more broadly as that together with the philosophy of art. The
traditional interest in beauty itself broadened, in the eighteenth
century, to include the sublime, and since 1950 or so the number of
pure aesthetic concepts discussed in the literature has expanded even
more. Traditionally, the philosophy of art concentrated on its
definition, but recently this has not been the focus, with careful
analyses of aspects of art largely replacing it. Philosophical
aesthetics is here considered to center on these latter-day
developments. Thus, after a survey of ideas about beauty and related
concepts, questions about the value of aesthetic experience and the
variety of aesthetic attitudes will be addressed, before turning to
matters which separate art from pure aesthetics, notably the presence
of intention. That will lead to a survey of some of the main
definitions of art which have been proposed, together with an account
of the recent "de-definition" period. The concepts of expression,
representation, and the nature of art objects will then be covered.
1. Introduction
The full field of what might be called "aesthetics" is a very large
one. There is even now a four-volume encyclopedia devoted to the full
range of possible topics. The core issues in Philosophical Aesthetics,
however, are nowadays fairly settled (see the book edited by Dickie,
Sclafani, and Roblin, and the monograph by Sheppard, among many
others).
Aesthetics in this central sense has been said to start in the early
eighteenth century, with the series of articles on "The Pleasures of
the Imagination" which the journalist Joseph Addison wrote in the
early issues of the magazine The Spectator in 1712. Before this time,
thoughts by notable figures made some forays into this ground, for
instance in the formulation of general theories of proportion and
harmony, detailed most specifically in architecture and music. But the
full development of extended, philosophical reflection on Aesthetics
did not begin to emerge until the widening of leisure activities in
the eighteenth century.
By far the most thoroughgoing and influential of the early theorists
was Immanuel Kant, towards the end of the eighteenth century.
Therefore it is important, first of all, to have some sense of how
Kant approached the subject. Criticisms of his ideas, and alternatives
to them, will be presented later in this entry, but through him we can
meet some of the key concepts in the subject by way of introduction.
Kant is sometimes thought of as a formalist in art theory; that is to
say, someone who thinks the content of a work of art is not of
aesthetic interest. But this is only part of the story. Certainly he
was a formalist about the pure enjoyment of nature, but for Kant most
of the arts were impure, because they involved a "concept." Even the
enjoyment of parts of nature was impure, namely when a concept was
involved— as when we admire the perfection of an animal body or a
human torso. But our enjoyment of, for instance, the arbitrary
abstract patterns in some foliage, or a color field (as with wild
poppies, or a sunset) was, according to Kant, absent of such concepts;
in such cases, the cognitive powers were in free play. By design, art
may sometimes obtain the appearance of this freedom: it was then "Fine
Art"—but for Kant not all art had this quality.
In all, Kant's theory of pure beauty had four aspects: its freedom
from concepts, its objectivity, the disinterest of the spectator, and
its obligatoriness. By "concept," Kant meant "end," or "purpose," that
is, what the cognitive powers of human understanding and imagination
judge applies to an object, such as with "it is a pebble," to take an
instance. But when no definite concept is involved, as with the
scattered pebbles on a beach, the cognitive powers are held to be in
free play; and it is when this play is harmonious that there is the
experience of pure beauty. There is also objectivity and universality
in the judgment then, according to Kant, since the cognitive powers
are common to all who can judge that the individual objects are
pebbles. These powers function alike whether they come to such a
definite judgment or are left suspended in free play, as when
appreciating the pattern along the shoreline. This was not the basis
on which the apprehension of pure beauty was obligatory, however.
According to Kant, that derived from the selflessness of such an
apprehension, what was called in the eighteenth century its
"disinterest." This arises because pure beauty does not gratify us
sensuously; nor does it induce any desire to possess the object. It
"pleases," certainly, but in a distinctive intellectual way. Pure
beauty, in other words, simply holds our mind's attention: we have no
further concern than contemplating the object itself. Perceiving the
object in such cases is an end in itself; it is not a means to a
further end, and is enjoyed for its own sake alone.
It is because Morality requires we rise above ourselves that such an
exercise in selfless attention becomes obligatory. Judgments of pure
beauty, being selfless, initiate one into the moral point of view.
"Beauty is a symbol of Morality," and "The enjoyment of nature is the
mark of a good soul" are key sayings of Kant. The shared enjoyment of
a sunset or a beach shows there is harmony between us all, and the
world.
Among these ideas, the notion of "disinterest" has had much the widest
currency. Indeed, Kant took it from eighteenth century theorists
before him, such as the moral philosopher, Lord Shaftesbury, and it
has attracted much attention since: recently by the French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu, for instance. Clearly, in this context
"disinterested" does not mean "uninterested," and paradoxically it is
closest to what we now call our "interests," that is, such things as
hobbies, travel, and sport, as we shall see below. But in earlier
centuries, one's "interest" was what was to one's advantage, that is,
it was "self-interest," and so it was the negation of that which
closely related aesthetics to ethics.
