic, particularly in the domain of writing, in a series of hieroglyphs that demand to be read but that also refuse to yield their full meaning. Pointing to the ways in which “the concept of écriture has become relevant,” Adorno argues that “all artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content. Artworks are language only as writing” (1997, 124). While these hieroglyphs cannot be reduced to a singular truth statement or stable meaning without being canceled, they also cannot not be read. Rather, what is at stake in interpreting the hieroglyphs of the aesthetic is the determination of the specific ways in which they resist determination. As Adorno tells us, the “aim of the artwork is the determination of the indeterminate” (1997, 124). Because the hieroglyphs of the aesthetic reveal themselves in the form of enigmas, that is, as “script” in which, “as in linguistic signs, its processual element is enciphered in its objectivation” (Adorno 1997, 177), the artwork can only be understood as a system whose internal laws are out of joint: “Each artwork is a system of irreconcilability” (1997, 184). Once this system of irreconcilability becomes visible in an artwork, what reveals itself is that in “artworks nothing is literal, least of all their words” (Adorno 1997, 87). This means that to read artworks and the realm of the aesthetic to which they belong entails a decisive turn away from the realist or mimetic effect that they may simulate on the surface. In an act of dissimulation, they become thinkable and experienceable only in and as something irreducibly figurative. One might call this their material moment of inscription. Artworks become material and readable in what Adorno calls “their own figuration,” that is, the allegorical enactment of “the solution” to problems “which they are unable to provide on their own without intervention.” The specific intervention that the artwork can perform thus

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unfolds not in the sphere of immediacy but precisely in the aesthetic and incommensurate event marked—but not containable—by its inscription. This suggests, according to Adorno, that “every important work of art leaves traces behind in its material and technique, and following them defines the modern as what needs to be done, which is contrary to having a nose for what is in the air. Critique makes this definition concrete.” For Adorno, the material inscription of the aesthetic event as a political act presents itself in the figure of the scar: “The traces to be found in the material and the technical procedures, from which every qualitatively new work of art takes its lead, are scars: They are the loci at which the preceding works misfired.” A scar, as a trace of corporeal writing, marks the place of a previous incision or injury. A sign of what no longer is, it also is a deeply historical marker. The scar always occurs as a double gesture: it represents itself as the concrete and present image of a disfiguration, excessive in its reference to something that no longer exists, a signifier with a signified but without a referent. The scar bespeaks that utopian moment of coming to terms with and recovering from a traumatic injury, even as it continues to render the forgetting of that trauma impossible. After all, a scar is a sign both of healing and of danger: it always threatens to be reopened. Seen from this perspective, the scar occupies a ghostly locus between the various axes of time and of cognition. We even could say that the figure of the scar, like Adorno’s sentences themselves, not only signifies the historical and theoretical complexity of material inscription, but also embodies it. Following Adorno’s lead, the history of Western art and aesthetics deserves to be rewritten not in terms of teleological succession but as an archive or constellation of scars. The scar, and “not the historical continuity of [the works’] dependencies, binds artworks to one another” (Adorno 1997, 35). For Adorno, the political function of the aesthetic paradoxically is located in the very space in which it is inaccessible to instrumentalist reasoning and unmediated political intervention. Here, “art becomes social by its opposition to society.” Adorno argues that “by crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as ‘socially useful,’ it criticizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it” (Adorno 1997, 225–6). Because even art that is socially and politically engaged can become affirmative of the status quo by fulfilling the function of critique that the status quo already has assigned to it—that is, by offering a critique that is co-opted by the system that spawned it—Adorno prefers to think of the aberrant event of art in terms of a “determinate negation of a determinate society.” Therefore, art “keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance” without which it becomes, even in its critical forms, “a commodity.” Because “nothing social in art is

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immediately social, not even when this is its aim,” what art can contribute to society “is not communication with it but rather something extremely mediated: It is resistance” (Adorno 1997, 226). For Adorno, there can be no resistance lodged in an artwork that is not perpetually retreating from what it signifies and from the determinate nature of the relays between it and the contexts that mediate it. In the particular case of musical aesthetics, a topic to which Adorno devotes thousands of pages, we might say that to the extent that there are strong mediating relays between music and philosophical thought, these must be measured against, and modulated by, the fundamental tension that traverses the explication of all aesthetic forms and that saturates music in medium-specific ways. In other words, while the pleasure one derives from an artwork, especially a musical one, is certainly open to analysis, any attempt to understand that work by means of the precepts of reason alone—whether merely with an eye to its illustrative function vis-à-vis this or that philosophical or political agenda, or in an instrumentalizing attempt to translate aesthetic form and its irrational pleasures into a rational system of concepts—will, sooner or later, bring the question of art’s raison d’étre to the fore. Adorno illustrates this conundrum as follows: “When one asks a musician if music is a pleasure, the reply is likely to be—as in the American joke of the grimacing cellist under Toscanini—‘I just hate music.’” This leads to the following dilemma: “Whoever enjoys artworks concretistically is a philistine; expressions such as ‘a feast for the ears’ give him away. Yet if the last traces of pleasure were extirpated, the question as to the purpose of artworks would be an embarrassment” (Adorno 1997, 13). As such, any philosophical explication of music first of all must acknowledge that “art stands in need of philosophy that interprets it in order to say that which it cannot say, whereas art is only able to say what it says by not saying it” (Adorno 1997, 72). Remaining faithful to the difficulty of this task of simultaneously saying and not-saying would, therefore, constitute a perpetual challenge to any speculative analysis of musical aesthetics. The difficulty of speaking philosophically about music is augmented when one considers that the proximity of music to discursive language, its linguisticality, continually offers a conceptual content that it simultaneously withholds. Does music have a language? If so, is it a language of its own? What kind of language would it be? If it can be conceded that music is or has a form of language—and the jury among musicians and theorists of music alike remains very much out on this point—how would the language of music relate to the language of speculative thought, its grammatical categories and organizing principles, its logic and its vocabulary? In his “Music and Language: A Fragment,” Adorno argues that “music resembles language . . .

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in that it is a temporal sequence of articulated sounds which are more than mere sounds. They say something, often something human. The more sophisticated the music, the more penetratingly they say it. The succession of sounds is related to logic: there is right and wrong.” He continues: “But what has been said cannot detach itself from the music. Music forms no system of signs” (Adorno 2002, 1). Thus, while music and language share certain modes of signification that, broadly speaking, could be construed as belonging to the vast realm of textuality, the content of music cannot be considered as belonging to the temporal gesture of its performance and cannot be paraphrased without being erased. In its failure to supply such reliable hermeneutic access to its arrangements of acoustic signs, music singularly denies itself, if not to citation, then certainly to summary and paraphrase. This refusal to be summarized or paraphrased should not, however, be regarded simply as a deficit, since it constitutes a triumph as well as a failure. The triumph resides in the musical artwork’s insistence upon remaining faithful to the difficulties that lie at the heart both of musical composition and of philosophical thought. In following this logic, one may recall Adorno’s comments in Negative Dialectics when, apropos of his musical mentor Arnold Schönberg and the Second Viennese School, he writes: An experience that Schönberg noted with regard to traditional music theory is confirmed in the case of philosophy: one actually only learns from it how a movement begins and ends, nothing about the movement itself, its course. Analogously philosophy would need first, not to turn itself into a series of categories but rather, in a certain sense, to compose itself. (Adorno 2000, 33–4)

Adorno adds: “It must, in the course of its progression, relentlessly renew itself, as much from its own strength as from the friction with that against which it measures itself.” For Adorno, it “is what happens in philosophy that is decisive, not a thesis or a position; its fabric, not the deductive or inductive single-tracked train of thought. Therefore philosophy is in essence not summarizable. Otherwise it would be superfluous; that most of it allows itself to be summarized speaks against it” (Adorno 2000, 33–4). Far from merely equating musical aesthetics with philosophy, Adorno emphasizes the shared compositional form and meticulously constructed aesthetic elements that, in the most rigorous and liberating musical and philosophical works, mitigate against a freezing of their sounds and signs into an apparently fixed and scannable database of meaning capable of being expressed in any number of ways that are independent of the resistant singularities of their

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forms. From this perspective, what the music of such figures as Beethoven (who, for Adorno, is Hegel set to music), Mahler, and Schönberg shares, or ought to share, with the orbit of philosophy is a resistance to paraphrase and a refusal to play along with the commodity fetishism of regressive listening that characterizes techno-capitalism and the ideology of lucidity that demands remainderless and submissive transparency. As with Benjamin, for Adorno the aesthetic encounter is one of possibility and unregimented, non-predigested experience. In this encounter, what comes to pass is the intimation of reason with its conceptual basis as well as its perpetual withholding in the guise of a singularly resistant form. It is here, in art’s irreducibly double movement of disclosure and retreat, that the aesthetic assumes its own dignity and political potentiality. After all, as Aesthetic Theory reminds us, “only what does not fit into the world is true” (Adorno 1997, 59). Benjamin and Adorno are precisely the mis-fits who would have us linger with the many forms of exhilaration and mourning borne of this insight in (i.e., both into and contained within) the work of art.2

Notes 1 Here and elsewhere, I have occasionally modified the published English translations in order to enhance their fidelity to the original German. 2 For this chapter, I have borrowed some arguments, sentences, and paragraphs from work on Benjamin and Adorno that I have carried out over the years, revising them and fitting them into a new framework.

Primary Sources Benjamin and Adorno: 1999. The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940. H. Lonitz (ed.), N. Walker (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Benjamin: 1994. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940. Manfred R. and Evelyn M. Jacobson (trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996. Selected Writings. Vol. 1: 1913–1926. M. Jennings et al. (eds.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. J. Osborne (trans.). London: Verso.

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1999a. The Arcades Project. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1999b. Selected Writings. Vol. 2: 1927–1934. M. Jennings et al. (eds.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2002. Selected Writings. Vol. 3: 1935–1938. M. Jennings et al. (eds.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2003. Selected Writings. Vol. 4: 1938–1940. M. Jennings et al. (eds.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. M. W. Jennings, B. Doherty, and T. Y. Levin (eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Adorno: 1981. Prisms: Cultural Criticism and Society. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1992. “Commitment.” In Notes to Literature, vol. 2. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.), 76–94. New York: Columbia University Press. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. R. Hullot-Kentor (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2000. Negative Dialectics. E. B. Ashton (trans). New York: Continuum. 2002. “Music and Language: A Fragment.” In Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music. R. Livingston (trans.). London: Verso.

References and Further Reading Bernstein, J. M. 1992. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. 1985. The German Ideology. C. J. Arthur (ed.). New York: International Publishers. Richter, Gerhard. 2007. Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Richter, Gerhard, ed. 2010. Language without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity. New York: Fordham University Press. Richter, Gerhard. 2016. Inheriting Walter Benjamin. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Richter, Gerhard. 2019. Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoercive Gaze. New York: Fordham University Press. Weber, Samuel. 2008. Benjamin’s -abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985) Robert E. Innis

1  Pathways of Symbolic Transformation Susanne K. Langer is most well known for her classic 1942 book, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Its goal was nothing less than to reorient the “practice of philosophy,” the title of her first book (1930), toward the analysis of “meaning” in the broadest sense of that term. Meaning, she proposed, was to be accessed through the lens of the symbolic transformations of experience, of which art is a prime example. Langer’s lifelong project was to explore the fundamental notion of symbolization as “the keynote of all humanistic problems.” All her philosophical work in the subsequent decades until her death in 1985 was devoted to following up the consequences and implications for human meaning-making of this core notion. Her goal was to chart the various ways experience is transformed through the creation of symbolic forms, exemplified not just in art, our present theme, but in the essential, intertwined roles language, myth, ritual, and sacrament play in human life. Langer’s focal concern in Philosophy in a New Key and in her later works was to widen the notion of “reason” and the “meaningful” to encompass the whole realm of human culture. Following especially the lead of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1953, 1955, and 1957) and other writings, Langer characterized human beings as symbolic animals and not just rational animals, whose principal distinguishing mark was language and rational argumentation. Human beings are not restricted to discursive forms of language, including the formal languages of logic and mathematics, and the language of science, when trying to understand and bring themselves into relation with the world. Myth, ritual, religion, and art are not to be shunted to the realm of the subjective, the merely expressive, or the irrational. With a creative appropriation of the early Wittgenstein, Langer thought of them

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as original ways, with their own logical forms, of conceiving the world and of orienting oneself in it (see Denkerink Chaplin 2020; Innis 2009). But their ways of conceiving are not separable from their semiotically distinct embodiments in stories, ritual actions, religious narrative, and artistic works of all sorts. They are not discursive symbolizations but presentational symbolizations. This is one of the Langer’s most important distinctions, as we will see. Symbolic transformations of experience by the symbolic animal go beyond the pragmatic realms of multileveled organic life and their contexts of dealing with concrete situations. Such contexts Langer called the domain of indication, the domains of signals, indices, and pragmatic lures to action so as to accommodate the organism to its lifeworld and its tasks, the primary one being survival and reproduction. Human beings, as organisms of a certain kind, are likewise bound to the lifeworld by concrete, really effective existential bonds that they undergo as well as undertake. The concrete lifeworld proper to humans is “articulated” by our skillful actions and by the various kinds of experience-based knowledge forms that support and inform them. The concrete features of the environment into which and not just to which one is responding are engaged in a spiral of reconstructive activities. The human animal, however, Langer contends, does not just reconstruct or deal with experience pragmatically, in intimate body-based interactions with it. We transform such an experience by the production of symbolic structures that capture or embody patterns of relations and forms of feeling. Such transformation take two symbolic pathways, each distinctive for human beings. Clearly, we are language animals, defined by the ancients as those animals that “divide their voice.” Such a division of voice is also a division of the world of experience into stable objects and patterns of relations. This division and its variable results are rooted in and biased by perception, but go beyond perception to different levels of abstraction as well as varying degrees of inter-translatability. Language, Langer holds, constructs various kinds of maps or representational systems that order the world and bring it under intellectual control. Whether spoken or written (or made present in some other perceptible form), language is defined by having a lexicon, a repertory of signifying units, a system of rules, a syntax, by means of which the lexicon is ordered, and possibilities of translation, however inadequate, from one language to another. The core principle of language is its radical conventionality as a shared system. It is not based on any principle of resemblance. It is a free, yet arbitrary, creation of the symbolic animal. Its emergence and development create the distinctively human animal that we are. It articulates, captures, and transmits in distinctive ways and media the knowledge of the world that can be put into words.

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Langer’s central contention, however, is that it would be a fatal philosophical mistake to restrict knowledge to what can be put into words. The bounds of language are not the “last limits of experience” (Langer 1942, 265). The limits of language are not the limits of our world nor of our powers to express its deepest meanings. To be sure, Langer affirms that “the notion of giving something a name is the vastest generative idea that ever was conceived: its influence might well transform the entire mode of living and feeling, in the whole species, within a few generations” (1942, 142). Nevertheless, words fail by reason of the impossibility of language to capture in essential ways the “symbolic pregnancies” of experience itself. “[T]hings inaccessible to language may have their own forms of conception, that is to say, their own symbolic devices” (Langer 1942, 265). Langer proposes that the great powers of discursive abstraction, which generate language and other formal systems, are matched by the differentiated powers of presentational abstraction, which transform experience itself in its perceptual reality, and embody experience’s “morphology” or “shapes” in living images of felt life—be they paintings, sculptures, and so on. Presentational abstraction articulates experience by the creation of these symbolic forms that “realize” authentic insight into the life of feeling with its many dimensions and affective tones. The life of feeling is not only made known through these symbolic forms but developed and created by them. Ritual, sacrament, mythic, and artistic images are such forms of articulation that Langer examines. Their forms manifest the unique way they access and constitute the very reality that is brought into being and realized in them—the reality of life as lived. Our concern here, however, is with Langer’s account of art as a distinctive form of articulation of experience in powerful images. In aesthetic creation and perception of such images, whether internal or constructed, we consider them “only in their capacity of meaning things, being images of things— symbols whereby those things are conceived, remembered, considered, and not encountered” (Langer 1942, 144–5)—that is, in mainly pragmatic situations. Images, Langer argues, are distinctive kinds of symbolic instruments for abstracting concepts “from the tumbling stream of actual impressions” (1942, 145). They operate with a different “logic,” or have different “logical forms,” from those of language. They are “our spontaneous embodiments of general ideas” (Langer 1942, 145), although they are cloaked in a variety of sensory garments: visual, auditory, gestural, material, and so forth. This spontaneous embodiment—or exemplification—of general ideas reveals how “feelings have definite forms, which become progressively articulated” (Langer 1942, 100). Presentational symbolization, in the form of art, is a methodical and self-conscious exploitation of the semantic possibilities of the field of experience itself. In the course of its distinguishing

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itself ultimately from ritual, myth, and sacrament, art becomes a “normal and prevalent vehicle of meaning” (Langer 1942, 97), without, however, ever shedding its connections with them.

2  The Paradigmatic Role of Music In Philosophy in a New Key Langer focuses, admittedly controversially, on the paradigmatic role of music in establishing that the function of a presentational form is not self-expression, which requires, she writes, no artistic form. Indeed, in an important sense, she claims, music is an “art without ostensible subject matter”; that is, it does not make known an “object” in any normal sense of the word. Rather, as Langer sees it, music is an exposition and exploration of forms of feeling in sonic materials, an exploration of our inner life in time through the construction of melodies and internal rhythms in tonal materials, a position that has led to extensive critical discussion. But while music is a symbolism, it is not a language in anything other than in an analogical sense. There is, however, a complex musical “syntax” of some sort, different systems of ordering tones, pitches, harmonies, rhythms, and so forth, but music is not made up of systems of propositions about things and their relations to one another. “What music can actually reflect is only the morphology of feeling” (Langer 1942, 238) as presented in the rich continuum of sound and its historical structuring into “more and more integrated, disciplined and articulated forms” (1942, 216). The “aboutness” of musical forms is not the aboutness of language, with its ideational content embodied in the language of tones. Music is, also, in principle no sound-painting. Like any symbol or symbolic structure, Langer holds, music mediates knowledge, knowledge of human feeling, but the knowledge is symbolically embodied and projected in the musical form in a way essentially different from language. Extending a notion from Wittgenstein (see Denkerink Chaplin 2020, Chapter 7), musical forms are for Langer “logical pictures” of emotions, moods, mental tensions, and resolutions, the primary constituents of “sentient, responsive life.” Through our production and experience of musical forms, we learn about the structures of our “interior life” by encountering their formalized and distanced presentations in the musical symbols. Music, Langer asserts, is no “high abstraction” (1942, 239). Its message is not an immutable abstraction, a bare, unambiguous, fixed concept, as a lesson in the higher mathematics of feeling should be. It is always new, no matter how well or how long we have known it, or it loses

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its meaning; it is not transparent but iridescent. Its values crowd each other, its symbols are inexhaustible. (1942, 239)

Thus, the free forms of music arise by “possible articulation suggested entirely by the musical material” and music “grows in meaning by a process of articulation, not in articulate forms by a process of preconceived expression” (Langer 1942, 240), but by expanding what Langer in her Feeling and Form (1953, 122) called a “commanding form” or being lured toward the discovery of one emerging from the creative process. The task of music as a presentational symbolic configuration is to “make things conceivable rather than store up propositions,” giving us “a knowledge of ‘how feelings go’” (Langer 1942, 244). Langer summarizes what is involved in this process in the following way: The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling. Because no assignment of meaning is conventional, none is permanent beyond the sound that passes; yet the brief association was a flash of understanding. (1942, 244)

3  The Notion of Artistic Import How does Langer extend these ideas into a general theory of art? Such a theory is both genetic, tracing the development of art out of the processes of the symbolic transformation of experience, and structural, tracing the specific symbolic configurations of art forms into visual, balletic, literary, musical, architectural, and so forth, and the types of meanings they articulate and make available to us. Langer’s main concern throughout her work is what she called “the genesis of artistic import.” She traces this import down to a “symbolic need” of the human organism that actively translates “experience into symbols, in fulfillment of a basic need to do so. It carries on a constant process of ideation” (Langer 1942, 42–3) that takes many forms. This idea not only recurs but is central to her development of the import of art in the first volume of her great book, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. There we find the following synthetic passage bearing on the symbolic role of images.

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An image does not exemplify the same principles of construction as the object it symbolizes but abstracts its phenomenal character, its immediate effect on our sensibility or the way it presents itself as something of importance, magnitude, strength or fragility, permanence or transience, etc. It organizes and enhances the impression directly received. And as most of our awareness of the world is a continual play of impressions, our primitive intellectual equipment is largely a fund of images, not necessarily visual, but often gestic, kinesthetic, verbal or what I can only call “situational” . . . [W]e apprehend everything which comes to us as impact from the world by imposing some image on it that stresses its salient features and shapes it for recognition and memory. (Langer 1967, 59)

Langer argues that the role of the symbolic images of art is not just to shape quite generally the salient features of experience but to raise them to a higher power. They capture—or attempt to capture—every shade of significance in the complex and at times turbulent flows of what William James in the famous chapter on the stream of thought in The Principles of Psychology called the “free water of consciousness.” They heighten and develop, indeed potentiate, our powers of perceiving in an enriching manner, and formulate new forms significance, by following up the luring affinities of experiencing. Experiencing is a “process of formulation.” It involves the selection of “certain predominant forms” (Langer 1942, 89). These forms are not just distinctive units recognized in experience but can become symbols of something else. Thus, for instance, fire has become “an irresistible symbol of all that is living, feeling, and active” (Langer 1942, 145), or ritual washing has become a symbolic enactment of spiritual cleansing or the mere gesture of washing one’s hands an enactment of declining responsibility; or, again, eating becomes participation in a common life with fellow eaters, the creation of a distinctive community, or the taking on of the “powers” of what one is consuming. All of these symbolic examples involve a form of deep metaphor, of exemplifying something beyond their mere physical pragmatic meaning that bears upon “vital meanings.” We apprehend something “in” a perceptible form or action or situation that goes beyond the immediately given, that has a resonance or significance that signals a new dimension of meaning. The articulation of visual forms is rooted in the grasp of a kind of significance, making up a visual “melody.” We see significance in things long before we know what we are seeing, and it takes some other interest, practical or emotional or superstitious, to make us produce an object which turns out to have expressive virtue

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as well. We cannot conceive significant form ex nihilo; we can only find it, and create something in its image; but because a man has seen the “significant form” of the thing he copies, he will copy it with that emphasis, not by measure, but by the selective, interpretive powers of his intelligent eye. (Langer 1942, 251)

Such notions apply to what Langer calls “the plastic arts” quite generally, arts that are governed by a semantics determined by “the play of lines, masses, colors, textures” while the “poetic arts” of language in its nondiscursive uses pursue a semantics defined by the “play of images, the tension and release of ideas, the speed and arrest, ring and rhyme of words” (1942, 257). But both of these forms of art—the plastic and the poetic—have the same import: “the verbally ineffable, yet not inexpressible law of vital experience, the pattern of affective and sentient being” (Langer 1942, 257). Grasping this import is the “comprehension of an unspoken idea,” achieving “insight into literally ‘unspeakable’ realities” (Langer 1942, 259–60). The artistic idea—no matter what the medium—is contained in or mediated by the artistic image, as a presentational symbol, the understanding of which is “more like having a new experience than like entertaining a proposition” (Langer 1942, 263). It is this interruptive character of artworks that heals a kind of blindness rooted in what Langer calls the “glaring evidence of familiar things” (265). Artworks distance us from hastiness of attention and from language’s claim, in its discursive function, to be or define the “last limits of experience . . . things inaccessible to language may have their own forms of conception, that is to say, their own symbolic devices” (Langer, 1942, 265). How does Langer frame more concretely these symbolic devices? What is the principle of their differentiation? What types of artistic work do they do?

4 Artworks Philosophy, Langer had argued in The Practice of Philosophy, deals with meanings in the broadest, yet more differentiated, sense. Its task is interpretation and the dialectic of interpretations, something Langer had also made central to her Introduction to Symbolic Logic. Langer sees art as located in the intertwined play between the richness of subjective feeling and production of objective forms that articulate and embody the lived reality of these feelings. By “feeling” Langer means to encompass, as she puts it in Mind, whatever can be felt in any way in the affective continuum of undergoings and undertakings that make up our intentional bonds with

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the world. Langer uses “feeling” and “sentience” as comprehensive terms to cover the total range of movements and states that mark embodied human subjectivity. The forms of sentience have distinctive patterns, or what she calls logical forms. Presentational forms are symbolic configurations that make present to view these inexhaustible variety of ways in which the world touches us at every level, including the discursive level, which can itself be lighted up by being presented and not just read, or read through in a transparent manner. Presentational forms are intuitive symbols, symbols of feeling, rooted in spontaneous and natural processes of abstraction and interpretation. Langer writes that “both abstraction and interpretation are intuitive, and may deal with non-discursive forms. They lie at the base of all human mentality, and are the roots from which both language and art take rise” (Langer 1953, 378). This is one of Langer’s major contributions to aesthetics, rooted in a nuanced and non-dogmatic or universalizing semiotic framework, which, from this base, establishes a pivotal branching of the symbolic transformation of experience. The linguistic differentiation “aims at building up, cumulatively, more and more complex logical intuitions.” The sudden emergence of meaning from this synthetic building up that marks discourse is “always a logical intuition or insight” (Langer 1953, 379), proceeding by “emendation.” The symbolic differentiation of experiences taking place in art results in the creation of a presentational form that “cannot be built up like the meaning of a discourse” out of preexisting units ordered by syntactical rules. Langer makes a general point: “In discourse, meaning is synthetically construed by a succession of intuitions; but in art the complex whole is seen or anticipated first” (1953, 379), arising out of the “commanding form” (1953, 386). Langer’s general semiotic point is that “it is hard to hold an envisagement without a more or less permanent symbol” (1953, 387). A “symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents” (Langer 1953, 26), and furthermore when we come to understand how it presents it, a position close to the American philosopher C. S. Peirce’s notion of the “material quality” of a sign, its distinctive feel (see Innis 2013). Artworks, according to Langer, lack conventional reference in the sense of merely referring to their “object” or “thing-meant.” Each work envisages in its unique way what it feels like to feel—in whatever mode of consciousness—the significances of the world in this way. These significances drive it forward and guide its progress. The various forms or genres of art present their “import” according to their defining “primary illusions.” In this way they give rise to “semblances” or “formed appearances” that put the experienced world into play, a notion bordering on that developed in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters.

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I will illustrate this important aesthetic notion by sketching how this idea is developed by Langer in three paradigmatic art forms: (a) pictorial or visual art, (b) dance, and (c) literature. Langer argues that the primary illusion of pictorial or visual art, exemplified in painting, sculpture, and architecture, is virtual space, apprehended in certain “basic shapes” such as circles, triangles, spirals, and parallel lines, the exploitation of which gives rise to new effects of form. For Langer “form is first, and the representational function accrues to it” (1953, 70). The combination of design with pictorial elements allows a complex tension to exist at the heart of visual art which is “symbolizing from the outset,” a process of formulation, shaping, defining of “the impressions themselves according to the principles of expressiveness” (Langer 1953, 71). Imitation, however, is not the operative principle governing the artwork’s organization. The goal is the articulation of visual form in such a way that the work itself, “so immediately expressive of human feeling that it seems to be charged with feeling” (Langer 1953, 71), becomes the sole or paramount object of perception. Think of van Gogh’s cosmic vortex of Starry Night, the torqued Room at Arles, or Wheatfield with Crows and their shaping of space and not just the creation of a shape in space. The creation of this self-contained and independent virtual space is the primary illusion of plastic art (Langer 1953, 72). It is not the re-creation of a space that existed prior to its presentation. The architectonic process of creation is “the construction and ordering of forms in space in such a way that they define and organize the space. But a perceptually defined space is a shape: so the complete shaping of a given visual field is a work of pictorial art” (Langer 1953, 74), in this way “making space visible and its continuity sensible” (1953, 77). In the end one arrives at the “perfect livingness of the work” (Langer 1953, 79), what Langer called “living form,” the exploitation of materials by turning them into elements, factors in the presentational form as a semblance. Plastic art for Langer, as mentioned, is not restricted to pictorial art in the more usual sense of marking surfaces and the consequent emergence of figures from a ground. While pictorial art gives rise to a virtual scene, sculpture gives rise to a virtual kinetic volume, and architecture gives rise to a virtual ethnic domain. Painting creates planes of vision, or “scene” confronting our eyes, on an actual, two-dimensional surface; sculpture makes virtual “kinetic volume” out of actual three-dimensional material, i.e. actual volume; architecture articulates the “ethnic domain,” or virtual “place,” by treatment of an actual place. (Langer 1953, 95)

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Sculpture, by torquing the primary illusion of virtual space into the modality of volume, does not create a space of direct vision, “for volume is really given originally to touch, both haptic touch and contact limiting bodily movement, and the business of sculpture is to translate its data into entirely visual terms, i.e. to make tactual space visible” (Langer 1953, 90). Architecture, for its part, Langer holds, is “more subtle than the construction of illusory scene or even illusory organism” (1953, 92). At its deepest level architecture “creates the semblance of that World which is the counterpart of a Self. It is a total environment made visible” (Langer 1953, 129). It is the “envisagement of an ethnic domain” (Langer 1953, 100), that is, the domain of a people or a community. Such a domain is a “place” bearing the articulated imprint of human life—or of an inhuman life as in the architecture of the gulag, concentration camp, or prison. The distinctiveness of dance is engaged in Feeling and Form and in Problems of Art by asking what the dancers do and what is signified by the dancing (Langer 1953, Chapter 12; 1957, Chapter 1). In dance a motion is transformed into a gesture. The gestic character of dance constitutes the “basic abstraction whereby the dance illusion is made and organized.” A gesture is a vital movement with “subjective and objective, personal and public, willed (or evoked) and perceived” dimensions or aspects whose form carries its expressive qualities (Langer 1953, 174). A dance gesture is not gesticulation, but a “free symbolic form, which may be used to convey ideas of emotion, of awareness and premonition, or may be combined with or incorporated in other virtual gestures, to express other physical and mental tensions” (Langer 1953, 175). For Langer dance is a play of felt energies, both performed and perceived. The dancer’s body is disposed to put these energies into play, while the perceiver is caught up in “complexes of intersecting forces in balletic space” (Langer 1953, 187), made up of rhythmic gesture embodied in a new body-feeling, the dancer’s body being, as Langer put it, ready for rhythm. Dance is made into a work of art through the translation of kinesthetic experience into visual and audible elements . . . . The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time, without effecting either a work of plastic art or of “melos.” (Langer 1953, 204)

This is a powerful claim. Literature’s primary illusion, according to Langer, is virtual experience and virtual memory (see Innis 2007). Poetic art’s primary illusion is the

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illusion of life. The materials of the poetic art are words. The poetic elements built up out of them make the poetic work in the most general sense. They are deployed and balanced, spread out or intensified in quality. The goal of such a poetic work is the creation of a semblance of experienced events or of a virtual order of experiences. Literature’s primary abstraction is virtual events (including the events of thinking or imagining) embodied or presented in a text, a web of words. Literature is not propositional, in spite of its often resembling the discursive use of language, and it does not produce a discourse about acts and events that exist independently of their qualitatively defined formulations within the work. Poetic art escapes the grip of discursive logic, weaving instead its verbal web and exploiting the full meanings of words, which are “flashing, iridescent shapes like flames—ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly-evolving consciousness beneath them” (Langer 1953, 238). The experience of literature, indeed the experience mediated by and constructed by literature, is governed by the principle of poesis that “everything actual must be transformed by imagination into something purely experiential” where the illusion of life in all its forms and “all its connections are lived connections” (Langer 1953, 265). The experiential mode of presentation of literature entails that everything in it is created, not recorded, even if the material of literature is discursive language. This material is transformed into an expressive form with a distinctive feel and tone of its own.

5  Art and Mind Langer’s work culminated in her Mind trilogy. Her discussion there, especially in the first volume, joins the end of her work on aesthetics with its very beginning. It focuses on the import of art and its heuristic role in furnishing us with images of the mind itself and its core activity: the symbolic transformation of experience. Langer sees one of the tasks of philosophy to reflect upon these symbolic images, and on the great structures and processes of discursive symbolization, and to construct a model of mind adequate to its lived reality both in its individual and social-cultural forms. The symbolic images of art in their vast cultural and historical diversity have a unique power to make us aware of the “wholeness and over-all form of entities, acts and facts in the world . . . [O]nly an image can hold us to the conception of a total phenomenon, against which we measure the adequacy of the scientific terms wherewith we describe it” (Langer 1967, viii). Langer holds that works of art, as images of forms of feeling, can by their expressiveness present all aspects of mind and human personality and function as an essential measure of our descriptions of the total phenomenon of mind.

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Langer sees human beings as open semiotic or sign-creating systems of creativity who follow the twin symbolic paths of discursive and presentational symbolizations. Unlike language and discourse, however: A work of art is a single symbol, not a system of significant elements which maybe variously compounded. Its elements have no symbolic values in isolation. They take their expressive character from their functions in the perceptual whole. Art has a logic of its own (and by “a logic” I mean a relational structure), which is very complex; it is largely by virtue of its complexity that it can present us with images of our even more complex subjective activity. (Langer 1967, 84)

How can this be? What does the artist do? [T]he artist’s eye sees in nature, and even in human nature betraying itself in action, an inexhaustible wealth of tensions, rhythms, continuities and contrasts which can be rendered in line and color; and those are the “internal forms” which the “external forms”—paintings, musical or poetic compositions or any other works of art—express for us. . . . Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature. (Langer 1967, 87)

This artistic objectification is the result of abstraction through symbolic exemplification, not through linguistic articulation and its progressive emendation. It gives rise through processes of projection to living forms of feeling, not just images of mind but of minding, marked by patterns of tensions which reflect feeling “predominantly as subjective, originating within us, like the felt activity of muscles and the stirring of emotions” (Langer 1967, 164). Langer points out that the art image retains—or can retain—in various ways all the prior phases of its development and is meant to be contemplated and not treated as an ordinary percept or a “thing.” The art image, when it is successful, is a living form marked by “gradients of all sorts—of relative clarity, complexity, tempo, intensity of feeling, interest, not to mention geometric gradations (the concept of ‘gradient’ is a generalization from relations of height)—[which] permeate all artistic structure” (Langer 1967, 211)—and by the mental activities that have given rise to it. Langer’s approach to aesthetics and to the contribution of aesthetics to our understanding of the distinctiveness of human minding has always had a dual focus: to establish the semiotic and philosophical distinctiveness and nature of art and to exploit its power to uncover by reflection on the import

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of art central defining features of minding offered by the suggestiveness of artistic form. But the task is complicated and long. Langer warns us that there is much work to be done. A symbol always presents its import in simplified form, which is exactly what makes that import accessible for us. No matter how complex, profound and fecund a work of art—or even the whole realm of art—may be, it is incomparably simpler than life. So the theory of art is really a prolegomenon to the much greater undertaking of constructing a concept of mind adequate to the living actuality. (Langer 1967, 244)

Constructing such a concept of mind is an essential task of the great adventure of philosophical thinking. Langer’s rich analysis of art as a fundamental manifestation of the symbolic transformation of experience is an indispensable guide to such a concept. Art, along with language, science, myth, ritual, and sacrament, belongs to those intertwined and dynamic worlds of energized cultural forms in which we have embodied the deepest meanings of our lives (see Innis 2016). Art creates in its distinctive way living images of the diversity of ways in which felt life is and can be given perceptible form. It satisfies our deepest symbolic need, for, as Langer wrote, “life is incoherent unless we give it form” (1953, 400).

Primary Sources Langer: 1930. The Practice of Philosophy. New York: Holt. 1942. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art, 3rd ed., with new preface by the author. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1953. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. New York: Scribner’s. 1957. Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures. New York: Scribner’s, 1957. 1967. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Vol. 1. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1972. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Vol. 2. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1982. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Vol. 3. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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References and Further Reading Cassirer, Ernst. 1953, 1955, and 1957. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Ralph Manheim (trans.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Originally published 1923, 1925, and 1929. Denkerink Chaplin, Adrienne. 2020. The Philosophy of Susanne Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art, and Feeling. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Innis, Robert E. 2007. “The Making of the Literary Symbol: Taking Note of Langer.” Semiotica, 165: 91–106. Innis, Robert E. 2009. Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Innis, Robert E. 2013. “Peirce’s Categories and Langer’s Aesthetics: On Dividing the Semiotic Continuum.” Cognitio, 14 (1): 35–50. Innis, Robert E. 2016. “Energies of Objects: Between Dewey and Langer.” In Franz Engel and Sabine Marienberg (eds.), Das Entgegenkommende Denken, 21–38. Berlin: Springer Verlag.