2. Aesthetic Concepts
The eighteenth century was a surprisingly peaceful time, but this
turned out to be the lull before the storm, since out of its orderly
classicism there developed a wild romanticism in art and literature,
and even revolution in politics. The aesthetic concept which came to
be more appreciated in this period was associated with this, namely
sublimity, which Edmund Burke theorized about in his "A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful."
The sublime was connected more with pain than pure pleasure, according
to Burke, since threats to self-preservation were involved, as on the
high seas, and lonely moors, with the devilish humans and dramatic
passions that artists and writers were about to portray. But in these
circumstances, of course, it is still "delightful horror," as Burke
appreciated, since one is insulated by the fictionality of the work in
question from any real danger.
"Sublime" and "beautiful" are only two amongst the many terms which
may be used to describe our aesthetic experiences. Clearly there are
"ridiculous" and "ugly," for a start, as well. But the more
discriminating will have no difficulty also finding something maybe
"fine," or "lovely" rather than "awful" or "hideous," and "exquisite"
or "superb" rather than "gross" or "foul." Frank Sibley wrote a
notable series of articles, starting in 1959, defending a view of
aesthetic concepts as a whole. He said that they were not rule- or
condition-governed, but required a heightened form of perception,
which one might call taste, sensitivity, or judgment. His full
analysis, however, contained another aspect, since he was not only
concerned with the sorts of concepts mentioned above, but also with a
set of others which had a rather different character. For one can
describe works of art, often enough, in terms which relate primarily
to the emotional and mental life of human beings. One can call them
"joyful," "melancholy," "serene," "witty," "vulgar," and "humble," for
instance. These are evidently not purely aesthetic terms, because of
their further uses, but they are still very relevant to many aesthetic
experiences.
Sibley's claim about these concepts was that there were no sufficient
conditions for their application. For many concepts—sometimes called
"closed" concepts, as a result—both necessary and sufficient
conditions for their application can be given. To be a bachelor, for
instance, it is necessary to be male and unmarried, though of
marriageable age, and together these three conditions are sufficient.
For other concepts, however, the so-called "open" ones, no such
definitions can be given— although for aesthetic concepts Sibley
pointed out there were still some necessary conditions, since certain
facts can rule out the application of, for example, "garish," "gaudy,"
or "flamboyant."
The question therefore arises: how do we make aesthetic judgments if
not by checking sufficient conditions? Sibley's account was that, when
the concepts were not purely perceptual they were mostly metaphoric.
Thus, we call artworks "dynamic," or "sad," as before, by comparison
with the behaviors of humans with those qualities. Other theorists,
such as Rudolph Arnheim and Roger Scruton, have held similar views.
Scruton, in fact, discriminated eight types of aesthetic concept, and
we shall look at some of the others below.
3. Aesthetic Value
We have noted Kant's views about the objectivity and universality of
judgments of pure beauty, and there are several ways that these
notions have been further defended. There is a famous curve, for
instance, obtained by the nineteenth century psychologist Wilhelm
Wundt, which shows how human arousal is quite generally related to
complexity of stimulus. We are bored by the simple, become sated, even
over-anxious, by the increasingly complex, while in between there is a
region of greatest pleasure. The dimension of complexity is only one
objective measure of worth which has been proposed in this way. Thus
it is now known, for instance, that judgments of facial beauty in
humans are a matter of averageness and symmetry. Traditionally, unity
was taken to be central, notably by Aristotle in connection with
Drama, and when added to complexity it formed a general account of
aesthetic value. Thus Francis Hutcheson, in the eighteenth century,
asserted that "Uniformity in variety always makes an object
beautiful." Monroe Beardsley, more recently, has introduced a third
criterion—intensity—to produce his three "General Canons" of objective
worth. He also detailed some "Special Canons."
Beardsley called the objective criteria within styles of Art "Special
Canons." These were not a matter of something being good of its kind
and so involving perfection of a concept in the sense of Kant. They
involved defeasible "good-making" and "bad-making" features, more in
the manner Hume explained in his major essay in this area, "Of the
Standard of Taste" (1757). To say a work of art had a positive quality
like humor, for instance, was to praise it to some degree, but this
could be offset by other qualities which made the work not good as a
whole. Beardsley defended all of his canons in a much more detailed
way than his eighteenth century predecessor however: through a
lengthy, fine-grained, historical analysis of what critics have
actually appealed to in the evaluation of artworks. Also, he
explicitly made the disclaimer that his canons were the only criteria
of value, by separating these "objective reasons" from what he called
"affective" and "genetic" reasons. These two other sorts of reasons
were to do with audience response, and the originating artist and his
times, respectively, and either "The Affective Fallacy" or "The
Intentional Fallacy," he maintained, was involved if these were
considered. The discrimination enabled Beardsley to focus on the
artwork and its representational relations, if any, to objects in the
public world.