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Monroe Beardsley (1915–1985) Noël Carroll

Monroe Beardsley was an American philosopher specializing in aesthetics. He was born on December 10, 1915, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and he died on September 18, 1985, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was married to the ethicist Elizabeth Beardsley. He was awarded his BA in 1936 from Yale University and did graduate work at Yale, receiving his PhD in philosophy in 1939. Beardsley taught at several colleges, including Mount Holyoke and Yale, before he settled at Swarthmore, where he taught for twenty-two years. From Swarthmore, he moved to Temple University, where he taught for sixteen years, until his death. Beardsley was a major figure—if not the major figure—in establishing the discipline of analytic aesthetics in America. He was affectionately called “The Dean of Aesthetics” because of the seminal role he played in the field. Beardsley first attracted wide attention for his work with the literary scholar W. K. Wimsatt (1907–1975) on what they called “the intentional fallacy”— the putative error of basing either the interpretation or the evaluation of a work of art on the intention of the author. Their best-known statement of the alleged fallacy appeared in their 1946 article “The Intentional Fallacy” (Wimsatt and Bearsdley 1987), which was an expansion of the 1943 entry on the topic of intention in The Dictionary of World Literature. In 1949, Wimsatt and Beardsley also coauthored another famous article, “The Affective Fallacy.” There they argued that the affective response of the audience was also irrelevant to the interpretation and evaluation of the artwork. Both fallacies stressed that the artwork itself was the proper object of critical focus—not that which brings it about (the author’s intention) or that which it brings about (the audience’s response). The critic should perform close readings of the work and not dwell on where the work came from or what consequences issued from it. These arguments served the interests of the school of thought called the New Criticism, which dominated American literary criticism in the

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1940s and 1950s. They gave teeth to the New Critics’ slogan that one’s reading should not wander outside the text where things like intentions and affective consequences lurk. Beardsley and Wimsatt provided the New Criticism with philosophical armor, which, in turn, reinforced the legitimacy of literary studies by arguing that it had a unique object of study—the literary work itself—and a correspondingly appropriate methodology—close reading. In 1958 with the publication of his groundbreaking treatise—Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (reissued with a postscript in 1981)— Beardsley applied the tenets of the New Criticism to the arts in general, thereby legitimatizing the field of analytic aesthetics. Blending the kind of analytic philosophy that was coming to dominate the American academy with a tendency toward empiricism, Beardsley gave the aesthetician a method—what can be called metacriticism—and an object of study—what he first called an “aesthetic object” but later defined as the artwork itself. Metacriticism, à la Beardsley, consists of the examination of the concepts and modes of argument of the art critic. Thus, topics like representation and expression come in for close examination in Aesthetics and his subsequent investigations. Moreover, criticism itself has a unique object—the artwork itself. So metacriticism involves the analysis of the concepts appropriately deployed in the criticism of art. Although Beardsley’s ideas changed over the course of his long and productive career, in retrospect one finds his position to be remarkably stable. That is, seen retrospectively, the structure of Beardsley’s thinking remains basically consistent throughout, despite some tinkering here and there. For instance, he never gives up on the idea of the intentional fallacy, although over the years he constructs new arguments on its behalf. One change in Beardsley’s approach, as already mentioned, is from his initial designation of the focus of criticism as the aesthetic object to the more ordinary concept of the artwork. And although Beardsley’s propounding of a definition of art comes somewhat late in his career, we can see that it was holding his system together all along. Beardsley was an immensely systematic philosopher. The keystone of his system is the notion of aesthetic experience, which, under the influence of John Dewey, Beardsley identifies as an experience of singular clarity and coherence, so singular, in fact, that the aesthetic experience is autonomous in the sense that it stands out or detaches itself from ordinary experience. When in the throes of aesthetic experience, we are free, released from antecedent concerns, and emotionally detached from events, such as tragic calamities, that might ordinarily threaten or oppress us. Beardsley then goes on to define the art object as an intentional arrangement of conditions for affording experiences of marked aesthetic

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character. Here, the value of the artwork is construed instrumentally—the artwork is valuable for abetting aesthetic experiences. Beardsley requires that the artistic arrangement be intentionally contrived in order to distinguish artworks from things in nature that may afford aesthetic experience. The artwork is an artifact that in virtue of its features—such as unity, complexity, and intensity—provides the occasion for having non-negligible aesthetic experience (so long as we batten upon the artwork itself and not the factors that brought it about or the consequences it may have for practical affairs). Because Beardsley’s theory of art is, broadly speaking, functionalist, he has the wherewithal to evaluate artworks specifically in terms of what they are ideally designed to bring about, namely, the promotion of aesthetic experiences of a non-negligible magnitude. And artworks can be chided when they are incapable of delivering the requisite quotient of aesthetic experience. Moreover, when critics commend artworks, they can do so in virtue of the features of the artworks that afford aesthetic experience—features such as unity, complexity, and intensity of “regional qualities” (roughly Beardsley’s name for expressive and/or aesthetic properties). That is, a canon of critical standards flows directly from Beardsley’s experience-centered, functionalist definition of art. Furthermore, given the structure of Beardsley’s theory, he is able to hypothesize the importance of art for human life. The purpose of art is to engender aesthetic experience. Thus, whatever the value that art qua art possesses will depend upon whatever values attach to having aesthetic experiences. According to Beardsley, having aesthetic experiences is instrumentally valuable for several reasons. First, aesthetic experience is said to relieve tensions and quiet destructive emotions. Aesthetic experience also aids us in sorting out the jumble in the flow of consciousness in our mind, by virtue of its tendencies toward heightened clarity and coherence. In addition to these contributions to mental health, aesthetic experiences enhance our perceptual faculties, enabling us to discriminate the elements of perceptual stimuli more and more subtly. Aesthetic experience also enlarges the imagination, notably expanding our ability to see affairs from the perspective of others. Moreover, aesthetic experience brings people together, fostering sympathy and social cohesion. And finally, aesthetic experience presents us with an ideal of human life; that is, human life may be modeled on artworks with their surpassing degree of unity, complexity, and intensity. By speculating on the importance of aesthetic experience, Beardsley is able to answer the demand that Leo Tolstoy formulated in his 1896 treatise, What Is Art?: that in order to be adequate, a definition of art must indicate why art is a significant human practice, one whose benefits outweigh the sacrifices it exacts. Because of the central role that aesthetic experience plays in Beardsley’s account of art, it is often called an aesthetic theory of

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art. Indeed, aesthetic experience is so important to Beardsley’s system that he calls his entire field of inquiry “aesthetics” rather than “philosophy of art.” Beardsley’s system is immensely elegant due to the way in which the notion of aesthetic experience is fundamental to the notions of art and artistic evaluation, and even to the value of the very practice of art. Few theories of art are as neatly interconnected as Beardsley’s. But for all of its admirable economy, it is open to a number of challenging criticisms. One way to appreciate its limitations is to look closely at Beardsley’s concept of art. According to Beardsley, an artwork is an intentional arrangement of conditions for the purpose of affording experiences of a markedly aesthetic character. On the one hand, this seems far too narrow and exclusive. Art of the twentieth century provides us with many examples of anti-aesthetic art— intentional arrangements of conditions created in order to discourage and even thwart experiences with any aesthetic character, marked or otherwise. Ready-mades are a pertinent example here. In 1926, Marcel Duchamp, for example, exhibited an ordinary metal, canine-grooming comb that was as dull looking as dull can be, and he did so intending to frustrate any attempt to use it to support an aesthetic experience. Furthermore, Duchamp’s ready-mades have been embraced by art historians, curators, collectors, art lovers, and artists alike as major contributions to the world of art. Yet Beardsley’s theory of art cannot assimilate them. Beardsley, of course, was aware of this; his response was to deny that such ready-mades were art. Instead, he reclassified them as comments on art. However, this maneuver seems very ad hoc and stipulative. At this late date, given the history of modern art, the attempt to legislate that ready-mades are not art appears highly dubious. Moreover, Beardsley’s theory of art is not only too narrow; it is too broad. To see this, visit your local grocery store. There, you will see aisle upon aisle of products handsomely packaged to attract buyers. These have been designed at great expense. The commercial artists who created these colorful boxes surely intended these arrangements to afford appreciable aesthetic experiences. They wanted to make things that were pleasing to look at. Thus, they would appear to count as art on Beardsley’s definition. But it is doubtful that most cereal boxes are art in terms of our ordinary understanding of that concept. Nor is this problem a marginal one, when one recalls the indefinitely large number of manufactured products—including automobiles and refrigerators—that are designed, very often successfully, to sustain experiences of a marked aesthetic character. In short, Beardsley’s definition saddles us with too much art. It might be thought that the way to prevent the preceding embarrassment might be to require that the arrangements in question be created with the

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primary intention that they promote aesthetic experience of a certain nonnegligible magnitude. However, that will result in rendering the theory too narrow again. The stain-glass windows in medieval European churches were not designed with the primary intention of affording aesthetic experience. They were intended to serve as pedagogical props that priests could use to educate their parishioners regarding the founding narratives of Christianity. Likewise, the Stations of the Cross in those churches were made with the primary intention of assisting the faithful in prayer and ritual. The artists and artisans who produced these works would be appalled at the suggestion that they made these things with the primary intention to abet aesthetic experience. Such a view they might regard as tantamount to blasphemy. They did not undertake the creation of these items in order to celebrate the autonomy of art from everyday life, but as instruments to assist the very purpose of life, which for them was salvation. Thus, although one must admire the breathtaking, architectonic beauty of Beardsley’s system, at the same time, one must approach it critically, as Beardsley himself did with respect to every leading theory in the philosophy of art of his time.

Primary Sources Beardsley: 1970. The Possibility of Criticism. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 1971. (With William K. Wimsatt.) “The Affective Fallacy.” Reprinted in Hazard Adams (ed.), Critical Theory since Plato. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Janovich. 1981. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, Second ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. 1982. The Aesthetic Point of View. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1987. (With William K. Wimsatt.) “The Intentional Fallacy.” Reprinted in Joseph Margolis (ed.), Philosophy Looks at the Arts. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

References and Further Reading Dickie, George. 2006. “Monroe Beardsley.” In Donald Borchert (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Second ed., vol. 1, 508–10. New York: Thompson/Gale Publishers.

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Kivy, Peter, ed. 2010. “Beardsley Symposium.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 44: 1–25. Wreen, Michael. 1998. “Monroe Beardsley.” In Michael Kelly (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 1, 232–7. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wreen, Michael and Callen, Donald, eds. 2005. “Symposium : Monroe Beardsley’s Legacy in Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63: 175–95.

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Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) Alessandro Giovannelli

The American philosopher Henry Nelson Goodman produced groundbreaking work in different areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and applied logic. He also helped revolutionize Anglo-American analytic aesthetics. His often unorthodox and radical views on a range of issues central to the philosophy of art energized the aesthetics debate of the second half of the twentieth century, opening up avenues of investigation that still continue today. His aesthetic views were given a systematic presentation in the seminal Languages of Art (1976), first published in 1968, but they were expanded and refined in later writings. Goodman looked at issues in aesthetics, and especially in philosophy of art, out of a personal, deep love and respect for the arts (prior to his academic career, he directed an art gallery, in Boston, and he remained an avid art collector all his life). Yet, a remarkable feature of his aesthetics is also its continuity with his proposals in other areas of philosophy. Indeed, Goodman provides a unifying theoretical key into the understanding of disparate parts of reality and human activity. His leading idea is that access to reality, whether through ordinary experience, science, or art, is made possible and modified by the use of symbols, and hence is ultimately a matter of interpretation. How we experience and understand any kind of reality—whether relevant to ordinary experience, the sciences, or the arts—ultimately depends on the classifications we cast upon the world—on the “predicates,” linguistic and nonlinguistic, and combinations thereof that we “project” onto reality. We experience and understand the world in a certain manner partly because, for example, we project such predicates as “green” and “blue” onto those things that we call “emeralds” and “sapphires” (which, again, are what they are partly because of our projecting those predicates onto them; see Goodman 1983). Predicate projections do not reveal a preexisting reality to us. Rather, reality is, quite literally, made, constructed by our categorizations. Hence, whether

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we are considering ordinary perception, scientific theories, or artistic projects, we should see these human, cognitive activities as contributing to “worldmaking,” according to a constructivist metaphysical view Goodman first defended in The Structure of Appearance (1966), and then, in less formal terms, in Ways of Worldmaking (1978). Yet, Goodman is also a relativist: alternative and incompatible classifications may be acceptable. Emeralds and sapphires could be as adequately described as “grue” and “bleen,” the two predicates Goodman famously devised in the context of his discussion of induction (1983). If “grue” is defined as “green when observed prior to a time t and blue otherwise,” and “bleen” as “blue when observed prior to t and green otherwise,” then nothing prevents describing emeralds and sapphires as we know them by these two predicates (an emerald, e.g., is as green as it is grue). The reasons why we project “green” and “blue” instead, and project them in a certain way, are ultimately pragmatic: it is because of habit, of the “entrenchment” of those predicates rather than of alternative ones (Goodman 1983). Accordingly, there are as many worlds as the irreducible categorizations we can successfully devise (cf. Goodman 1978). These are not just the worlds of the sciences—different worlds correspond to Newtonian and Einsteinian physics for example—but also the worlds of the arts, artistic styles, and artistic works: we can think of Picasso’s cubist paintings, for example, as bringing about a largely different world from the one brought about by Masaccio’s frescos. Which categorizations, hence symbols, are successfully projected over time—for example, which artistic styles are perceived as familiar and which ones as revolutionary, or which linguistic uses are considered literal and which ones metaphorical—largely depends on what is customary, entrenched within a given cultural, artistic, or linguistic community. Fortunately, much of what Goodman has to offer regarding art does not depend on the rather controversial claim that talk of “worldmaking” ought to be taken literally.1 Quite independently of his constructivism, Goodman still challenges us with a view of the arts as capable of bringing about new and important views on reality, and of doing so by means of works whose nature and meaning ultimately depend on conventions—old or new artistic conventions that operate in our cultures. Goodman succeeds in proposing articulate theories on a range of aesthetic issues—pictorial representation and realism, artistic expression, metaphor, the ontology of art, meaning in different art forms (including the non-representational arts), the notion of style, artistic merit, and even such specific issues as that of “variations upon a theme” in music and painting—starting from a remarkably simple basis: the primitive notion of “standing for,” that is, symbolization. Works of art are concrete objects—a

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piece of canvas with paint on it, a carved chunk of marble, a series of uttered sounds, or ink marks on paper—that acquire artistic status, meaning, and value when they become symbols functioning within some system of rules. Hence, understanding what painting, or sculpture, or music, or literature is amounts to understanding how certain things acquire symbolic function, and symbolic function of a certain sort, within some systems of rules. Two theses are fundamental to Goodman’s theory of symbols: (1) symbolization, which is for him the same as reference, comes in different modes, and denotation or labeling (e.g., the relation between “dog” and dogs) is only one of them; (2) a symbol is a symbol of a certain kind only within a system of that kind (e.g., something is a picture only within a pictorial system). It is in this sense, then, that there are languages of art, although natural languages and other linguistic systems are by no means the only possible ones; there exist many other systems: pictorial, gestural, diagrammatic, and so forth.

1  Modes of Reference One of Goodman’s important contributions to philosophy is his investigation of kinds, or modes, of reference or symbolization (1976; see also Goodman 1984, Chapter 3). Denotation is the relationship between a label, such as “Barack Obama,” or “the 44th President of the United States,” or the picture in an Obama campaign poster, and what it labels. As labels refer to things, so things possess the features attributed to them by whichever labels apply to them—that of being Barack Obama or the 44th US president (and also, of course, of being of such-and-such a height, a parent, etc., according to the respective labels). As said, labels are not limited to linguistic ones: pictures, sculptures, musical sonatas, and so on can also be labels that classify world items. Hence, the world or worlds we experience and try to understand are as much the result of linguistic categorizations as of categorizations brought about by paintings, sculptures, musical sonatas, and so on. As mentioned, denotation is only one of the modes of reference. Think of the fabric swatches tailors use: they stand for a certain color and pattern, but they do so by (1) possessing those color and pattern features and (2) referring back to the labels that determine such feature possession (say, “red” and “tweed”), hence calling attention to those features. Thus, exemplification is that mode of reference that consists of “possession plus reference” (Goodman 1976, Chapter 2). Of course, exemplification is selective: not all the labels that apply to a swatch are referred to by the swatch; typically, a swatch exemplifies color and pattern but not size or location for example

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(Goodman 1978, 63–70). This mode of reference would be hardly relevant if it were limited to the world of tailoring and the like. Yet, Goodman claims exemplification to be as common as philosophically unrecognized a form of reference, with some central applications in aesthetics. Naturally, exemplification is key to the analysis of meaning—understood as symbolic function—in the non-representational arts, paradigmatically: most music, dance, and architecture, as well as paintings with no representational content. Appealing to exemplification, Goodman can attribute to works that do not aim at representation a pervasive capacity of calling attention to some of their features, that is, of exemplifying them. Indeed, for Goodman exemplification pervades the arts even where representation is present. A poem’s symbolic function, for instance, is not exhausted by what it says, hence denotes; that is why the task of the translator must be the “maximal preservation of what the original exemplifies as well as of what it says” (1976, 60). The analysis of artistic expression also appeals to exemplification, combined with a theory of metaphor. We have a metaphor, Goodman claims, when a symbol that normally refers to a certain (kind of) thing is made to refer to another (as when a man is called a “wolf ”). Symbols, and labels in particular, do not work alone but rather as members of schemata, each ordinarily correlated to a certain realm of things. “Blue” and “green,” for instance, belong to the same schema, usually correlated to colored things; likewise, “wild” and “carnivorous” are normally correlated to certain animals. A term is used metaphorically when it is successfully made to refer to the members of a realm different from that of its schema. When that happens, it is not just one label that is re-assigned to a new referent, but rather a whole family of symbols to a new realm. Hence, if a metaphor like “Men are wolves” is successful, it typically bears other metaphorical attributions—say, that men are feral or that they have a pack mentality. Whether a symbol’s use is metaphorical or not is relative to what are considered its literal uses. Indeed, the difference between the literal and the metaphorical is, again, a matter of habit: literal uses of a term are often old metaphors that have just become literal applications (as when we refer to certain table parts as the legs of the table). Artistic expression is, then, nothing but metaphorical exemplification. Specifically, an artwork expresses, say, sadness when it exemplifies a label, “sad,” that metaphorically denotes it (metaphorically, since works of art literally do not have mental states). Indeed, for Goodman, expression is not limited to affective states such as emotions and feelings. Any feature (e.g., color, or shape, or movement features) can be expressed. Hence, we can say that a building expresses movement, dynamism, or being “jazzy” (Goodman and Elgin 1988, 40). Perhaps, Goodman’s analysis of expression

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is most enlightening if considered as aimed at a general but not exhaustive account. For, if it is the case that a work of music expresses sadness insofar as it exemplifies a feature it only metaphorically possesses, then more could be said on what the metaphorical attribution of a mental state to a musical work amounts to, though that is not part of Goodman’s project.2 The “routes” of reference are many. Other rhetorical figures can be explained, for Goodman, as requiring “transfers” of label schemata onto new realms, hence as “modes of metaphor”: personification, synecdoche, antonomasia, hyperbole, litotes, irony, and so on. (1976, 81–5; see also Goodman 1984, Chapter 3). More generally, reference, whether by means of denoting or exemplifying, can also be direct or indirect. It is the latter when a symbol refers to its referent by means of referring to some other symbol or symbols. Indeed, symbols may combine in “chains of reference,” where one symbol refers to another, such a symbol to yet another, and so on, giving rise to an instance of “complex” (vs. “simple”) reference: an image of a bald eagle may represent the United States by denoting the member of a set, that of bald eagles, with those animals exemplifying a label as “bold and free,” a label that in turn denotes the United States and is exemplified by it (Goodman 1984, 62). Goodman appeals to the different modes of reference to account for a range of disparate notions. Addressing artistic style, for instance, he proposes that the stylistic features of a work make up a subset “of what is said, of what is exemplified, or of what is expressed” (Goodman 1978, 32). In particular, stylistic features are those symbolic properties of a work that allow us to situate it in a certain place, time period, and artist’s oeuvre. They help, in other words, in answering questions like “where?” “when?” “who?” with respect to a work—they function as a “signature” of sorts (Goodman 1978, 35). Even an issue like that of variation upon a theme, which Goodman extends from music to any art form, can be explained in terms of referential functions (Goodman and Elgin 1988). A musical passage, Goodman suggests, is a variation upon a theme when it both shares and differs from, musically, the theme and—via those same shared and differing features—it refers to the theme. Once again, the notion of exemplification, literal and metaphorical, is here explanatorily crucial, as the variation—Goodman submits—calls attention to the features it shares and it does not share with the theme. In painting, Picasso’s forty variations upon Velázquez’s Las Meninas dwell on selected aspects of the subject matter and other pictorial features of the original work.3 The result is a series of what ultimately are to be considered interpretations of Las Meninas: we do not just see the Picasso’s painting variations as derivative of Las Meninas, but also see the Velasquez’s differently thanks to Picasso’s insightful interpretations.

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2  Types of Symbol Systems Investigating the routes of reference is part and parcel of a more general project aimed at spelling out, as the subtitle of Languages of Art states, a general theory of symbols. For symbols refer the way they do—by denotation or exemplification, literal or metaphorical, direct or indirect—always within some symbol system or other. Further, whether a symbol is pictorial, or sculptural, or musical, and so on depends on the kind of system it belongs to: something is a picture because part of a pictorial system, a musical work because part of a musical system, and so on. Symbol systems differ from each other for their different syntactic and semantic rules, governing respectively how symbols can be formed and combined (e.g., how the letters of an alphabet can be combined into words and the words into well-formed sentences), and how they refer to what they refer to. In other words, a symbol system like the English language consists of a symbol scheme—that is, of a collection of symbols or “characters” (all the inscriptions of “a,” “b,” “c,” etc.)—associated to a field of reference. The scheme is governed by syntactic rules, determining how to form and combine characters into new, combined ones; the system by semantic rules, determining how the symbols in the scheme refer to their field of reference. The theory of symbol systems gives Goodman a way to address questions regarding ontology and the distinctions between the different art forms.4 Questions like “What is a painting?” or “What is a work of music?” are answered in terms of the syntactic and semantic rules governing the different kinds of systems and how symbols are individuated within them. Of course, symbol systems may differ greatly from each other for the respective realm associated to each of them—roughly speaking, for what their symbols are about. Yet, the different art forms cannot be differentiated by reference to content, distinguishing, say, painting from music for their referring, respectively, to a world of shapes and colors, and to one of sounds and aural structures. A painting may represent a sound (as perhaps Edvard Munch’s The Scream does) or a musical piece represent colored, shaped objects (Mozart’s Requiem may represent the flames of Hell). The notion central to Goodman’s theory of symbol systems and, hence, art ontology is that of a notation—in brief, a symbol system in which the marks that compose a character (say, all the inscriptions of the letter “a”—A, a, a, etc.) only compose that character, and in which to each symbol, that is, character, corresponds only one item in the realm, and to each item only one symbol (Goodman 1976, Chapter 4). Musical scores get quite close to being symbols functioning in a notation in a Goodmanian sense. The English language has the syntactic but not the semantic characteristics of a notation: certain terms are ambiguous between

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two or more different possible meanings: “bank,” for example, can refer to a financial institution or the land along a river. The existence of a notation is what makes possible, in some art forms, a certain kind of multiple instantiation of artworks. You and I can both have our copies of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, and the same symphony can be performed on different occasions. Relatedly, such art forms as music, dance, and theater allow for performances of the work thanks to the existence of a notation, within which the score or script specifies “the essential properties a performance must have to belong to the work” (Goodman 1976, 212). Notice that, in such art forms, the work is not the score or the script but rather the class of performances that are “compliant” with that score or script.5 In contrast, paintings and sculptures do not work within a notation; hence, there is no copying of an original that would preserve its originality. A copy of a painting is a copy, not an instance of the original. This issue, then, has consequences on the question of forgery, and more generally on the relevance of a work’s history of production to the identity, experience, and merit of the work (Goodman 1976, Chapter 3). In certain arts—literature, music, and (if a notation is available) dance—copying the text or score preserves the identity of the work. In other arts—paradigmatically, painting and sculpture—if one were to pass a copy for an original, that would be a forgery, not an instance or performance of the original. The latter are the “autographic” arts, those for which it matters whether an item is the original or a copy; the former are “allographic.” Notice how such a distinction is not the same as that between single and multiple art forms. In the art of etching, for instance, there are typically several instances of the same work—as many as the prints from the original plate. Yet, etching remains an autographic art: only prints from the original plate are instances of the work. Goodman’s proposals on what individuates artworks in those art forms that allow for some kind of notation seem to generate odd results. Regarding music written in standard Western notation, Goodman claims that only those performances that fully comply with the score count as instances of the work (1976, 186). Hence, even one small mistake on the part of the performer, say, replacing one note with another when playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, disqualifies a performance from being an instance of the Fifth. On the other hand, since music is notational only with respect to the flags arranged on the staff, and not, say, indications of tempo, even radically differently sounding performances (in principle even one taking a whole year to be completed!) would count as instances of a work. It must be noticed, however, that Goodman sharply distinguishes the question of work identity from the question of the value of a performance, and that he is aware of the distance between ordinary usage and the requisites

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established by philosophical analysis. Thus, while “the most miserable performance without actual mistakes does count as . . . an instance [of a work], . . . the most brilliant performance with a single wrong note does not” (Goodman 1976, 186). Yet, technical discourse is one thing, everyday speech another—Goodman cautions; he is “no more recommending that in ordinary discourse we refuse to say that a pianist who misses a note has performed a Chopin Polonaise than we refuse to call a whale a fish, the earth spherical, or a grayish-pink human white” (1976, 187). Goodman’s reference to actual artistic practice is particularly explicit with respect to architecture. Although this art form has developed something close to a notation, it is to be considered a “mixed and transitional case” between an allographic and an autographic art (Goodman 1976, 221). In principle, two buildings built according to the same architect’s plates could be considered instances of the same work. Yet, in reality, the identity of architectural works is still fairly tightly bound to the history of production of each individual building. In the case of literature, however, Goodman claims the identity of a work to be completely severed from the history of production. A novel or a poem as works of literature are the same as their texts. Of Jorge Luis Borges’s famous Pierre Menard case—that of a fictional author trying to write a novel word-for-word identical to Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Borges 1962)—Goodman and Catherine Elgin argue that the case fails to show that two works can have the same text (1988, Chapter 3). All Menard might have been able to produce, they claim, is another inscription of the original text and work, and perhaps suggest a new interpretation of it. This syntactic approach to the identity of literary works, and the identification of works with their texts—a view Gregory Currie (1991) calls “textualism” and quite effectively criticizes—seem to conflict with powerful intuitions, and to have undesirable consequences. Two poems composed by two people independently of each other have a strong prima facie claim to be different works even if it were to happen that the two acts of composition produce the same text; and there appear to be two authors at play. The Goodmanian proposal, instead, is that of attributing the single poem thereby composed either to whoever happens to be the first writer or, if the texts are produced simultaneously, to both writers as authors of a multi-authored work (Goodman and Elgin 1988, 63–4). In either case, it seems the proposal not only conflicts with our intuitions, but also implies a withered, if not peculiar, notion of authorship. Ultimately, Goodman’s syntactic approach seems arbitrary in excluding the relevance to the identity of a work of the, broadly speaking, context of projection of a notational structure, whether linguistic, musical, or other.6

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3  Pictorial Representation Goodman’s analysis of pictorial representation, or depiction, has been heavily debated. Whatever its merits or flaws, it remains a clear, if radical, representative of a possible position on the issue: that for which the pictorial mode of signification is no less conventional, and no more “natural,” than others, such as signification by means of language. For Goodman, at the core of depiction there is denotation: pictures (whether artistic or nonartistic) are labels for things, singular or multiple; respectively, a portrait of Napoleon represents Napoleon by denoting him and a picture of a beaver in a dictionary severally denotes all the beavers (Goodman 1976, Chapter 1). Pictures acquire their meaning as symbols working within their systems, and such meaning (i.e., the picture depicting something), like with any other sort of symbol, is ultimately a matter of convention. This may seem a strange thesis, since we would have thought that the relationship between a picture and, say, the dog it represents were more natural than the relationship between “dog,” or “perro,” or “hund,” within the respective languages, and dogs. Yet, theories claiming that pictures relate to things by some natural relationship— the most traditional candidate being resemblance—are victims of the “myth of the innocent eye” (Goodman 1976, 7–10). Like perception, depiction is always relative to some conceptual framework, some system of classification, which allows us to see in the picture—as perception does in the world— certain things but not others, and see them in some ways but not others. Whatever the case, that the relationship between a painting and its object is ultimately conventional need not be interpreted simplistically: the relevant conventions are not specific to the particular image (though, of course, there are distinctive conventions regarding, say, the iconography of Napoleon or the representation of religious figures in Western painting) but, rather, to all the pictures depicted within a certain tradition broadly conceived. They are general rules such as the use of outline, of the chiaroscuro, or of traditional perspective—and rules of which we are perhaps less aware, say, that a curved line in a certain context stand for a curved shape in the object represented. All of them are conventionally established rules of correlation between the members of certain pictorial systems and the realm of reference. And it is those correlations that are, for Goodman, ultimately conventional. Realism in pictorial representation is also explained in terms of conventions, specifically of the acquaintance a viewer has with certain sets of rules of interpretation. Pictures that we consider to be more realistic are nothing but those depicted according to rules with which we are more acquainted. In sum, no picture or pictorial style bears a more natural relationship with what it represents than any other, hence requiring less or

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no interpretation. The interpretation is simply easier, more immediate, for pictures depicted according to familiar rules. An apparent problem for a theory based on denotation is that of pictures that are of fictional or otherwise nonexistent things—say, pictures of Harry Potter or of unicorns—since they all, equally, denote nothing. Such pictures are nonetheless different from each other, Goodman glosses, in being denoted by different labels: “unicorn-picture” and “Harry-Potter-picture,” respectively. Yet, a more fundamental concern might hide in the wings here, more general than that regarding pictures with null denotation. As Goodman himself emphasizes, consider that all pictures, whether they have a referent or not, singular or multiple, are denoted by predicates of the type “so-andso-picture”; after all, a picture of Napoleon is in the first place a man-picture (indeed a man-in-uniform-riding-a-horse-etc.-picture). Independently of whether it denotes anything, a picture is the picture it is in the sense of its being denoted by a “so-and-so-picture” type of predicate. Hence, it is precisely to this question that a theory of depiction must offer an answer: what is it that makes a given picture a man-picture (we could say, a picture in which one can see a man) and not a dog- or a tree-picture? However, it must be emphasized that, for Goodman, philosophy cannot answer this question. Why pictures are classified in different ways (as unicorn-pictures, manpictures, etc.), why certain shapes are correlated to certain kinds of objects, ultimately is a matter of habit within a cultural, artistic community, hence a question for anthropologists, not philosophers to answer. Philosophers only investigate the “routes” of reference—how the referential relationship applies between symbols and things, or between symbols—not the “roots” of reference—that is, why certain symbols refer to certain things or symbols (see also Goodman 1984). What Goodman does offer is an articulate and sophisticated answer to the more general question of what distinguishes pictorial symbols from symbols of other sorts (1976, Chapter 6; see also Goodman and Elgin 1988, Chapter 8). Pictures, as we have seen, are not symbols in notational systems. Specifically, pictorial systems are syntactically and semantically dense. In this, they are similar to certain diagrams and measurement tools: all those diagrams or instruments for which, in brief, any difference in the marks that compose them could in principle matter to meaning. When reading an analog watch, for instance, any difference in the position of the hands counts as a difference in the time indicated. Likewise, a change, no matter how small, in the marks composing a painting could affect its pictorial meaning. Indeed, with paintings it is not even the case that small differences in the marks make for small differences in meaning: just think of how even a minimal alteration to the lip area of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa could dramatically change

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the painting! Pictorial systems are also, in contrast to diagrammatic systems, relatively replete. That is, a larger number of features (color, shape, texture, hue, etc.) tend to be relevant while, with a diagram, generally fewer features (e.g., the relative position of the dots of a line) are. Hence, the difference between diagrams and pictures is only a matter of degree: typically, with a picture a smaller number of features can be dismissed as contingent or irrelevant.

4  Aesthetic Status and Artistic Merit For Goodman aesthetics really is, ultimately, a branch of epistemology and metaphysics, and this bears on his views regarding both aesthetic—or artistic—status and merit. For him, asking questions about the arts (Goodman did not really address questions regarding the aesthetics of nature) is continuous with asking more general questions regarding the ways in which other forms of symbolization, hence of human knowledge, shape realities for us. Thus, artistic symbols are to be judged for the classifications they bring about, for how novel and insightful those classifications are, for how they change our world perception and relations. The cognitive value of art—that is, art’s contribution to understanding—counts as artistic merit only because the symbols involved and the experiences they bring about belong in some sense to what Goodman calls “the aesthetic” (1976, Chapter 6, and 1978, Chapter 4). Indicating the features that qualify certain symbolic activities and experiences as aesthetic or artistic is then important, though more to see the commonalities between art and other human pursuits, including science, than to isolate the realm of art from them. Since to be a work of art is, for Goodman, to perform certain referential functions, the question “What is art?” should really be replaced by the question “When is art?”—when does the performing of a symbolic activity qualify as artistic? No definition of art is possible; only “symptoms” of the aesthetic can be indicated—features of a symbolic activity that, when present, tend to qualify it as aesthetic, hence tend to occur in art. There are five of such symptoms: syntactic density, semantic density, syntactic repleteness, exemplificationality (Goodman 1976, 252–5), and multiple and complex reference (Goodman 1978, 67–8). These are just clues that indicate but do not guarantee artistic status; and artistic status is possible even without them. Art has a general importance to the epistemic endeavor, which is addressed with special clarity in Ways of Worldmaking. Works of art can participate in worldmaking precisely because they have symbolic functions (Goodman 1978, 102). As linguistic labels categorize the world (and new,

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unusual labels as “grue” and “bleen” categorize it differently), so do pictorial labels, for instance, categorize it in a number of ways (and some of them indeed in new ways). Literal denotation, metaphorical denotation, as well as exemplification and expression, can all contribute to the construction of a world. Cervantes’s Don Quixote literally denotes no one, yet it metaphorically denotes many of us (Goodman 1984, 130). And artworks, by exemplifying shapes, colors, emotional patterns, and so on, as well as by expressing what they literally do not possess, can bring about a reorganization of the world of ordinary experience. Visiting a museum can change our perception of the world, making us notice new aspects of reality and allowing us to encounter a different reality (Goodman 1984, 178–80). Indeed, works of art may have effects that go beyond their medium; hence music may affect seeing, painting affect hearing, or both senses be affected by dance, and so on (Goodman 1978, 106). Especially in “these days of experimentation with the combination of media in the performing arts,” Goodman glosses, music, pictures, and dance “all interpenetrate in making a world” (1978, 106).7

Notes 1 There is a sense, for Goodman, in which we make even physical objects, such as the stars (see his “On Starmaking” and, for discussion, the essays by Israel Scheffler and Hilary Putnam, among others, all in McCormick, ed. 1996). 2 Contemporary theories of expression abound (see, e.g., Chapters 25 and 29, on Peter Kivy and Jerrold Levinson, and the works mentioned in Chapter 30, n. 11). 3 Nineteen of Picasso’s variations are reproduced, and discussed, in Goodman and Elgin (1988). 4 On ontology, see also Chapter 30, Section 3. 5 In Languages of Art, Goodman explicitly opts for a less formal exposition of his views, which defers from the nominalism he had defended since the time of his 1947 “Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism,” coauthored with W. V. Quine (reprinted in Goodman 1972, 173–98). The departure is only at the superficial level of exposition however (Goodman 1976, xiii). Hence, for instance, his speaking of “classes” should not be taken as a commitment to their existence. 6 For an articulate critique of Goodman’s construal of allographic arts, see Levinson (2011). 7 Rather unconventionally for a philosopher but consistently with his views, Goodman himself worked on three multimedia projects, using text, music, dance, and painting. One of such works, Hockey Seen: A Nightmare in Three Periods and Sudden Death, is briefly discussed in Goodman (1984, 69–71). Parts of this essay adapt Giovannelli (2017).

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Primary Sources Goodman: 1966. The Structure of Appearance. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 1972. Problems and Projects. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 1976. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. 1983. Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1984. Of Mind and Other Matters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1988. With Catherine Z. Elgin. Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences. London: Routledge.

References and Further Reading Borges, Jorge Luis. 1962. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In Labyrinths, 36–44. New York: New Directions. Currie, Gregory. 1991. “Work and Text.” Mind, 100: 325–40. Elgin, Catherine Z., ed. 1997. Nelson Goodman’s Philosophy of Art. New York: Garland Publishing. Giovannelli, Alessandro. 2017. “Goodman’s Aesthetics.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2017 edition. Edward N. Zalta (ed.). URL = https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/fall2017​/entries​/goodman​-aesthetics/. Levinson, Jerrold. 2011. “Autographic and Allographic Art Revisited.” In Music, Art, and Metaphysics, 89–106. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCormick, Peter J. 1996. Starmaking: Realism, Anti-Realism, and Irrealism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Symposium: The Legacy of Nelson Goodman. 2000. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 58: 213–53.

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Frank Sibley (1923–1996) Emily Brady

Frequently credited with founding analytic aesthetics, Frank Sibley is one of the most influential philosophers in modern aesthetics. “Aesthetic Concepts,” published in 1959, is now a landmark paper in the field, and best known for his groundbreaking distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic concepts. His ideas continue to generate important discussions about the concepts and evaluations of aesthetic judgments, as well as how aesthetic objectivity is to be established in practice and in theory. Sibley was born in Lowestoft, England, in 1923 and studied at University College, Oxford. He taught at several US universities, most notably Cornell, before returning to England in 1964 to take up the first Chair in Philosophy at Lancaster University. He held the Chair there until receiving Emeritus status in 1985, and was an active philosopher until a couple of years before his death in 1996 (Lyas 1996). Sibley’s work in aesthetics appears in papers between 1955 and 1995, and his major published and previously unpublished essays were collected together in Approach to Aesthetics (2001).

1  Sibley’s Philosophical Method Sibley’s distinctive contribution to aesthetics was shaped both by the context within which his ideas emerged and by his particular philosophical method. From the very beginning, his interests were influenced by the central philosophical figures working in Oxford during or around the time he studied there: J. L. Austin, George Paul, H. P. Grice, and Sibley’s teacher, Gilbert Ryle. Other influences were likely eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and Wittgenstein. Sibley’s thought was also shaped to a greater or lesser extent by his peers, as either companions or sparring partners: Monroe Beardsley, Paul Ziff, Max Black, Harold Osborne, Margaret MacDonald, Arnold Isenberg,

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Ruby Meager, J. O. Urmson, Vincent Tomas, Michael Scriven, and Michael Tanner, among others (Lyas 1996; Brady 2001). Sibley’s main interests were shaped by that philosophical setting: aesthetics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. Language as unveiling human practice is an overriding view and his starting point, whether in his examination of verbs and adjectives or in that of the various terms used in aesthetic descriptions and evaluation. As we see in the philosophers who influenced him, Sibley’s approach is grounded firmly in the public domain and not concerned with the metaphysical, ontological, or “private” psychological dimensions of the topics he addresses. For Sibley, philosophy was a matter of critically dissecting practices, the ways people talk, perceive and think, rather than a matter of creating grand theories and sweeping philosophical models, which obfuscate issues and end up in muddles from their failure to examine differences and relations (Sibley 1966). He showed little concern for defining a special aesthetic attitude, focusing instead on the practice of aesthetics and, more specifically, on the variety of particular words used in aesthetic discourse. Lying at the heart of his work is his methodological approach of collecting lists of aesthetic terms (Lyas 1996; Benson 2001). Sibley located the richness of aesthetic experience not in the emotional, imaginative, or cognitive aspects of appreciation, but rather in the immediate, firsthand perception of various qualities expressible through the variety and diversity of aesthetic language. This explains, perhaps, why he was less interested in the range of topics that attracted his peers, such as intention, truth and fiction, interpretation, the definition of art, representation, and expression. In taking aesthetic discourse as the starting point of a philosophical method rather than, say, a particular art form like music, it is possible to see why he viewed the data of aesthetics as very broad indeed. In the 1950s, Sibley, among others like J. O. Urmson, discussed cases taken not only from the arts but also from the everyday world: cars, furniture, smells and tastes, as well as natural objects and environments—animals, human faces, sunsets, clouds, and meadows. This perspective runs through much of his work, as we see, for example, in “Particularity, Art and Evaluation,” where he argues that the particularity of aesthetic assessment has to do not with the logical features of the concept of a work of art but with the dependence relations between terms used in criticism, a point which he thinks is overlooked by a number of writers because they “have so constantly had their eyes on works of art” (Sibley 1974, 20–1). It is possible to identify a set of themes that represent the main ideas in his philosophy from the early to the late work: (1) the aesthetic/nonaesthetic distinction and its implications for understanding aesthetic

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concepts, descriptions, and properties; (2) the distinctive character of aesthetic objectivity, evaluation, and implications for aesthetic justification and education; (3) the exploration and expansion of the boundaries of the aesthetic domain. To these we now turn.

2  The Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic Distinction In examining the language of art criticism and aesthetic discourse more generally, Sibley was struck by the variety of aesthetic vocabulary that extends beyond familiar general terms such as “beautiful,” “ugly,” “fine,” “poor,” and the like, with a host of more specific, descriptive terms, like “serene,” “sombre,” “moving,” and “delicate,” in use. He argued that these terms belong to a class of judgments that are more common and important than the overall verdict type judgments signified by terms like “beautiful” (Sibley 1965, 36). He also noticed that these descriptive terms are part of everyday language, and so in that sense they are carried from everyday talk into the discourse of aesthetic judgments. This move often involves giving otherwise literal words a metaphorical or figurative meaning, as with “melancholy” (a person may be melancholy, but a landscape never is, literally) (Sibley 1959, 422). The application of aesthetic concepts requires “taste,” a kind of perceptual attentiveness or sensitivity (Sibley 1959, 423). These ideas motivate his distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic terms, and his interest in how they are related. There are, he says, many terms that are not used very often if at all as aesthetic concepts, like “red,” “noisy,” and “square” (Sibley 1959, 422). No perceptual attention or sensitivity is needed to apply these terms or to see the non-aesthetic qualities to which they refer. But non-aesthetic terms matter, too, because aesthetic concepts are dependent on them. For example, something is “delicate because of its pastel shades and curving lines” (Sibley 1959, 424). Sibley uses a distinction between general and specific aesthetic concepts to ground a distinction between levels of aesthetic discourse. In his early work, this is presented in a general way, where aesthetic concepts are used merely descriptively, evaluatively, or to support overall verdicts; however, in later work the distinction becomes more sophisticated, with more refinements introduced (Sibley 1965, 1974). With these ideas, he initiated one of the most significant and longstanding debates in aesthetics. Early and influential critical discussions about Sibley’s work were set out by Ruby Meager (1970), Ted Cohen (1973), and Peter Kivy (1973). Generally, his critics question the aesthetic/non-aesthetic distinction and dispute that it can be made as clearly as Sibley believes. More

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recently, his famous distinction has motivated much debate about aesthetic realism, objectivity, and aesthetic supervenience (Levinson 2001; Zangwill 2001). Sibley argues that aesthetic qualities depend on non-aesthetic qualities for their existence, and could not exist in isolation from them; that nonaesthetic qualities determine aesthetic qualities, so that changes in the former will generally induce changes in the latter; and that aesthetic qualities are “emergent” (Sibley 1965, 138–9). It is important to note that he does not himself use the concept of supervenience to conceive of the dependence relation as existing on a metaphysical level, and he does not discuss aesthetic realism as such (Benson 2001). His own approach is to establish objectivity in aesthetics by examining critical discourse and practice. “Aesthetic Concepts” makes a key point about aesthetic evaluation, namely, that aesthetic concepts are not positively condition-governed: “There are no sufficient conditions, no non-aesthetic features such that the presence of some set of them will beyond question justify or warrant the application of an aesthetic term” (Sibley 1959, 426). These thoughts mature in his later writing, where he argues that the relationship is not fixed by a determinate description and discusses in more refined terms the dependence relations, between aesthetic and non-aesthetic concepts, and their indeterminacy (Sibley 1974). Here, Sibley contributes to ongoing debates about the nature of aesthetic “reasons,” and how objectivity in aesthetic judgment is established (see Beardsley 1962; Kivy 1973; Bergqvist 2010).

3  Aesthetic Objectivity, Evaluation, and Justification Sibley’s distinctive approach to aesthetic objectivity is grounded in the intimate connection he observes between aesthetics and perception: It is of importance first that, broadly speaking, aesthetics is a matter of perception. People have to see the grace or unity of a work, hear the plaintiveness or frenzy in the music, notice the gaudiness of a colour scheme, feel the power of a novel, its mood, or its certainty of tone . . . . To suppose indeed that one can make aesthetic judgments without aesthetic perception, say, by following rules of some kind, is to misunderstand aesthetic judgment. (1965, 137)

This insistence on perceptual experience and the dependence of aesthetic on non-aesthetic, supports his view that aesthetic justification is not a matter of giving deductive or even inductive proof for our judgments. Aesthetic evaluation is not the practice of inferring from a description of a work of

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art whether or not it meets the general criteria of a fine work. It is not the learning of rules or standards ahead of time and their application. Rather, aesthetic judgments issue from seeing for ourselves the qualities and overall value of something. Aesthetics is not a science (Sibley 1966). “Objectivity and Aesthetics” (1968) launches his special strategy for showing in just what sense aesthetic properties might have a kind of objectivity. Through an exploration of the similarities and differences between aesthetic and color properties, he writes that colors are not emergent and dependent properties; the fact is we just see them or not, rather than having to attend carefully, as we do in order to discern aesthetic properties. But Sibley finds a similarity in the way that both color and aesthetic judgments are supported: With colours, the ultimate kind of proof or decision procedure, the only kind there could be ultimately, consists in a certain kind of appeal to agreement in reaction or discrimination. The ultimate proof that something is of a given colour is tied to an overlap of agreement in sorting, distinguishing and much else which links people present and past. (1968, 36)

Agreement in aesthetic judgments is achieved through close attention and development of skills in discovering aesthetic qualities, for example, making finer discriminations, and using richer and more refined aesthetic vocabulary. Disagreement is apparent in differences between levels of skills, and in the background knowledge that shapes our assessments, and he recognizes that no matter how hard we try, we may never get someone to see a particular aesthetic quality. As a perceptualist, the role of knowledge in judgments mattered less to him, although he recognized the way in which different degrees of background knowledge may inform aesthetic judgments by enabling the perception of aesthetic qualities. Two final points suggest how progress toward agreement might be made. First, over time we can attend more closely to the aesthetic object and vary and deepen our knowledge to make better judgments. Second, he suggests that certain paradigms may exemplify particular aesthetic qualities in an abiding manner; passages from King Lear are moving, gazelles and horses may exemplify grace in animals, and so on (Sibley 1968, 50). The process of aesthetic justification set out by Sibley remains a fascinating and impactful contribution to the field. That process draws upon the two critical activities of explanation and “getting someone to see” or giving “perceptual proof ” (Sibley 1959, 1965). Explanation is the first stage, in which the appreciator points out why a work of art has the aesthetic qualities it does, such as grace or unity. Sometimes it may be impossible to say why a

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work has those qualities, but when we can say it, this activity of explanation may serve to deepen appreciation and help us to understand further why we appreciate the work in the way we do (Sibley 1965). The next stage involves the actual demonstration, the proof for the judgment made. This proof is not reasoned in the sense of giving general reasons for a work’s merit, but rather is a kind of perceptual proof: [The critic’s] aim was to bring his audience to agree with him because they perceived for themselves what he perceived; and this is what, if successful, he achieved. But an activity the successful outcome of which is seeing or hearing cannot, I think, be called reasoning. . . . Thus the aesthetic judgments I am concerned with can neither have nor lack a rational basis in this sense, namely, that they can either be or fail to be the outcome of good or bad reasoning. Perception is “supported” in the manner described or not at all. (Sibley 1965, 144)

The critic is giving reasons of some kind in the form of explaining why something is so (say, why a painting is balanced or a landscape melancholy), but these reasons are not the sort of general reasons from which we could draw inferences about the value of works of art. The critic is trying to show someone that the aesthetic qualities are there by getting the person to see them for themselves. If the critic does get someone to see the melancholic quality of a landscape, then that functions to support the critic’s judgment. Sibley further explains the process of aesthetic justification by setting out seven specific critical activities, all of which may be said to provide an understanding of his approach to aesthetic education (1959, 442–4): (1) getting someone else to see aesthetic qualities by pointing to non-aesthetic qualities; (2) directly mentioning aesthetic qualities; (3) directly linking non-aesthetic to aesthetic qualities in one breath; (4) the use of figurative language of similes and metaphors to make aesthetic qualities apparent; (5) the use of contrasts, comparisons, and reminiscences to reveal aesthetic qualities, perhaps by relating one artwork to another; (6) repeating with some variation and development points and observations already made and bringing together an overall aesthetic description; (7) the use of appropriate gestures or pointing to make one’s case. Aesthetic justification is very much a form of communication. In attempting to get someone to see an aesthetic quality, this encourages the aesthetic appreciator to develop skills of discrimination. This aesthetic practice is not limited to professional critics, for Sibley recognizes contributions from so-called experts in artistic institutions, as well as educators, and laypersons in an everyday context. Because aesthetic practice is a matter of perception

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first and foremost rather than rational knowledge (or status within an artistic institution), the pleasures of aesthetic discovery are open to all. Anyone with perceptual abilities has the capacity to develop skills of discernment, even children (Sibley 1968). Although he uses the term “taste” in early writings, he does not identify a special sense or perceptive faculty, nor in most cases, a matter of special training or knowledge: “[A]lmost everybody is able to exercise taste to some degree and in some matters” (Sibley 1959, 423).

4  Exploring and Expanding the Boundaries of Aesthetics Sibley’s work sketches a picture of aesthetic practice that is quite egalitarian. To be sure, this practice includes the fine arts but also, importantly, the simple objects of sense perception, “people and buildings, flowers and gardens, vases and furniture, as well as poems and music” (Sibley 1959, 438). The aesthetic qualities in these objects are not esoteric, but rather “very familiar indeed,” discernible through careful, sensitive perception. The language of aesthetic critical practice is not esoteric, but rather emerges from and is involved in much everyday discourse. Sibley’s later work shows the extent to which he wholeheartedly embraces this enduring concern, by exploring a number of topics that expand aesthetics into new territory. For example, in his last published paper, “Making Music Our Own,” he supplies a list of extra-musical terms divided carefully into the sense categories from which they originate, such as movement, smell and taste, feel, touch, and textures, physiognomy, and gait (Sibley 1995, 165–6). His determination to study non-verdictive aesthetic judgments has impacted the field by encouraging many philosophers to think beyond terms of overall aesthetic appraisal, such as “beautiful.” He was, however, interested in one type of overall aesthetic appraisal, “ugliness,” a category still largely ignored in aesthetics, which he discussed in the posthumously published paper, “Some Notes on Ugliness” (Sibley 2001d; see Sauchelli 2014). Studying aesthetic terminology in all its variety and particularity reveals that aesthetic practice is not limited to the use of the two common sensory modes, vision and hearing. Sibley was keen to show this, not only through the metaphorical language we draw upon but also in terms of our very use of the other senses. This is shown in his lengthy study of smells and tastes, an unrivalled philosophical treatment of the topic at the time of its publication (Sibley 2001e). The paper argues against the common view, made by Roger Scruton (1979) and others, that tastes and smells cannot be objects of

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aesthetic appreciation. Sibley’s treatment is thorough and careful, enriched by lists of smell and taste-related aesthetic concepts. He also uses the topic to challenge and consider just where the boundaries of the aesthetic lie. Although Sibley discussed the arts, he liked to mention quite purposefully, again and again, “people, animals and scenery,” as if to remind his reader of the breadth of nonartistic aesthetics. Across his work, the aesthetic qualities he identified demonstrate a belief that aesthetic concepts are very much relevant to nonartistic things, such as the natural world (Foster 2001). The most explicit attention to this appears in two, posthumously published papers, “Arts or the Aesthetic—Which Comes First?” and “Aesthetic Judgments: Pebbles, Faces, and Fields of Litter” (Sibley 2001c and 2001a; see Benson 2001). The second paper discusses the distinction between predicative and attributive adjectives, focusing on particular examples and counter examples in cases of natural objects. With respect to the question asked in the first paper, his view is that nature is prior because, for one thing, there are no grounds for claiming that there is a set of aesthetic objects which are central in appreciation. That is, art is not central and nature peripheral. The concept of art is logically secondary and dependent on the concept of the aesthetic, a concept that gets much of its meaning from the simplest and most basic aesthetic responses we have, those in response to nature. These points underline Sibley’s enduring interest in removing aesthetics from the confines of specialist discourse and studying it within the context of everyday language, everyday people, and everyday objects. That his work remains deeply relevant is shown not only by a continuing interest in his ideas but also the proof of the pudding: the very expansion of the aesthetic field that we find today.

Primary Sources Sibley: 1959. “Aesthetic Concepts.” Philosophical Review, 68: 421–50. Reprinted in Sibley 2001b. Revised version in Joseph Margolis (ed.). Philosophy Looks at the Arts, 64–87. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1978. 1965. “Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic.” Philosophical Review, 74: 135–59. Reprinted in Sibley 2001b. 1966. “Philosophy and the Arts.” Inaugural Lecture, 23rd February, Inaugural Lectures 1965–1967, 130–48. University of Lancaster. 1968. “Objectivity and Aesthetics.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 42: 31–54. Reprinted in Sibley 2001b.

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1974. “Particularity, Art and Evaluation.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 48: 1–21. Reprinted in Sibley 2001b. 1995. “Making Music Our Own.” In Michael Krausz (ed.), The Interpretation of Music: Philosophical Essays, 165–176. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reprinted in Sibley 2001b. 2001a. “Aesthetic Judgments: Pebbles, Faces, and Fields of Litter.” In Sibley 2001b, 176–189. 2001b. Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics. B. Redfern, J. Benson, and J. Roxbee Cox (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001c. “Arts or the Aesthetic—Which Comes First?” In Sibley 2001b, 135–141. 2001d. “Some Notes on Ugliness.” In Sibley 2001b, 190–206. 2001e. “Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics.” In Sibley 2001b, 207–255.

References and further reading Beardsley, Monroe. 1962. “On the Generality of Critical Reasons.” The Journal of Philosophy, 59: 477–86. Benson, John. 2001. “Sibley After Sibley.” In Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (eds.), Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley, 213–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bergqvist, Anna. 2010. “Why Sibley Is Not a Generalist After All.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 50: 1–14. Brady, Emily. 2001. “Sibley’s Vision.” In Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (eds.), Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley, 1–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brady, Emily and Levinson, Jerrold, eds. 2001. Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, Ted. 1973. “Aesthetic/Non-Aesthetic and the Concept of Taste: A Critique of Sibley’s Position.” Theoria, 39: 113–52. Davies, David. 2015. “Sibley and the Limits of Everyday Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 49: 50–65. Foster, Cheryl. 2001. “I’ve Looked at Clouds from Both Sides Now: Can there be Aesthetic Qualities in Nature?” In Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (eds.), Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley, 180–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kivy, Peter. 1973. Speaking of Art. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinson, Jerrold. 2001. “Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility.” In Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (eds.), Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley, 61–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyas, Colin. 1996. “Frank Sibley: In Memoriam.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 36: 345–55. Lyas, Colin. 2013. “Sibley.” In B. Gaut and D. M. Lopes (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 3rd ed., 190–9. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Meager, Ruby. 1970. “Aesthetic Concepts.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 100: 303–22. Sauchelli, Andrea. 2014. “Sibley on ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Ugly.’” Philosophical Papers, 43: 377–404. Scruton, Roger. 1979. The Aesthetics of Architecture. London: Methuen. Zangwill, Nick. 2001. The Metaphysics of Beauty. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.

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Richard A. Wollheim (1923–2003) Malcolm Budd

The British philosopher Richard Arthur Wollheim, whose interests, both inside and outside philosophy, were unusually wide, was, among other things, the finest aesthetician of his generation. He brought to the subject not only a powerful and creative mind but exceptionally deep and extensive knowledge, a rich conception of the mind informed by his allegiance to and mastery of psychoanalytic theory, a passion for at least three of the arts (architecture, literature and, above all, painting), and a concern for the importance of art in human life. His profound interest in the human mind is reflected in the marked psychological orientation of his aesthetics. Wollheim’s first major statement on, and his principal contribution to, pure or analytic aesthetics is Art and Its Objects (1968). The distinctive conception of the philosophy of art it articulates was further elaborated in the second edition (1980), which contains six supplementary essays, and in other later writings, especially those collected in On Art and the Mind (1973) and The Mind and Its Depths (1993). A notable feature of his aesthetics is its assignment of conceptual priority to the philosophy of art over the aesthetics of nature. This is achieved through representing the aesthetic attitude to nature as the attitude of regarding nature as if it were art. This, I believe, is a definite mistake: if the aesthetic appreciation of nature (of the flight of a hen harrier, say) is understood as it should be, as the aesthetic appreciation of nature as nature, this precludes regarding it as something it is not—in particular as art. But I shall leave this aside and consider instead the topics he focused on in the philosophy of art, which was, after all, his prime concern. These were principally the nature of art, the ontological status of works of art, the meaning and understanding of a work of art, the nature of pictorial representation, and the nature of the expression by a work of art of psychological states or processes.

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1  Art’s Nature, Ontology, and Meaning About the ontology of works of art he argued in favor of three principal claims. The first is that for all works of art the identity of a work of art is determined by the history of its production: two objects that have a different history of production (produced, perhaps, by different people at different times) cannot be instances of the same work, no matter how alike they otherwise may be. (Of course, for this claim to have a fully definite sense, what constitutes one and the same history of production must be specified, as the existence of different impressions or editions of the same print or the restoration of paintings, for example, makes clear.) The second claim is that the fundamental distinction within works of art is between those that are individuals and those that are types, most being types, some individuals. And the third is that every work of the same art form belongs to the same category: if one poem is not an individual but a type, all poems are alike in being types, not individuals, and if one painting is an individual, all paintings are individuals, not types. Although he acquiesced in the view that the central concern of the philosophy of art is to clarify the nature of art, his account of the nature of art is unusual. For he considered the concept of art to be of such complexity that the standard approach of attempting to provide an illuminating definition of the concept is inadequate. The right way of looking at the subject is, first, to eschew the normal spectator-oriented aesthetics in favor of one that does justice to both the point of view of the artist and that of the spectator. The aim of the artist is to give to the object she produces a meaning that is determined by the intentions that guide her activity—a meaning that can be grasped by the right spectators. (The notion of intention is here a very generous one, which includes more or less any psychological factor—desires, beliefs, emotions, commitments and wishes, for example—that motivates the artist to work in the manner he has.) If the artist fulfills his intentions, the work is meaningful. The aim of the spectator is to understand the work, to grasp its meaning, which is a matter of retrieving the artist’s intentions and perceiving the work in the light of those intentions. This requires the spectator to be adequately sensitive and informed, possessing knowledge of the work’s “diachronic setting” or the aesthetic tradition to which it belongs, and usually much more knowledge than this, such as knowledge of artistic conventions and various truths about the world. But this understanding is not a cognitive achievement: it does not consist in recognizing that the artist intended the spectator to have a certain experience in perceiving the work. Instead, it is achieved by engaging with the work and undergoing the experience the artist

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intended it to provide: understanding a work is essentially experiential. Given that the subject must be looked at from both points of view, the philosophical focus must shift from works of art themselves to the so-called aesthetic attitude, understanding this as whatever is involved in regarding something as a work of art, which is intertwined with the complementary attitude of producing something as a work of art. Adopting this focus led Wollheim to the view that art should be thought of as a form of life (in Wittgenstein’s sense), this form of life being such that for artistic activity and appreciation to be possible a complex, ramified structure of practices and institutions must exist, none of these elements being identifiable independently of the other elements in the structure. And having reached the conclusion that art is an essentially historical phenomenon, inevitably changing over time, with its changes affecting the conceptual structure that surrounds it, he suggested a recursive procedure that might be adopted for identifying which objects are works of art.

2  Pictorial Representation and Artistic Expression Two other important topics, to which Wollheim returned again and again, constantly reforming or refining his views, are pictorial representation and artistic expression, each of which, he held, depends on the exercise of both the artist’s and the spectator’s role. For both he advanced a psychological account, the nature of the phenomenon being definable in terms of a certain form of perception and the specific form of that perception the artist intended his or her work to receive. From his earliest writings he held that seeing an opaque-marked surface as a representation essentially involves seeing it in such a way that one thing (a plane of color, perhaps) is seen as being behind or in front of another thing, so that, since most abstract paintings require this kind of seeing, pictorial representation is not restricted to figurative representation. Accordingly, since we see the surface of a painting, what is distinctive of pictorial perception is its particular twofold character. At first, Wollheim thought of this twofold character in terms of Wittgenstein’s notion of seeing-as, but he soon changed this to seeing-in, thinking of seeing-in as a conjunction of experiences, one of seeing a surface and the other a form of seeing that involves the third dimension—seeing one thing in front of or behind another. But this conception of seeing-in was itself quickly replaced by his final view that seeing-in is a single experience with two aspects, the so-called configurational aspect is the visual awareness of the marked surface, the “recognitional” aspect is the visual awareness of, minimally,

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something being in front of or behind something else, more usually, many things being in front of or behind many other things—in other words, the representational content of the picture, which is usually a three-dimensional scene. Wollheim’s final conception of seeing-in as the true account of pictorial perception has few adherents, not always because other accounts seem more plausible, and not necessarily in virtue of some feature inherent in my exposition of it, but because of a difficulty caused by Wollheim’s refusal to countenance certain interpretations of seeing-in. The crucial issue concerns the recognitional aspect, the visual awareness of the depicted scene. What does this visual awareness of depth, of things three-dimensionally related, consist in? Three obvious candidates are these: a visual illusion as of seeing the scene, a perceived resemblance of the scene, an experience of imagining seeing the scene. But Wollheim firmly rejected all three. It is the apparent absence of any other plausible interpretation—and Wollheim not only did not offer one, but considered that none was necessary—that primarily explains the lack of adherents. Wollheim sought to elucidate artistic expression in terms of a form of perception that he called “expressive perception” and the artist’s achievement in making a work that encourages a specific form of such perception. Now perception of this kind can be provoked by the landscape as well as by works of art, but I shall focus upon art only. Wollheim’s conception of expressive perception directed upon a work of art always included the idea of the perception of a “correspondence” between the work and a psychological state: when we perceive a work as being expressive of a certain emotion, for example, the work seems to us to correspond to, to match or “be of a piece with,” what we experience when in that emotional state. But this was only a partial characterization of this kind of perception and his full characterization underwent a number of changes. It finally crystallized into an analysis based on the psychoanalytic idea of the projection of emotion. But whereas standard psychoanalytic theory recognizes what Wollheim calls “simple” projection, Wollheim introduced another form of projection, not standardly recognized, so-called complex projection. Accordingly, Wollheim referred to a work’s expressive properties as projective properties that are perceived by expressive perception. But he presented more than one characterization of the perception of projective properties. The two principal characterizations differ mainly in the presence or absence of emotion in the perceiver. One requires the observer to be experiencing the emotion that might be projected onto the work; the other drops this requirement. In both versions the emotion that might be projected “colors” the observer’s perception of the work. However, only the second form is consistent with Wollheim’s long-standing opposition to the idea that an

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artist, in creating a work as an expression of emotion, or an observer, in appreciating it as an expression of emotion, must feel the emotion that the work expresses. Despite this fact, his final formulation of the theory relies on the first version. Brought up against this and other difficulties in his position, Wollheim was prepared to concede that the crucial concepts involved in his theory, even in its final form, suffer from indefiniteness, so that the theory is merely programmatic (although he wondered, not altogether unreasonably in the case of painting, his prime concern, whether this might well be true of all philosophical theories of expression, the subject being still in its infancy).

3  Aesthetic Value and Applied Aesthetics Given Wollheim’s passion for art it might appear strange that the topic of the evaluation of art figures so little in his work (although his own aesthetic judgments are manifest, even when not explicit). But as is explained in an essay in the second edition of Art and Its Objects that addresses the incidence and status of aesthetic value, the omission of the topic from the first edition was a deliberate distancing from certain tendencies of thought then prevailing in academic aesthetics. However, this essay itself is largely confined to enumerating and sketching the only views of the status of aesthetic value that he considers to have any plausibility. There are four of them: in Wollheim’s idiosyncratic choice of terms, they are Realism, Objectivism, Relativism, and Subjectivism. I shall not attempt to summarize these views, but three of them liken the status of aesthetic value to the status of something else: for Realism aesthetic value has the status of a primary quality; for Objectivism it has the status of a secondary quality; and for Subjectivism it has “something of ” the status of an expressive quality. The reason why Subjectivism holds that aesthetic value has something of the status of an expressive quality—an expressive quality being what Wollheim later called a “projective property”—is that Subjectivism, as Wollheim understands it, requires that at some point along the causal pathway between a work of art and an experience of it that grounds an aesthetic evaluation of the work, a projective mechanism intervenes essentially. Wollheim does not indicate the nature of this mechanism, but, as his thoughts about moral psychology make clear, he thinks of the projection as being some form of complex, not simple, projection. Although Wollheim does not commit himself to any of the four views he outlines, it seems probable that he favored Subjectivism. But given the variety of aesthetic value across the arts, for Subjectivism to be viable it would need a more nuanced account of projection than the one he proposed,

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in The Thread of Life, for moral value, where what is projected is “archaic bliss,” “love satisfied.” Wollheim’s work on aesthetics was not confined to general or analytic aesthetics but encompassed what he termed substantive aesthetics. His contribution to substantive or applied aesthetics is dominated by the massive work that is perhaps his masterpiece, devoted to what was his favorite art, Painting as an Art (1987). It contains a presentation of his theory of pictorial representation and the conception of the perception of pictorial expression that he held at the time. It also contains an application of his psychological theory of artistic meaning and understanding to the art of painting: a painting’s meaning is revealed in the experience induced in an adequately sensitive and informed observer who looks at the surface of the painting as the fulfilled intentions of the artist led him to mark it. And it argues that a painting is a work of art in virtue of the manner in which the activity from which it issues is practiced. In addition it advances a bold theory of the individual style of an artist. The notion of individual style must be distinguished from that of general style. General style is a merely taxonomic notion, consisting of a (fluctuating) set of features thought to be characteristic of paintings in that style. But individual pictorial style is not the set of characteristics associated with it. Rather, it is a generative affair, a matter of what in the artist’s mind underlies and explains this set of characteristics. An individual style itself has psychological reality: it is a practical capacity that has been formed and lies deep in the artist’s psychology, which causes the characteristics associated with it to be as they are and which enables the artist to fulfill his intentions. Wollheim recognizes that not all of a painter’s works will derive from his individual style. He identifies three possibilities: pre-stylistic works, that is, works created before the style has formed; post-stylistic works, works created after the painter’s style had collapsed; and extra-stylistic works, works in which an artist attempts something beyond the capacity of his style. Wollheim appears to rule out the possibility that an artist could possess more than one style at the same time, and although he allows that there can be changes in the enduring style of an artist, he maintains that an artist could acquire a different individual style only in a case of massive psychological disturbance. But perhaps the most interesting feature of Wollheim’s book is his identifying, in addition to representational and expressive meaning, three other varieties of so-called primary pictorial meaning or content that a painting can achieve—textual, historical, and metaphorical meaning—and also what he calls “secondary” meaning, which is what the act of giving a picture its primary meaning meant to the artist; and his illustrating these kinds of meaning by a series of highly challenging interpretations of works by some of the painters he most admired.

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Primary Sources Wollheim: 1968. Art and Its Objects: An Introduction to Aesthetics. New York: Harper and Row. Reprinted in 1970 (London: Pelican Books). Second edition with six supplementary essays published in 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 1973. On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures. London: Allen Lane. 1987. Painting as an Art: The Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. London: Thames and Hudson. 1993. The Mind and Its Depths. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

References and Further Reading Hopkins, Jim and Savile, Anthony, eds. 1992. Psychoanalysis, Mind and Art: Perspectives on Richard Wollheim. Oxford: Blackwell. van Gerwen, Rob, ed. 2001. Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as Representation and Expression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Arthur C. Danto (1924–2013) Sondra Bacharach

Arthur Coleman Danto published in a variety of fields in philosophy, but he was most famous for his systematic work in the philosophy of art, philosophy of art history, and art criticism. For nearly half a century, his writings in these areas have transformed the way aestheticians, art historians, and art critics engage with the disciplines. Throughout this time, Danto maintained an intimate relationship with the artworld, himself a practicing artist and influential art critic; indeed, his knowledge and expertise in the arts is by any standards extensive.

1  Danto’s Account of Art Danto’s contributions to the philosophy of art were wide-ranging, covering the nature of beauty, issues in ontology and art interpretation—notably the role of intention in determining a work’s identity, its meaning and artistically relevant qualities—as well as the philosophy of art criticism more broadly. However, by far, Danto’s most significant contribution was his account of art, that is, his account of what makes an object a work of art. Indeed, a good portion of the contemporary discussions on the concept of art can be traced, directly or indirectly, to Danto’s writings, especially to his seminal The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981). Danto’s account of art was first sketched in “The Artworld” (1964). Noticing the prevalence of artworks that appeared indiscernible to ordinary objects by Pop artists, Danto realized that the “method of indiscernibles” could be applied to art more generally: What made the difference between ordinary comic strips, regular beds, real-world flags and store-bought Brillo boxes, on the one hand, and the artworks by Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol, on the other? The answer, he maintained,

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had to do with the nonmanifest, or non-perceptual properties of the works. This was a novel way of thinking about art. Prior to Danto, definitions of art focused on the manifest properties of artworks—the way they looked, sounded, and so on. Any object that qualified as art did so in virtue of the object’s manifest properties and, as a result, artworks were defined in terms of their visual, aural, and so on, properties. Brillo Box challenged this tradition: it was designed to look identical to its ordinary, store-bought counterpart. Indeed, Brillo Box was only identifiable as art, and distinguishable from non-art, by appeal to its non-visual, conceptual, properties. Danto took Brillo Box to raise the philosophical question regarding the nature of art, by presenting an artwork that could not be differentiated from non-art in virtue of its manifest properties. Indeed, the moral of Brillo Box was a general one, regarding the relevance of conceptual properties as opposed not just to the manifest properties of an artwork, but its physical, intrinsic properties more generally. Of course, artworks that were indiscernible from ordinary objects predate both Danto and Warhol—just consider Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which was a signed ready-made urinal. According to Danto, however, Fountain made a strikingly different comment on the nature of art than Warhol’s Brillo Box. Duchamp originally submitted Fountain as a joke to the 1917 Société des Artistes Indépendants exhibition, under the fictitious name, Mr. R. Mutt. The exhibition was supposed to accept any artwork submitted by any person who paid the $6 membership and entry fee. After a heated debate, however, Fountain was not accepted, on the grounds that the object was not a work of art. In response to this rejection, the Blind Man, a magazine published by Duchamp and two friends who knew the real identity of Fountain’s creator, carried an unsigned lead editorial, arguing that Fountain was in fact an artwork because the artist chose the work. According to the editorial, the meaning of Fountain was supposed to be that what made an object an artwork was a declaration by the artist that it was such. Fountain showed that it may be sufficient for an artist to choose an object to transform it into an artwork. Notice, then, that Pop art raised a fundamentally different philosophical challenge than Duchamp’s art. While mere declarations by the artist might transform a urinal into Fountain, something other than artists’ declarations distinguished two perceptually indiscernible objects, like Warhol’s Brillo Box and its ordinary counterpart from the hardware stores. On Danto’s view, the former, but not the latter, was an artwork because of the artistic theories surrounding the work. These artistic theories explained why an object was considered part of what Danto dubbed “the artworld”: “What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a

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Brillo Box [sic] is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is” (1964, 581). We would not understand why Warhol made Brillo Box unless we also knew its relation to the theories of art that were endorsed by the so-called New York School of the 1950s and 1960s. On Danto’s view, the art theories of the artworld allowed us to understand why an object was a work of art. As he famously proclaimed, “[t]o see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry [sic]—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld” (Danto 1964, 580). The artworld performed this central task, of individuating artworks from their indiscernible counterparts, by providing the art theories with which to interpret artworks. What made an object art was that it could be interpreted, and what made the artwork the particular artwork it was (and not some other, perceptually indiscernible artwork) was a function of the particular interpretations generated by the artworld of the time. The notion of the artworld served as the foundation for the formal definition of art that Danto advanced in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and that he refined in his later work (1997 and 1999). According to this definition, for something to be an artwork, (a) the object must be about something and (b) the object must embody its meaning, where this aboutness and embodiment were determined by the interpretation for the artwork, an interpretation that, in turn, depended on the art-historical and art-theoretical context in which the artwork appeared. Warhol’s Brillo Box, but not an ordinary Brillo box, made a statement about the kinds of objects that could qualify as art, and about the kinds of properties in virtue of which an object was art. Brillo Box, in other words, was importantly about the nature of art, and in virtue of this aboutness, it qualified as a work of art. Of course, many works were about the nature of art (as, e.g., Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist was partly about  the process of making a painting); but Brillo Box expressed what it was about in a particular way, namely, by looking identical to a Brillo box, rather than in some other way (as with the Pollock’s). The way that Brillo Box embodied its meaning, the way that it made the statement that it did, individuated this work from other artworks. For Danto, Warhol’s work revealed an interesting insight into the viability of essentialism, the view according to which necessary and sufficient conditions govern the application of the concept of art. Classical attempts at defining art in essentialist terms had focused on identifying some standard feature of art as necessary and sufficient for an object to qualify as a work of art. Traditional definitions invoked a variety of different manifest properties of artworks, such as representational, expressive, or formal features. For Danto, what

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Warhol’s work showed was not that we should reject essentialism, tout court. Rather, it showed that any plausible definition of art must be formulated with reference to an object’s nonmanifest, as well as its manifest, properties. This was what distinguished Danto’s essentialism from the traditional essentialist accounts of art. Danto’s account of art had a significant advantage over earlier essentialist definitions: by appealing to nonmanifest properties, his definition was rendered immune to certain problems that had plagued these earlier definitions. The general problem for definitions that relied exclusively on manifest properties was that the development of art subsequent to any given definition could always produce some artwork that represented a counterexample to that definition, that is, was an artwork but lacked the very manifest property such a definition considered essential. Warhol taught us that an artwork could have any manifest property and still be art, and hence that manifest properties were not essential to defining art. In this respect, Danto’s essentialist definition of art, relying on nonmanifest properties, appeared to be shielded from any possible counterexamples arising from future art.

2  Danto’s Historicism One of the interesting consequences of the way that Danto’s views are shaped by Warhol and the surrounding artistic theories of the artworld was that his definition of art was closely tied to art history: if what counted as art depended on the artworld, then what counted as art also depended on the particular moment in history at which an artwork appeared in the artworld. Danto was sensitive to the fact that Brillo Box “could not have been art fifty years ago . . . . It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible” (1964, 581). As the artworld and related artistic theories evolved, so would the range of possible meanings that artworks may be about and embody. The evolution of art history determined the set of meanings that are possible at a given moment in the history of art (Danto 1994, 327–8). As a result, the development of an appropriate definition of art would depend importantly on the development of art history and art theory: what was possible to discover philosophically would depend ultimately on what was possible to discover art historically. An analogy may help explain how, on Danto’s view, certain facts could only become epistemically accessible once the appropriate history of art has evolved. Consider the case of physics. In the eighteenth century, even the smartest physicist would have been unable to discover the central claims

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entailed by the theory of relativity. The physicist’s knowledge is constrained by the current state of scientific theorizing. It would be impossible for anyone to discover the truth of a physical claim entailed by the theory of relativity before the theory of relativity had been discovered; such claims could only be discovered after the appropriate theories of physics had arisen. Similarly, even the smartest aesthetician would be unable to discover that, for example, aboutness was a necessary condition for an object to be an artwork, if the appropriate artistic theories were not already part of the artworld. We could only realize, for example, that aboutness was a necessary condition for an object to be a work of art once the relevant modernist theories of art that made artworks like Warhol’s possible were in place in the artworld. Of course, it has always been, and always will be, a property that applies truly and correctly to artworks—even to artworks created before the existence of modernist art theories. If art history had not evolved as it did, then aboutness would still be a necessary feature of all artworks, but no definition could ever make reference to this fact. The definition of art is held hostage by what is possible in art history. As the relevant facts become historically available, so will the essence of art reveal itself through history.

3  Art History and “The End of Art” While Danto was most highly regarded for his views about the philosophy of art, he was most widely criticized for his account of art history, and particularly the startling end-of-art thesis—presented in the 1984 essay “The End of Art” (reprinted in Danto 1986)—that he took to follow from this account of art history. Danto’s account of art history was broadly Hegelian. First, he conceived of the history of art teleologically, such that it made sense to say that art was striving for, or progressing toward, some goal, namely, formulating the question about the nature of art in its proper philosophical form (see Danto 1992, 241–2). The history of art was construed as progressive and works of art were interpreted against the backdrop of art history. Further, since the history of art was constituted by different periods, each period contained its own internal development and the history of art during any given period was the history of works of art trying to achieve or realize a goal specific to that period. Second, the development of the history of art passed through distinct narrative phases at particular times: the representational period, ending with the invention of cinematography; the expressionist period, ending roughly with Fauvism; and the modernist period, ending with Warhol’s Brillo Box. Each period was necessary to reach the next narrative,

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or level of art-historical development, and these narratives culminated in the realization of the final phase of art history: the modernist period, as it was expressed by the ultimate goal of the master narrative, in which art’s goal was to formulate the philosophical nature of art. Finally, Danto emphasized how contemporary art was striving to be reflexive, that is, to raise philosophical questions about the nature of its own existence and become conscious of its own self. Ultimately, art was about its own nature and that was why, in contemporary times, its reflexivity had become so overt. Art became reflexive once Warhol arrived on the scene with Brillo Box. Danto argued that at this point, artists had raised the central philosophical question about the nature of art. Moreover, since this question was essentially a philosophical one, Danto claimed that it could only be answered by philosophers. Artists had been philosophically disenfranchised, and there was nothing more for them to do. As a result, Danto argued that art history ends in 1964 with Warhol’s Brillo Box; after this point, we entered into the “post-historical” era—an era in which there is no more art history in the sense of a progressive narrative of art’s development, but there is still art making (Danto 1990, 335). Because there are no more narratives governing art’s development, anything goes in art today—the arts have been freed from any constraints (see Danto 1992, 229).