Against Beardsley, over many years, Joseph Margolis maintained a
"Robust Relativism." Thus he wanted to say that "aptness,"
"partiality," and "non-cognitivism" characterize art appreciation,
rather than "truth," "universality," and "knowledge." He defended this
with respect to aesthetic concepts, critical judgments of value, and
literary interpretations in particular, saying, more generally, that
works of art were "culturally emergent entities" not directly
accessible, because of this, to any faculty resembling sense
perception. The main debate over aesthetic value, indeed, concerns
social and political matters, and the seemingly inevitable partiality
of different points of view. The central question concerns whether
there is a privileged class, namely those with aesthetic interests, or
whether their set of interests has no distinguished place, since, from
a sociological perspective, that taste is just one amongst all other
tastes in the democratic economy. The sociologist Arnold Hauser
preferred a non-relativistic point of view, and was prepared to give a
ranking of tastes. High art beat popular art, Hauser said, because of
two things: the significance of its content, and the more creative
nature of its forms. Roger Taylor, by contrast, set out very fully the
"leveller's" point of view, declaring that "Aida" and "The Sound of
Music" have equal value for their respective audiences. He defended
this with a thorough philosophical analysis, rejecting the idea that
there is such a thing as truth corresponding to an external reality,
with the people capable of accessing that truth having some special
value. Instead, according to Taylor, there are just different
conceptual schemes, in which truth is measured merely by coherence
internal to the scheme itself. Janet Wolff looked at this debate more
disinterestedly, in particular studying the details of the opposition
between Kant and Bourdieu.
4. Aesthetic Attitudes
Jerome Stolnitz, in the middle of the last century, was a Kantian, and
promoted the need for a disinterested, objective attitude to art
objects. It is debatable, as we saw before, whether this represents
Kant's total view of art, but the disinterested treatment of art
objects which Stolnitz recommended was very commonly pursued in his
period.
Edward Bullough, writing in 1912, would have called "disinterested
attention" a "distanced" attitude, but he used this latter term to
generate a much fuller and more detailed appreciation of the whole
spectrum of attitudes which might be taken to artworks. The spectrum
stretched from people who "over-distance" to people who
"under-distance." People who over-distance are, for instance, critics
who merely look at the technicalities and craftwork of a production,
missing any emotional involvement with what it is about. Bullough
contrasted this attitude with what he called "under-distancing," where
one might get too gripped by the content. The country yokel who jumps
upon the stage to save the heroine, and the jealous husband who sees
himself as Othello smothering his wife, are missing the fact that the
play is an illusion, a fiction, just make-believe. Bullough thought
there was, instead, an ideal mid-point between his two extremes,
thereby solving his "antinomy of distance" by deciding there should be
the least possible distance without its disappearance.
George Dickie later argued against both "disinterest" and "distance"
in a famous 1964 paper, "The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude." He
argued that we should be able to enjoy all objects of awareness,
whether "pure aesthetic" or moral. In fact, he thought the term
"aesthetic" could be used in all cases, rejecting the idea that there
was some authorized way of using the word just to apply to surface or
formal features— the artwork as a thing in itself. As a result, Dickie
concluded that the aesthetic attitude, when properly understood,
reduced to just close attention to whatever holds one's mind in an
artwork, against the tradition which believed it had a certain
psychological quality, or else involved attention just to certain
objects.
Art is not the only object to draw interest of this pleasurable kind:
hobbies and travel are further examples, and sport yet another, as was
mentioned briefly above. In particular, the broadening of the
aesthetic tradition in recent years has led theorists to give more
attention to sport. David Best, for instance, writing on sport and its
likeness to art, highlighted how close sport is to the purely
aesthetic. But he wanted to limit sport to this, and insisted it had
no relevance to ethics. Best saw art forms as distinguished expressly
by their having the capacity to comment on life situations, and hence
bring in moral considerations. No sport had this further capacity, he
thought, although the enjoyment of many sports may undoubtedly be
aesthetic. But many art forms—perhaps more clearly called
"craft-forms" as a result— also do not comment on life situations
overmuch, for example, décor, abstract painting, and non-narrative
ballet. And there are many sports which are pre-eminently seen in
moral, "character-building" terms, for example, mountaineering, and
the various combat sports (like boxing and wrestling). Perhaps the
resolution comes through noting the division Best himself provides
within sport-forms, between, on the one hand, "task" or
"non-purposive" sports like gymnastics, diving, and synchronized
swimming, which are the ones he claims are aesthetic, and on the other
hand the "achievement," or "purposive' sports, like those combat
sports above. Task sports have less "art" in them, since they are not
as creative as the purposive ones.
5. Intentions
The traditional form of art criticism was biographical and
sociological, taking into account the conceptions of the artist and
the history of the traditions within which the artist worked. But in
the twentieth century a different, more scientific and ahistorical
form of literary criticism grew up in the United States and Britain:
The New Criticism. Like the Russian Formalists and French
Structuralists in the same period, the New Critics regarded what could
be gleaned from the work of art alone as relevant to its assessment,
but their specific position received a much-discussed philosophical
defense by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1946. Beardsley saw
the position as an extension of "The Aesthetic Point of View"; Wimsatt
was a practical critic personally engaged in the new line of approach.