4  Critical Assessment There has been much critical debate over Danto’s writings in all domains, but the most recent criticisms continue to be preoccupied with two main issues: the end-of-art thesis and the relation between Danto’s essentialist definition of art and his historicist account of art history. The end-of-art thesis is without a doubt his most controversial view. Many of the criticisms of this thesis arise as a result of ambiguities over what it means. Does it simply mean that painting in particular, rather than art in general, has ended? Or does the thesis mean that art-making has stopped but not ended? Does it mean that a particular narrative of art history has been completed (say, the modernist narrative in which art articulates its nature), or that the entire master narrative has come to an end? Other criticisms center around the possibility of art coming to an end with Warhol: why does art end with the raising, rather than the answering, of a question? Why think that artists cannot answer a question about the nature of art, if they are capable of raising the question? Further criticisms challenge the viability of his periodization of art history; for example, the expression period, in which art is purely expressive, fails to have an internal development: there is no

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clearly defined goal for art whose aim is just to express, and hence no way to measure the progress or development of the history of art during this period. Still other criticisms challenge Danto’s Hegelian conception of art history: the Hegelian model of art history diverges radically from Danto’s own characterizations of the art-historical narratives, if only because Hegel could never have conceived of a period of art ending with Warhol. All these challenges ultimately are designed to deny that art or art history has come to an end in any interesting or meaningful sense. A second debate over Danto’s views focuses on the relation between his particular, essentialist account of art and his historicist account of art history. Many commentators (e.g., Lee Brown, David Carrier, Michael Kelly, and Noël Carroll) have argued these two accounts are fundamentally at odds with one another. Brown was one of the earliest critics to challenge his account of art history and the related end-of-art thesis. More recently, Noël Carroll has noted that the thesis conveniently indemnifies Danto’s definition of art from the possibility of future counterexamples to his definition of art. After all, if there is no more art, there can be no more counterexamples to his definition, and Danto can rest assured that no future art could ever threaten his definition of art.

Primary Sources Danto: 1964. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy, 61: 571–84. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1984. The Death of Art. New York: Haven. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press. 1990. Encounters and Reflections. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1992. Beyond the Brillo Box. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994. Embodied Meanings. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 1997. After the End of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1999. Philosophizing Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

References and Further Reading Auxier, Randall E. and Hahn, Lewis Edwin, eds. 2013. Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art. Chicago: Open Court.

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Bacharach, Sondra. 2002. “Can Art Really End?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60 (1): 57–66. Boardman, Frank. 2015. “Back in Style: A New Interpretation of Danto's Style Matrix.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 73 (4): 441–8. Brown, Lee B. 1989. “Resurrecting Hegel to Bury Art.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 29: 303–13. Carrier, David, ed. 1998. “Danto and His Critics: Art History, Historiography and After the End of Art,” special issue. History and Theory, 37: 1–143. (Includes articles by David Carrier, Noël Carroll, and Michael Kelly, among others.) Carroll, Noël. Forthcoming. Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art: Essays. The Hague: Brill. Goehr, Lydia and Gilmore, Jonathan, eds. Forthcoming. A Companion to Arthur C. Danto. Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell. Rollins, Mark, ed. 2012. Danto and His Critics, 2nd ed. Cambridge: WileyBlackwell.

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Stanley Cavell (1926–2018) Malcolm Turvey

Considered by some to be one of the most important American philosophers of the twentieth century, Stanley Cavell occupies a unique position in the philosophy of art. Although he wrote a great deal about particular art forms, especially film and literature, Cavell did not make a sustained contribution to the theoretical debates that preoccupy analytical aestheticians. While his work contains arguments that pertain to much-discussed topics such as the definition and ontology of art, aesthetic experience, the nature of pictorial representation, and artistic value, Cavell offered little theoretical defense of his views on these matters, and he rarely engaged systematically with the views of others. Nor did he have much to say about the ideological and political functions of art, which tend to concern continental philosophers. Instead, Cavell pioneered a distinctive approach to interpreting artworks that was informed by his equally distinctive response to the traditional philosophical problem of skepticism, the worry that “we can never know with certainty of the existence of something or other; call it the external world, and call it other minds” (1979b, 37). Rather than an abstract problem addressed by professional philosophers, Cavell believed that skepticism is the modern or “secular” manifestation of “the human wish to deny the condition of human existence” (1988, 5). Hence, for Cavell, skepticism is intrinsic to human life, at least in modern times, and it is expressed in many forms, including in artworks, as he sought to show in his interpretations of films and works in other media. Although these interpretations were almost entirely ignored in film and literary studies when they first started appearing in the 1960s—doubtless because they did not accord with semiotics, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism, the reigning theoretical paradigms of the day—they have since grown in influence to the point that Cavell’s impact on these fields is perhaps greater than that of any other American philosopher. Certainly, the approach

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to literature and especially film that Cavell established, which consists of treating artworks, even popular ones such as Hollywood movies, as capable of addressing the most profound philosophical issues, has now been widely embraced. Meanwhile, Cavell’s third book, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971), which is perhaps his most theoretical text about art, helped legitimize the philosophical study of film.

1  Cavell and Skepticism Cavell’s view of skepticism, which he formalized in his major philosophical work, The Claim of Reason (1979b), stems largely from his understanding of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. According to Cavell, Wittgenstein teaches us that skepticism is (not exactly true, but not exactly false either; it is the name of) a standing threat to, or temptation of, the human mind— that our ordinary language and its representation of the world can be philosophically repudiated and that it is essential to our inheritance and mutual possession of language, as well as to what inspires philosophy, that this should be so. (Cavell 1996, 89)

For Cavell, Wittgenstein affirms the “concluding thesis of skepticism” (Cavell 1979b, 45) because of his concept of a criterion. In Cavell’s view, Wittgenstein argues that “any concept we use in speaking about anything at all . . . call for criteria” (1979b, 14). By this, Cavell means that in order to be able to apply the concept of, for example, a cat to the same objects that other English speakers do, one must learn the various criteria that define what objects are counted as cats in English: that a cat is a small animal with fur, a tail, four legs, that meows, and so on. These are criteria that English speakers share by virtue of having learned how to use the concept of a cat, and they facilitate widespread agreement among English speakers about what objects count as cats in the practice of applying the concept. The role of criteria in human language for Wittgenstein, Cavell contends, is to determine the meaning of concepts, thereby allowing language-users to identify phenomena. Their role is not to enable the language-user to know with certainty whether the phenomena she identifies exist or not. Criteria are “criteria for something’s being so,” not in the sense that they tell us of a thing’s existence, but of something like its identity, not of its being so, but of its being so. Criteria do not determine the certainty of

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statements, but the application of the concepts employed in statements. (Cavell 1979b, 45)

Criteria only “settle questions of identity rather than existence” (Mulhall 1994, 84) for Cavell’s Wittgenstein. Hence, appeals to criteria cannot refute skepticism, and “criteria, for all their necessity, are open to our repudiation, or dissatisfaction (hence they lead to, as well as lead from skepticism)” (Cavell 1988, 5). The skeptic is therefore right, according to Wittgenstein’s concept of a criterion: human beings never know with certainty the existence of the external world and other minds on the basis of criteria. Thus, the relation of human beings to the world via criteria and the concepts they define cannot be one of certain knowledge. As Cavell puts it, “Our relation to the world as a whole, or to others in general, is not one of knowing, where knowing construes itself as being certain,” and skepticism is always a “natural possibility” of language (1979b, 45, 47). In his writings, Cavell refers to this as “the truth of skepticism” (1979b, 7; 1988, 5), and his principal philosophical claim is that we must “acknowledge” that certainty about reality and other minds is not possible. However, while Wittgenstein’s concept of a criterion shows that the skeptic is right, it also reveals why skepticism is ultimately wrong. The fact that the role of criteria in human language is to settle questions of identity rather than existence means that criteria cannot be accused of failing to settle questions of existence, which is precisely what the skeptic accuses criteria of doing. Skepticism is therefore “not exactly true” for Cavell’s Wittgenstein: that criteria only guarantee identity, not existence, is only a failing on the part of criteria from the skeptic’s incorrect point of view, which wrongly assumes that criteria should be able to guarantee existence. For Cavell, the impossibility of knowing with certainty the world and other minds is a condition of human knowledge, not a limitation, as the skeptic maintains, which is why he describes skepticism as a form of “the human wish to deny the condition of human existence” (1988, 5). Cavell conceives of human beings as possessing a fundamental, almost natural impulse to view the conditions of their existence as limitations, and hence to want to escape those conditions. Skepticism and the wish to deny the condition of human existence that motivates it, he argues, “is essential to what we think of as the human” (1988, 5). Hence, skepticism “cannot, or must not, be denied” (1988, 5). Instead, its hold on us must be loosened by repeatedly acknowledging that a lack of certainty is not a limitation of ordinary human knowledge but a condition of it. Cavell’s work can in large measure be seen as an inquiry into the foundational role that the struggle between denying and acknowledging “the truth of skepticism” plays in human life, especially art.

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2  The World Viewed Cavell was drawn to cinema because he felt that the medium of film is “a moving image of skepticism” (Cavell 1979a, 188) and therefore “as if meant for philosophy” (Cavell 1996, xii). In The World Viewed, he reflected on the ontology of the cinematic medium in order to support this contention. In this work, Cavell connects skepticism to the human condition of solipsistic loneliness. At some point the unhinging of our consciousness from the world interposed our subjectivity between us and our presentness to the world. Then our subjectivity became what is present to us, individuality became isolation. (1979a, 22)

While we can be sure that our own minds exist, we cannot be certain of anything beyond them, which results in metaphysical solitude. We therefore wish to make reality present to us and thereby escape our solipsistic entrapment in subjectivity. It is precisely this wish that the photographic arts such as cinema satisfy. “So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied . . . the human wish . . . to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation—a wish for the power to reach this world” (Cavell 1979a, 21). This is due to what film theorist André Bazin famously called the “ontology of the photographic image,” the removal “of the human agent from the task of reproduction” by virtue of what Cavell calls photography’s “automatism,” its automatic registering of light rays from a subject onto a photo-sensitive medium (Cavell 1979a, 23). By removing human beings, at least in part, from the act of representation, photography “overcame subjectivity” and made the world “present” to us. It enabled us to see reality unmediated by human subjectivity, and Cavell suggests that “In a photograph, the original is still as present as it ever was” (1979a, 20), and that “A photograph does not present us with ‘likenesses’ of things [like painting]; it presents us, we want to say, with things themselves” (1979a, 17). However, while reality is present to us when we watch films, this does not mean we are present to it because the events recorded on photographic film occurred in the past. Photography maintains the presentness of the world by accepting our absence from it. The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it; and a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless not present . . . is a world past. (Cavell 1979a, 23)

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In automatically removing us from the reality it makes present and thereby permitting “us to view [the world] unseen” (Cavell 1979a, 40), Cavell believed that cinema instantiates our skeptical, solipsistic relation to reality. As he put it, “In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity” (Cavell 1979a, 40). Hence, the medium of photographic film is a “moving image of skepticism” in that it satisfies the skeptic’s desire to escape subjectivity while simultaneously creating the condition of solipsistic entrapment that gives rise to this desire. On the one hand, by way of its automatism, it fulfills the wish, born of the solipsistic isolation that skepticism engenders, to transcend subjectivity and make reality present. On the other, because it automatically removes the viewer from the reality it makes present, film reinforces the solipsism of skepticism that propagates this wish, making “displacement appear as our natural condition” (Cavell 1979a, 41).

3  Interpretations of Artworks For Cavell, the medium of cinema provides an “image” of the struggle against and retreat into skepticism and solipsism due to its ontology. Specific films and genres, however, also depict this struggle through their narratives and characters. Cavell’s 1981 book Pursuits of Happiness addresses seven Hollywood romantic comedies from the 1930s and 1940s that together, Cavell argues, constitute a genre he called the “comedy of remarriage.” Each film concerns a couple that has separated and must learn to acknowledge, primarily through conversations with each other, the condition of human existence—that certainty about the other is impossible and therefore loving them involves a risk—before they can reunite and escape solipsistic isolation, an unending process or moral journey Cavell comes to associate with Emersonian perfectionism in that it “sets itself against any idea of ultimate perfection” (Cavell 2004, 3). The good or perfect life enabled by romantic union is an ideal forever sought after, never definitively attained, because the truth of skepticism must be perpetually reacknowledged as a result of the “the human wish to deny the condition of human existence” (Cavell 1988, 5), to view skepticism as a limitation rather than a condition of human life. For example, in his interpretation of It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), Cavell maintains that newspaper reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and rich heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) “trace the progress from narcissism and incestuous privacy to objectivity and the acknowledgment of otherness as the path and goal of human happiness” (Cavell 1981, 103). His reading of their transformation from combatants into lovers focuses on

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the meaning of the blanket (“the Walls of Jericho”) that hangs between and separates them in the motel room where they are staying while Elle gives Peter her exclusive story in return for Peter helping her to reunite with her husband, with whom she eloped against her father’s wishes. Cavell argues that the blanket invokes “issues of metaphysical isolation and of the possibility of community” (1981, 80), and that it is a “way to frame a solution to the so-called problem of the existence of other minds” (1981, 101). Elle is the first one to cross the blanket barrier between them, to “accept her relation to common humanity,” but Peter initially rebuffs her (Cavell 1981, 100). Cavell contends that his problem is “one of having to put together his perception of the woman with his imagination of her” (1981, 100), and that the blanket barrier “censors . . . the man’s knowledge of the existence of the human being ‘on the other side’” (1981, 109). Peter is unable to acknowledge that “she is ‘somebody that’s real, somebody that’s alive,’ flesh and blood, someone separate from his dream who therefore has, if she is to be in it, to enter it” (Cavell 1981, 100). He is trapped in his subjective, solipsistic conception of his ideal partner. It is only when he takes the risk of acknowledging her as “someone separate from his dream” with her own beliefs and desires that he can never know with certainty, that the barrier between them dissolves away. As Cavell puts it in the context of a discussion of The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941), another comedy of remarriage, “It is an awful, an awesome truth that the acknowledgement of the otherness of others, of ineluctable separation, is the condition of human happiness” (Cavell 2004, 381), a statement that, as Paul Guyer astutely notes, applies to all the comedies of remarriage (Guyer 2019, 352). In the comedies of remarriage, the romantic couple are able to overcome solipsistic skepticism by acknowledging “the otherness of others,” although, as befits Emersonian perfectionism, this is an ideal of happiness they must continually pursue rather than conclusively attain. In Cavell’s interpretations of other artworks, acknowledgment and the struggle against skepticism sometimes fail. Cavell’s 1996 book Contesting Tears examines four Hollywood films from the same period as the remarriage comedies that together constitute a genre Cavell calls “the melodrama of the unknown woman.” This genre bears an “inner relation” of negation to the remarriage comedies. Like them, the four films concern women who come to know themselves. But unlike in the remarriage comedies, the women in them remain unknown to men and they do not marry. Cavell writes: I discuss the amatory wars of the comedies as struggles for acknowledgement; in the melodramas this is avoided or renounced: the man’s struggle there is, on the contrary, a struggle against recognition.

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The woman’s struggle is to understand why recognition by the man has not happened or has been denied or has become irrelevant. (1996, 30)

Because of the failure of men to acknowledge them fully, the women in these films must find sources of contentment other than marriage or romantic union, such as happiness in a daughter’s happiness, which is Charlotte Vale’s [Bette Davis] lot in Now Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942). Cavell argued that the comedies of remarriage and the melodramas of unknown women inherited “the preoccupations and discoveries” of Shakespeare’s plays, and much of his writing about art beyond cinema was devoted to these plays. Indeed, Cavell’s first book, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), ends with “The Avoidance of Love,” an essay on King Lear in which he claims that Lear’s behavior exemplifies the skeptical condition he diagnoses in the rest of the book: that we cannot know with certainty that our own words or the words of another mean what they usually do. Lear’s tragedy, in Paul Guyer’s paraphrase of Cavell’s argument, “is brought on by trusting or acknowledging the excessive avowals of daughterly love by Goneril and Regan and failing to plumb the depth of love behind the modest avowals of Cordelia” (Guyer 2019, 342). In its concern to show how characters in a narrative suffer as a consequence of failing to acknowledge the “truth of skepticism” as a condition of human existence, this essay proved to be seminal both for Cavell’s own writings on art, and for the philosophical approach to interpreting artworks he pioneered, one that is now, thanks to him, firmly established in the study of art.

Primary Sources Cavell: 1969. Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. New York: Scribner’s. 1979a. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1979b. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1981. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1988. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of Moral Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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References and Further Reading Guyer, Paul. 2019. “Stanley Cavell: What Becomes of People on Film?” In Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa, and Shawn Loht (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook for the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, 335–55. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Loxley, James and Andrew Taylor, eds. 2011. Stanley Cavell: Philosophy, Literature, and Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mulhall, Stephen. 1994. Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rothman, William and Keane, Marian. 2000. Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Wheatley, Catherine. 2019. Stanley Cavell and Film: Skepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema. London: Bloomsbury.

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Peter Kivy (1934–2017) James O. Young

Peter Kivy is widely regarded as the most distinguished philosopher of music of our or, perhaps, any, time. He was certainly the most eminent contemporary defender of a formalist philosophy of music. Kivy spent the bulk of his career at Rutgers University, where he was promoted to Professor in 1976. He was the author or editor of twenty-three books, including eighteen monographs. These influential works have gone a long way toward shaping debates in philosophy of music since the publication of his first book on music, The Corded Shell (1980). Kivy’s philosophical achievements received many forms of recognition. He served as president of the American Society for Aesthetics, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was the holder of an honorary Doctor of Music degree from Goldsmith’s College, University of London. His final book, De Gustibus (2015), received the American Society for Aesthetics’ annual prize for best monograph.

1 Formalism Kivy was the most important contemporary advocate of musical formalism. According to Kivy, formalism can be defined in terms of what music is not. Formalists hold that “absolute music does not possess semantic or representational content. It is not of or about anything: it represents no objects, tells no stories . . . music is ‘pure’ sound structure” (Kivy 2002a, 67). Elsewhere Kivy describes such music as “pure, empty decoration: arabesque” (1993, 348). Note the restriction of this definition to absolute music, that is, purely instrumental music or what Kivy sometimes called “music alone” (1990). Kivy does not deny that music with lyrics can have content, but all of the content is owed to the words. Since formalists hold that absolute music is pure sonic form, they must also hold that it is appreciated as such. The experience of music is, Kivy

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believes, akin to experience of the patterns of colors in a kaleidoscope or the experience of the pattern on a Persian carpet. Kivy describes a sonata movement as a “sonic carpet” (1993, 350). Just as the eye delights in running along the pattern of a Persian carpet, the ear follows the sonic patterns of music, delighting in them. Musical form can be, Kivy believes, beautiful. According to Kivy, the beauty of musical form is ineffable. We cannot specify what makes a musical pattern beautiful. He wrote that “if someone should ask me to define musical beauty, I would, of course, decline the invitation, as any sensible person ought” (Kivy 1990, 77). On his view, “the beauty of . . . music . . . is a brute aesthetic fact” (Kivy 1999, 268). Nevertheless, Kivy attempts to say something about what makes the experience of music so rewarding. The analogy between the experience of music and the pleasure of running one’s eye over a carpet is one attempt to cast some light upon the rewards of the experience of music. Elsewhere, Kivy proposes that listeners play two intellectually rewarding games as they listen to music. The first of these games he calls musical hide and seek or “cherchez le thème,” in which listeners search for the principal themes of a work. The proposal that listeners play this game is plausible in the case of the works of J. S. Bach, a composer that Kivy particularly admired. Bach sometimes inverts a theme or re-introduces it backward and it is often a challenge for the listener to identify the theme as it is varied. The pleasure of rising to this challenge, Kivy believed, goes a long way toward explaining the rewards of listening to music. In fact, Kivy writes that “this special case of musical enjoyment can be generalized for all musical enjoyment” (1990, 73). Kivy has another explanation of listeners’ appreciation of music. He calls this the “hypothesis game” (2002a, 75). When playing this game, listeners form hypotheses about what will happen next as a composition unfolds. A listener may, for example, hypothesize that a work will modulate into the parallel minor or that a fugue will unfold in a certain way. Listeners can then be pleased by the confirmation of a hypothesis or pleasantly surprised by a composer’s unexpected ingenuity. In playing the hypothesis game, as in playing cherchez le thème, listeners delight in musical form. Despite the introduction of these games, musical beauty remains ineffable since Kivy provides no explanation of why these games are enjoyable.

2  Music and the Arousal of Emotion A corollary of Kivy’s formalism is his view that music cannot arouse what he calls “garden-variety emotions.” These are the emotions that we feel in the

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ordinary courses of our lives: emotions such as sadness, melancholy, joy, and fear. The view that music arouses such emotions is widely held but rejected by Kivy. He does, however, hold that music can arouse a special sort of emotion that he calls “musical emotion.” Kivy’s argument for the conclusion that music does not arouse gardenvariety emotions rests on his adoption of the cognitive theory of emotions. According to this theory, a person must have certain beliefs about some object in order to be in a given emotional state. The theory entails that, for example, people can only feel fear if they believe that some object threatens them. Kivy argues that works of music cannot be the objects of beliefs that would make it possible for them to feel afraid, sad, or any other garden-variety emotion. For example, people cannot believe that music is threatening, so it cannot arouse fear in them. People cannot have a belief about a work of music that would make it possible for them to feel sadness. In recent years alternative theories of emotion have been proposed. Empirical evidence suggests that music does arouse emotion (Robinson, 2005; Young 2014, Ch. 2). Alternative theories of emotion have been proposed that can account for such arousal. Kivy remained committed, however, to the view that music cannot arouse garden-variety emotions. Kivy did, however, believe that music arouses a special emotion. He describes this emotion as “an enthusiasm, an intense musical excitement” (2002b, 117). Kivy argues that the arousal of a special musical emotion is explicable in terms of the cognitive theory of emotions. As we have seen, according to the cognitive theory, one must have an appropriate belief about some object if one is to be in an emotional state. According to Kivy, when listeners experience musical emotion, they have a belief about a work of music or a musical performance. They believe of the music that it is beautiful. When listeners have this belief, they can be moved to feel special musical emotion.

3  The Contour Theory The Corded Shell (1980) contained Kivy’s first major contribution to the philosophy of music, a defense of what Kivy called the “contour theory.” The contour theory was a version of what is often called a resemblance theory of musical expressiveness. (Kivy (1980) was reprinted with additional essays in Kivy (1989).) Although Kivy is a formalist, in his early work he defended the view that music can be expressive of emotion. This led Philip Alperson to describe Kivy’s position as “enhanced formalism” (Alperson 1991).

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The contour theory was not wholly original. On the contrary, as Kivy himself noted, the theory can be traced back at least as far as the Florentine Camerata in the sixteenth century. Kivy’s contribution was to give a rigorous philosophical defense of the theory. (Stephen Davies 1980 and 1994, independently and simultaneously defended a similar theory.) The contour theory is an account of what makes music expressive of a given emotion. In essence, it states that music is expressive of a given emotion when the music resembles human behavior expressive of that emotion. Kivy drew a crucial distinction between music expressing an emotion and music being expressive of an emotion. Something expresses emotion when it is a manifestation of a person’s state of mind. Laughter, for example, may be an expression of a person’s happy state of mind. Some philosophers have thought that music is an expression of a musician’s state of mind. Early in his career, at least, Kivy allowed that music can express emotion, writing that “I am inclined to think it sometimes does” (1989, 15). Kivy gives Mozart’s Requiem as an example of a work that expresses emotion. It expresses the composer’s fear of death. Later in his career, Kivy tended to downplay the possibility that music expresses emotions. Something is expressive of an emotion when it resembles behavior that expresses an emotion. Crucially, something can be expressive of emotion without expressing emotion. Kivy illustrated this point with the example of a St. Bernard’s face. A St. Bernard is not expressing sadness with its droopy, jowly face. A St. Bernard could be carefree and cheerful despite its face. However, the dog’s face resembles the face of a sad person. In this sense, the dog’s face is expressive of sadness. Just as a dog’s face can resemble a sad expression, music can resemble a voice that is expressive of an emotion. Kivy uses the falling vocal line in a work by Monteverdi to illustrate the contour theory. “We hear sadness in the opening phrase of the Lamento d’Arianna in that we hear the musical sounds as appropriate to the expression of sadness” (Kivy 1989, 51). We hear the work as expressive of sadness because we discern the resemblance between the musical line and the way a sad voice falls. Although the contour theory is one of Kivy’s most notable contributions to philosophy of music, he soon began to doubt it. As early as Sound Sentiment he already indicated that the theory “has not entirely satisfied its author.” He had come to think that musical expressiveness is “a divine mystery” (Kivy 1989, 258). Later he wrote that “Having vigorously defended the contour theory . . . I can no longer say that I am not without serious qualms” (Kivy 2002a, 47). Although Kivy abandoned the contour theory of musical expressiveness, other writers have continued to defend versions of the theory and it enjoys substantial empirical support.

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4  Problem of Opera Like other formalists before him, Kivy believed that there is a “problem of opera.” The problem stems, he believed, from a fundamental difference between music and literature. Formalists hold that literature is a narrative art and works of literature unfold in a way that is determined by the content of words. Kivy adopted a propositional theory of literature, according to which works of literature explicitly or implicitly make statements about the world (1997, 122). He also believed that opera libretti can similarly make statements. In contrast, as we have seen, music is contentless form and considerations about form shape the way that a piece of music unfolds. Music and literature are “antithetical arts” (2009). Kivy believed that composers face a stark choice when they set words to music. They can write music that is subservient to the text and enhances its semantic content, or they can write music that is successful in purely musical terms. They cannot do both. The “inevitable conflict between the purely musical and music in the service of textual ‘representation’ shapes, for all time, the aesthetics of opera, and, indeed, of all vocal music” (1999, 15). This is the problem of opera. On Kivy’s view, there is no fully satisfactory solution to the problem of opera. There will always be a tension between musical and literary considerations when words are set to music. Sometimes, as in the case of Monteverdi, literary considerations will predominate and the music will tend to be somewhat unsatisfactory. Sometimes, musical and literary considerations take turns dominating. Kivy gives the example of Handel’s operas. In these works, secco recitatives, in which the poetry dominates, alternate with arias in which musical considerations are ascendant. Sometimes purely musical considerations override everything. Mozart’s great dramatic ensembles are examples. Kivy describes such an ensemble as a “sinfonia concertante for voices and orchestra” (1999, 235). Kivy held that opera is not to be appreciated as an art form with content. He wrote that “What music can’t do, opera can’t do” (1999, 274). Consequently, music cannot possess the psychological depth that some writers have attributed to it. This psychological depth is “an illusion” (1999, 269). Rather tentatively, Kivy suggests listeners enjoy trying to find the drama hidden in the music and that this explains why the experience of opera is rewarding. While some philosophers (Levinson 1996) have agreed that there is a problem of opera, others have disagreed (Ridley 2004, Ch. 3, Young 2013). Skeptics about the problem of opera hold that both formalism and the propositional theory of literature are wrong. Music is held to be more akin to literature than Kivy allows.

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5  Ontology of Musical Works In addition to his writings on the experience of music, Kivy produced a significant body of writing on the ontology of musical works. The ontology of musical works is puzzling in a way that the ontology of, for example, paintings and carved sculptures is not. From an ontological point of view, a statue such as Michelangelo’s David is simply a concrete individual. It is a piece of marble. Works of music, however, cannot be identified with any concrete individual. Various proposals have been made about the ontological category to which works of music belong. Kivy adopted a version of Platonism, according to which works of music are abstract types. Kivy never systematically developed a case for Platonism. Rather, his views on the ontology of music are found in a series of essays that attempt to refute certain objections to Platonism. Kivy endorses what he calls extreme Platonism, the view that works of music are eternal, immutable, abstract sound structures. The relationship between works and performances is to be understood in terms of types and tokens of types: a performance can be a token of a work type. Since he adopts extreme Platonism, Kivy spends a good deal of time defending the view that musical works are discovered, not created. He also embraces the view that works of music cannot be destroyed. Kivy rejects a view, associated with Julian Dodd, known as timbral sonicism (Dodd 2007). Since, on Kivy’s view, a work is a pure sound structure, he holds that performance means are inessential to a work and that a work can be performed on various instruments even if the timbres of these instruments differ. For example, on Kivy’s view, a performance on a modern piano can be a token of Bach’s Goldberg Variations just as much as a performance on a harpsichord with two manuals, the instrument specified by Bach. In this respect, Kivy’s views on musical works differ from those of Jerrold Levinson (2011), who held that performance means are essential to a work of music. Kivy also differs from Levinson in another respect. Levinson holds that if the Goldberg Variations were written by a composer in 1941, the 1941 composition would be numerically distinct from Bach’s composition of 1741 since the aesthetic properties of the two works are different. Kivy disagrees. On his view, the aesthetic properties of musical works are inessential and works are independent of their historical contexts. In the realm of ontology Kivy is also known for his “great divide” hypothesis. In his view, what music is and how it was experienced was dramatically different before and after the great divide, which he believed to have occurred in the eighteenth century. Kivy wrote that “before the great divide . . . all music, including instrumental music, was a mixed-media art

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in the sense that it was written for various and sundry domestic, social, public, and religious ceremonies that, as musical practice, formed part of its appreciated aesthetic character” (1995, 94). The hypothesis that there was a great divide in music has come in for some criticism (Young 2005 and 2015), but Kivy continued to advocate the hypothesis until the end of his life (2012, Appendix I).

6 Conclusion Peter Kivy made important contributions to the history of aesthetics, philosophy of literature, and general philosophy of art, but he will be remembered as a philosopher of music. He brought a rigor to philosophy of music that had seldom been seen and has only rarely been equaled. He combined this rigor with a deep appreciation of music and a musicological background possessed by few philosophers. His philosophical and musicological acumen established the standard for future philosophers of music and the questions he posed have set the agenda for future inquiries in the field.

Primary Sources Kivy: 1980. The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1989. Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions Including the Complete Text of the Corded Shell. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 1990. Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1993. The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1997. Philosophies of Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Osmin’s Rage: Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama, and Text. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2002a. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2002b. New Essays on Musical Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2009. Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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2012. Sounding Off: Eleven Essays in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. De Gustibus: Arguing About Taste and Why We Do It. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

References and Further Reading Alperson, Philip. 1991. “What Should One Expect from a Philosophy of Music Education?” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 25: 215–42. Davies, Stephen. 1980. “The Expression of Emotion in Music.” Mind, 89: 67–86. Davies, Stephen. 1994. Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dodd, Julian. 2007. Works of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1996. The Pleasures of Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2011. Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ridley, Aaron. 2004. Philosophy of Music: Theme and Variations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Robinson, Jenefer. 2005. Deeper than Reasons. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Young, James O. 2005. “The ‘Great Divide’ in Music.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 45: 175–84. Young, James O. 2013. “Kivy and the ‘Problem of Opera.’” Opera Quarterly, 29: 282–301. Young, James O. 2014. Critique of Pure Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Young, James O. 2015. “Was there a ‘Great Divide’ in Music?” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 46: 233–44.

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Kendall L. Walton (b. 1939) David Davies

The contributions of Kendall Walton to philosophical reflection on the arts over the past fifty-odd years are striking both for their significance and influence and for their diversity. His work on the nature of visual representation in the arts, the nature of fiction and our emotional responses to it, puzzling aspects of our imaginative engagement with artworks, and the role of a work’s provenance in its artistic appreciation has played a major part in structuring contemporary philosophical exploration of these issues. Walton has also enhanced the place of aesthetics in the broader philosophical culture, both by drawing on the latter in his work and by providing resources that have illuminated philosophical debates outside aesthetics.

1  Foundations of the Representational Arts: Mimesis as Make-Believe To orient ourselves in Walton’s corpus, we must begin with Mimesis as MakeBelieve (1990), his magisterial work on the foundations of the representational arts. Representational artworks usually employ visual or verbal media, or, as in theater, some combination thereof. Paintings, for example, use a visual medium to depict their subjects, while novels use language to describe the things they represent. As a basis for clarifying the distinction between depiction and description, Walton offers a general theory of representation that applies both to artworks and to more mundane things such as children’s games. He describes a game where two children walking in the woods pretend that stumps are bears. In such a game, the stumps serve as “props” in the game of make-believe. A prop in a game of make-believe is a generator of truths in that game: facts about the props generate such truths. For example, that

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one stump is bigger than another makes it true in the game that one bear is bigger than another. Something acquires the status of prop in a game thanks to an understanding among its players, which Walton terms a “principle of generation.” Given such a principle, whether something is true in the game is independent of whether anyone believes it to be true in the game. In the “stumps are bears” game, for example, a stump, even if unnoticed, makes it true in the game that a bear is lurking nearby. Props, then, prescribe what is to be imagined. This provides the basis for a general theory of fictional truth: a proposition is true in a fiction just in case there is a prescription that, in engaging with that fiction, we are to imagine that proposition. Artistic representations, Walton argues, are also props in games of makebelieve. A representation prescribes that we imagine certain things. The content of the prescribed imagining depends upon the relevant principles of generation, and the intended audience for an artistic representation understands what it prescribes because they understand these principles. Walton stresses the varied nature of the principles of generation operative in the arts. The occurrence of the name “Napoleon” in War and Peace, for example, prescribes that we imagine certain things narrated in the novel to be true of that historical figure. The title Snowstorm at Sea of one of Turner’s more impressionistic paintings indicates the content of the prescribed imagining. Other principles of generation are more culturally specific. For example, the principles of generation operative in late-fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance painting prescribe that, where a figure is depicted as extending her hand, palm forward, toward the viewer or another depicted figure, we are to imagine that she is issuing an invitation or welcome, rather than, say, a rebuff. The difference between description and depiction is to be explained in terms of a more general difference in the kind of imagining prescribed. In the case of novels, readers are prescribed to imagine that certain events take place or that certain things obtain, and that they are learning this from a narrator. In the case of paintings, on the other hand, what is prescribed is that the viewer imagines that her seeing of the painted surface is a seeing of what the picture depicts. While what is true in the world of the work is determined by principles of generation, what is true in the world of the game we play with the work also includes facts about our relation to the world of the work as the confidants of narrators or as viewers of what is depicted. Walton argues that his account of depiction in terms of imagined seeing captures what is left unelucidated in Richard Wollheim’s talk of the “twofoldness” of our perceptual engagement with visual artworks, our seeing the subject of a painting in the array of pigment on canvas (1992). It also accounts, he argues (Walton 1990), for a crucial difference between our

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engagement with artistic representations and our engagement in ordinary games of make-believe. In the former, we are interested not only in the content that we are prescribed to make-believe but also in how the work’s creator made these things fictional by manipulating the medium to produce a “prop” that articulates that content.

2  “Prop-Oriented” Make-Believe, Metaphor, and Fictional Characters Walton draws an important distinction between “content-oriented” and “prop-oriented” make-believe (1993). While props usually serve our interest in participating in games of make-believe, sometimes regarding something as a prop in an actual or potential game may provide an illuminating way of thinking about that thing. This offers an insight into how many metaphors work. Consider Romeo’s classic metaphor “Juliet is the sun.” This invites us to consider a possible game of make-believe in which certain features of Juliet, as prop, make various things true of the sun (say, that it is a source of life). This leads us to focus on these features of Juliet, which are the ones that Romeo wishes to call to our attention by using the metaphor. Thinking of many metaphors in terms of prop-oriented make-believe helps us to understand the merits and demerits of alternative views of metaphor, such as the idea that metaphors provide “frames” for thinking about their subjects (Moran 1989), Walton argues. Prop-oriented make-believe also helps explain our ability to talk about entities that don’t exist, including fictional characters like Romeo (Walton 2000). When participating in prop-oriented make-believe, we usually pretend to say one thing but actually assert something else. In such a case, we often assert something about the real-world circumstance that generates a particular fictional truth. Walton claims that this applies to existential statements of the form “X exists” or “X does not exist.” In uttering the sentence “Sherlock Holmes does not exist,” we make believe that “Sherlock Holmes” refers to someone and that there is a property of “existing” that the referent of “Sherlock Holmes” doesn’t possess. What we are really asserting, however, is that the attempt to refer using a particular linguistic expression fails. A similar analysis applies to uttering the sentence “Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character,” though here we also identify the reason why we fail to refer. Walton offers, here, a fictionalist account of existential statements, which maintains that such statements are part of a “useful fiction” that doesn’t commit us to the things we seem to be talking about. Walton’s general

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account of fictions has inspired fictionalist accounts of other discourses, for example, talk of numbers in pure mathematics (see Kalderon 2005).

3  “Transparent Pictures” Both paintings and photographs can be means of depiction. But it is often said that photographs have a kind of “realism” that paintings lack. Such “realism” is neither a matter of photographs’ relative fidelity to the look of things nor of their capacity to engender illusions. Rather, Walton argues, paintings and photographs differ in the kind of epistemic access they give to their subjects (1984). A photograph provides us with a new way of seeing. It is transparent, in that we literally see its subject through it, albeit indirectly by means of a picture. Cameras then are, like glasses, mirrors, and telescopes, “aids to vision.” Paintings, on the other hand, are not transparent. What we see when looking at a painting is a representation of X, not X itself. Photographs, too, are representations, insofar as they prescribe certain imaginings. In looking at a photograph of X, while I literally, indirectly see X, it may be prescribed that I imagine that I am directly seeing X. Also, a photograph through which I indirectly see one thing can serve as a depiction of something else which I imagine seeing in the photograph. In looking at a still from Casablanca, for example, I indirectly see Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman while imagining that I see Rick and Ilsa. Walton argues that we acquire information about the world from photographs and from paintings in different ways. In general, if we learn about X from an image I, then I must be counterfactually dependent on X: if X had been different, then I would have been different in certain systematic ways. When we learn something from a drawing or painting, this dependence is “intentional”—mediated by the beliefs of the artist A. If X had been different, then a painting of X would have been different only if A would have formed different beliefs about X. Only if we take A to be reliable in her beliefformation can we claim to learn, from her paintings, about the objects they depict. With a photograph, on the other hand, as with ordinary seeing, the dependence of I on X is not mediated in this way by the beliefs of the artist. A difference in X would result in a difference in I, whatever the photographer’s beliefs about X. That is why, for instance, unwanted subjects such as an intruding passer-by may appear in photographs but not in paintings. However, as Walton recognizes, this isn't sufficient to establish that we see through photographs. A mechanical device that produced descriptions might exhibit non-intentional counterfactual dependence, but we wouldn’t thereby see what was described. A further necessary condition for seeing is

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that our susceptibility to make mistakes reflects similarities among things of the type seen. We may visually mistake a dog for a fox, or a sheep for a goat. But, in the case of the device that produces verbal descriptions, we might mistake a “dog” for a “hog” or a “Goat” for a “Coat.” The claim is that looking at photographs of X’s can lead to the same kinds of mistakes as looking at X’s. Indeed, this is a characteristic that distinguishes depictions in general, and not just photographs, from descriptions. Critics, however, have questioned the sufficiency of Walton’s proposed conditions for seeing, claiming that seeing X also requires “egocentric information” as to how X is related to us spatially and temporally (see Currie 1995, Chapter 2). But Walton disputes the claim that this provides a reason for denying that we see things through pictures (2008b).

4  The “Paradox of Fiction” A much-discussed “paradox” concerning our imaginative engagement with fiction is our ability to respond affectively to something we don’t believe to be true. The paradox arises if, as many philosophers do, we subscribe to a cognitivist view of the emotions, which maintains that there is an essential cognitive component to an emotional state like fear. Famously Walton considers the case of Charles, who claims to be “terrified” by the green slime in a film that he is watching (1978). If the cognitivist theory of the emotions is correct for emotions like fear, then it seems that Charles’s affective response to the green slime cannot be terror, or any similar emotional state, since he lacks the required beliefs. Only if one has certain kinds of beliefs, and perhaps also certain kinds of desires, can one be said to be genuinely afraid of something. Or, if Charles’s affective state is terror, then he must be holding inconsistent beliefs—believing, for example, both that the slime doesn’t exist (to explain why he remains in his seat) and that the slime does exist (to explain how he can satisfy the cognitive requirements for being genuinely terrified of the slime). Walton’s solution to the paradox draws on his more general account of our engagement with fictional representations. The reader of a fiction comes to believe that certain things are true in the story and thus that, to properly engage with the fiction, one should make-believe those things. But such a make-belief may produce physiological and affective responses in the reader. It is Charles’s belief that it is fictionally true that the slime is heading toward him, and his making believe that this is so, that causes him to experience the feelings he reports on this occasion. But, since this occurs in the context of Charles’s imaginative engagement with the fiction, these feelings provide

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further input to the game of make-believe that Charles is playing, and make it true in that game that Charles is actually terrified. Thus, in the game of makebelieve that Charles is playing as a result of viewing the film, it is indeed true that he is terrified of the slime. But he is not really terrified of the slime. Rather, as said, it is true that Charles is terrified of the slime only in the expanded game of make-believe generated by Charles’s imaginative engagement with the film. In a later paper, Walton explores difficulties presented by our imaginative engagement with fictions that ask us to imagine things in conflict with our moral beliefs, such as that it is morally permissible to kill infants if they are female (1994). This paper has spawned a considerable literature on what has become known as the “puzzle of imaginative resistance” (e.g., Gendler 2000), although Walton himself rejects this way of labeling the issues (2008a, 47–59).

5  Artistic Categories, Artistic Style, and Aesthetic Empiricism In two important earlier papers (1970 and 1979), Walton argues for the bearing of facts about an artwork’s history of making on its appreciation as a work of art. The target, here, is the “empiricist” view that only a work’s “manifest” properties—those properties given to a receiver in a perceptual encounter with an instance of the work—can bear upon its proper appreciation. We can distinguish here between “narrowly” and “broadly” manifest properties of an instance of a work. The narrowly manifest properties comprise the non-aesthetic properties of the artistic vehicle—the distribution of pigment on canvas, for example. The broadly manifest properties are the aesthetic properties that a suitably sensitive viewer will see in its non-aesthetic properties—formal properties, expressive properties, and representational properties. The empiricist maintains that, given the sensitivity of the receiver, a work’s narrowly manifest properties uniquely determine its broadly manifest properties, and thus its properly appreciable properties. By contrast, Walton argues that the properly appreciable properties of a work are not uniquely determined in this way (1970). They also depend upon the kind of work it is, where this may not be narrowly or broadly manifest. Which appreciable properties we ascribe to a work, he maintains, depends upon the category of art under which it is apprehended. Artistic categories are defined in terms of three kinds of features: those that are standard or required, those that are contra-standard and are proscribed, and those that are variable and do not bear upon categorization. For

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example, being two-dimensional and having a picture-plane are standard, and having moving parts is contra-standard, for works belonging to the category “painting.” The aesthetic properties we experience a work as having depend not merely upon our sensitive response to its narrowly manifest properties, but also upon whether these properties are standard or variable for the category under which we apprehend it. Two art objects with identical narrowly manifest properties might possess different aesthetic properties if apprehended under different artistic categories. Furthermore, Walton maintains, the aesthetic properties that are correctly ascribed to a work are those it possesses when apprehended under the category to which it actually belongs, where this is determined by facts about its provenance. Thus aesthetic empiricism is wrong to claim that such facts do not bear upon the proper appreciation of artworks. To illustrate his argument, Walton invites us to imagine a culture with a category of artworks called guernicas. What is standard for a guernica is that a work, when viewed at right-angles to its frame, has the pictorial properties of Picasso’s painting of that name. What is variable includes the topology of the work, guernicas being understood to be three-dimensional, bas-relief-like entities whose artistic value depends crucially upon their topological features. An object possessing the narrowly manifest properties of Picasso’s work, while highly valued as a painting, would presumably be quite uninteresting as a guernica. Or, if it were an interesting work qua guernica, this would rest upon entirely different considerations from the ones that ground the interest and value of Picasso’s work as a painting—its radical minimalism, for example. In a second paper, Walton argues that the notion of artistic style is properly understood in terms of a style of action involved in the making of a work, rather than being a property of the product of that action taken independently of its history of making (1979). The style we ascribe to an artwork reflects the way it appears to have been made. This will apply, for example, to “aesthetic” aspects of style, such as being passionate, pretentious, exuberant, playful, sensitive, or sentimental. Although a work’s stylistic properties are linked to how it appears to have been made rather than to how it was actually made, Walton stresses the importance of locating the work in the actual historical context of its making if we are to correctly identify how it appears to have been made, and thus the qualities that constitute its style. The idea that a work’s expressive properties depend not merely upon its manifest qualities but also upon how we take those qualities to have been produced has been developed by Jerrold Levinson (2011). He defends the idea that the expressive properties of musical works are often grounded in the kinds of actions that are involved in producing the sounds that we hear. Levinson

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takes this to show that prescribed instrumentation is partly constitutive of a musical work. These two papers stress ways in which determining the aesthetic and artistic properties of an artwork requires that we locate the artistic vehicle in the work’s context of making. They have played an important part in arguments against the kind of empiricist view of artistic appreciation that held sway at the time they were written. Taken together with the very influential work on depiction, fiction, transparency, and imagination already surveyed, they firmly establish Walton’s place as one of the key thinkers in contemporary aesthetics. The implications of his insights both within and beyond the philosophy of art are still being explored and will be for many years to come.

Primary Sources 1970. “Categories of Art.” The Philosophical Review, 79: 334–67. Reprinted in Walton 2008a. 1978. “Fearing Fictions.” The Journal of Philosophy, 75: 5–27. Reprinted, with a “Postscript,” in Walton 2015. 1979. “Style and the Products and Processes of Art.” In Beryl Lang (ed.), The Concept of Style, 45–66. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press. Reprinted in Walton 2008a. 1984. “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism.” Critical Inquiry, 11: 246–77. Reprinted in Walton 2008a. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1992. “Seeing-in and Seeing Fictionally.” In James Hopkins and Anthony Savile (eds.), Mind, Psychoanalysis, and Art, 281–91. Oxford: Blackwell. Reprinted in Walton 2008a. 1993. “Metaphor and Prop-Oriented Make-Believe.” The European Journal of Philosophy, 1: 39–57. Reprinted in Walton 2015. 1994. “Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 68: 27–50. Reprinted in Walton 2008a. 2000. “Existence as Metaphor?” In Anthony Everett and Thomas Hofweber (eds.), Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence. Chicago: CSLI Publications. Reprinted in Walton 2015. 2008a. Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008b. “On Pictures and Photographs: Objections Answered.” In Walton 2008a, 117–32. 2015. In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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References and Further Reading Currie, Gregory. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gendler, Tamar Szabó. 2000. “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance.” The Journal of Philosophy, 97 (2): 55–81. Kalderon, Mark Eli, ed. 2005. Fictionalism in Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press (especially Stephen Yablo, “The Myth of the Seven,” 88–115). Levinson, Jerrold. 2011. “Authentic Performance and Performance Means.” In Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, 393–408. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moran, Richard. 1989. “Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force.” Critical Inquiry, 16: 87–112.

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Noël Carroll (b. 1947) Deborah Knight

Noël Carroll has doctoral degrees in both cinema studies and philosophy, having studied film with Annette Michelson at NYU and philosophy with George Dickie at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A former president of the American Society for Aesthetics, Carroll has addressed topics which are both historical and contemporary. He has shaped debate in aesthetic theory, the philosophy of the moving image, and the philosophy of mass art. He has made signature contributions to diverse topics including the nature of art interpretation and art criticism, the defining features of genres including horror, suspense, and humor, as well as the philosophy of dance. His work on the nature of our emotional engagement with works of art has developed alongside his analysis of the moral dimensions of art. Carroll eschews totalizing theories. Indeed, he argues against the idea that there is “one monolithic category, Art with a capital ‘A,’” and recommends instead focusing on issues arising in relation to particular arts and on themes that cut across distinct art forms (2017, 257).

1  Against Enlightenment Formalism The idea that there is one monolithic category of Art emerges with the invention of the system of fine arts in the eighteenth century. “Enlightenment Formalism” is Carroll’s term for the theory that united practices as different from one another as painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry as distinct from, and superior to, more mundane artisanal or craft practices (2017, 257). The fine arts were said to share a unique aesthetic feature capable of producing a distinctive aesthetic experience—specifically, a kind of formal beauty that required disinterested appreciation. The legacy of Enlightenment Formalism has been surprisingly persistent. Carroll tracks it through the works

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of Kant, Bell, Collingwood, and Beardsley, among others. Bell, for example, argued that aesthetic experience derives from the aesthetic properties of a work of art, typically formal properties such as the relationships between line and color. To appreciate formal beauty, our engagement with the work of art had to be sympathetic but, more importantly, it also had to be disinterested. As Kant would have recommended, we are to appreciate the artwork as an end in itself. Carroll’s criticism of Enlightenment Formalism is twofold. First, objects are not in fact identified as works of art by virtue of possessing a specific inherent property, whether beauty or something else. This means that far more practices properly fall under the concept of “art” than those the Enlightenment countenanced as fine arts. But the more egregious error is Enlightenment Formalism’s insistence on disinterested attention. Carroll’s objection to disinterested attention, used as a standard for proper engagement with works of art, is that it effectively isolates art from history and politics, and from social and moral issues more generally, as well as from the intentions of artists and authors—hence Carroll’s exhortation that the philosophy of art should move “beyond aesthetic theories of art and their various prohibitions” (2001, 1). Against Enlightenment Formalism, Carroll notes that not only have philosophers of art failed to discover an intrinsic feature shared by all and only works of art, they have not succeeded in the closely related philosophical project of creating a real definition of art in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions (1999, 249). Given the failure of essentialism and the inconclusiveness of the definitional project, Carroll argues that the best way to answer the question, “What is art?” is by means of historical narratives (2001, 100). Only certain practices at certain points in cultural history produce objects that can be properly identified as works of art. Moreover, the proper focus for philosophers of art should not be Art with a capital “A,” but rather the many distinct but overlapping art practices available to us. Following Peter Kivy, Carroll argues that we should embrace the philosophies of the arts (Carroll 2010, 2). Additionally, Carroll encourages examination of concerns that range across different art forms but might not appear in all art forms, for example, emotional engagement, moral evaluation, and narrative structure.

2  Art, the Emotions, and Morality Enlightenment Formalism took the visual arts as its paradigm. By privileging aesthetic experience, it downgraded other, less rarified responses to works of art. Carroll, in contrast, starts with the narrative arts and draws attention to

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the importance of “garden-variety” emotional responses, for example “fear, anger, horror, reverence, suspense, pity . . . compassion, comic amusement, and the like” (2001, 216; see also 2003, 60). He notes that our emotions serve as modes of attention and judgment. For instance, fear cues us to be wary of danger while compassion cues us to be concerned for others. Thus, as we read fictional narratives, our fear on behalf of characters keeps us attentive to risks that might befall them, while our compassion causes us to hope that things work out well. As Carroll puts it, our emotional engagement serves as the “glue” that keeps us attuned to the events occurring in the fictional world (2001, 228). But our attention is not merely focused on events happening at the moment. Stories have narrative arcs. They lead us forward in time. Our emotional engagement is therefore also forward-looking. We are concerned about how things will go for characters. Emotions “prime our anticipation” about what will ensue (Carroll 2001, 217). Typically, as Carroll notes, we hope that things end well for the story’s central characters. Thus, our emotional engagement not only secures our ongoing attention, it serves as the grounding for our moral response. We hope that events will lead to a proper outcome for the characters, that virtuous characters will prevail, and that evil characters will be defeated. Carroll takes our emotional responses to works of art as a central matter of philosophical concern, and in doing so focuses attention on basic emotional responses, such as fear and comic amusement, as well as on moral emotions, such as compassion, pity, and sympathy. Both basic emotions and moral emotions are necessary for us to engage with and comprehend typical works of narrative fiction. This lays the groundwork for Carroll’s more explicit analyses of just how works of art and ethical issues intersect. Carroll defends a moderate position in the debate about the ethical criticism of art. He also defends clarificationism, according to which artistic narratives (in literature, cinema, etc.) can “provide a source of knowledge and a contribution to education, especially moral knowledge and education with respect to the virtues” (2010, 233; see also 1998a).

2.1  Moderate Moralism There are two extremes in the ethical criticism of art debate: moralism and autonomism. Moralists claim that a work of art’s value as art depends upon its moral content or address. Thus, immoral content, immoral representations, and immoral forms of artistic address necessarily count against the value of a work of art as such. Autonomists argue that the moral content of a work of art is strictly irrelevant to a work’s aesthetic value. Carroll stands

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between these positions. He argues that some works of art may call for moral evaluation. Indeed, “one of the fundamental aesthetic effects of stories— being absorbed in them, being caught up in a story—is intimately bound up with our moral responses, both in terms of our emotions and judgments” (2001, 304–5). Thus, looking at particular cases, we may conclude that a work exhibits moral merits or suffers from moral defects. Such merits or defects may, Carroll argues, count in our aesthetic evaluation of the work. How they count depends on the work of art in question. Against the autonomists, Carroll argues that moral merits and defects can impact aesthetic evaluation. Against the moralists, he argues that morally evil content is not necessarily an aesthetic defect nor morally commendable content necessarily an aesthetic merit. A particularly chilling representation of moral evil might count toward our positive aesthetic evaluation of a work, as is the case in A Clockwork Orange, both Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film, whereas an ineptly crafted work would warrant a negative aesthetic evaluation even if it upheld all moral virtues. Thus Carroll defends moderate moralism, according to which moral flaws may be aesthetic flaws but where immoral content, if it is part of a broader overall artistic structure, may count as an aesthetic merit.1

2.2  Clarificationism and Moral Knowledge Clarificationism is Carroll’s theory of how we can derive moral knowledge from works of art. He admits that his position is controversial and that many, from Plato to Monroe Beardsley and beyond, reject the idea that works of art, including even literary works of art, can function as sources of moral knowledge. For example, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s no-truth theory of literature holds that, because literature does not traffic in epistemic truths, including moral ones, it cannot be a source of knowledge at all. Against these skeptics, Carroll argues that literature and art “can impart knowledge of virtue and vice,” and thus serve “as a source of moral knowledge” (2010, 202). While we can derive moral knowledge from works of art, Carroll denies that, in the typical case, we “acquire interesting, new propositional knowledge from artworks” (2001, 283). Rather, readers, viewers, and listeners already possess basic moral concepts that allow us to distinguish good and bad actions, on the one hand, and good and bad features of character, on the other hand. If we did not already possess this repertoire of concepts, we would be unable to make sense of narrative fictions or other artworks where recognizing moral value is required for understanding. Clarificationism is the process by which, starting with moral concepts we already possess, our engagement with works of art allows us to “deepen our moral understanding”

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(Carroll 2001, 283). Through the combination of our cognitive processes of narrative comprehension, our emotional engagement with characters and events, and our ability to assess situations in moral terms, we are able to reflect upon, clarify, and refine our moral concepts. Thus we gain a more exact ability to apply moral concepts to particular cases. This counts as new moral knowledge in the sense that we now have a better understanding of concepts we already had (Carroll 2010, 234).

2.3  The Wheel of Virtue To illustrate how clarificationism works in practice, Carroll notes that we often find that a novel’s or film’s central characters represent a range of moral virtues and vices. We can think of these moral qualities as comprising a virtue wheel. Readers compare and contrast the actions of characters in terms of their virtues and vices. This allows us to refine our ability to make subtle discriminations in the proper application of moral concepts. Artworks that are structured by means of virtue wheels help us to “cultivate our capacities for moral perception” in part by making us aware of “the criteria we depend upon in judging the moral character of others,” whether those others are fictional characters or actual persons (Carroll 2010, 220). While it would be false to assert that all works of art have a moral dimension, it is nevertheless true that many works of art “are designed to engage us morally” (Carroll 2001, 279). Thus, clarificationism supports moderate moralism since, at least for those works of art where moral concepts play a central role, decisions about the work’s aesthetic or artistic value will necessarily involve an ethical dimension.

3  The Philosophy of the Moving Image Arguably Carroll’s most sustained work has been in the theory and philosophy of the moving image. He has pursued these two lines of inquiry in tandem. The theory side develops out of his training in cinema studies, itself a newly minted academic discipline in the 1970s trying to establish its academic bona fides. The philosophy of film side, which he has developed into a philosophy of the motion picture and moving image, found in Carroll one of the most important early defenders of the idea that film merited its own philosophical study. He brings the rigor of analytic philosophy to bear on questions central to cognitive film theory. As we have seen in his work on aesthetic theory more generally, Carroll’s approach is often reactionary, and that is certainly

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true of his attack on the dominant methodology of late-twentieth-century film studies, a methodology Carroll and his Wisconsin-Madison colleague, film historian David Bordwell, dubbed “Grand Theory.”

3.1  “Grand Theory” and Mid-Level Theorizing In Mystifying Movies and also in Post-Theory, Carroll presented a scathing critique of the quixotic amalgam of structuralist and post-structuralist theories that came to dominate both the pedagogy and critical methodology of film studies and cultural studies more broadly from the 1970s onward. Grand Theory was, roughly, a mix of Saussure’s semiotics, Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and Althusser’s Marxism, with additions of Barthes’s textualism and Foucault’s work on power and sexuality. Adding to these the idea of “the death of the author” as promulgated by Barthes and Foucault, Grand Theory aspired to produce “readings” of “texts” in terms of the purported knowledge systems—concerning language, gender, class, identity, and so forth—that were believed to make themselves manifest through films, works of art, and other cultural products. Carroll rejects Grand Theory’s role as “ideological-institutional . . . enfranchiser” (1996a, 11). In place of Grand Theory, he advocates “mid-level theorizing” about specific questions central to the understanding of film and other moving image media. This calls for a close analysis of the narrative structures of film, which range from basic decisions about how film images are shot and edited together to the overall structure of the film’s story. Carroll has been especially interested in the intersection of story comprehension and emotional engagement. Thus he has written about film genre and also about specific genres (including horror, melodrama and comedy, among others); the basic components of filmic construction (the shot, editing, point-of-view, suspense); different types of film including popular films, the art cinema, the avant-garde, non-fiction and experimental film; emotional responses to film; the nature of film narratives; and the prospects for film theory after Grand Theory. Carroll defends broadly humanistic interpretative practices including those based on the idea of authorial intention as adapted to filmmaking contexts. Perhaps this commitment to the creative role of the filmmaker was to be expected given Carroll’s cinema studies doctoral thesis on Buster Keaton’s The General. Much of Carroll’s mid-level work in the philosophy of the moving image develops his argument that, by virtue of basic decisions about image construction, films focus and direct viewers’ attention. “Criterial prefocusing” is Carroll’s term to describe narrative authors’ choices to guide audience’s attention and responses, for example, filmmakers’ decisions

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about what to show and how to show it in individual shots, as well as how to edit shots together into sequences (2003, 69). By drawing the viewer’s attention toward certain characters, actions, or situations, films help to establish the conditions for proper comprehension, including the conditions for appropriate emotional and moral response. Criterial prefocusing is particularly important in popular generic films, allowing viewers to quickly distinguish, for example, who the heroes and villains are, which characters will turn out to be the correct romantic couple, as well as when protagonists are in danger and the ways in which they might be saved. Carroll argues that these strategies are central features of motion pictures as “attentional engines,” that is, as “artifacts used to deliver information on the fly as it is needed for the development of the narrative” (2013a).

3.2  Against Medium Specificity A question shared by both academic cinema studies and the philosophy of film was the question whether film was an art, or at least whether some identifiable subset of films—perhaps including exemplary works of fiction, experimental, documentary, and avant-garde film—counted as works of art. Carroll rejects one of the main arguments in favor of this view, which he has dubbed “the medium-specificity argument” (2003, 1). What makes film a candidate for the status of art, the argument went, is the specific medium employed, whether celluloid film stock projected at a speed to give the appearance of motion, or celluloid plus sound built into the recording and projecting technologies, or more recently these plus digital technologies. Here as elsewhere, Carroll opposes essentializing explanations. He argues that it is not the medium of cinema which elevates motion pictures to the status of works of art—since, plainly, there are both celluloid-based and digital films that will never count as works of art, for example instructional films, as well as moving image artworks that do not depend on either celluloid or digital media. Given the historically changing nature of the technologies of the moving image, and because “the arts of the moving image” comprise an extremely wide-ranging group of works—everything from Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), the experimental film shot from a fixed position observing the Empire State Building that is projected in slow motion and runs over eight hours, to Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), to documentaries such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), to Chuck Jones’ Duck Amuck (1953), to the range of works from both World cinema and Hollywood, to online streaming productions, television, videogames, and more—there can be no singular philosophy or theory to explain it all. Rather, investigations of specific questions that might initially seem piecemeal come, over time,

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to provide the sort of breadth and range of explanation that a dynamically unfolding practice deserves.

4  Mass Art and Genre Fictions Mass art, as Carroll notes, has been condemned on grounds such as its propensity to pander to audiences by encouraging passive consumption of easily recognized material. Carroll calls this the “majority view,” noting as well the “minority view” of Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan, who recognize positive features of mass art, notably its broad dissemination. Carroll argues that neither condemnation nor praise is appropriate across the board. Rather, mass art needs to be understood in terms of its particular means of production as well the accessibility of its content. Carroll’s initial project is definitional and classificatory. First, works of mass art are “multiple instance or type” artifacts, for example, recordings, films, books, and photographs. While there is only one The Night Watch, The Godfather and Abbey Road are available in multiple instances. Second, unlike multiple manuscript copies of a text, works of mass art are produced and distributed by means of mass technologies, in the form of movies, television series, novels, musical recordings, and so on. Being a multiple instance, technologically distributed work does not make something either “high” art or “low” art. The third feature of mass art, the one that helps us to distinguish between Rashoman and Ironman, is that mass art is “intentionally designed to gravitate” toward ease of access for a maximal audience (Carroll 1998a, 196). While easily understood stories or lyrics coupled with emotional hooks aid the sort of accessibility mass art aims for, Carroll argues that the accessibility condition does not reduce consumers to mere passive consumption. Rather, audiences of mass artworks are engaged cognitively, emotionally, and morally. Audience “participation” turns out to be a crucial condition for the successful reception of works of mass art (Carroll 1998a, 414). Certain types of narrative promote and encourage just this sort of easy access. Carroll has in mind “things like Harlequin romances; sci-fi, horror, and mystery magazines; comic books; and broadcast narratives . . . as well as commercial movies” (1994, 225). They are to narrative what junk food is to nutrition. Junk fictions, as Carroll dubs them, typically “belong to wellentrenched genres,” feature only a “limited repertoire of story-types,” and are made for easy consumption. They are, in a word, formulaic. But they are also popular. Carroll asks: is it not simply irrational to continue to consume works of junk fiction, given that, in an important way, we already know pretty much how things will go (226–7)? His answer is that generic stories do not preclude

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active engagement. We might know the main features of a generic storyline, but not necessarily how a particular generic fiction will develop. Even in as deeply conventionalized a genre as the romantic comedy, the romantic hero and heroine are not always united (My Best Friend’s Wedding). As readers or viewers of junk fictions, we make guesses about how events will unfold, and we experience a kind of cognitive satisfaction when we guess correctly. Because readers and viewers are actively engaged in understanding how a story unfolds, we are not merely passive consumers of generic fictions. Even with highly formulaic works, cognitive engagement can be its own reward.2 Horror, with its roots in Gothic novels of the eighteenth century, requires a unique form of audience participation based on the interplay between its two key elements: the monster, and the specific response that the monster is intended to evoke both in the human characters in the fiction and in us as readers and viewers (Carroll 1990). “Art-horror” is not to be conflated with real-life horrors caused, for example, by acts of war or terror or by natural disasters. Art-horror depends on a seemingly paradoxical attraction to or fascination with something that strongly repels us. Thus, horror is a genre defined by its intended affective reaction rather than, say, its setting (the Western) or its plot (the mystery). Carroll defines the horror monster as both threatening and impure (1990, 28). Because it is threatening, we fear the monster or at least we fear what it represents in the fictional world. Because it is impure—it is not part of the world as understood by the natural sciences— our response is not merely distaste or aversion but disgust. The disgust we feel is both a physical and a moral revulsion. Carroll’s philosophy of horror tracks the otherness, the unnaturalness, the repulsiveness, of the monster and our distinctive emotional response to it. Dracula and Pennywise are monsters in the relevant sense; Sully and Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc., are not creatures of art-horror but rather of comedy. In response to Carroll’s account, philosophers including Cynthia Freeland (1998) have argued that the horror genre can also feature depraved human beings who are metaphorically, but not literally, monsters, figures such as Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Red Dragon) and Jack Torrance (The Shining). Freeland argues that the disgust we feel for these human monsters is made more complex by realizing that they are like us in ways that the Babadook is not.

5 Envoi Not only does Carroll reject “the philosophy of art” in favor of the philosophies of the arts, he has simply swept past the idea that certain art

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forms are essentially superior to others. The idea of an objective qualitative distinction between so-called high or fine art and so-called low or popular art is another legacy of the Enlightenment that Carroll disavows. Just as there are inferior paintings in all genres and periods, so too there are superior works in modalities such as series television and comics. Artisanal art forms are not inherently superior to technology-based art forms. For Carroll, the Enlightenment was mistaken to claim that certain forms of art were superior across the board and others inferior. What a philosophy of the arts ought to be doing, as Carroll’s work demonstrates, is investigating the nature of particular art forms. Hence in his work on mass art, the basic question is not about praise or blame but about understanding what mass art is, exactly, and in particular what makes it different from art forms more typically produced by a single artist. The high-art/low-art distinction distracts us from the issues that, for Carroll, are actually important, most obviously the range of ways in which we derive value from our interactions with art.

Notes 1 An early objection to Carroll’s argument is Anderson and Dean (1998); Giovannelli (2007), instead, criticizes Carroll’s way of distinguishing between the different kinds of theories and defends an alternative taxonomy. 2 Knight (1995) argues that Carroll overestimates the role of hypothesistesting in the average reader’s or viewer’s engagement with generic fictions. To properly understand a story involves more than just correctly guessing what might happen next; it requires us to understand the story as a whole. Because many formulaic genre fictions are more concerned with our engagement in the story’s ongoing present, we can lose a sense of the story as a whole.

Primary Sources Carroll: 1988a. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. 1988b. Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge. 1994. “The Paradox of Junk Fiction.” Philosophy and Literature, 18 (2): 225–41. Republished in Carroll 2001.

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1996a. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (edited with David Bordwell). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1996b. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998a. A Philosophy of Mass Art. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998b. “Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding.” In Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, 129–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998c. Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge. 2000 (ed.) Theories of Art Today. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2001. Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Engaging the Moving Image. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2006. Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (edited with Jinhee Choi). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2007. Comedy Incarnate: Buster Keaton, Physical Humor and Bodily Coping. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2009. On Criticism. London: Routledge. 2010. Art in Three Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2011. Narrative, Emotion, and Insight (edited with John Gibson). University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. 2013a. “Cognitivism, Psychology and Neuroscience: Movies as Attentional Engines” (with William Seely). In Arthur Shimamura (ed.), Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, 53–75. New York: Oxford University Press. 2013b. Minerva’s Night Out: Philosophy, Pop Culture, and Moving Pictures. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2014. Humour: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017. “Art Practice, Art Criticism, and Philosophy of Art: A Conversation with Noël Carroll.” In Hans Maes (ed.), Conversations on Art and Aesthetics, 257–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

References and Further Reading Anderson, James C. and Dean, Jeffrey T. 1998. “Moderate Autonomism.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 38: 150–66. Freeland, Cynthia. 1998. “Realist Horror.” In Carolyn Korsmeyer (ed.), Aesthetics: The Big Questions, 283–93. New York: Blackwell, 1998. Giovannelli, Alessandro. 2007. “The Ethical Criticism of Art: A New Mapping of the Territory.” Philosophia, 35: 117–27. Knight, Deborah. 1995. “Making Sense of Genre.” Film and Philosophy, 2: 58–73. Slugan, Mario. 2019. Noël Carroll and Film: A Philosophy of Art and Popular Culture. London: Bloomsbury.

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Peter Lamarque (b. 1948) Filippo Contesi

Peter Vaudreuil Lamarque is one of the most prominent members of the golden generation of analytic aestheticians born immediately after the Second World War. If, to follow Archilochus via Isaiah Berlin (via Peter Kivy), “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing,” Lamarque is perhaps the biggest hedgehog of his generation. Lamarque’s “important thing” is not a single idea but, as he would put it, the practice that we call “literature.” His distinctive achievement has been to integrate a number of different ideas into a systematic philosophical account of literature, which also sheds light on art more generally. Lamarque’s philosophy is characterized in part by a defense of traditional views of literature such as its humanistic vocation, the non-instrumentality, indeed (following Oscar Wilde) the “uselessness” of its value, and the unity between its form and its content. At a time when aesthetics was beginning to break free as an independent subdiscipline of analytic philosophy, Lamarque’s defense was informed by some of the tools previously sharpened in those areas of analytic philosophy—philosophy of language and metaphysics, especially—that had started to develop earlier than aesthetics.

1  Emotions and Fiction After graduating with a BA in English and philosophy, Lamarque went on to complete a BPhil in philosophy at Oxford. There, he specialized in the philosophy of language under the supervision of L. Jonathan Cohen. The work that began to establish Lamarque’s reputation was his 1981 “How Can We Fear and Pity Fictions?” (1981). In this article, Lamarque developed what later became known as the “thought theory” solution to the paradox of fiction.

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A long-standing issue in art appreciation, the paradox of fiction is the question as to why fictional stories and images can elicit emotions in the absence of belief in those stories and images. The question had been hinted at since at least Plato, and then by Augustine, Coleridge, and others. However, it became a topic of intense discussion after Colin Radford tabled a version of it in a 1975 article. In those years, interest in fiction in analytic philosophy was starting to rise to prominence, partly as an under-explored topic of an otherwise more mature interest in language. Especially influential in this period were John Searle’s foray into the topic, which appeared the same year as Radford’s article, as well as Kendall Walton’s introduction (from the early 1970s onward) of a theory of fiction that appealed to the concept of makebelieve. A building block of Walton’s theory is his solution to the paradox of fiction (1990, 195 ff.). On this solution, art appreciators do not, in response to fictional events, experience the genuine, garden-variety emotions that they appear to be experiencing. Instead, they engage in sophisticated games of make-believe with themselves and with the fictional work. In this sense, it is only make-believe that they are, say, afraid or angry, in response to fictional representations of fearsome or anger-inducing events. At the same time, appreciators do often experience some of the phenomenological and physiological reactions characteristic of the corresponding garden-variety emotions; they are, in Walton’s terminology, “quasi-afraid” or “quasi-angry.” Nonetheless, their affective reactions do not reach the status of full-fledged occurrences of those emotions. In his 1981 article, Lamarque challenges Walton’s skeptical conclusion that it is only make-believe, not a matter of fact, that appreciators experience full-fledged, garden-variety emotions. On his thought theory, an audience, say, when reading Tolstoy’s eponymous novel, can experience real pity for the fate of Anna Karenina. This pity is caused by imagining, or entertaining the thought (or “thought-cluster”) of, Anna’s pitiful circumstances as Tolstoy describes them; and it is directed at the content of this thought. From what Lamarque calls the perspective that is “internal” to a reader’s imaginative project, this content includes a particular human being called “Anna” and the particular predicament that Tolstoy describes in his pages. From this internal perspective, then, it can be said that the reader pities Anna. At the same time, Lamarque adds, a reader does not, literally speaking, pity Anna Karenina. This is so since, from the “external” perspective, the reader does not commit to the existence of any individual called “Anna Karenina,” who has all the other properties that Tolstoy describes the fictional character of Anna Karenina as having. The reader’s emotions arise from reflecting on those properties.

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The possibility of adopting both internal and external perspectives, Lamarque suggests, is behind the importance that philosophers from Aristotle to Iris Murdoch have seen in literature’s capacity to combine the universal and the particular. By seeing (through imagination) the lives of fictional characters finely drawn in all particularities by an artist, we are offered an opportunity to reflect more universally and objectively on comparable matters in the real world. Imaginatively we bring to mind unique individuals; intellectually we recognize the presentation of universals. So it is with our emotional responses to fiction, which, from the twin perspectives, are directed both to the details of imagined individual lives and to thoughts of an intrinsically general nature which reach beyond imaginary worlds back into the real world. (Lamarque 1996, 130)

Although he defends the reality, even rationality, of our emotional responses to fiction, elsewhere Lamarque also expresses skepticism about the centrality to literary value (viz., to the value of works of literature as art) of the elicitation of emotions in readers. He argues against the view that having affective responses to works of literary fiction plays a central role in art appreciation. In this respect, he appeals to certain modern practices of critical evaluation of literary works. He contends that the literary critic’s “standard concern with emotions is less with those aroused by a work than with those expressed by, or illustrated in, the work” (Lamarque 2000, 148). In other words, the central literary value of affects to literature lies in the way they are expressed, described or explored, independently of whether or how readers actually experience them when reading. Lamarque’s views on these matters are influenced by Modernist criticism’s reaction to the Romantic way of understanding the value of art (and to other critical practices such as those appealing to psychoanalysis). His views draw on some of the criticisms against the Romantic conception of art developed in the late 1940s by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. In their 1949 paper denouncing “The Affective Fallacy,” Wimsatt and Beardsley famously instruct the critic to “talk not of tears, prickles, or other physiological symptoms, of feeling angry, joyful, hot, cold, or intense, or of vaguer states of emotional disturbance, but of shades of distinction and relation between objects of emotion” (1949, 47). In line with Wimsatt and Beardsley, Lamarque’s skepticism about the importance of the role of actual affect elicitation in literature also extends to the critical appropriateness of seeing in the literary work the expression of its author’s own emotions. The venerable target here is again Romanticism, with its double emphasis on emotions and the expression

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of the artist (though see Lamarque 2009b, Ch. 3, for his reservations about Wimsatt and Beardsley’s anti-intentionalism in criticism). What Lamarque sees in these Modernist critiques is especially the autonomy of literary criticism from the influence of psychology and the cognitive sciences. On Lamarque’s view, literature as an artistic practice is concerned with the articulation and understanding of characters and artistic personae, rather than of (imaginary) people and (actual) artists. In literary criticism, it “is rhetoric, not psychology, being judged” (Lamarque 2014, 194).

2  Value and Literature To understand what a literary work is, Lamarque (2010) emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between the work and the object (Lamarque 2010). The classic instance of this distinction comes from a different art form: sculpture. Is the artistic masterpiece that is Giuseppe Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ (1753) different from the marble it is made of? According to an influential tradition that Lamarque continues, the Veiled Christ is ontologically distinct, and a different kind of entity, from the marble it is made of. The latter is an object with a certain shape, size, consistence, and so on. The former is instead a work of art that, in addition to the material properties it shares with the object, also possesses a number of other properties. Among these is its having being authored by Sanmartino, in Naples, with the intention of representing Jesus Christ immediately after his death and covered with a thin veil, under commission from the Prince of Sansevero for his Chapel, and so on. Evaluation of the Veiled Christ as a work of art requires attending to the work’s intentional and relational properties, not merely to those possessed by the material object itself. Such a distinction is not exclusive to material objects and can be made across art forms. While in most literary cases, the relevant object may be more plausibly characterized as, say, an ordered set of words, there is still an important distinction to be made between it and the literary work that is (partly) constituted by that ordered set of words. In addition to an ordered set of words, the work will also have an author, with a certain intention, belong to a genre, draw on cultural and literary traditions, and so on. Crucial among these additional properties that the literary work has, continues Lamarque, is its being historically and culturally inscribed in the particular social practice of writing and reading works of literature. This practice constrains, to some extent, the literary activities in which both authors and readers can engage. In particular, it provides constraints on what counts as the intrinsic value of the work, or its value as a work of literature (or “as art,” or “for its own sake”).