In their essay "The Intentional Fallacy," Wimsatt and Beardsley
claimed "the design or intention of the artist is neither available
nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of
literary art." It was not always available, since it was often
difficult to obtain, but, in any case, it was not appropriately
available, according to them, unless there was evidence for it
internal to the finished work of art. Wimsatt and Beardsley allowed
such forms of evidence for a writer's intentions, but would allow
nothing external to the given text.
This debate over intention in the literary arts has raged with full
force into more recent times. A contemporary of Wimsatt and Beardsley,
E.D. Hirsch, has continued to maintain his "intentionalist" point of
view. Against him, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels have taken up
an ahistorical position. Frank Cioffi, one of the original writers who
wrote a forceful reply to Wimsatt and Beardsley, aligned himself with
neither camp, believing different cases were "best read" sometimes
just as, sometimes other than as, the artist knowingly intended them.
One reason he rejected intention, at times, was because he believed
the artist might be unconscious of the full significance of the
artwork.
A similar debate arises in other art forms besides Literature, for
instance Architecture, Theater, and Music, although it has caused less
professional comment in these arts, occurring more at the practical
level in terms of argument between "purists" and "modernizers."
Purists want to maintain a historical orientation to these art forms,
while modernizers want to make things more available for contemporary
use. The debate also has a more practical aspect in connection with
the visual arts. For it arises in the question of what devalues fakes
and forgeries, and by contrast puts a special value on originality.
There have been several notable frauds perpetrated by forgers of
artworks and their associates. The question is: if the surface
appearance is much the same, what especial value is there in the first
object? Nelson Goodman was inclined to think that one can always
locate a sufficient difference by looking closely at the visual
appearance. But even if one cannot, there remain the different
histories of the original and the copy, and also the different
intentions behind them.
The relevance of such intentions in visual art has entered very
prominently into philosophical discussion. Arthur Danto, in his 1964
discussion of "The Artworld," was concerned with the question of how
the atmosphere of theory can alter how we see artworks. This situation
has arisen in fact with respect to two notable paintings which look
the same, as Timothy Binkley has explained, namely Leonardo's original
"Mona Lisa" and Duchamp's joke about it, called "L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved."
The two works look ostensibly the same, but Duchamp, one needs to
know, had also produced a third work, "L.H.O.O.Q.," which was a
reproduction of the "Mona Lisa," with some graffiti on it: a goatee
and moustache. He was alluding in that work to the possibility that
the sitter for the "Mona Lisa" might have been a young male, given the
stories about Leonardo's homosexuality. With the graffiti removed the
otherwise visually similar works are still different, since Duchamp's
title, and the history of its production, alters what we think about
his piece.
6. Definitions of Art
Up to the "de-definition" period, definitions of art fell broadly into
three types, relating to representation, expression, and form. The
dominance of representation as a central concept in art lasted from
before Plato's time to around the end of the eighteenth century. Of
course, representational art is still to be found to this day, but it
is no longer pre-eminent in the way it once was. Plato first
formulated the idea by saying that art is mimesis, and, for instance,
Bateaux in the eighteenth century followed him, when saying: "Poetry
exists only by imitation. It is the same thing with painting, dance
and music; nothing is real in their works, everything is imagined,
painted, copied, artificial. It is what makes their essential
character as opposed to nature."
In the same century and the following one, with the advent of
Romanticism, the concept of expression became more prominent. Even
around Plato's time, his pupil Aristotle preferred an expression
theory: art as catharsis of the emotions. And Burke, Hutcheson, and
Hume also promoted the idea that what was crucial in art were audience
responses: pleasure in Art was a matter of taste and sentiment. But
the full flowering of the theory of Expression, in the twentieth
century, has shown that this is only one side of the picture.
In the taxonomy of art terms Scruton provided, Response theories
concentrate on affective qualities such as "moving," "exciting,"
"nauseous," "tedious," and so forth. But theories of art may be called
"expression theories" even though they focus on the embodied,
emotional, and mental qualities discussed before, like "joyful,"
"melancholy," "humble," "vulgar," and "intelligent." As we shall see
below, when recent studies of expression are covered in more detail,
it has been writers like John Hospers and O.K. Bouwsma who have
preferred such theories. But there are other types of theory which
might, even more appropriately, be called "expression theories." What
an artist is personally expressing is the focus of self-expression
theories of art, but more universal themes are often expressed by
individuals, and art-historical theories see the artist as merely the
channel for broader social concerns.