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The literary value of a work is, on this view, grounded in the largely autonomous practice of literature, and as such distinct from other, instrumental values. Among these is, as we have already seen, the value of eliciting emotions in readers. Other significant values that, according to Lamarque, do not contribute to literary value are, for instance, the moral or political values that the work advocates for or embodies, as well as the truth of its contents. Indeed, Lamarque is especially well known for consistently opposing the relevance of truth to literary appreciation (starting from Truth, Fiction and Literature, a book he coauthored with the literary scholar Stein Haugom Olsen). As Lamarque and Olsen famously put it, “the concept of truth has no central or ineliminable role in critical practice” (1994, 1). On their “no-truth theory” of literary value, the value of literature as literature does not depend on any truth conveyed by literary works. While some readers may sometimes learn truths from works of literature or fiction, such learning contributes in no significant way to the works’ literary value properly so called. The driving thought behind the no-truth theory is again a desire to circumscribe the autonomy of literary value. While works of history, philosophy, and other academic disciplines are primarily valuable insofar as they expound truths, literature’s own distinctive value resides elsewhere. Moreover, understanding the sentences contained in literary works does not require readers to ascribe truth values to them. Neither are truth values needed to find value in entertaining the thought-clusters suggested by a literary work. What is needed is only that such thought-clusters are of interest to literary readers. This is Lamarque’s version of a humanistic conception of literature, namely, as a practice that is valuable insofar as it presents or develops themes of human interest or concern. On this (autonomous and humanistic) conception of literary value, the work of literature must be evaluated as literature, or from what Lamarque calls “the literary point of view”: the literary point of view essentially involves an expectation of value . . .; that, for example, the interplay of subject matter and form has a reasonably high degree of subtlety and complexity; and above all that the work, under a process of literary interpretation, can be shown to develop themes of more or less general (if not universal) human interest. (1996, 200)

In using the “point of view” metaphor, Lamarque means to suggest, among other things, that such “literariness” is a way to attend to a text, rather than an intrinsic feature of that text. These considerations ultimately bring Lamarque to endorse a version of the view that art and literature are, in themselves and as such, “useless.” Their value lies beyond the merely utilitarian. Although

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he aims to avoid the aestheticist and formalist extremes that such a view can take, Lamarque is beholden to a view of literature as valuable for its own sake. Evaluation of a work from the literary point of view requires of a reader that they consider the content of the work and the form in which it is presented as inextricably linked. This view, variously referred to as “form/ content unity” (or identity, inseparability or indivisibility; or indeed through Lamarque’s related concept of opacity), was defended by, among others, the Oxford literary scholar A. C. Bradley at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the unity of form and content is more obviously appealing in the case of poetry, it is, according to Lamarque, true of literary prose as well. As defended by Lamarque, the unity of form and content is again not an intrinsic feature of a text. Neither is it best characterized as the impossibility of adequately paraphrasing the same content with different words. For sometimes such paraphrases are possible, and indeed in certain contexts permissible (for instance, in some student literary textbooks). By contrast, the unity of form and content is the requirement (the “demand,” as Lamarque 2009a puts it, arising from the practice) that the form and content of a work, when this is evaluated from the literary point of view, be evaluated as a whole.

3  Art and Time Although Lamarque’s philosophical reflections have tended to focus on literature, his intention is often to make, through a detailed look at literary cases, general claims about art. Indeed, Lamarque is wary of the risks of an excessive “disintegration of aesthetics” into distinct subdisciplines, which may lose track of the fundamental questions of aesthetics concerning value and experience (2020, 50–66). In a number of more recent works, however, Lamarque focuses more explicitly on nonliterary and non-textual cases. One such case is that of a politically motivated painting such as Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793). At least on the face of it, the case of politically charged art is in some tension with Lamarque’s contention that art be considered as valuable for its own sake. David’s masterpiece was so politically charged that it would not be much of a stretch to consider it as a propaganda piece. David was a personal friend and political ally of Marat’s, and the painting was commissioned by their fellow Jacobins in the heated moments immediately following Marat’s assassination. The compassionate and austere depiction of its subject has clear religious resonances, and its author already had a familiarity with historical, celebratory painting.

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However, Lamarque argues, The Death of Marat grew to become a timeless artistic masterpiece as its original, visceral political motivations became less salient (Lamarque 2020, 17–30). After a brief initial period of politically motivated celebration, David’s painting plunges into obscurity, hidden in David’s private studio. It resurfaces to acclaim in a very different period both politically and artistically, under the influence of Baudelaire’s 1846 glowing endorsement. The reasons behind its somewhat late critical success, Lamarque points out, are to a large extent a consequence of the sliding into the background of its once politically inspired passions. The depotentiation of its political charge left way for the stylistic, as well as symbolical and religious merits of the painting to come to the fore, and made it surge to the high artistic value that we now commonly recognize in it. A similar concern with the change over time of the value of artworks is expressed by Lamarque in his discussion of the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet (Lamarque 2020, 31–49). The practices in the context of which such paintings were produced are lost to us moderns, and so then is our capacity to evaluate them as the works they were intended as. Nonetheless, Lamarque suggests, the paintings still appear to us to be, to some extent, apt objects of aesthetic appreciation. Similarly concerned with time are also Lamarque’s (2016) reflections on the appropriateness of different practices of conservation and restoration of damaged artworks. About aesthetic appreciation, Lamarque endorses a (moderate) form of aesthetic empiricism, according to which the aesthetic value of a work of art is essentially related to the way in which the work is experienced (2010, 122–38). Lamarque defends the importance of such a claim against contemporary attacks. First, he stresses that aesthetic empiricism is a thesis about aesthetic, as opposed to artistic, appreciation. He further concedes that the aesthetic value of a work of art depends on a number of historical, contextual, and other factors, namely, factors that are not detectable on an immediate, uninformed experience of the work. Nevertheless, he maintains that awareness of such factors on the part of an appreciator is capable of modifying their experience in a way that does not threaten (his form of) aesthetic empiricism.1

Note 1 For their most valuable help with this chapter, I wish to thank Alessandro Giovannelli, Manolo García-Carpintero, Peter Lamarque, Enrico Terrone, as well as the LOGOS Research Group and the Barcelona Institute for Analytic Philosophy.

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Primary Sources Lamarque: 1981. “How Can We Fear and Pity Fictions?” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 21: 291–304. 1994. Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (with Stein Haugom Olsen). Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1996. Fictional Points of View. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2000. Review of Susan Feagin, Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Mind, 109: 145–9. 2009a. “The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning.” Ratio, 22: 398–420. 2009b. The Philosophy of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. 2010. Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014. The Opacity of Narrative. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. 2016. “Reflections on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Restoration and Conservation.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 56: 281–99. 2020. The Uselessness of Art: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Literature. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press.

References and Further Reading Radford, Colin. 1975. “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 49: 67–80. Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wimsatt, W. K. and Beardsley, Monroe. 1949. “The Affective Fallacy.” The Sewanee Review, 57: 31–55.

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Jerrold Levinson (b. 1948) James O. Young

Jerrold Levinson is among the most distinguished and influential contemporary philosophers of art. He has contributed to almost every area of philosophy of art, but he is particularly known for his contributions to the definition of art, philosophy of music, the ontology of musical works, theories of interpretation, and the theory of aesthetic experience. Since 1976, Levinson has been a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, holding the title of Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy until 2018, when he became Emeritus. Many of his former students have gone on to make important contributions to philosophy of art. He is a past president of the American Society for Aesthetics (2001–3).

1  Historical Definition of Art Levinson has developed a distinctive definition of art (2011, ch. 1). His definition can be classified, in the terminology of Davies (1991), as a procedural definition of art. Procedural definitions are contrasted with functional definitions. A functionalist definition of art defines works of art in terms of a common function, such as the expression of emotion or the imitation of nature. A procedural definition defines art in terms of the process by means of which something becomes a work of art. One widely adopted procedural definition of art is the institutional definition. Several versions of the institutional definition have been advanced but any institutional theory holds that something can only be art in a particularly institutional context. In this context, certain people (such as people who have the institutional role of being artists) have the authority to confer arthood on some object. Levinson’s historical definition is developed as an alternative to the institutional definition.

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Roughly speaking, Levinson holds that “a work of art is a thing intended for regard-as-a-work-of-art, regard in any of the ways works of art existing prior to it have been correctly regarded” (2011, 6). This definition requires that an initial work or set of works be stipulated to be works of art. Persons with proprietary rights over subsequently created works (typically these are the creators of subsequent works) can then intend that their works be regarded as previous works of art were regarded. The reference to proprietary rights is an important part of the definition since Levinson wants to prevent random individuals from conferring arthood on some item. This definition is able to explain how new genres and art forms can emerge in the course of the history of art. Levinson’s definition of art has faced several objections. Richard Wollheim (1980), among others, criticized procedural definitions on the grounds, unlike functional definitions, that they make no reference to the value, aesthetic or otherwise, of artworks. Levinson recognized that this objection might be thought to tell against his definition as well. Levinson can respond to this objection that “the expected experiential rewards of . . . attending to a work could be understood, at least in typical cases of art making, as part of or integral to the fully characterized mode of regard or treatment that art makers intend for their efforts to receive” (2011, 55). Levinson’s ability to make this response gives his historical definition of art an advantage over other procedural definitions.

2  Philosophy of Music Levinson has made several notable contributions to philosophy of music. The theme running through these contributions is skepticism about purely formalist accounts of the value of music. Formalism is the view that music is appreciated as pure, contentless form. Formalists typically hold that musical form cannot arouse the emotions that we feel in the course of ordinary life, though it may arouse a special aesthetic emotion. On Levinson’s view, music can be expressive of a wide range of the emotions we feel in the course of ordinary life. In doing so, he believes, music can arouse emotions and even provide insight into human emotion. Levinson has presented a novel theory of musical expressiveness. Perhaps the most widely held theory of musical expressiveness is the resemblance theory. According to this theory, particularly associated with Davies (1994), music is expressive of emotions because it resembles human expressive behavior associated with these emotions. Levinson regards this account

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of musical expressiveness as incomplete. His theory, which he calls the “appearance-of-expression” view (Levinson 1996), differs from standard versions of the resemblance theory in several respects. Levinson’s first concern about standard versions of the resemblance theory is a concern about how music resembles human expressive behavior. He notes that everything resembles everything else in some respect, so we are owed an account of the ways in which music resembles human expressive behavior (Levinson 1996, 102). Levinson hypothesizes that music can only be heard as resembling human expressive behavior because humans have an evolved disposition to hear certain musical features as expressive of behavior. He was among the first philosophers to posit such a disposition and subsequent empirical research suggests that he was right to do so. Most importantly, Levinson introduces the notion of a persona into his theory of musical expressiveness. Levinson was not the first philosopher of music to defend the view that listeners hear a persona in music, but he is among those who have made talk of musical personae widespread. Levinson reasons that if music is heard as expressive of an emotion, then it must be heard as expressive of the emotion of some persona. After all, an emotion cannot exist without a person who experiences the emotion. On Levinson’s view, a musical passage is heard as expressive of a given emotion when music is heard as expressive of that emotion by a persona. This persona, he adds, has no particular character. As indicated in the previous paragraph, Levinson seems to hold that a persona is heard in music. In this respect his view is different from that of other persona theorists. Jenefer Robinson and Robert Hatten, for example, refer to “an imagined persona” (2012, 78). Tom Cochrane (2010) is also committed to the view that personae in music are imagined. In one passage Levinson speaks of “hearing an agent [i.e., a persona] in the music . . . or at least imagining such an agent” (2006, 193). His considered view seems, however, to be that personae are heard in music and not imagined. Unlike some contemporary philosophers of music, Levinson believes that some music arouses emotions that we feel in the course of ordinary everyday life. Indeed, Levinson’s theory of musical expressiveness is quite robust and, in contrast to some defenders of a resemblance theory, he believes that music can be expressive of a wide palette of garden-variety emotions. He holds, for example, that music can be expressive of such emotions as hope (Levinson 1996, chap. 14). On his view, emotions are aroused, at least in part, as an empathetic response to the emotions of the persona heard in music. He recognizes that, if music arouses ordinary emotions, then he needs to explain how we find it rewarding to listen to music that is expressive of, say, sadness and that can arouse sadness in us. Levinson identifies several ways in which

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the experience of music expressive of negative emotions can be rewarding. Of these perhaps the most important is that it is possible for listeners to experience emotion, as it were, offline, removed from real-life implications. We are then able to explore the full range of emotions, including negative emotions in a nonthreatening and even rewarding manner. Levinson writes that “Having a negative emotional response to music is like giving our emotional engines a ‘dry run’” (2011, 326). Levinson is also known as an advocate of “concatenationism,” the view that music is apprehended and appreciated as a series of moments rather than as a whole piece of musical architecture (Levinson 1998). Levinson has continued to develop and expand his views on music (2015). This volume includes, among others, three essays on jazz and improvisation.

3  Ontology of Musical Works Levinson has developed an original and influential ontology of musical works. At least prior to his writings on the subject, Platonism was the most widely adopted position on the ontology of musical works. According to Platonism, musical works are eternal and immutable abstract sound event structures or types. Performances are tokens of these types. Platonism has the consequence that musical works are discovered, not created. Platonism about the ontology of musical works appears attractive to many philosophers since they believe that musical works are abstract and that abstract objects cannot be created. Levinson does not deny that musical works are sound structures or sound event types. He simply adds that sound structures come into existence and that they need to be individuated by reference to the point in time at which they come into existence and by reference to the means by which sounds are produced. Levinson takes it as a desideratum of any satisfactory ontology of musical works that it be compatible with the principle that musical works are “such that they do not exist prior to the composer’s compositional activity, but are brought into existence by that activity” (2011, 68, emphasis in original). In adopting this position, Levinson introduced a novel ontological category: the created abstract object. He refers to these objects as indicated types. Other philosophers, notably Amie Thomasson (1998), subsequently held that other objects, including fictional characters, are created abstracta. In an influential thought experiment, Levinson argues that musical works cannot be sound structures simpliciter. He imagines that two composers, who exist at different times in the history of music, write compositions that are notefor-note identical. A Platonist would hold that the composers have written the very same work. Levinson holds, however, that they cannot be the same work

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since the works have different aesthetic properties. Suppose that a twentiethcentury composer writes a piece that is note-for-note identical to a symphony written by Stamitz in the eighteenth century. The Stamitz symphony has certain aesthetic properties, including that of being exciting. If a composer today were, quite independently, to write the same piece, it would be rather stodgy, perhaps even comical. Since the works have different aesthetic properties, Levinson concludes that “the musical works themselves must be nonidentical” (2011, 69). This view of musical works has been influential, but it has been rejected by Platonists such as Dodd (2007). On Dodd’s Platonist view, Levinson has mistaken the creation of a token of a type for the creation of a type. Levinson’s third innovation in ontology of music is a stress on the means by which works of music are performed. He holds that “specific means of performance or sound production are integral to” musical works (2011, 78). On this view, for example, Bach’s Goldberg Variations can only be performed on a two manual harpsichord since Bach explicitly states that the work is for such an instrument. Platonists hold, in contrast, that performance means are not specified by a work of music. On their view, the Goldberg Variations could be performed on a synthesizer, say.

4  Hypothetical Intentionalism For many years, two theories of interpretation were dominant. According to the first theory, actual intentionalism, the correct interpretation of a work of art is the interpretation intended by the work’s actual creator. The second widely held theory of interpretation is anti-intentionalism. According to this theory of interpretation, the intentions of a work’s author are irrelevant when interpreting the work. Instead, interpretation of a literary work is a matter of investigating the literal meaning of the words of which a work is composed. Levinson is one of several authors who have proposed a third approach to the interpretation of artworks: hypothetical intentionalism (1996, chap. 10; 2006, chap. 18). According to Levinson, the correct interpretation of a literary work “is properly tied . . . not to actual, even successfully realized, artist’s intent but rather to our best construction, given the evidence of the work and appropriately possessed background information, of the artist’s intent to mean such-andsuch for his or her intended audience” (1996, 179–80). Levinson’s hypothetical intentionalism, like other versions of this approach to interpretation, takes optimal hypotheses about authorial intent to be a key to arriving at the correct interpretation of a work. Levinson’s theory of interpretation is distinguished from some other versions of hypothetical intentionalism by its emphasis on the importance of identifying a work’s appropriate audience. The identity of the

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audience is crucial since it assists the interpreter in determining what evidence is to be considered when selecting the optimal hypothesis about authorial intent. Theories of interpretation often differ on the question of whether there is only one correct interpretation or several equally good interpretations. Monists about interpretation say that there is one best interpretation of a work of art, while pluralists say that several equally good interpretations may be available. On Levinson’s novel view, hypothetical intentionalism allows for a multiplicity of distinct and incompatible interpretations of a given work. At the same time, Levinson believes that, at least in principle, these interpretations can be combined into a single more comprehensive interpretation of the work. One of Levinson’s innovations in the theory of interpretation was to introduce a distinction between semantic intentions and categorial intentions. A semantic intention is the intention to have a text convey a given meaning. A categorial intention is the intention to have a work belong to some category of artwork (say, it being a novel, or a romantic novel). Levinson writes that “Categorical intentions involve the maker’s framing and positioning of his product vis-à-vis his projected audience” (1996, 188). (The concept of a category of work is borrowed, as Levinson acknowledges, from Walton 1970.) For example, Ed Wood intended that Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) be intended as a serious science fiction movie. If he had intended it to be a piece of avant-garde filmmaking, it might be regarded as a more successful piece of work. An artist’s categorical intentions are, however, in part constitutive of a work and Wood’s movie ought to be interpreted as a work of science fiction. Levinson’s distinction between semantic intentions and categorial intentions can be adopted by advocates of other theories of interpretation, including some versions of actual intentionalism, such as, perhaps, that of Carroll (2009).

5  Aesthetic Experience When it comes to aesthetic experience, Levinson takes issue with a longestablished theory, one first advanced by George Dickie (1964). According to Dickie, there is no special aesthetic attitude. Aesthetic experience is simply attention to an object’s properties. Levinson believes, in contrast to Dickie, that experience of an aesthetic object is not merely careful attention. There is “also the manner in which one’s attention is directed, in turn partly a function of what motivates such attention, as well as one’s willingness to be affected by what such attention discloses” (Levinson 2016, 28, emphasis in original). Levinson also

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rejects the minimalist account of aesthetic experience advanced by Noël Carroll (2000 and 2002). His views are more in line with those of Gary Iseminger (2003). The aesthetic attitude is a particular kind of attending, Levinson believes. According to Levinson, aesthetic experience is to be analyzed in terms of the concept of appreciation or in terms of valuing experience of an object for its own sake. One could pay careful attention to a painting but value it primarily as a good investment. In this situation one would not, on Levinson’s view, have an aesthetic experience of the painting. Levinson holds that his account of aesthetic experience has important advantages over those of Dickie and Carroll. In particular, Levinson’s account of aesthetic experience is readily able to explain how aesthetic experience is rewarding. Aesthetic experience is, on Levinson’s account, more than liking or enjoying a work. He contrasts enjoying the experience of a work of art and an experience that involves endorsement or approval of a work. This is an important point because it makes it possible for Levinson to preserve the distinction between liking a work and judging it to be aesthetically valuable. His conclusion is that “Aesthetic experience is experience involving aesthetic perception of some object, grounded in aesthetic attention to the object, and in which there is a positive hedonic, affective, or evaluative response to the perception itself or the content of that perception” (2016, 39, emphasis in original). One might wonder whether the account of aesthetic perception integral to the above definition is circular (since the term “aesthetic” is used in the definition of aesthetic experience), but the account succeeds in capturing many features of experiences that are typically thought to be aesthetic.

6 Conclusion This short chapter can scarcely do justice to the full range of Levinson’s contributions to aesthetics and philosophy of art. Levinson has contributed to philosophy of music in ways not even mentioned in passing in this chapter. Moreover, he has made important contributions to philosophy of humor, philosophy of film, meta-aesthetics, and philosophy of literature. His most important contributions have, however, addressed the big questions in philosophy of music, the definition of art, the theory of interpretation, the ontology of art, and theory of aesthetic experience. These contributions continue to be widely discussed in the literature philosophy of art, and they will likely to continue to be discussed for years to come.

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Primary Sources Levinson: 1996. The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1998. Music in the Moment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2006. Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2011. Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Reprinted with a new introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published in 1990. 2015. Musical Concerns: Essays in Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. Aesthetic Pursuits: Essays in Philosophy of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

References and Further Reading Carroll, Noël. 2000. “Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 40: 191–208. Carroll, Noël. 2002. “Aesthetic Experience Revisited.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 42: 145–68. Carroll, Noël. 2009. On Criticism. New York: Routledge. Cochrane, Tom. 2010. “Using the Persona to Express Complex Emotions in Music.” Music Analysis, 29: 264–75. Davies, Stephen. 1991. Definitions of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Davies, Stephen. 1994. Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dickie, George. 1964. “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 1: 56–65. Dodd, Julian. 2007. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Iseminger, Gary. 2003. “Aesthetic Experience.” In Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, 99–116. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, Jenefer and Hatten, Robert S. 2012. “Emotions in Music.” Music Theory Spectrum, 34: 71–106. Thomasson, Amie. 1998. Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walton, Kendall. 1970. “Categories of Art.” Philosophical Review, 79: 334–67. Wollheim, Richard. 1980. Art and Its Objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Some Contemporary Developments Alessandro Giovannelli

The last dozen chapters of this book already bring us into the aesthetic debates of our times. In many ways, Monroe Beardsley could be seen as continuing a somewhat traditional approach, one built around notions such as aesthetic experience, aesthetic object, and aesthetic attitude, and which is instantiated, albeit in very different ways, by Kant, Schopenhauer, Fry, Bell, and Dewey. Yet, already with Beardsley, we encounter a feature that has become characteristic of contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics: attention to a plurality of questions regarding the arts—from representation to expression, from interpretation to evaluation, from artistic ontology to the nature of metaphor, and so on and so forth. The aesthetics of the last five decades has followed suit, covering a range of issues that go well beyond what, in this concluding chapter, can only be touched on in passing and selectively. Indeed, philosophical aesthetics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seems to have undergone, progressively and increasingly, an evolution not unlike that which has occurred in other areas of philosophy, to wit, philosophy of science, or, even better, the philosophy of the different sciences: a process of progressive specialization and, at the same time, a reduction of the distance between philosophical analysis and the practices it addresses. Indeed, various philosophies of the different arts—for example, of literature, film, music, but also poetry, horror film, jazz music, and so on—have emerged. Less and less can aesthetics in the Anglo-American tradition be accused of being “arm-chair” philosophy or analysis of some alleged, simplistically construed “language of art criticism.” Rather, for philosophical investigations about art it is now almost an imperative that they be conducted with sufficient awareness of actual artistic and art-critical practices, and with close attention to actual artistic examples. Related to such an evolution are two other characteristics of at least some contemporary aesthetic investigations: their relationship with other art-related disciplines, on the one hand, and their relationship with wholly other disciplines and programs—especially scientific ones—on the other hand. Paradigmatic of the former is the work currently

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done in philosophy of film and philosophy of literature, which have arguably inherited some of the questions that traditionally were central to film theory and literary theory (say, on what distinguishes cinema from other art forms, or on the role of authors, narrators, and characters in the appreciation of narratives). Paradigmatic of the latter is the influence of cognitive science on aesthetics (and, to an extent, of aesthetics on cognitive science), for instance in addressing issues regarding the imaginative engagement between readers or viewers and narratives’ characters.1 Finally, it should be noted how philosophical attention has also opened up to art forms of a mass or popular sort: from rock music to cinema, from television to comics, from video games to design, from pulp literature to advertising. Much of what goes on in aesthetics today will not find adequate, if any, coverage in what follows. Rather, I here selectively concentrate on some of the liveliest areas of aesthetic debate today, hoping to exemplify, through them, the above-mentioned trends, while establishing, when appropriate, connections to the preceding chapters. The issues are arranged, for the most part, in a progression from the most general ones to some rather more specific ones.

1  The Aesthetic: Attitude, Properties, and Pleasure Philosophical discussion on the “aesthetic” comprises different questions, albeit related ones, depending on whether the focus of the investigation is the experiences that are deemed aesthetic or the properties that such experiences focus upon and by which they are perhaps brought about. The loosely Kantian idea, that adopting a distinctive kind of attitude—an aesthetic attitude—is essential to making an experience an aesthetic one, was given renewed emphasis, in the twentieth century, by Edward Bullough, who claimed that an aesthetic attitude is one that centrally involves distance from practical concerns, or “psychical distance” as he called it (Bullough 1912, which is widely anthologized). As illustration, think of looking through a polluted landscape where, indeed thanks to the pollutants floating in the air, objects acquire a softer look, light is diffused in interesting ways, shapes and colors change unexpectedly: an aesthetic attitude requires taking distance from, bracketing, setting aside, the noxious nature of those fumes. Whether the aesthetic attitude is best described in this or some other way (another classic reading is Stolnitz 1960, for which an aesthetic attitude is one of “contemplation” of an object, which such an attitude “isolates”), it has certainly been subjected to criticism. Famously, George Dickie (1964) called it a “myth”: once analyzed, he claimed, the so-called aesthetic attitude is not

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special at all, but is rather just a matter of close attention and focus on an object. Aesthetic experiences may be made possible, or at least be qualified as aesthetic, in virtue of targeting aesthetic properties. These need not be limited to beauty and ugliness, and are usually conceived as comprising a wide range of properties, from formal ones (e.g., being “balanced”), to content-related ones (“realistic”), to expressive ones (“somber”), and so on. The most influential paper on aesthetic properties is Frank Sibley’s 1959 “Aesthetic Concepts” (2001), in which the author offers a list of aesthetic properties, and proposes that they be understood as based on and rooted in, but not inferable from, an object’s more basic, non-aesthetic perceptual properties (see Chapter 21). (A more recent, and quite comprehensive, mapping of aesthetic properties is found in Goldman 1995.) Sibley’s appeal to taste as the capacity required to discern such properties left it mysterious how, on the ground of non-aesthetic perceptual properties, one manages to perceive aesthetic ones. Kendall Walton’s claim that the correct perception of an artwork depends on the application of the appropriate “categories of art,” of course, goes precisely in the direction of specifying some of the factors that are at play in the experience of an artwork’s aesthetic properties (cf. Chapter 26). The distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties has been questioned by Ted Cohen (1973) and Marcia Eaton (1994), who have differently argued that, for so-called aesthetic qualities, non-aesthetic applications can be easily found, and for so-called non-aesthetic qualities, aesthetic applications. If aesthetic properties can indeed be individuated, they may help us explain the value of art as well as the aesthetic value of parts of nature; we attribute beauty, for instance, to paintings and natural scenes alike. This has suggested— within the tradition that gives a primary role to aesthetic experience and attitude—that aesthetic properties are independent of and conceptually prior to art; after all, beautiful landscapes existed long before paintings—paintings of beautiful landscapes included. In contrast, as Chapter 22 explains, Richard Wollheim opted for giving theoretical primacy to the appreciation of art over that of nature, making the latter depend on the former. More recently, Berys Gaut (2007), too, has articulated a view of aesthetic properties that in a sense makes them depend on art. Aesthetic properties are evaluative properties, he claims; specifically, they are properties that make an object valuable as art. Natural objects, too, can have some of those properties; and, certainly, one need not be cognizant of this or any other view of aesthetic properties to appreciate them individually. However, what makes them unified under the concept of the aesthetic is, for Gaut, ultimately a relation to art. One strand of the discussion regarding aesthetic properties is ontological: are they real properties? Do they actually exist independently of our

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conceiving of them? A realist position, affirming that aesthetic properties do exist, and exist in a mind-independent way, has been defended, for example, by Nick Zangwill (2001) and Jerrold Levinson (2006; see also Chapter 29).2 By contrast, Goldman (1995) defends a sophisticated form of anti-realism, one that emphasizes the irreducibility of certain aesthetic disagreements, specifically—and most damagingly for the realist stance, in Goldman’s view—disagreements among “ideal critics.”3 The issue of the aesthetic encompasses also the question of aesthetic pleasure: out of the many pleasures one can have in life, what is distinctive of those pleasures that we deem aesthetic? Specifically, what distinguishes merely sensory pleasures—say, the pleasure derived from chewing on a candy or being massaged or having an orgasm—from aesthetic pleasures had from looking at a painting or reading a novel or staring at an iceberg? Jerrold Levinson (1996) has characterized aesthetic pleasure as deriving from an attention not just to an object’s qualities—for example, the spatial balance manifested in a painting or, say, its insightful treatment of a subject—but also from the unique complex of lower-level properties that brings about such qualities. Though Levinson’s focus is on works of art, an extension to nature seems warranted. Hence, similarly perhaps, an aesthetic pleasure prompted by a natural object such as the iceberg cannot be limited to enjoying the pleasing-to-the-eye shapes and colors, but must derive from reflecting upon what makes the iceberg be what it is and look what it looks like.4 Regarding art, there is in Levinson an emphasis on the unique manner in which an artwork brings about its content and character, an awareness of which must be integral to the aesthetic appreciation of a work (see Chapter 29). It is then not surprising that Levinson (2006) would also argue for the impossibility of pornographic (as opposed to erotic) art: when an item is projected—and hence, most likely used and enjoyed—pornographically, for the purpose of sexual arousal, the item is necessarily not projected as art. The pornographic use and enjoyment, we could say, is simply too oblivious to the formal features of a work that bring about the intended, non-aesthetic, pleasure. This thesis, in opposition to what was earlier argued by Matthew Kieran (2005), has been at the center of a small but growing debate, once again proving the vitality of contemporary aesthetics and the richness of its interests (see Levinson and Maes, eds. 2012, and Maes, ed. 2013). Discussions of pornography within aesthetics have also proven to be able to fruitfully interact with the debates occurring, on the subject, within feminist analytic philosophy. Most feminist philosophers address such topics as the possible harms of pornography, the nature and mechanisms of objectification and silencing by pornographic works, or the possibility of egalitarian or feminist pornography, mostly within ethical, political, and public policy contexts. Of

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recent, reflections that properly belong to the area of aesthetics have enriched those debates with articulated discussions, for example, of the different types of depictions that can be found within pornography, the possibly fictional status of pornographic representations, the possibility for fiction to make statements—most notably about women as a group—or more generally the role of the imagination in the engagement with and effects of pornography (see, for instance, some of the essays in Mikkola, ed. 2017). Indeed, aesthetics owes part of its richness to a capacity for enlarging its scope to questions that are neither about art traditionally conceived nor about nature. Hence nowadays we encounter aestheticians interested in the philosophy of food and drink (Korsmeyer 1999), the philosophy of humor and jokes (Morreall, ed. 1987; Cohen 1999), and the aesthetics of the everyday (Saito 2007 and 2017; Leddy 2012), to just mention some examples.

2  Definitions of Art The question “What is art?” became all the more pressing in the twentieth century due to the development of various avant-garde artistic movements. Since the early 1900s, artists seemed to become less and less interested in producing items endowed with aesthetic qualities and conducive to aesthetic experiences as traditionally understood. (Artists interested in ready-mades or in the art of the found object in fact seem more intent in re-contextualizing and re-conceptualizing objects than in producing or creating them in a strict sense). Such developments naturally represent a challenge for aesthetic theories of Beardsley’s sort, which link artistic status to the capacity for bringing about aesthetic experiences.5 Indeed, under the influence of the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, and in response to the revolutionary spirit of much mid-twentieth-century art, skepticism regarding the possibility of offering a definition of art arose. In an influential and still widely anthologized essay, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” (1956), Morris Weitz claimed that the creative character of art—in virtue of which new styles, artistic movements, art forms, and so on continuously emerge—makes the concept of art and its related subconcepts (e.g., “novel,” “tragedy,” “comedy,” “painting,” “portraiture”) “open concepts,” allowing for no explicit definition (much as with Wittgenstein’s famous example of “game”). Of new objects it is decided whether or not they fall under such concepts only thanks to “strands of similarity” (or what Wittgenstein called “family resemblances”) between them and other objects that have already been categorized that way. And sometimes a new concept, though related to already existing subconcepts of art, will have to be invented, as when some of Alexander Calder’s work cannot quite be

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called a “sculpture,” and is hence dubbed a “mobile.” Any attempt at indicating a set of necessary conditions (unless aimed at some special purpose, as with concepts like “(extant) Greek tragedy,” which allows for no new cases, and can thus be “closed”) will always have to face possible counterexamples of works that, although undoubtedly works of art, or sculpture, or what have you, fail to satisfy such conditions. Further, we must recognize, for Weitz, that “art” and its subconcepts have both a descriptive and an evaluative use: by the former, we differentiate an item from items of a different kind (say, a novel from such other types of writing as medical handbooks or historical essays); by the latter, we praise the object. And we often do both things at once. Definitions of art, such as “art is expression” or “art is form” (see Chapters 12 and 13), which at the descriptive level are doomed to fail, ought rather to be recognized as evaluative, “honorific definitions,” which ultimately recommend certain ways of making art, and are valuable in helping to focus debate over criteria of evaluation that would otherwise be overlooked. A contemporary and somewhat different proposal that denies art the possibility of being defined is Gaut’s “cluster” account of arthood (see Carroll, ed. 2000): an artifact or a performance—being the product of an action is the only necessary condition all artworks must fulfill, for Gaut—is a work of art when it possesses features comprised in one of several “clusters” of jointly sufficient features for arthood (say, possessing positive aesthetic properties, being expressive, being intellectually challenging). The list of possible clusters and of possible features, however, necessarily remains open, and new features and new clusters are always possible in the future. Worthy of note is the fact that the skeptical view on defining art has been defended also on empirical grounds, for example, by pointing to a mismatch between the proposed definitions and people’s (art professionals and not) intuitions, as shown in surveys (see, e.g., Kamber 2011). On the other hand, one could argue that the very empirical surveys and studies could benefit from progress made within conceptual philosophical analysis. Such empirical studies, after all, presuppose some understanding of art, which impacts their very findings (cf. S. Davies 2012). The real turn in definitional attempts came with the institutional theory of art, found somewhat embryonically in Arthur Danto’s landmark essay, “The Artworld” (1964; cf. Chapter 23), but which received its canonical formulation in Dickie (1974). In a nutshell, the theory claims that the status of art is conferred upon an item by members of that institution that can be called “the artworld.” This allows for a ready-made object like the snow shovel used by Marcel Duchamp for his In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), which would otherwise belong to a hardware store, to be turned into a work of art, when the artist presents it for exhibit, or an art curator includes it in an exhibition, or an art critic writes an essay about it, and the like, for those acts implicitly or explicitly confer upon the item its artistic status. Dickie (1984) himself later

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reformulated his view in ways that in fact downplay the institutional character of the artworld—which indeed does not seem to have the characteristics of an institution—and foregrounded what he called the “inflected” (or mutually involving) nature of art and associated concepts. Whatever the specifics of the versions of the institutional theory, its break from the more traditional definition is that of not pointing to some quality or function—be it representation, expression, or the capacity of eliciting aesthetic experiences—but rather to a relation between artworks and some background situation. Once the relation between artworks and this background situation is construed not in terms of a quasi-institutional artworld but rather in terms of art’s concrete past, the major alternative to the institutional theory, the historical definition, emerges. Originally proposed by Levinson in his 1979 “Defining Art Historically” (2011), the historical (or intentional-historical) approach is still at the center of contemporary debate. Roughly, in Levinson’s proposal, which he has been refining in subsequent essays (1996, 2006), the artistic status of an item derives from the intention of the maker of the artwork, which—although not necessarily art-aware— successfully links the item to the preceding history of art. Specifically, something is an artwork if the work is intended for one or more of the “ways of regard” (ways of being treated, assessed, received) in which items previously recognized as works of art have been properly regarded: say, with a painting, being looked at for certain color features, appreciated for balance, engaged with for its expressivity, among many other things (cf. Chapter 29). Stephen Davies (1991) has proposed an influential framing of definitional attempts, centered on the distinction between “functional” and “procedural” definitions (paradigmatic of the former is Beardsley’s aesthetic definition, and of the latter, Dickie’s institutional definition), with historical definitions representing a third type of approach (one that, for Davies, suffers from leaving unspecified whether its central reference is to historically evolved functions or procedures). Davies himself shows a preference for an institutional, hence procedural, account, though one that he tentatively qualifies through reference to both the historical development of the institutions proper of the art world and a limited appeal to aesthetic function. On the other hand, Robert Stecker much more explicitly combines the historical with the functional approach in his “historical functionalist” theory (1997).

3  Ontology of Art Perhaps the most basic fact about works of art is that they are artifacts in a broad sense (broad because the “making” of an artwork may just amount to the recontextualizing of a ready-made or found object and because conceptual

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art may have at its core the formulation of ideas, categories, thoughts, rather than the production of any artifact narrowly understood).6 Beyond this basic fact, however, artworks exhibit the most remarkable ontological diversity. The ontological issue is largely coincident with that of distinguishing between different types or modes of art. Discussion has proceeded in terms of a number of fundamental distinctions, the first and most natural one being that between singular and multiple art forms. Paradigmatic of the former are painting and carved sculpture: the work has only one instance, say, the painted piece of canvas or the shaped block of marble that is in front of us. Paradigmatic of the latter are literature (including theater), music (including opera), cast sculpture, etching, engraving, photography, film, and dance. Of course, what counts as a multiple art work may depend on the artistic conventions internal to a practice and sometimes to a specific artistic project. Architecture, for instance, though having every potential for being a multiple art form, most often is taken to produce site-specific works, or at least works that are bound to a construction process, and hence unique, singular works. (St. Peter’s in Rome seems bound to its specific site and, if an Egyptian pyramid preserves its identity in spite of relocation, it does so because of a link to the original construction process.) Further, what is true of the paradigm cases of an art form might fail to be true of some variations of the same art: Polaroid photos, for example, are singular, not multiple. The singular/multiple art distinction is normally accepted, with the notable exception of Gregory Currie’s (1988) claim that, in principle, all art forms are multiple. Currie invites us to imagine a world where superxerox machines exist, capable of duplicating, molecule-by-molecule, say, a painting, hence showing, he argues, that art forms like painting are singular only contingently (for criticism, see Carroll 1998 and Levinson 1996; for a more sympathetic critique, see D. Davies 2004).7 Among those arts that are normally considered multiple, the production of the instances of the work may happen in fairly different ways. Accordingly, the principles of individuation of proper instances of a work vary radically. Within some arts—paradigmatically literature and classical music—we find notations; in others—say, etching or cinema—we do not. The identity of a novel, for example, seems to be preserved by a word-for-word (including punctuation) correspondence with the original, and one that can be compatible with great differences in features that are irrelevant to both the work’s identity and aesthetic value, say, the fonts used in different prints of the same novel. By contrast, a film screening or a cast statue is an instance of a work in virtue of having being produced from a template of sorts (Carroll 1998): the film stock (which, of course, might itself be one of the many prints of a film) or the statue’s mold.

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A distinction of crucial importance within the multiple arts is that between those for which the realization of a work requires a performance and those for which no performance is possible. The distinction is a general one: of etching, for example, we can say that, although a multiple art, it does not require and cannot receive a performance, but only an instancing. Yet the distinction becomes especially relevant when applied to those multiple arts for which some notation exists. A novel, so it seems, is accessed with no need of a performance; plays and symphonies (which have notations in scripts and scores) are instead accessed through performances, which in some sense realize the work. It seems central to performances that they require or amount to interpretations and that they can be judged artistically in their own right: there are good and bad performances of Hamlet for example. The notion of performance has been widely investigated (D. Davies 2011 is the most recent work on the matter), especially with respect to music (see, e.g., S. Davies 1994, Kivy 1998, and Levinson 2011). Interestingly, however, the role of performance in other arts, for example, the “performance” of reading a poem, even of reading it to oneself, has also been explored (Kivy 2006). David Davies (2004) has argued that all works of art, even those outside of the classical paradigm, are to be considered performances, specifically, performances by the artists who produced them. On the other hand, not all music qualifies as a performing art, or not in the same way. For example, of rock songs it has been argued that their identity is bound to the studio recording a band or singer produced as the master of a work (Gracyk 1996). If so, then rock songs would have an ontological status that is not so different, in this respect, from that of movies. The issue has consequences on the question of authorship, most significantly, in cinema; as Berys Gaut (2010, Chapter 3) argues, the fact that movies include recordings of the actors’ performances militates in favor of a multiple authorship thesis for most movies. It is worth mentioning that the real-world identity of a work may not always be fully determinate and compliant to the paradigms of theory (not even for theories that genuinely try to account for actual artistic practice): of Shakespeare’s plays there exist significantly different texts, and a filmmaker may offer differently edited versions of the same film.

4  Art Interpretation Theories of interpretation—answers to the question of what, if anything, determines the correct interpretation of a work or the work’s meaning broadly construed—have been developed primarily with respect to literature. Yet, the issue is clearly relevant to engagement with artworks

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produced in any art form or medium. When we appreciate an artwork, hence value it as a work of art, the appreciation or evaluation targets the work and its features only if such features, or at least their artistic relevance, are correctly attributed to it. Relatedly, interpretations of artworks may— indeed one would expect they would—open up opportunities for artistic appreciation, by calling attention to artistic features that would have otherwise passed unnoticed. The primary divide on the issue of interpretation, at least within AngloAmerican aesthetics, is that between intentionalism (or more precisely, actual intentionalism) and anti-intentionalism, with the former being the view according to which the meaning of a work constitutively depends on the author’s or artist’s intention. A classic defense of intentionalism was offered by E. D. Hirsch (1967), while more recent defenses comprise those by Noël Carroll, Gary Iseminger, Steven Knapp, and Walter Benn Michaels (conveniently assembled in Iseminger, ed. 1992), Paisley Livingston (2005), and Kathleen Stock (2017). The debate over intentionalism revolves in part around how best to understand the notion of intention, and on the possibility for a work to fail to have the meaning the artist intended, without thereby being meaningless, and for works to have meanings their producers never intended them to have. Anti-intentionalism may take what can be called a formalist direction, along the lines suggested by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their famous 1946 paper, “The Intentional Fallacy” (see Chapter 19, on Beardsley), and by the New Criticism school in general: the meaning is in the work itself and, quite independently of the author’s intentions, it is to be discovered and extracted from the text alone. A contemporary defender of an approach of this sort, though one more nuanced than that associated with the New Critics, is Daniel Nathan (in Iseminger, ed. 1992). The debate on this type of view naturally concentrates on whether the very notion of meaning, as applied to literature and art in general, can be severed from at least some appeal to intentionality. Anti-intentionalism can also take a constructivist direction, one that emphasizes the role of the reader or critic in projecting meanings on to a work.8 A contemporary defender of the constructivist approach is Michael Krausz (in Iseminger, ed. 1992), who to some extent follows Joseph Margolis (see, e.g., Margolis 1995). It can be here noted only in passing that, of course, not all constructivist views are alike; most notably, while Krausz, like Richard Rorty (1931–2007) for example, concentrates on the meaning-producing power of the reader who approaches a text, Stanley Fish sees instead the production of meaning as residing in entire interpretative communities (see Fish 1980). One concern with respect to constructivism has to do with its perhaps admitting too much in terms of what count as acceptable

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interpretations, including for instance, anachronistic interpretations (something that Wollheim 1980 notes as a fatal objection to this approach).9 In addition to contributing to a better understanding of the notion of intention, progress in this area has been facilitated by at least two other developments: attention to the existence of different levels of meaning and attention to the different aims that may be part of the interpretative critical enterprise. There is a basic, textual level of meaning, amounting to the meaning of a word sequence according to the conventions of language; such word-sequence or textual meaning need not be the same at the utterer’s meaning, the meaning a speaker (writer, artist) intends to convey by the use of an utterance (which, of course, is here just short for, say, a whole novel or, more generally, work of art). Yet, the meaning of the utterance in its context of production—utterance meaning—need not coincide with the meaning intended by the utterer. Finally, what can be dubbed ludic meaning (from the Latin for “play”) encompasses meanings an utterance may be seen as suggesting under possible, and often rather adventurous, construals. The above-summarized distinctions are suggested by Levinson (in Iseminger, ed. 1992), who defends a middle-ground position between those characterized above, one that regards utterance meaning as the notion central to the enterprise of interpreting a literary work and artworks in general. Levinson’s hypothetical intentionalism identifies the meaning of a work with what is delivered by an optimal projection of meaning—that is, a hypothesis of intended meaning that is best attributed to the artist/author in question. Such projecting or hypothesizing must occur in light of all meaning-relevant considerations: the artist’s actual intention, the artist’s overall oeuvre, the historical context of the work’s production, and so on, and in light of the type of work (say, a painting or, perhaps more specifically, a portrait) the artist actually intended to produce. Which approach to art interpretation is preferable might partly depend on the different aims of an interpretative enterprise, as argued by Stecker (2003). And different criteria of correctness or acceptability perhaps apply to different aims. In any event, the question of what determines the meaning of artworks ought to be distinguished from the question of the possible truth of so-called critical pluralism (as opposed to critical monism): can some works allow for multiple and yet not reconcilable interpretations? One way to defend an affirmative answer is by pointing to the interest we have in not limiting the interpretive investigation of works just to interpretations that are true, and expanding it to interpretations that, though not true, are otherwise acceptable (Stecker 2003). Indeed, perhaps one of the central values of art is what can be called “interpretation-centered” value: a work’s capacity, that is, to notably engage our interpretative abilities (Stecker 1997).10

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5  Affective Engagement with Fictions and Narratives Affective engagement is often central to our encounters with art. Some works are said to express emotions.11 Often, perceiving (reading, viewing, listening to) an artwork provokes a variety of affective states in us, with emotions, moods, and desires being the most central ones. Indeed, responding in a variety of ways seems to be part and parcel of properly apprehending many artworks. And, of course, it is common experience to bond with fictional characters and come to care for them. Within the representational arts, most typically with narrative works, affective engagement prompts several philosophical issues, most prominently: the so-called paradox of fiction, that is, the apparent paradox of our having emotional responses toward characters and events that we know to be fictional (see Chapters 26 and 28, on Walton and Lamarque); the paradox of negative emotions, that is, of how it can possibly be desirable to experience prima facie unpleasant or painful emotions, such as pity toward a fallen hero or fear for a monster (see Budd 1995 and Levinson, ed. 2014, on the former, and Carroll 1990 on the latter; see, also, Chapters 6 and 7, in regard to Du Bos and Hume on tragedy, and 27 and 29, in regard to Carroll and Levinson); and the exploration of the types of imaginative, affective mechanisms of engagement that narratives and their characters invite. At the origin of contemporary debate on the paradox of fiction is a famous paper by Colin Radford (1975, followed by a series of other papers by the same author), arguing that our responding to fictions ultimately commits us to irrationality. In rejecting Radford’s type of conclusion, most contemporary debate has turned around two approaches, roughly: Walton’s make-believe theory (e.g., 2015), for which at least some responses to fictions have a make-believe status, and the thought theory, for which emotional responses to fictional characters and events target thoughts or unasserted propositional contents, say, the thought that Desdemona is being killed by Othello (Lamarque 1981; Carroll 1990; Dadlez 1997). The issue has also attracted the attention of philosophers interested in the cognitive sciences and more generally empirical approaches, especially in regard to how much (or how little) emotions targeting fictions differ from emotions had with respect to real-life objects: in phenomenology, motivational force, or underlying mechanisms (see, e.g., Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, and some of the essays in Kieran, ed. 2006 and in Currie and Kieran, eds. 2014). Recent developments have also emphasized the importance of distinguishing between different kinds of emotional responses, say, between a viewer’s selforiented response of fear for oneself (e.g., as prompted by a fictional monster

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portrayed in a movie) and the viewer’s other-oriented response of pity for a character (Neill 1993). The paradox of negative emotions (tackled by Levinson with respect to music in a very influential 1982 paper [2011], and addressed more generally by various authors—see, for example, the essays in Levinson, ed. 2014), with respect to horror has been given a cognitivist solution by Carroll (1990). Audiences, Carroll claims, are attracted to horror fictions, in spite of the unpleasantness of being scared of/disgusted by some monster (which for Carroll is essential to horror), out of curiosity toward the nature of the monster and, quite typically at least, by the “erotetic” (from the Greek for “questioning”) nature of such narratives, which raise, and then often answer, a multitude of questions, including the overarching question of whether the human characters (and sometimes humankind as a whole) will be able to prevail over the monstrous presence. The more classical version of the paradox of negative emotions, however, is the one targeting tragedy. To the paradox of tragedy Susan Feagin (1983) has offered a “metaresponse” solution: we don’t enjoy feeling fear and pity with respect to the tragic events and hero, but we do enjoy having responses about those responses, since such metaresponses allow us to recognize ourselves as being capable of caring for others. An articulate and nuanced solution to the paradox is offered by Budd (1995), who emphasizes how the suffering that engaging with tragedies brings about is inextricably bound to what we value in the experience of a tragedy: a heightened understanding of the reality of human life, made of a first-person insight into ways of suffering and of an increased comprehension of reality offered by the play as a whole, together with an admiration for the hero’s character traits and quality of consciousness and for the writer’s capacity of looking at the most tragic aspects of life without falling into despair. It is worth noting how reference to the affective responses that certain types of narratives necessarily or typically prompt has been used, much in Aristotelian fashion, to elucidate the nature of some genres, especially in film. As for Aristotle a tragedy aims at fear and pity, so—it can be argued—horror aims at some complex of fear and disgust, melodrama at a compound of pity and admiration, comedy at amusement, and a variety of works in what is called the “suspense” genre at the emotion of the same name (see, e.g., Carroll 1990; cf. Chapter 27). One of the many issues regarding the relationship between art and emotion is that of the kinds of engagement narrative readers, viewers, or listeners, depending on the medium, entertain with a narrative’s characters and situations, something that the layperson would often describe, vaguely, as a form of “identification.” Some thinkers, most notably, Currie (e.g.,

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in Levinson, ed. 1998), Feagin (1996), and Murray Smith (1995 and 2017), have differently appealed to the notion of mental simulation— developed within the philosophy of mind and cognitive science debates on our capacity to attribute mental states to others—to explain what they consider an important form of engagement with narratives.12 Roughly, these thinkers emphasize the importance, to a proper understanding and full appreciation of a narrative, of a certain kind of imaginative projection, some form of “getting in the shoes” of characters and more generally of getting oneself into a fictional scenario. Hence, besides the appeal to mental simulation, these approaches, which can synthetically be dubbed the “participant view” (Giovannelli 2008), can be seen as more generally emphasizing an important role for empathy and other forms of projective imagination into fictional situations. Opposed to this general approach is what can be called the “onlooker view,” championed especially by Carroll (1990, 1998, and 2010) and Kieran (in Kieran and Lopes, eds. 2003), who emphasize how projecting oneself into a character’s mind or situation is most often unneeded, when not positively a hindrance, to a proper and full engagement with a narrative. In contrast, it is sympathy that is central to our interactions with narratives, they claim (see especially Carroll 2010). As the debate continues, the distance between the two positions might have been partly reduced by clarifying that there exists a plurality of forms of imaginative engagement with characters and situations (see, e.g., Carroll 2010 and Currie’s essay in Kieran, ed. 2006; see also Giovannelli 2008, 2009, and forthcoming). Most importantly perhaps, further progress can be achieved by clarifying the tenets of such a debate. For instance, it would help if the implications be more fully drawn, of the fact that the notions central to the discussion—most notably “empathy” and “sympathy”—are affected by vagueness in both their ordinary and specialized uses. As I have suggested elsewhere (Giovannelli 2009 and forthcoming), it might be explanatorily advantageous to consider such notions as corresponding not to emotions but, rather, to mechanisms of engagement, which generate emotions and qualify them as, for example, sympathetic. Relatedly, a more promising form of pluralism ought to acknowledge the existence of different variations of such mechanisms, and devise the methodology most suitable to analyze such notions. With respect to sympathy, for example, a more fruitful approach might be that of indicating a paradigmatic or prototypical form of such a notion, by reference to which its several other modes can be elucidated (cf. Giovannelli 2009 and forthcoming). Be as it may, there might be room, here, for an investigation that emerged within aesthetics to offer methodological and conceptual contributions to other philosophical areas and even disciplines.

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6  Some Dimensions of Artistic Value Contemporary aesthetic debate has also addressed questions regarding the kinds of values artworks may have and the possible relationships between such values. The two main issues are the epistemic issue, of what, if anything, we can learn from art, and the art-critical issue, of whether and how values of, say, an epistemic or a moral sort ever bear on a work’s artistic value. The view that art can have important cognitive, epistemic roles—that it can and perhaps should be a vehicle and instrument for knowledge—was already contained in Horace’s (first century BCE) maxim that art ought “to delight and instruct” (see also Chapters 1 and 2). Yet, the opposite view, aestheticism, which the “art for art’s sake” motto of such nineteenth-century figures as Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde epitomizes, also has a long tradition. Aestheticism insists on the necessity for art to be made and judged according to strictly artistic criteria, condemning the attribution of any other duties to art and artists, most notably duties toward truth and moral goodness (see also Chapter 13). Recent analytic aesthetics includes, if greatly revisited, positions that are representatives of both approaches. Those who believe in art’s capacity to convey insights or contribute to knowledge have primarily, though not exclusively, concentrated on insights and knowledge of an ethical sort. Representational artworks, especially of a narrative kind, are claimed to have the ability to contribute to the moral understanding and character of their readers, viewers, or listeners. Among the most notable views are those of such authors as: Martha Nussbaum (1990), who, within the articulation of an Aristotelian moral approach, claims literature to be, by its ability to represent the full complexity of moral situations, a necessary component of moral philosophy; Richard Eldridge (1989), who, starting from a Kantian approach, with subtlety and richness of examples sees in some literary works pivotal opportunities for us to develop an adequate understanding of ourselves as moral agents; and Currie (in S. Davies, ed. 1997 and Levinson, ed. 1998), who attributes to fiction, for the way it engages our imagination, a practical role in refining our understanding of others, of ourselves, and of morally relevant situations.13 Objections to the possibility for art to convey knowledge have mostly focused on knowledge of a propositional kind (as opposed to knowledge of practical, experiential, or “know-how” kinds), to the effect that art never makes statements about the world (T. J. Diffey in S. Davies, ed. 1997), or that whichever truths an artwork might convey are doomed to be trivial, or that beliefs expressed by works of art, even when true, cannot find in the works themselves the required justification for them to qualify as knowledge (Stolnitz 1992). Several authors have presented arguments against

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these claims. Budd (1995), for example, with special reference to poetry, emphasizes poems’ ability to express beliefs and views of life, which a reader may perceive as true or false, as corresponding or failing to correspond to reality. Carroll (in Levinson, ed. 1998) concentrates on the triviality charge, distinguishing between the acquisition of new knowledge—which, he concedes, is rarely what art contributes—and an improved understanding of knowledge we already have. Gaut (2007) takes up the task of defending the claim that art can be a source of bona fide knowledge by providing the necessary justification, or more generally confirmation, for the claims it conveys. Key to Gaut’s reasoning is the role of certain engagements of the imagination: a novel like William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, he argues, thanks to how it engages the reader’s imagination, can not just claim but also confirm that moral dilemmas are real. The art-critical issue, of whether cognitive or moral merits or demerits of a work ever count toward its artistic assessment, has often been discussed with respect to what could be called transformative merits/demerits: whether a work improves or confuses one’s understanding, whether it is morally educational or corruptive (in addition to the above-mentioned works by Carroll and Gaut, see, for example, Kieran in Bermúdes and Gardner, eds. 2003). That is, the art-critical issue has often been addressed in relation to the epistemic issue. Yet, a work may be flawed or sound, ethically or otherwise, without having, and independently of, any substantial capacity to corrupt or ameliorate those who engage with it. Hence, since the issue has been mostly addressed with respect to moral, rather than more generally epistemic, evaluation, progress in this area could be achieved by specifying the kind of ethical judgment that is being addressed. Consider that artworks can be ethically judged in a number of different ways, most notably perhaps (i) for the perspective they embody, (ii) for the consequences on those who engage with them, and (iii) for the way they were produced (Giovannelli 2007, 2013a). Hence, the art-critical issue can be raised with respect to a range of evaluations that go beyond the scope suggested by the epistemic issue. When addressed with respect to ethical evaluation, the art-critical issue amounts to asking whether the art-critical practice known as “ethical criticism” is legitimate: is it ever appropriate to consider an artwork’s ethical merits or demerits as relevant to the overall judgment of the work as art? Specifically, should a work’s being in some sense ethically praise- or blameworthy be considered, respectively, a good- or bad-making feature of the work, at least in some cases? The recent revival of the question of ethical criticism is to be credited mostly to Wayne Booth (1988), who, among other things, convincingly argued that ethical criticism had disappeared more from theory than from actual literary critical practice. In the past twenty

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years or so, a range of positions addressing the ethical criticism of art have been defended. In brief, and somewhat roughly, autonomist positions deny the existence of any relation between ethical and artistic value, such that the former could be considered a dimension of or at least somewhat intimately related to the latter. The value of artworks is so to speak shielded from these other sorts of considerations; hence that a work, say, includes some moral insight or is instead potentially corruptive, embodies an ethically praise- or blame-worthy perspective, and so on are all claims that nothing have to do with its artistic value. It should be noted that autonomists need not deny that ethical considerations may enter the process of artistic evaluation: they just need to insist on their artistic irrelevance as such (see, e.g., Peter Lamarque in Kieran, ed. 2006 and Anderson and Dean 1998; cf. Giovannelli 2013a). Further, even a view that allows for the possible bearing of ethical evaluation on artistic evaluation, yet denies that the relation between the two kinds of values is in any way systematic (one work might be artistically better because of an ethical merit, another be artistically worse for the same reason, and yet another work be unaffected by its ethical status), may be argued to be ultimately a form of autonomism (Giovannelli 2007), of a sort that could also be dubbed “particularism” (Giovannelli 2013b; a paradigmatic example of such a view is Daniel Jacobson’s “anti-theoretical” position; see Jacobson’s essay in Kieran, ed. 2006). In contrast to autonomism, moralist positions do accept the artistic or aesthetic relevance of ethical evaluation (see, e.g., Budd 1995; the essays by Carroll, Karen Hanson, Mary Deveraux, and Gaut in Levinson, ed. 1998; Gaut 2007; and Giovannelli 2013a). Carroll’s defense of the relevance of the ethical dimension is based on the claim that certain works may fail to receive the intended uptake, at least among morally sensitive audiences, because of immorality (e.g., the immorality of a hero for whom the work is attempting to elicit sympathy).14 Gaut’s thesis, which he names ethicism, establishes a much more systematic relationship between the two kinds of values than Carroll’s view: when aesthetically relevant, moral merits and demerits are aesthetic merits or demerits, and quite independently of how audiences in fact respond to the work; what matters for Gaut is not the responses a work receives, but whether it merits the responses it aims at. Overall, the debate on ethical criticism has suffered from lack of clarity on how best to identify the different kinds of positions—that is, the different strands of autonomism and moralism—though some criteria-driven taxonomies have been offered by Gaut (2007) and myself (Giovannelli 2007; see also 2013b). Both of us emphasize, under different terminology, the importance of distinguishing between views that argue for the existence of a systematic relationship between ethical and artistic merits/demerits and

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views that deny it. Yet, in contrast to Gaut, I also underscore the importance of distinguishing between theories that accept the existence of such a systematic relationship across the realm of art (as Gaut’s ethicism, or what can also be called “radical moralism”—including my own view—does) and more “moderate” moralist approaches, which maintain the systematic relationship to obtain within certain artistic genres, but not all of them. Three striking features of this debate are worth highlighting, if very briefly. First, the vast majority of views, and certainly of those maintaining that ethical value and artistic value are at least sometimes related, are responsedependent (or ultimately “Humean” in spirit). They focus, in different ways, on artworks’ asking audience members to feel, or imagine, or respond to their contents, and deem such responses, for immoral works, ethically problematic. Yet, arguments for why certain forms of imaginative engagement should be considered intrinsically problematic are lacking; and indeed, as Brandon Cooke (2014) has shown, the very claim, in its relevant sense, that they are problematic proves unwarranted. Second, again, among those theorists who claim the existence of some relationship between artistic and ethical value, there is a striking reluctance to stating that such a relationship is systematic. Indeed, as I have pointed out elsewhere (Giovannelli 2013b), even Gaut’s ethicism allows for some exceptions to be assessed on a case-by-case basis; hence, across the range of so-called moralism and beyond, virtually every theorist ends up, in fact, conceding to particularism. Third, most theorists fail to properly separate the ethical question—can the work be judged ethically, and if so, how?—from the art-critical question—does the ethical status of the work bear on the value of the work as art? Hence, the opportunity is missed, to investigate the relationship between the two values (and perhaps find that they are systematically related, for works of all kinds, and with no exceptions, as a truly radical moralist position should advocate and as I have myself argued) and, separately, address the question of how often, and in which ways, artworks can be the proper target of the relevant kind of ethical evaluation (Giovannelli 2013a).

Notes 1 For some recent collections, which include interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary contributions, see Currie and Kieran et al., eds. (2014); and Shimamura and Palmer, eds. (2012). For a recent monograph, see Seeley (2020). 2 Notice that claiming the mind independence of aesthetic properties is different from and compatible with the claim, discussed above, that aesthetic properties depend on non-aesthetic properties.

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3 It is here relevant, of course, to look at Chapter 7, on Hume. 4 On the appreciation of nature, see, most notably the work done by Allen Carlson (e.g., 2000) and Malcolm Budd (2002). This area of investigation, however, has become quite broad and prolific; hence, see also, e.g., Berleant (1992) and Parsons (2008); for the related questions surrounding the aesthetics of human environments (from gardens to human-shaped countryside, to urban environments, etc.), and, more generally, the aesthetics of the ordinary and of everyday life, see, e.g., Cooper (2006), Leddy (2012), and Saito (2017). 5 That is not to suggest that the aesthetic approach has been altogether abandoned by all; Zangwill (2001), for instance, has proposed a sophisticated version of the aesthetic theory. 6 For some recent work on conceptual art, see the essays in Goldie and Schellekens, eds. (2007). 7 A related issue regarding multiple art forms is the ontological status of the work within them: that is, whether the work is best understood, in Platonic fashion, as an abstract entity (for which see Chapters 25 and 29, on Kivy and Levinson), or instead as a class (Goodman 1976), a type (Wollheim 1980), or a kind (Wolterstorff 1980). 8 Though not belonging to the Anglo-American tradition in its dominant, analytic approach, the “death of the author” proposal of Roland Barthes (1915–80), which goes in the direction of constructivism, is certainly not ignored by contemporary, analytic debate; see Barthes (1977). 9 It should be noted that not every attribution of meaning that was not accessible at the time of work production is to be construed as flat-out anachronistic; indeed, some such attributions may be acceptable even to nonconstructivists (see Levinson 2011). 10 Stecker (1997) maintains that critical monism and pluralism are compatible, a position that Matthew Kieran (1996), who defends pluralism, criticizes. 11 The role of emotional expression in art has been investigated especially with respect to music (see, e.g., Budd 1985, S. Davies 1994, and Levinson 2011). 12 See also Walton (2015), Walton’s and Currie’s essays in Hjort and Laver, eds. (1997), and Currie and Ravenscroft (2002). 13 See also Feagin’s contribution in S. Davies, ed. (1997), in which she emphasizes the role literature can play in an emotional form of learning, a learning about the emotions as well as through the emotions, and one which is not fully reducible to the acquisition of new beliefs. See also Noël Carroll’s proposal (Chapter 27), which could be interestingly compared, for example, to Nussbaum’s. 14 Carroll explicitly links his argument to the notion known as imaginative resistance, the phenomenon for which, so it seems, some people find it difficult or impossible, or are otherwise unwilling, to engage in the imaginings a fiction calls for, for example, when those are considered morally repugnant (in Walton’s famous example [2008, 35], imagining the truth of such a proposition as, “In killing her baby, Giselda did the right

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Aesthetics: The Key Thinkers thing; after all, it was a girl”). The phenomenon—first identified by Richard Moran (1994) and Walton (in his “Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality,” reprinted in 2008; see also Walton 2015; cf. Chapter 26)—and the possible related puzzle have been at the center of a lively, rich debate (inclusive of the seminal Gendler 2000 paper).

References and Further Reading Anderson, James and Dean, Jeffrey. 1998. “Moderate Autonomism.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 38: 150–66. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang. Berleant, Arnold. 1992. The Aesthetics of Environment. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Bermúdes, J. L. and Gardner, Sebastian, eds. 2003. Art and Morality. London: Routledge. Booth, Wayne. 1988. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Budd, Malcolm. 1985. Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories. London: Routledge. Budd, Malcolm. 1995. Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music. London: Penguin Books. Budd, Malcolm. 2002. The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature: Essays on the Aesthetics of Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bullough, Edward. 1912. “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle.” The British Journal of Psychology, 5: 87–98. Carlson, Allen. 2000. Aesthetics and the Environment. London: Routledge. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror: or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge. Carroll, Noël. 1998. A Philosophy of Mass Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carroll, Noël, ed. 2000. Theories of Art Today. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Carroll, Noël. 2010. Art in Three Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, Ted. 1973. “Aesthetic/Non-Aesthetic and the Concept of Taste: A Critique of Sibley’s Position.” Theoria, 39: 113–52. Cohen, Ted. 1999. Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Cooke, Brandon. 2014. “Ethics and Fictive Imagining.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72: 317–27. Cooper, D. 2006. A Philosophy of Gardens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Currie, Gregory. 1988. An Ontology of Art. London: Macmillan. Currie, Gregory, Kieran, Gregory et al., eds. 2014. Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Currie, Gregory and Ravenscroft, Ian. 2002. Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. Dadlez, Eva. 1997. What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Davies, David. 2004. Art as Performance. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Davies, David. 2011. Philosophy of the Performing Arts. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Davies, Stephen. 1991. Definitions of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Davies, Stephen. 1994. Musical Works and Performances. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Stephen, ed. 1997. Art and Its Messages: Meaning, Morality, and Society. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Davies, Stephen. 2012. The Artful Species. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dickie, George. 1964. “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 1: 56–65. Dickie, George. 1974. Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dickie, George. 1984. The Art Circle. New York: Haven Publications. Eaton, Marcia. 1994. “The Intrinsic, Non-Supervenient Nature of Aesthetic Properties.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52: 383–97. Eldridge, Richard. 1989. On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and Self-Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Feagin, Susan. 1983. “The Pleasures of Tragedy.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 20: 95–104. Feagin, Susan. 1996. Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gaut, Berys. 2007. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaut, Berys. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gendler, Tamar Szabó. 2000. “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance.” The Journal of Philosophy, 97 (2): 55–81. Giovannelli, Alessandro. 2007. “The Ethical Criticism of Art: A New Mapping of the Territory.” Philosophia, 35: 117–27. Giovannelli, Alessandro. 2008. “In and Out: The Dynamics of Imagination in the Engagement with Narratives.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 66: 11–24. Giovannelli, Alessandro. 2009. “In Sympathy with Narrative Characters.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67: 83–95. Giovannelli, Alessandro. 2013a. “Ethical Criticism in Perspective: A Defense of Radical Moralism.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71: 335–48. Giovannelli, Alessandro. 2013b. “Ethicism, Particularism, and Artistic Categorization.” Ethical Perspectives, 20: 375–401. Giovannelli, Alessandro. Forthcoming. “The Modes of Sympathy: The Prototype Theory’s Challenge to Noël Carroll.” Philosophy and Literature.

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Goldie, Peter and Schellekens, Elisabeth, eds. 2007. Philosophy and Conceptual Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldman, Alan. 1995. Aesthetic Value. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Gracyk, Thedore. 1996. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hirsch, E. D. 1967. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hjort, Mette and Laver, Sue, eds. 1997. Emotion and the Arts. New York: Oxford University Press. Iseminger, Gary, ed. 1992. Intention and Interpretation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Kamber, Richard. 2011. “Experimental Philosophy of Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 69: 197–208. Kieran, Matthew. 1996. “In Defence of Critical Pluralism.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 36: 239–51. Kieran, Matthew. 2005. Revealing Art. New York: Routledge. Kieran, Matthew, ed. 2006. Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Oxford: Blackwell. Kieran, Matthew and Lopes, Dominic, eds. 2003. Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts. London: Routledge. Kivy, Peter. 1998. Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kivy, Peter. 2006. The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 1999. Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Krausz, Michael, ed. 2002. Is There a Single Right Interpretation? University Park: The Pennsylvania State University. Lamarque, Peter. 1981. “How Can We Fear and Pity Fictions?” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 21: 291–304. Leddy, Thomas. 2012. The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Peterborough: Broadview. Levinson, Jerrold. 1996. The Pleasure of Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levinson, Jerrold, ed. 1998. Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2006. Contemplating Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2011. Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Reprinted with a new Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, Jerrold, ed. 2014. Suffering Art Gladly: The Paradox of Negative Emotion in Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Levinson, Jerrold and Maes, Hans, eds. 2012. Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Livingston, Paisley. 2005. Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maes, Hans, ed. 2013. Pornographic Art and the Aesthetics of Pornography. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Margolis, Joseph. 1995. Interpretation Radical but Not Unruly: The New Puzzle of the Arts and History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mikkola, Mari, ed. 2017. Beyond Speech: Pornography and Analytic Feminist Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Moran, Richard. 1994. “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination.” The Philosophical Review, 103 (1): 75–106. Morreall, John, ed. 1987. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: State University of New York Press. Neill, Alex. 1993. “Fiction and the Emotions.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 30: 1–13. Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Parsons, Glenn. 2008. Aesthetics and Nature. London: Continuum Press. Radford, Colin. 1975. “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 49: 67–80. Saito, Yuriko. 2007. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saito, Yuriko. 2017. Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seeley, William. 2020. Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts. New York: Oxford University Press. Shimamura, Arthur and Palmer, Stephen, eds. 2012. Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience. New York: Oxford University Press. Sibley, Frank. 2001. Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers in Philosophical Aesthetics. J. Benson, B. Redfern, and J. R. Cox (eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Murray. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Murray. 2017. Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stecker, Robert. 1997. Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Stecker, Robert. 2003. Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech, and the Law. Oxford: Blackwell. Stock, Kathleen. 2017. Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stolnitz, Jerome. 1960. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism. Boston, MA: Riverside.

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Stolnitz, Jerome. 1992. “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 32: 191–200. Walton, Kendall. 2008. Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walton, Kendall. 2015. In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weitz, Morris. 1956. “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15: 27–35. Wollheim, Richard. 1980. Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1980. Works and Worlds of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zangwill, Nick. 2001. The Metaphysics of Beauty. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Contributors Sondra Bacharach is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). Her recent research interests include authorship, collaboration, street art, and LEGO. She is also an active member of the group Occupation: Artist. Emily Brady is the Susanne M. and Melbern G. Glasscock Director and Chair at the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University (USA). Her book publications include Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley (co-edited with Jerrold Levinson) and The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature. Malcolm Budd is Grote Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic Emeritus at University College London (UK), Emeritus Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the British Society of Aesthetics. His most recent books are The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature and Aesthetic Essays. Noël Carroll is Distinguished Professor in the Philosophy Program of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (USA). His most recent book is Humor: A Very Short Introduction. His forthcoming books include Philosophy and the Moving Image and Classics in the Western Philosophy of Art: Interpretations. Filippo Contesi is Beatriu de Pinós Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Barcelona (Spain), in the LOGOS Research Group. He has published articles, book chapters, and other essays on issues in metaphilosophy and the philosophy of mind and arts. Angela Curran is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kansas State University (USA). She is the author of the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics as well as essays on Aristotle’s aesthetics, metaphysics, and philosophy of film. She is currently working on Aristotle’s views on the role that imagination plays in our emotional response to characters in fiction.

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David Davies is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University (Canada). He has published widely in aesthetics, especially on issues in philosophy of film, the performing arts, literature, and the visual arts. He is the author of Art as Performance, Aesthetics and Literature, and Philosophy of the Performing Arts. Richard Eldridge is Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Swarthmore College (USA) and Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (USA). His most recent books are Images of History: Kant, Benjamin, Freedom, and the Human Subject and Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher. Susan Feagin is Research Professor of Philosophy at Temple University (USA) and former editor of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. She has published many journal articles and book chapters, and is the author of Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Gian Carlo Garfagnini is Professor Emeritus of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Florence (Italy) and former vice-president of the Italian Dante Society. He has authored numerous articles, focusing especially on the relationship between ethics and politics between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. His most recent monograph is Da Chartres a Firenze: etica, politica e profezia fra XII e XV secolo. Alessandro Giovannelli is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lafayette College (USA). He has published articles and book chapters on the imaginative engagement with characters, art and ethics, the philosophy of film and literature, and depiction and portraiture. Alan H. Goldman is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the College of William and Mary (USA). He has written nine books; the most recent are Reasons from Within: Desires and Values; Philosophy and the Novel; and Life’s Values: Pleasure, Happiness, Well-Being and Meaning. Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College (USA). Author of numerous books and articles, and editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, his most recent book is Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood.

Contributors

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Robert E. Innis is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (USA). His primary interests are the links between philosophy, semiotics, and aesthetics. His books include Consciousness and the Play of Signs, Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense, and Susanne Langer in Focus. Scott Jenkins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas (USA). His major research interests are Kant, German Idealism, and Nietzsche, on all of which he has published several articles. Kelly Dean Jolley is the Goodwin-Philpott Endowed Chair in Religion and Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University (USA). He has published on the history of analytic philosophy, the philosophy of logic, ancient philosophy, and the philosophy of poetry. Gary Kemp is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow (UK). He mainly works in philosophy of logic and language but has a serious interest in aesthetics. His latest book is What Is This Thing Called Philosophy of Language? Deborah Knight is Queen’s National Scholar and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University (Canada). Her most recent book chapters examine Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, the role of grief and remembrance in our experiences of memorial art, and the analytic philosophy of film. Thomas Leddy is Professor of Philosophy at San José State University (USA). He is the author of The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. He has published many articles and contributions on such topics as metaphor, interpretation, creativity, architecture, the pretty, pragmatist aesthetics, and the aesthetics of the everyday. Paisley Livingston is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Lingnan University (Hong Kong). His books include Art and Intention, Literature and Rationality, and Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman. Gerhard Richter is University Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University (USA). Among his most recent books are Inheriting Walter Benjamin as well as Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoercive Gaze.

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Contributors

Elisabeth Schellekens is Chair Professor of Aesthetics in the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala University (Sweden). She is Principal Investigator of the research project “Aesthetic Perception and Cognition,” and has published on aesthetic judgment; objectivism and subjectivism; non-perceptual art; the interaction between aesthetic, moral, and cognitive values, aesthetic reasons; and more. Robert Stecker is Professor of Philosophy at Central Michigan University (USA). His numerous publications include the books: Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value; Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech, and the Law; Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art; and, most recently, Intersections of Value: Art, Nature, and the Everyday. Ingvild Torsen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo (Norway). She has published articles on the aesthetics of Heidegger, Hegel, and Kant, and is the co-editor of Philosophy of Sculpture: Historical Problems, Contemporary Approaches. Malcolm Turvey is Sol Gittleman Professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department and Director of Film and Media Studies at Tufts University (USA). His books include Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition; The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s; and, most recently, Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism. James O. Young, FRSC, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria (Canada). He is the author of several books, including Art and Knowledge, Cultural Appropriation and the Arts, and Critique of Pure Music.