R. G. Collingwood in the 1930s took art to be a matter of
self-expression: "By creating for ourselves an imaginary experience or
activity, we express our emotions; and this is what we call art." And
the noteworthy feature of Marx's theory of art, in the nineteenth
century, and those of the many different Marxists who followed him
into the twentieth century, was that they were expression theories in
the "art-Historical" sense. The arts were taken, by people of this
persuasion, to be part of the superstructure of society, whose forms
were determined by the economic base, and so art came to be seen as
expressing, or "reflecting" those material conditions. Social theories
of art, however, need not be based on materialism. One of the major
social theorists of the late nineteenth century was the novelist Leo
Tolstoy, who had a more spiritual point of view. He said: "Art is a
human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means
of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived
through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also
experience them."
Coming into the twentieth century, the main focus shifted towards
abstraction and the appreciation of form. The aesthetic, and the arts
and crafts movements, in the latter part of the nineteenth century
drew people towards the appropriate qualities. The central concepts in
aesthetics are here the pure aesthetic ones mentioned before, like
"graceful," "elegant," "exquisite," "glorious," and "nice." But
formalist qualities, such as organization, unity, and harmony, as well
as variety and complexity, are closely related, as are technical
judgments like "well-made," "skilful," and "professionally written."
The latter might be separated out as the focus of Craft theories of
art, as in the idea of art as "Techne" in ancient Greece, but
Formalist theories commonly focus on all of these qualities, and
"aesthetes" generally find them all of central concern. Eduard
Hanslick was a major late nineteenth century musical formalist; the
Russian Formalists in the early years of the revolution, and the
French Structuralists later, promoted the same interest in Literature.
Clive Bell and Roger Fry, members of the influential Bloomsbury Group
in the first decades of the twentieth century, were the most noted
early promoters of this aspect of Visual art.
Bell's famous "Aesthetic Hypothesis" was: "What quality is shared by
all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? Only one answer seems
possible— significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a
particular way; certain forms and relations of forms, stir our
aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and
colors, these aesthetically moving forms, I call 'Significant Form';
and 'Significant Form' is the one quality common to all works of
visual art." Clement Greenberg, in the years of the Abstract
Expressionists, from the 1940s to the 1970s, also defended a version
of this Formalism.
Abstraction was a major drive in early twentieth century art, but the
later decades largely abandoned the idea of any tight definition of
art. The "de-definition" of art was formulated in academic philosophy
by Morris Weitz, who derived his views from some work of Wittgenstein
on the notion of games. Wittgenstein claimed that there is nothing
which all games have in common, and so the historical development of
them has come about through an analogical process of generation, from
paradigmatic examples merely by way of "family resemblances."
There are, however, ways of providing a kind of definition of art
which respects its open texture. The Institutional definition of art,
formulated by George Dickie, is in this class: "a work of art is an
artefact which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for
appreciation by the artworld." This leaves the content of art open,
since it is left up to museum directors, festival organizers, and so
forth, to decide what is presented. Also, as we saw before, Dickie
left the notion of "appreciation" open, since he allowed that all
aspects of a work of art could be attended to aesthetically. But the
notion of "artefact," too, in this definition is not as restricted as
it might seem, since anything brought into an art space as a candidate
for appreciation becomes thereby "artefactualized," according to
Dickie— and so he allowed as art what are otherwise called (natural)
"Found Objects," and (previously manufactured) "Readymades." Less
emphasis on power brokers was found in Monroe Beardsley's slightly
earlier aesthetic definition of art: "an artwork is something produced
with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy the aesthetic
interest"— where "production" and "aesthetic" have their normal,
restricted content. But this suggests that these two contemporary
definitions, like the others, merely reflect the historical way that
art developed in the associated period. Certainly traditional
objective aesthetic standards, in the earlier twentieth century, have
largely given way to free choices in all manner of things by the
mandarins of the public art world more recently.
7. Expression
Response theories of art were particularly popular during the Logical
Positivist period in philosophy, that is, around the 1920s and 1930s.
Science was then contrasted sharply with Poetry, for instance, the
former being supposedly concerned with our rational mind, the latter
with our irrational emotions. Thus the noted English critic I. A.
Richards tested responses to poems scientifically in an attempt to
judge their value, and unsurprisingly found no uniformity. Out of this
kind of study comes the common idea that "art is all subjective": if
one concentrates on whether people do or do not like a particular work
of art then, naturally, there can easily seem to be no reason to it.
We are now more used to thinking that the emotions are rational,
partly because we now distinguish the cause of an emotion from its
target. If one looks at what emotions are caused by an artwork, not
all of these need target the artwork itself, but instead what is
merely associated with it. So what the subjective approach centrally
overlooks are questions to do with attention, relevance, and
understanding. With those as controlling features we get a basis for
normalizing the expected audience's emotions in connection with the
artwork, and so move away from purely personal judgments such as
"Well, it saddened me" to more universal assessments like "it was
sad."
And with the "it" more focused on the artwork we also start to see the
significance of the objective emotional features it metaphorically
possesses, which were what Embodiment theorists like Hospers settled
on as central. Hospers, following Bouwsma, claimed that the sadness of
some music, for instance, concerns not what is evoked in us, nor any
feeling experienced by the composer, but simply its physiognomic
similarity to humans when sad: "it will be slow not tripping; it will
be low not tinkling. People who are sad move more slowly, and when
they speak they speak softly and low." This was also a point of view
developed at length by the gestalt psychologist Rudolph Arnheim.