Index NOTE: Bold text indicates thinkers or periods to which a chapter is dedicated, and pages within such chapter. aboutness. See also denotation; symbolic function in Danto  257, 259 in Langer  206 Abstract Expressionism  173 acquaintance principle  96, 104 n.5 actual intentionalism  313–14, 326. See also interpretation: theories of Addison, Joseph  45 Adorno, Theodor W.  3, 5, 6, 115, 191–3, 196–201 advertising  1, 318 Aeschylus  11, 18, 134, 138 aesthetic and non-aesthetic distinction  239–40, 242, 319 aesthetic attitude  104 n.8, 249, 314–15, 318–19 vs. aesthetic discourse  238 and contemplation  48–50 aesthetic contemplation  37, 99–100, 104 n.8. See also contemplation aesthetic experience  6, 289–90, 319 in Beardsley  218–19 in Dewey  172 in Heidegger  187 in Hutcheson  60–4 in Kant  95–6 in Levinson  314–15 in Nietzsche  137–8 in Schopenhauer  129–33 in Shaftesbury  47–8, 55–6 three stages of, in Dewey  170

aestheticism  331. See also art for art’s sake movement; autonomism aesthetic judgment in Batteux  78 in Hutcheson  67–71 in Kant  93–6, 102 kinds of  100–2 nature of  81–3, 174 in Shaftesbury  53–4 in Sibley  238, 239 universality of  68–71, 97–9, 102 aesthetic life  177–80 aesthetic movement in England  155 aesthetic properties  47, 83–4, 90, 102, 145, 219, 241, 284–5, 290, 319–20, 334 n.2 and the identity of musical works  276, 312–13 aesthetics. See also analytic aesthetics; philosophy of art ancient  4 applied/substantive  252 and civilization  172–3 and cognitive science  1, 318, 330 contemporary  317–18 descriptive approach  37 early modern period  4 and empiricism  45, 53, 56 of everyday life  174, 244, 335 n.4 and evolutionary theory  1, 174 feminist  174 history of  2, 3

346 late modern period  4 mathematical approach  35–6, 38, 39 medieval  3, 4, 6, 33–44 mystic approach  37, 38, 40 of nature  78–9, 174, 247, 319, 335 n.4 and neuroscience  174 as philosophical discipline  102 post-1950  3–4, 317 affective engagement  217, 328–30. See also emotions and paradox of fiction  283–4, 301–4, 328–9 and paradox of tragedy  28–9, 75–6, 90–1, 329 affective fallacy  217, 303 Alberti, Leon Battista  7 n.2 Albert the Great  39–40, 42 Alcuin of York  36 Alexander, Thomas  174 Alexander of Hales  39 allographic arts  229, 230 Alperson, Philip  273 Althusser, Louis  294 American Pragmatism  165, 174 analytic aesthetics  1–4, 102, 217, 218, 223, 237. See also analytic revolution analytic philosophy  1, 7 n.1, 218, 301 analytic revolution  174–5 Anderson, James C.  298 n.1, 333 anti-intentionalism  313, 326–7 anti-realism  320 Apelles  120 Apolline and Dionysiac arts  135, 136 appreciation  178–9 Aquinas, Thomas  40–3 architecture  114, 154, 161, 207, 226, 247 12th century “renaissance”  37–8 abstract referentiality  112

Index exemplification  226 as fine art  107, 108, 132–3, 289 and notation  230 pleasure and utility  76–7, 83 primary illusion of, in Langer  211–12 as singular art form  324 temporal dimension  171–2 Arendt, Hannah  191 Ariosto, Ludovico  85 Aristotle  4, 5, 7 n.2, 21–32, 41, 49, 59, 77, 90, 303, 329 art aesthetic theory of  218–21 antiaesthetic  220 Apolline and Dionysiac  135, 136 and astrology  137 cluster account of  322 commonalities and differences between arts  170–2 conception and definitions of  6, 10–11, 18–19, 41, 121, 255–7, 309–10, 321–3 corrupting power of  13, 16, 17, 19, 332, 333 as cultural phenomenon  109 and education  11–13 Egyptian  112 essentialist conception of  158–9, 257–61 external  123–4, 125 family resemblance view of  159, 321–2 functionalist definitions of  309, 310, 323 functions of  110–11 historical definition of  109–10, 187, 258–9, 323 historical functionalist theory of  323 honorific definitions of  322 institutional theory of  142, 309, 322–3

Index and knowledge  5, 13–18, 30, 35, 78, 129, 133–4, 233, 291–3, 331–2 and mind  213–15 “museum” conception of  165–6 nature of  13, 248–9, 256, 257, 260 and nature  5, 170–7, 214, 319 non-representational  226 as “open concept”  321 philosophy of (see philosophy of art) plastic and poetic  209, 211–13 procedural definition of  309, 310, 323 of pure thought  123 romantic  113–15 as significant form  158–60 singular/multiple distinction  324–5, 335 n.7 as social phenomenon  115 art for art’s sake movement  155, 331. See also aestheticism; autonomism art history. See history of art art-horror  297 artistic categories  284–5, 319 artistic expression  226–7 psychological account of  250–1 artistic genres  31, 289, 294, 296, 310, 329, 334 artistic import  207–10, 214–15 artistic value art-critical issue  331–3 epistemic issue  331–2 innate  52–4 and knowledge  331–2 and moral/ethical value  55–6, 332–4 Plato’s critique on  9–10 artists  138, 141, 169–70, 184 declaration of an object as artwork  256

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intention of  248–9 (see also authorial intention) arts and crafts  3, 6, 10 artwork. See work of art artworld  174, 255–9, 322–3 astrology  137 audience  78, 111, 184. See also spectator emotional engagement of (see affective engagement) intended  86–7 participation  296–7 response  9, 19, 22, 25–31, 294–5 Augustine, Saint  34–5, 41, 302 Austin, J. L.  237 authorial intention artists’  248–9 filmmaker’s  294–5 and hypothetical intentionalism  313–14 autographic arts  229, 230 autonomism  191, 291–2, 333. See also aestheticism; art for art’s sake movement Bach, Johann Sebastian Goldberg Variations  276, 313 Baroque art  114 Barthes, Roland  294, 335 n.8 Basil of Caesarea  34 Batteux, Charles  3, 4, 6, 73, 76–9 Baudelaire, Charles  155, 194, 307, 331 Baumgarten, Alexander  2 Bazin, André  266 Beardsley, Elizabeth  217 Beardsley, Monroe  6, 108, 174, 217–22, 237, 290, 292, 303, 317, 321, 323, 326 beauty  6, 319 absolute vs. relative  66–8 as aesthetic property  120 artistic  107 Bolzano’s conception of  117–20

348 and cognition  61–2 dispositional  120 divine/spiritual  33–4, 37–40 formal  39, 49–50, 82, 119, 289–90 free and dependent  101, 103 and goodness  33, 40, 41, 43, 53, 55–6, 82–3 human  82–3 moral  37 natural  43, 45–7, 53, 82–3, 117, 131, 160 natural and artistic  160 non-aesthetic  160 pankalìa  34, 37 and pleasure  33, 40–1, 53–4, 65–6 Pythagorean conception  35 and relation  42 as response-dependent  74 sensory/worldly  33–7, 40 “sensuous charm”  155 as subject-dependent  138 and the sublime  93, 101–2 “supersensual”  155, 160 three degrees/orders of, in Shaftesbury  51–2 and truth  36, 43, 46–7, 132–3 and ugliness  40 and utility  82–3, 85 Wittgenstein on  179 Beethoven, Ludwig van  138, 139, 201 Fifth Symphony  229 behaviorism  179–80 Bell, Clive  5, 6, 153, 158–63, 170, 290, 317 Bell, Vanessa  153 Bellini, Giovanni  114 Bendavid, Lazarus  119 Benjamin, Walter  3, 5, 6, 115, 191–6, 201, 296 Berenson, Bernard  145 Berg, Alban  196

Index Berkeley, George  145 Berleant, Arnold  174, 335 n.4 Berlin Academy of Sciences  79 Bernard of Clairvaux  37 Bernays, Jacob  27 Bible  33–4, 38 Black, Max  237 Bloomsbury Group  153 Boethius  6, 35–6 Bolzano, Bernard  4, 6, 117–27 Bonaventure of Bagnoregio  39, 42 Booth, Wayne  332 Borges, Jorge Luis “Pierre Menard”  230 Bradley, A. C.  306 Brecht, Bertolt  194 Breughel the Elder  157 Brown, Lee  261 Budd, Malcolm  328, 329, 332, 335 nn.4, 11 Bullough, Edward  318 Burgess, Anthony A Clockwork Orange  292 Calcidius  38 Calder, Alexander  321–2 calligraphy  124 Cambridge Platonism  45, 49, 55 Campe, Joachim Heinrich  118 caricature  157 Carlson, Allen  174, 335 n.4 Carolingian Renaissance  36 carpentry  3, 76, 121 Carrier, David  261 Carroll, Noël  5, 6, 31, 261, 289–99, 314–15, 324, 328–30, 333, 335 nn.13–14 Cassirer, Ernst  203 categorial intentions  314 Cathedral of Chartres, school of the  38 Cavell, Stanley  5, 6, 263–70 censorship  9, 11, 122 Cervantes, Miguel de  114

Index Don Quixote  230, 234 Cézanne, Paul  153, 162, 188 character-building. See education: and art characters affective engagement with (see affective engagement) fictional  12, 19, 85, 281–2, 293, 302–3 Shakespearean  114 tragic  25–31 vs. comic  25 and virtue wheel  293 Charlemagne  37, 44 n.1 Chillida, Eduardo  183, 188 Chinese landscape scroll painting  155, 157–8 the chorus  134–6 Christianity  41–2, 113, 221 cinema. See film clarificationism  291–303 clarification theory of katharsis  27–8 classical art  112–13 A Clockwork Orange (film: Kubrick)  292 Cochrane, Tom  311 cognition  318 Benjamin’s and Adorno’s  192–3 vs. contemplation  118–19 cognitive science  1, 318, 328, 330 Cohen, L. Jonathan  301, 319 Cohen, Ted  239–40, 321 Coleridge, Samuel  302 Collingwood, Robin G.  5, 6, 115, 141–52, 290 Colossi of Memnon  112 comedy  17–18, 25, 31, 294, 321, 329. See also humor comic pleasure  25 comics  174, 298, 318 common sense. See also sensus communis account of expression  142–3, 144

349

in Hume  83–4 in Kant  100 Conrad, Joseph  85 constructivism in metaphysics  224 as theory of interpretation  326, 335 n.8 contemplation and aesthetic attitude  48–50 in Aristotle  23 in Bolzano  117–18 in Kant  98–100, 104 n.8 in medieval philosophy  33 passive  149 in Schopenhauer  132 as visio  33 Cooke, Brandon  334 Cooper, D.  335 n.4 created abstract object/created abstracta  312 creative process  169, 171, 211 divine  38 creativity  6, 39, 42 divine  45–7 criterial prefocusing  294–5 criterion, Wittgenstein’s concept of  264–5 critical monism and pluralism  327, 335 n.10 Critical Theory  192 criticism art  6, 73–4, 172, 194, 238, 239 in Dewey  170, 172 ethical  291–2, 332–4 language of art criticism  194–5 literary  303–4 critics (ideal)  85–7, 320 disagreement amongst  89–90 identification of  87–8 judgments of  88–9 Croce, Benedetto  4–6, 141–52, 173 cultural studies  2, 294 culture

350

Index

and art  5, 109 Greek  34, 109, 134 “savage”  166 and taste  83, 86, 89 Currie, Gregory  230, 324, 328–31, 334 n.1, 335 n.12 dance  17, 76, 77, 226, 234, 324 and notation  229 primary illusion of, in Langer  212 Dante Alighieri  6, 43 Danto, Arthur Coleman  5, 6, 115, 174, 255–62, 322 Daumier, Honoré  157 David, Jacques-Louis The Death of Marat  306–7 Davies, David  324, 325 Davies, Stephen  322, 323, 325, 335 n.11 Dean, Jeffrey T.  298 n.1, 333 death “death of God”  138–9 “death of the author”  294, 335 n.8 Defoe, Daniel  118 denotation  225–6, 228, 234 depiction and  232 depiction, and description  279–81 Descartes, René  59, 68, 73–4 design, elements of and emotions  155–6, 159–60 and visual arts  211 Deveraux, Mary  333 Dewey, John  5, 6, 115, 165–75, 317 diagrams  233 Dickens, Charles Hard Times  229 Dickie, George  4, 289, 314, 318–19, 322–3 discursive abstraction  205 discursive symbolization  203–4, 214 disinterestedness  48. See also aesthetic attitude

in Aquinas  41 in Augustine  35, 41 in Eriugena  26 in Kant  4, 98–9, 102, 104 n.8, 131 divine beauty. See spiritual/divine beauty divine creativity  45–7, 52 documentary  154, 295 Dodd, Julian  276, 313 Dominican order/school  39–41, 42 drama. See also comedy; tragedy characters  12 melodrama  31, 294, 328 drawing  148, 149, 154, 155, 157, 282 Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste  3–5, 73–6, 77–9, 328 Ducasse, C. J.  149 Duchamp, Marcel  220 Fountain  256 In Advance of the Broken Arm  322 Duck Amuck (film: Jones)  295 Dutch painting  114 earth, in Heidegger  185, 189 Eastern Empire of Byzantium  36 Eaton, Marcia  319 education and art  11–13 epistemic and art-critical issue  331–4 ethical  291 Eldridge, Richard  331 Elgin, Catherine Z.  230, 232, 234 n.3 Eliot, George  85, 138 emanation, theory of  34 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  181 emotions. See also feeling aesthetic emotion  158–60 and art  5, 15–16, 18 and audience (see affective engagement)

Index betrayal of  146–7 cognitive theory of  273 cognitivist view of  283–4 and design elements  155–6 and experience  154–6, 168 expression  143–4, 146–7, 226–7 and fiction  283–4, 301–4 garden-variety  272–3, 290–1, 302, 311 katharsis  26–9 and literature (see paradox of fiction; paradox of tragedy) and music  12–13, 27, 227, 272–4 negative/painful/unpleasant  5, 27–9, 75–6, 90–1, 311–12, 328–9 projective properties  250–1 empathy  330. See also sympathy empiricism  45, 53, 56, 59–61, 74, 168, 218, 286, 307 end-of-art thesis  259–60 Engels, Friedrich  192–3 Enlightenment Formalism, Carroll’s criticism of  289–90, 298 Environmental Art  173 Eriugena, John Scotus  36, 42, 43 essentialism aesthetic  135–6, 138 and art  257–61 etching  229, 324 ethical criticism  291–2, 332–4 ethicism  333–4 ethics. See also moral goodness; morality and aesthetics  30–1, 55–6 epistemic and art-critical issue  331–4 and innate aesthetic  52–4 Euripides  26 event ontology  183, 184 everyday life aesthetics of  174, 244, 335 n.4 and art  165–6, 173–4

351

emotions in  27, 29–30 paintings of  114 evolutionary biology/theory  1, 174 exemplification  225–6, 228, 234 metaphorical  226–7 experience  124–5 aesthetic (see aesthetic experience) of aesthetic emotion  158–60 art as  170, 205–6 emotional aspects of  154–6 an experience  167–71 experiential thesis  150 nature of  166–7 of pleasure  73–5, 118–20 of shame  55 symbolic transformation of  203–6, 215 through time  157–8 experimentalism  115 expression appearance-of-expression view  310–11 art as  5, 142–4, 146, 150–1, 170–1 artistic  226–7, 250–1 contemporary theories of  234 n.2 imaginative  146 and impulsion  169 musical  5, 12–13, 273–4, 285–6, 310–11 sensuous  109, 112–13 expressive object  169, 170 expressive perception  250–1 Feagin, Susan  329, 330, 335 n.13 fear  23, 25–31, 91, 273, 283–4, 291, 328–9. See also horror feeling. See also emotions Langer on  205–6, 209–10 role of  147–8, 150–1 feminist philosophy  174 and pornography  320–1

352 fiction  123. See also make-believe affective engagement  328–30 generic fiction  296–7, 298 n.2 modern  107, 114 and morality  331 narrative  21, 291–303 paradox of  283–4, 301–4, 328–9 thought theory  301–4, 328 fictional truth, general theory of  280 film  191 as art  295–6 film studies  293–4 genres of  31 as multiple art form  324 philosophy of  263–4, 293–6, 317–18 film theory  2, 293, 318 fine arts  3, 7 n.3, 9, 10. See also free art (freie Kunst) and applied arts  167 Carroll on  289–90 classification of  6, 76, 107–8, 121–5, 132–3 definition of  121–3 and imitation  73–5, 76, 78–9 and pleasure  76–7 Fish, Stanley  326 Flemish painting  114 forgery  229 form art as  158–63 and the beautiful  38–40, 42–3, 49–50 and content  157, 161, 301, 306 Dewey’s analysis of  169–70 knowledge of  14–15 living form  211–12 and matter/material  49–50, 56, 186 musical  207–8 pure  162–3 significant form  158–60 in work of art  13–15

Index formalism and anti-intentionalism  326 Enlightenment Formalism  289– 90, 298 literature  275 music  271–2, 310 form of finality  99–101, 103 Foucault, Michel  294 found objects  321. See also readymades Franciscan order/school  38–9, 42 Francis of Assisi, Saint  38 free art (freie Kunst)  108–9 Freeland, Cynthia  297 free play of understanding and imagination  96, 99 French aesthetics  73, 78–9. See also Batteux, Charles; Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste Freud, Sigmund  192 Frith, William Powell  159 Fry, Roger Eliot  5, 6, 153–8, 160–2, 170, 317 Gaut, Berys  319, 322, 332–4 Gendler, Tamar Szabó  336 n.14 The General (film: Keaton)  294 genius  132, 138, 141 and aesthetic ideas  99–100 individual artistic genius  141 George, Stefan  188 German Idealism  192 German Romanticism  192, 194 Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie  107 Giotto  114 Giovannelli, Alessandro  234 n.7, 330, 333–4 Glaucon  14 God. See also divine creativity; spiritual/divine beauty “death of God”  138–9 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  138, 194 Goldie, Peter  335 n.6

Index Goldman, Alan  319, 320 Gombrich, Ernst  158 Goodman, Henry Nelson  5, 6, 154, 174, 223–35, 335 n.7 Grant, Duncan  153 graphic arts  154–6, 196. See also drawing; painting Grice, H. P.  237 Grosseteste, Robert  39 guernicas  285 Guyer, Paul  269 Halliwell, Stephen  27 Handel, George Frideric  275 Hannibal (film: Scott)  297 Hanson, Karen  333 Happenings  173 harmony and beauty  34–7, 39, 119 of faculties  98 Hatten, Robert  311 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  2, 4–6, 107–16, 173, 186–7, 192, 201, 261 Heidegger, Martin  3, 6, 183–90 Hesiod  11 Hirsch, E. D.  326 history of aesthetics  2, 3 history of art  5, 111, 115, 162 end-of-art thesis  259–61 Hegelian conception of  261 historicist account of  258–60 phases of  112–14, 259–60 Hitler, Adolf  194 Hölderlin, Friedrich  183, 188, 189, 192, 194 Home, Henry  120 Homer  15, 16, 18, 109, 114 Iliad and Odyssey  11 Horace  77, 122, 331 Horkheimer, Max  192 horror  75, 91, 142–4, 291. See also emotions art-horror  297

353

and audience participation  290– 2, 297 genre of  31, 289, 294, 297, 329 and music  133 paradox of  91, 297 Hotho, H. G.  107 Hugh of Saint Victor  37, 45 Hume, David  4, 5, 7 n.2, 62, 74–6, 79, 81–92, 102–3, 108, 109, 147, 149–50, 168, 328 humor. See also comedy as genre  289 and jokes  321 objective, in Hegel  114 philosophy of  315, 321 Hutcheson, Francis  4, 45, 59–71, 82, 108, 109 hypothetical intentionalism  313– 14, 327 iconoclasts and iconophiles  5, 37, 115 ideality  144–6, 149–50 identification  31, 329–30 of audience with artwork  111 imagination  39, 219 imaginative projection  330 and understanding  95–6 imaginative life  153–6, 160 imaginative resistance, puzzle of  30–1, 283–4, 335 n.14 imitation  15, 22, 23, 211. See also mimēsis of nature  73–9 and painting  73, 76, 77, 154, 162–3 impulsion, in Dewey  169 indiscernibles, method of  255–7 Installation Art  173 institutional theory of art  142, 309, 322–3 intentional fallacy  217–18 intentionalism actual  313–14, 326

354 anti-intentionalism  313, 326–7 hypothetical  313–14, 327 semantic vs. categorical intentions  314 interpretation anachronistic  327, 335 n.9 “death of the author”  294, 335 n.8 nature and role of  6 theories of  313–14, 325–6 intuition  118, 143, 145–6 inwardness, depiction of  113–14 Iseminger, Gary  315, 326 Isenberg, Arnold  237 Italian Renaissance, painting  114, 280 It Happened One Night (film: Capra)  267–8 Jacobson, Daniel  333 James, William  165, 177 Janaway, Christopher  104 n.4 jazz  174 Johns, Jasper  255 judgment aesthetic (see aesthetic judgment) cognitive  94–6, 102, 118–19 critical  172 factual  84 moral/ethical  46, 53–4 power of  64–6, 94 reflective  93, 94, 103 n.1 by sentiments  73–5 of taste  56, 64–5, 101, 108–9, 131–2 junk fiction  296–7 justification in Nietzsche  133–7 in Sibley  240–3 Kakfa, Franz  194 Kamber, Richard  322 Kant, Immanuel  2, 4–6, 45, 62, 79, 93–105, 108, 109, 130, 147, 177, 192, 290, 317

Index katharsis  21, 30 and tragedy  25–9, 91 Keller, Gottfried  194 Kelly, Michael  261 Keynes, John Maynard  153 Kieran, Matthew  320, 328, 330, 332, 334 n.1, 335 n.10 Kivy, Peter  6, 234 n.2, 239–40, 271–8, 325 Klee, Paul  183, 188 Knapp, Steven  326 Knight, Deborah  298 n.2 knowledge acquisition of  18, 332 and aesthetic experience  130–1 and art  5, 13–15, 78, 133–4, 331–2 and clarificationism  292–3 intuitive and conceptual  143 Knox, T. M.  107 Korsmeyer, Carolyn  321 Krausz, Michael  326 Kristeller, Paul Oskar  7 n.3, 76 labels  225–7, 233–4 Lacan, Jacques  294 The Lady Eve (film: Sturges)  268 Lamarque, Peter  5, 292, 301–8, 333 Langer, Susanne  3–6, 203–16 language art as  197 of art criticism  194–5, 238, 239 as expression  148–9 Goodman’s views on  225 medium  22 of music  199–200 and notation  228–9 philosophy of  204–5, 238 as poetry  148, 149 of poetry  188–9 role of criteria in  264–5 Leddy, Thomas  321, 335 n.4 Leonardo da Vinci Mona Lisa  232–3

Index Levinson, Jerrold  5, 6, 234 nn.2, 6, 276, 285–6, 309–16, 320, 323, 324, 328, 335 n.11 Lichtenstein, Roy  255 light and experience  155–6 expression of  112 medieval theories  34, 39, 40 literary theory  2, 318 literature  36, 107, 115, 156, 196 interpretation theories  313–14 and morality  331–2 as multiple art form  324 and notation  230 philosophy of  301, 317–18 primary illusion of, in Langer  212–13 propositional theory of  275 pulp  318 role in emotional form of learning  335 n.13 and value  304–6 Livingston, Paisley  326 Locke, John  45, 49, 59, 61, 62, 66–7, 74, 82, 120, 145, 147, 168 love  43 Lukács, Gyorgy  115 McCloskey, Mary A.  104 n.7 MacDonald, Margaret  237 Machiavelli  89 McLuhan, Marshall  296 Mahler, Gustav  201 make-believe  279–81, 283–4, 302, 328. See also fiction content-oriented and proporiented  281–2 Marat, Jean-Paul  306–7 Margolis, Joseph  174, 326 Marx, Karl  173, 192–3 Masaccio  224 mass art  3, 296–7, 318 Matisse, Henri  162 Meager, Ruby  238–40

355

meaning  203, 210 and exemplification  226 levels of  327 “secondary”  252 mediality  195–6 media theory  195 medium  169–71 of fine arts  77, 108, 109 of language  22 medium-specificity argument  295–6 verbal and visual  279 melodrama genre of  31, 294, 329 “the melodrama of the unknown woman”  268–9 Melville, Herman  85 mental faculties  99–100, 103 and aesthetic experience  95–6 general  94 mental simulation  330 merit artistic  224, 233–4, 333 transformative  332 metacriticism  218 metaphor and aesthetic justification  242 and exemplification  226–7 metaphorical denotation  234 and mimēsis  24 and prop-oriented makebelieve  281 metaphysics and conception of beauty  34, 39 of light  39 Schopenhauer’s  129–33, 135, 137, 139 metaresponse  329 Michaels, Walter Benn  326 Michelangelo David  276 Michelson, Annette  289 Midas, King  134 Mikkola, Mari  321

356 Mill, John Stuart  89 Milton, John  74–5, 84 mimēsis  9, 10 and art  17–18 concept of  22–3 and creativity  46–7 expression as a kind of  12–13 origin of  23 mind  61, 62, 94 and art  213–15 nature of  59 philosophy of  142, 146–8, 238 modern art  107–10, 113–15 modern fiction  114 modernism  115 modern painting  113–15 modern poetry  114 Molière  77 Mondrian, Piet Compositions  146 Monsters Inc. (film)  297 Monteverdi, Claudio  274, 275 Moore, G. E.  177 moral/ethical judgment  46, 53–4 moral goodness  46, 53, 55–6, 82–3, 89, 331 moralism  291–2, 333–4 moderate moralism  292, 293, 334 morality  101, 102, 291, 331–2. See also ethics and appreciation of art  155 and transcendent beauty  45–8 Moran, Richard  336 n.14 morpho-chromatic works  124 Morreall, John  321 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  139 Requiem  228 multiple arts  231, 232, 324–5, 335 n.7 Munch, Edvard The Scream  142–4, 146, 148, 149, 228 Murdoch, Iris  303 music  6, 115, 163, 196, 243

Index aesthetics of  199–201 of the chorus  134–6 contour theory  273–4 cosmic  35–6 and emotions  12–13, 27, 227, 272–4 and exemplification  226, 227 expressiveness of  12–13, 285–6, 310–11 as fine art  10, 107, 108 and graphic art  154 “great divide” hypothesis  276–7 “hypothesis game”  272 as imitative art  76, 77, 79 and inwardness  113, 114 language of  199–200 as multiple art form  324 notation  228–9 and other arts  133, 135 paradigmatic role of  206–7 as performing art  325 philosophy of  271, 310–12 pure  271–2, 310 and unity  155 and worldmaking  234 mystery, as genre  31, 296 Nathan, Daniel  326 natural beauty  45–7, 52–3 nature  335 n.4 19th century conception of  45 appreciation of  2–3, 5, 174, 247, 335 n.4 and art  5, 43, 78–9, 247, 319 belle nature  77–8 imitation of  73–5, 78–9 and mimēsis  47 subjectification of  214 and ugliness  156 Neacles  121 Nehamas, Alexander  28 Neoplatonic philosophy  34, 36, 40, 43, 46, 49. See also Plato; Platonism New Criticism  217–18, 326

Index New York School  257 Nietzsche, Friedrich  4–6, 129, 133–40, 183, 192 nominalism  234 n.5 non-artistic aesthetics  5, 244 notation  228–30, 324 musical  229 Novalis  192 novel  1, 21, 91, 108, 118, 230, 279, 280, 292, 293, 296, 297, 302, 321, 324, 325 Now Voyager (film: Rapper)  269 Nussbaum, Martha  27–8, 331, 335 n.13 objectivism  35, 42, 53–4, 81–4, 251 objectivity  81, 237, 239–43 Oedipus  135, 136 Ogilby, John  74–5, 84 Olsen, Stein Haugom  292 Omega Workshops  154 ontology of aesthetic properties  319–20 of art  228–9, 248–9, 323–5 event ontology  183, 184 of musical works  276–7, 312–13 opera  134, 137, 324 problem of opera  275 optical arts  124–5 organicism  173 Osborne, Harold  237 painting  196 as Apolline art  135 copy of  229, 234 n.3 experience of  75, 155 as fine art  107 ideality of  144–5, 149–50 as imitative art  73, 76, 77, 154, 162–3 individual vs. general style  252 inwardness in  113–14 as knowledge source  14–15 modern  113–14, 115 nature and value of  154

357

as “open concept”  321 palaeolithic cave paintings  307 and photography  162, 282 primary illusion of, in Langer  211 and psychology  157–8 referential function of  227 significant form  159 as singular art  324 Palmer, Stephen  334 n.1 pankalìa  34, 37 Panofsky, Erwin  115 paradox of fiction  283–4, 301–4, 328–9 paradox of tragedy  28–9, 75–6, 90–1, 329 Parsons, Glenn  335 n.4 Passmore, J. A.  174 Patristic school  33–5 Paul, George  237 Paul, Jean  115 Peirce, Charles Sanders  165 Pepper, Stephen  173 perception  147, 219 aesthetic  42, 45–6, 52–3, 57 n.1, 171 aesthetic vs. pragmatic  48–50 Benjamin’s views on  195–6 Dewey’s theory of  167 expressive  250–1 internal  64–5 moral  53–4 of pleasure  60–1 pleasure in  61–4 sensory  49–50, 52–3, 61–2, 123–5, 243–4 visual  42 perceptual faculties  49 performing arts  233, 234 music as  325 persona, and musical expressiveness  311 Phidias  109 philosophy analytic  1, 7 n.1, 218, 301

358 continental  3 Frankfurt School  191–2 Greek  33 (see also Aristotle; Plato) medieval  69–70 Neoplatonic  34, 36, 40, 43, 46, 49 Wittgenstein  177–8, 180–2 philosophy of art  107–9. See also aesthetics and aesthetics  2–3 Carroll’s  290, 297–8, 326 Danto’s  255 Kant’s  45 Langer’s  209–13 Wollheim’s  247 philosophy of film  263–4, 293–4, 317–18 Grand Theory  294 mid-level theorizing  294–5 philosophy of language  204–5, 238 philosophy of literature  317–18 Lamarque’s  301 philosophy of mind Croce’s and Collingwood’s  142, 146–8 Sibley’s  238 philosophy of music Kivy’s  271 Levinson’s  310–12 photography  6, 191, 324 automatism  266–7 and painting  162, 282 singular/multiple art distinction  324 “transparent pictures”  282–3 Picasso, Pablo  224, 227, 234 n.3, 285 pictorial representation  231–3, 279–80 psychological account of  249– 50, 252 pity  291, 302, 328. See also sympathy

Index and admiration  329 and fear  23, 25–31, 301, 329 Plan 9 from Outer Space (film: Wood)  314 plastic arts  209, 211–12 Plato  4–7 n.2, 9–20, 38, 45, 49, 51, 56, 77, 90, 130, 154, 292, 302. See also Neoplatonic philosophy; Platonism Platonism  47, 56, 65, 70. See also Neoplatonic philosophy; Plato artistic creativity  46 and Kivy  276 ontology of musical works  312, 313 pleasure aesthetic  9–10, 18–19, 33, 40–1, 48–9, 98–9, 102, 117–18, 132, 320 and art  16–17 comic  25 and disinterestedness  98–9, 102 and fine arts  76–7 harmful  17 in mimēsis  23–4 and music  199 in perception  61–4 sensation of  60–1, 93–4, 97–8 sensory  48–50, 320 subjective  73–5 of tragedy  29–30 Plotinus  45, 49, 55 poetry  6 Aristotle’s account of  21–2 authorship  230 censorship of  122 dramatic  107, 113, 114 epic  25, 107, 109, 114, 135 as fine art  76 harmful  11–12, 13–15 Heidegger’s characterization of  188–9 and language  148, 149

Index lyric  107, 113, 114, 135 and mimēsis/imitation  18, 22–3, 77 and morality  332 pastoral  78 Plato on  9–11 and pleasure  16, 17 primary illusion of, in Langer  212–13 symbolic function of  226 Pollock, Jackson Lavender Mist  257 Pop Art  173, 256 pornography and erotic art  85, 320–1 post-impressionism  153–4, 162 post-modernism  115 post-structuralism  263, 294 Poussin, Nicholas  157 Praxiteles  109 pre-art  112 predicates, projection of  223–4 presentational abstraction  205 presentational symbolization  203– 4, 205–6, 210, 214 primary illusions  210–13 proportion, and beauty  34, 35, 39–41, 46, 119 Proust, Marcel  194 Pseudo-Dionysius  34, 40 psychoanalysis  263 psychology  109 of aesthetic judgment  93, 96–8 and expression  143–4, 250–1 and intention  248 and literary criticism  304 and meaning of painting  252 and pictorial representation  249–50 and representation  161 and visual arts  157–8 purgation theory of katharsis  27 purposiveness without purpose  99, 103

359

Putnam, Hilary  234 n.1 Radford, Colin  302, 328 radio  194, 196 Raphael  148 Rationalism  59, 73–4 Rauschenberg, Robert  255 Ravenscroft, Ian  328, 335 n.12 ready-mades  220, 321, 322 realism  5, 240 of aesthetic properties  319–20 and aesthetic value  251 and anti-realism  320 photographic  282 in pictorial representation  224, 231–2 of representation  154, 162–3 reality and art  5, 14, 137–8, 150 and belle nature  77 in medieval philosophy  36–7 in photography  266–7 and predicates  223–4 Red Dragon (film: Ratner)  297 reference, modes of  225–7 relativism and aesthetic value  74–5, 81, 251 and beauty  40, 46 religion and art  155 paintings  113–14 ritual  3, 26, 108, 112, 203–6, 208 symbolization  203–4 religious art  112–13 Rembrandt  158 representation  23, 67. See also mimēsis of the divine  36–7 dramatic  12 form and rhythm  169–70 Goodman’s theory of  231–3 irrelevance of  153, 161–3 pictorial  231–3, 279–80

360 realism in  154, 162–3, 224, 231 relevance of  156–8, 161 Walton’s theory of  279–80 and will  129–30, 135 representational arts  279–81 and morality  331–2 reproductions  229, 234 n.3 resemblance  159 between idea and object  66–7 and depiction  231 resemblance theory of musical expressiveness  273, 310–11 Richard of Saint Victor  37 Robinson, Jenefer  311 romantic comedies  297 “comedy of remarriage”  267–9 Romanticism  303–4 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano  173 Rorty, Richard  174, 326 Rothko, Mark  162 Russell, Bertrand  147 Ryle, Gilbert  237 the sacred, in Hegel  112–13 sacred images  36–7 Saito, Yuriko  174, 321, 335 n.4 Salieri, Antonio  84 Sanmartino, Giuseppe Veiled Christ  304 Saussure, Ferdinand de  294 Schapiro, Meyer  188 Scheffler, Israel  234 n.1 Schellekens, Elisabeth  335 n.6 Schiller, Friedrich  192 Schlegel, Friedrich  192, 193 Scholasticism  38–43 Scholem, Gershom  191, 194 Schönberg, Arnold  200, 201 Schopenhauer, Arthur  4–6, 129–33, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 317 Scotus, John Duns  42, 43 Scriven, Michael  238

Index scroll painting  155, 157–8 Scruton, Roger  243 sculpture  13, 53, 135, 188, 205 and earthy element  185–6 as fine art  10, 73, 76, 77, 107 Greek  109, 112–13 object and work distinction  304 ontology of  276 primary illusion of, in Langer  211–12 and rhythm  170 as singular art  324 Searle, John  302 seeing-as/seeing-in  249–50 self-understanding  112, 113, 115, 138 semantic intentions  314 sensory/worldly beauty  33, 36, 37 and absolute beauty  40 as “appearance”  35 and proportion  35, 40 and spiritual beauty  34, 37, 40 sensus communis  97–8 sentiment aesthetic  41, 285 beauty as  81–4 delicate  87 judgment by  73–5 unpleasant  75–6 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of  4, 6, 45–58 Shakespeare, William  85, 114 Hamlet  325 King Lear  269 Romeo and Juliet  281 Shimamura, Arthur  334 n.1 The Shining (film: Kubrick)  297 Shoah (film: Lanzmann)  295 Shusterman, Richard  174 Sibley, Frank  5, 6, 237–46, 319 The Silence of the Lambs (film: Demme)  297 skepticism 

Index and Cavell  263–5 and Shaftesbury  54–5 solipsistic  266–9 Smith, Murray  330 Socrates  15, 114 somaesthetics  174 Sophocles  114, 187 spectator. See also audience aim of  248–9 and Apolline/Dionysiac arts  135–7 and tragedy  24, 27, 29, 30, 135 spiritual/divine beauty  33–4, 37–40 Stamitz, Karl  312–13 Stecker, Robert  323, 327, 335 n.10 Stendhal  138 Sterne, Laurence  114 Steuermann, Eduard  196 Stock, Kathleen  326 Stolnitz, Jerome  318 Strachey, Lytton  153 structuralism  294 style artistic  227, 252, 285–6 Dolce Stil Novo  43 giving style to one’s character  139 Styron, William Sophie’s Choice  332 subjectivism  81, 83–4 Du Bos’  73–5, 78 Wollheim’s  251–2 sublime  45–6, 75–6, 93, 101–2, 104 n.7, 120, 125 subservient art (dienende Kunst)  108 suffering  29, 131, 134–6, 329 Sulzer, Johann Georg  119 supervenience  240 suspense  31, 91, 289, 294, 329 symbolic art  112 symbolic function  225–6, 233 symbolism Goodman’s  224–5, 233

361

Langer’s  203–6, 213–15 symbol systems  228–30 sympathy  31, 219, 291, 330, 333. See also pity Tanner, Michael  238 taste and aesthetic experience  319 definition of  94 delicacy of  87 judgments of  56, 64–5, 78, 108–9, 131–2 pure and impure judgments of  101 standard of  74–5, 83–6, 89–90 superior  88, 89 technē  10 technology  35, 188 Tempier, Étienne  42 Teniers, David  114 Terrasson, Jean  74 textualism  230, 294 textual/word-sequence meaning  327 theatre  1, 22, 30, 153, 154, 194, 196, 279, 324. See also tragedy and notation  229 Thomasson, Amie  312 thought theory  301–4, 328. See also paradox of fiction timbral sonicism  276 time  171–2 and value of artworks  306–7 Tolstoy, Leo  143, 219 Anna Karenina  302 War and Peace  280 Tomas, Vincent  238 tragedy  5, 12, 18, 21, 156. See also theatre birth of  134–5 definition of  25, 27–8 and katharsis  26–9 and mimēsis  24–6 in Nietzsche  135–7

362

Index

as “open concept”  321 paradox of  28–30, 75–6, 90–1, 329 Trakl, Georg  188 transcendent beauty  40, 45–8, 50 truth and art  186–8, 331–2 and beauty  36, 43, 46–7, 132–3 no-truth theory  292, 305 universal truth  65 Turner, Joseph Mallord William Snowstorm at Sea  280 ugliness  40, 93, 103, 119, 243, 319 Ulrich of Strasbourg  40 Un Chien Andalou (film: Buñuel and Dali)  295 understanding  61–2, 94, 233 emotional  29–30 and imagination  96, 99 moral/ethical  292–3 uniformity  67–9, 81 unity  171, 219 amidst variety  82, 155, 160 and beauty  68 of form and content  301, 306 organic  156–8 universality of aesthetic judgments  68–71, 97–9, 102 Urmson, J. O.  238 utility  82–3, 85 utterance, meaning of  327 value  90, 153, 218–19 aesthetic  74–5, 81, 251–2 artistic  9–10, 55–6, 331–4 cognitive  193, 233 expressive  150–1 of graphic arts  154–5 interpretation-centered  327 intrinsic  17, 63, 159, 304 literary  304–6 plastic  157–8, 162 psychological  157–8 and time  306–7

Van Eyck, Jan  114 Van Gogh, Vincent  211 Shoes  187–8 Velazquez, Diego Las Meninas  227 Vico, Giambattista  151 n.1 visual arts  10, 125, 135, 157, 188 1950s and 1960s movements  173 and aesthetic emotions  160 descriptive element  161–2 primary illusion of, in Langer  211 and representation  161–2 and significant form  158–60 Vitruvius  7 n.2 Wagner, Richard  134, 137–9 Walton, Kendall L.  5, 6, 279–87, 302, 314, 319, 328, 335 nn.12, 14 Warhol, Andy  255, 261 Brillo Box  256–60 Empire  295 Wartofsky, Marx  174 Weitz, Morris  321, 322 Wilde, Oscar  155, 331 will and aesthetic experience  131–2 in mental activity  147 and representation  129–30, 135 William of Auvergne  38–9 William of Ockham  42–3 Wimsatt, W. K.  217–18, 303, 326 Witelo  42 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  3, 57 n.3, 159, 177–82, 206, 237, 249, 264–5, 321 Wollheim, Richard Arthur  5, 158, 247–53, 280, 310, 319, 327, 335 n.7 Wolterstorff, Nicholas  335 n.7 Woolf, Leonard  153 Woolf, Virginia  153 Wordsworth, William  169

Index work of art  132 aboutness  257, 259 as artifact  323–4 category of work  314 experience of, in Dubos  73–5 extra-stylistic, post-stylistic, and pre-stylistic  252 Heidegger on  184–6 history of production  248 as ideal object  144–6 Langer on  209–13 manifest/non-manifest properties of  255–7, 284 multiple forms of  231, 232, 324–5, 335 n.7

363

properties of  85–6 ready-mades  220, 321, 322 singularity of  47, 193–6, 231, 232, 324 and time  306–7 world and earth  184–5, 189 as God’s work of art  6 worldly beauty (see sensory/ worldly beauty) worldmaking  224, 233–4 Zangwill, Nick  320, 335 n.5 Ziff, Paul  237 Zoroastrians  112

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