The discriminations do not stop there, however. Guy Sircello, against
Hospers, pointed out first that there are two ways emotions may be
embodied in artworks: because of their form (which is what Hospers
chiefly had in mind), and because of their content. Thus, a picture
may be sad not because of its mood or color, but because its subject
matter or topic is pathetic or miserable. That point was only a
prelude, however, to an even more radical criticism of Embodiment
theories by Sircello. For emotion words can also be applied, he said,
on account of the "artistic acts" performed by the artists in
presenting their attitude to their subject. If we look upon an artwork
from this perspective, we are seeing it as a "symptom" in Suzanne
Langer's terms; however, Langer believed one should see it as a
"symbol" holding some meaning which can be communicated to others.
Communication theorists all combine the three elements above, namely
the audience, the artwork, and the artist, but they come in a variety
of stamps. Thus, while Clive Bell and Roger Fry were Formalists, they
were also Communication Theorists. They supposed that an artwork
transmitted "aesthetic emotion" from the artist to the audience on
account of its "significant form." Leo Tolstoi was also a
communication theorist but of almost the opposite sort. What had to be
transmitted, for Tolstoi, was expressly what was excluded by Bell and
(to a lesser extent) Fry, namely the "emotions of life." Tolstoi
wanted art to serve a moral purpose: helping to bind communities
together in their fellowship and common humanity under God. Bell and
Fry saw no such social purpose in art, and related to this difference
were their opposing views regarding the value of aesthetic properties
and pleasure. These were anathema to Tolstoi, who, like Plato, thought
they led to waste; but the "exalted" feelings coming from the
appreciation of pure form were celebrated by Bell and Fry, since their
"metaphysical hypothesis" claimed it put one in touch with "ultimate
reality." Bell said, "What is that which is left when we have stripped
a thing of all sensations, of all its significance as a means? What
but that which philosophers used to call 'the thing in itself' and now
call 'ultimate reality'."
This debate between moralists and aesthetes continues to this day
with, for instance, Noël Carroll supporting a "Moderate Moralism"
while Anderson and Dean support "Moderate Autonomism." Autonomism
wants aesthetic value to be isolated from ethical value, whereas
Moralism sees them as more intimately related.
Communication theorists generally compare art to a form of Language.
Langer was less interested than the above theorists in legislating
what may be communicated, and was instead concerned to discriminate
different art languages, and the differences between art languages
generally and verbal languages. She said, in brief, that art conveyed
emotions of various kinds, while verbal language conveyed thoughts,
which was a point made by Tolstoy too. But Langer spelled out the
matter in far finer detail. Thus, she held that art languages were
"presentational" forms of expression, while verbal languages were
"discursive"— with Poetry, an art form using verbal language,
combining both aspects, of course. Somewhat like Hospers and Bouwsma,
Langer said that art forms presented feelings because they were
"morphologically similar" to them: an artwork, she held, shared the
same form as the feeling it symbolizes. This gave rise to the main
differences between presentational and discursive modes of
communication: verbal languages had a vocabulary, a syntax,
determinate meanings, and the possibility of translation, but none of
these were guaranteed for art languages, according to Langer. Art
languages revealed "what it is like" to experience something— they
created "virtual experiences."
The detailed ways in which this arises with different art forms Langer
explained in her 1953 book Feeling and Form. Scruton followed Langer
in several ways, notably by remarking that the experience of each art
form is sui generis, that is, "each of its own kind." He also spelled
out the characteristics of a symbol in even more detail. Discussions
of questions specific to each art form have been pursued by many other
writers; see, for instance, Dickie, Sclafani, and Roblin, and the
recent book by Gordon Graham.
8. Representation
Like the concept of Expression, the concept of Representation has been
very thoroughly examined since the professionalization of Philosophy
in the twentieth century.
Isn't representation just a matter of copying? If representation could
be understood simply in terms of copying, that would require "the
innocent eye," that is, one which did not incorporate any
interpretation. E. H. Gombrich was the first to point out that modes
of representation are, by contrast, conventional, and therefore have a
cultural, socio-historical base. Thus perspective, which one might
view as merely mechanical, is only a recent way of representing space,
and many photographs distort what we take to be reality— for instance,
those from the ground of tall buildings, which seem to make them
incline inwards at the top.
Goodman, too, recognized that depiction was conventional; he likened
it to denotation, that is, the relation between a word and what it
stands for. He also gave a more conclusive argument against copying
being the basis of representation. For that would make resemblance a
type of representation, whereas if a resembles b, then b resembles a—
yet a dog does not represent its picture. In other words, Goodman is
saying that resemblance implies a symmetric relationship, but
representation does not. As a result, Goodman made the point that
representation is not a craft but an art: we create pictures of
things, achieving a view of those things by representing them as this
or as that. As a result, while one sees the objects depicted, the
artist's thoughts about those objects may also be discerned, as with
Sircello's "artistic arts." The plain idea that just objects are
represented in a picture was behind Richard Wollheim's account of
representational art in the first edition of his book Art and Its
Objects (1968). There, the paint in a picture was said to be "seen as"
an object. But in the book's second edition, Wollheim augmented this
account to allow for what is also "seen in" the work, which includes
such things as the thoughts of the artist.
There are philosophical questions of another kind, however, with
respect to the representation of objects, because of the problematic
nature of fictions. There are three broad categories of object which
might be represented: individuals which exist, like Napoleon; types of
thing which exist, like kangaroos; and things which do not exist, like
Mr. Pickwick, and unicorns. Goodman's account of representation easily
allowed for the first two categories, since, if depictions are like
names, the first two categories of painting compare, respectively,
with the relations between the proper name "Napoleon" and the person
Napoleon, and the common name "kangaroo" and the various kangaroos.
Some philosophers would think that the third category was as easily
accommodated, but Goodman, being an Empiricist (and so concerned with
the extensional world), was only prepared to countenance existent
objects. So for him pictures of fictions did not denote or represent
anything; instead, they were just patterns of various sorts. Pictures
of unicorns were just shapes, for Goodman, which meant that he saw the
description "picture of a unicorn" as unarticulated into parts. What
he preferred to call a "unicorn-picture" was merely a design with
certain named shapes within it. One needs to allow there are
"intensional" objects as well as extensional ones before one can
construe "picture of a unicorn' as parallel to "picture of a
kangaroo." By contrast with Goodman, Scruton is one philosopher more
happy with this kind of construal. It is a construal generally more
congenial to Idealists, and to Realists of various persuasions, than
to Empiricists.
The contrast between Empiricists and other types of philosopher also
bears on other central matters to do with fictions. Is a fictional
story a lie about this world, or a truth about some other? Only if one
believes there are other worlds, in some kind of way, will one be able
to see much beyond untruths in stories. A Realist will settle for
there being "fictional characters," often enough, about which we know
there are some determinate truths— wasn't Mr. Pickwick fat? But one
difficulty then is knowing things about Mr. Pickwick other than what
Dickens tells us— was Mr. Pickwick fond of grapes, for instance? An
Idealist will be more prepared to consider fictions as just creatures
of our imaginations. This style of analysis has been particularly
prominent recently, with Scruton essaying a general theory of the
imagination in which statements like "Mr. Pickwick was fat" are
entertained in an "unasserted" fashion. One problem with this style of
analysis is explaining how we can have emotional relations with, and
responses to, fictional entities. We noticed this kind of problem
before, in Burke's description "delightful horror": how can audiences
get pleasure from tragedies and horror stories when, if those same
events were encountered in real life, they would surely be anything
but pleasurable? On the other hand, unless we believe that fictions
are real, how can we, for instance, be moved by the fate of Anna
Karenina? Colin Radford, in 1975, wrote a celebrated paper on this
matter which concluded that the "paradox of emotional response to
fiction" was unsolvable: adult emotional responses to fictions were
"brute facts," but they were still incoherent and irrational, he said.
Radford defended this conclusion in a series of further papers in what
became an extensive debate. Kendall Walton, in his 1990 book Mimesis
and Make-Believe, pursued at length an Idealist's answer to Radford.
At a play, for instance, Walton said the audience enters into a form
of pretence with the actors, not believing, but making believe that
the portrayed events and emotions are real.
9. Art Objects
What kind of thing is a work of art? Goodman, Wollheim, Wolterstorff,
and Margolis have been notable contributors to the contemporary
debate.
We must first distinguish the artwork from its notation or "recipe,"
and from its various physical realizations. Examples would be: some
music, its score, and its performances; a drama, its script, and its
performances; an etching, its plate, and its prints; and a photograph,
its negative, and its positives. The notations here are "digital" in
the first two cases, and "analogue" in the second two, since they
involve discrete elements like notes and words in the one case, and
continuous elements like lines and color patches in the other.
Realizations can also be divided into two broad types, as these same
examples illustrate: there are those that arise in time (performance
works) and those that arise in space (object works). Realizations are
always physical entities. Sometimes there is only one realization, as
with architect-designed houses, couturier-designed dresses, and many
paintings, and Wollheim concluded that in these cases the artwork is
entirely physical, consisting of that one, unique realization.
However, a number a copies were commonly made of paintings in the
middle ages, and it is theoretically possible to replicate even
expensive clothing and houses.
Philosophical questions in this area arise mainly with respect to the
ontological status of the idea which gets executed. Wollheim brought
in Charles Peirce's distinction between types and tokens, as an answer
to this: the number of different tokens of letters (7), and different
types of letter (5), in the string "ABACDEC," indicates the
difference. Realizations are tokens, but ideas are types, that is,
categories of objects. There is a normative connection between them as
Margolis and Nicholas Wolterstorff have explained, since the execution
of ideas is an essentially social enterprise.
That also explains how the need for a notation arises: one which would
link not only the idea with its execution, but also the various
functionaries. Broadly, there are the creative persons who generate
the ideas, which are transmitted by means of a recipe to manufacturers
who generate the material objects and performances. "Types are
created, particulars are made" it has been said, but the link is
through the recipe. Schematically, two main figures are associated
with the production of many artworks: the architect and the builder,
the couturier and the dressmaker, the composer and the performer, the
choreographer and the dancer, the script-writer and the actor, and so
forth. But a much fuller list of operatives is usually involved, as is
very evident with the production of films, and other similar large
entertainments. Sometimes the director of a film is concerned to
control all its aspects, when we get the notion of an "auteur" who can
be said to be the author of the work, but normally, creativity and
craft thread through the whole production process, since even those
designated "originators" still work within certain traditions, and no
recipe can limit entirely the end product.
The associated philosophical question concerns the nature of any
creativity. There is not much mystery about the making of particulars
from some recipe, but much more needs to be said about the process of
originating some new idea. For creation is not just a matter of
getting into an excited mental state— as in a "brainstorming" session,
for instance. That is a central part of the "creative process theory,"
a form of which is to be found in the work of Collingwood. It was in
these terms that Collingwood distinguished the artist from the
craftsperson, namely with reference to what the artist was capable of
generating just in his or her mind. But the major difficulty with this
kind of theory is that any novelty has to be judged externally in
terms of the artist's social place amongst other workers in the field,
as Jack Glickman has shown. Certainly, if it is to be an original
idea, the artist cannot know beforehand what the outcome of the
creative process will be. But others might have had the same idea
before, and if the outcome was known already, then the idea thought up
was not original in the appropriate sense. Thus the artist will not be
credited with ownership in such cases. Creation is not a process, but
a public achievement: it is a matter of breaking the tape ahead of
others in a certain race.
10. References and Further Reading
* Arnheim, R.1954, Art and Visual Perception. University of
California Press, Berkeley.
o A study of physiognomic properties from the viewpoint of
gestalt psychology.
* Beardsley, M.C. 1958, Aesthetics, Harcourt Brace, New York.
o The classic mid-twentieth century text, with a detailed,
practical study of the principles of art criticism.
* Bell, C. 1914, Art, Chatto and Windus, London.
o Manifesto for Formalism defending both his Aesthetic
Hypothesis, and his Metaphysical Hypothesis.
* Best, D. 1976, Philosophy and Human Movement, Allen and Unwin, London.
o Applies aesthetic principles to Sport, and assesses its
differences from Art.
* Bourdieu, P. 1984, Distinction, trans. R.Nice, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London.
o Studies contemporary French taste empirically, with
special attention to the place of the "disinterested" class.
* Carroll, N 1990, The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the
Heart, Routledge, London and New York.
o Investigation into the form and aesthetics of horror film
and fiction, including discussion of the paradox of emotional response
to fiction and the paradox of "horror-pleasure".
* Collingwood, R.G. 1958, The Principles of Art, Oxford University
Press, Oxford.
o Argues for important theses about Creativity, Art versus
Craft, and Self-Expression.
* Cooper, D. E. (ed.) 1995, A Companion to Aesthetics, Blackwell, Oxford.
o Short notes about many aspects of, and individuals in Art
and aesthetic theory.
* Crawford, D.W. 1974, Kant's Aesthetic Theory, University of
Wisconsin Press, Madison.
o Commentary on Kant's third critique.
* Curtler, H. (ed.) 1983, What is Art? Haven, New York.
o Collects a number of papers discussing Beardsley's aesthetics.
* Danto, A. C. 1981, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
o Contains Danto's developed views about the influence of art theory.
* Davies, S. 1991, Definitions of Art, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
o Contains a thorough study of the respective worth of
Beardsley's, and Dickie's recent definitions of art.
* Dickie, G. 1974, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional
Analysis, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
o Dickie's first book on his definition of Art.
* Dickie, G. 1984, The Art Circle, Haven, New York.
o Dickie's later thoughts about his definition of Art.
* Dickie, G. 1996, The Century of Taste, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
o Contains a useful discussion of Hutcheson, Hume, and Kant,
and some of their contemporaries.
* Dickie, G., Sclafani, R.R., and Roblin, R. (eds) 1989,
Aesthetics a Critical Anthology, 2nd ed. St Martin's Press, New York.
o Collection of papers on historic and contemporary
Aesthetics, including ones on the individual arts.
* Eagleton, T. 1990, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell, Oxford.
o A study of Aesthetics from the eighteenth century onwards,
from the point of view of a Marxist, with particular attention to
German thinkers.
* Freeland, C. 2001, But Is it Art?, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
o Discusses why innovation and controversy are valued in the
arts, weaving together philosophy and art theory.
* Gaut, B. and Lopes, D.M. (eds) 2001, The Routledge Companion to
Aesthetics, Routledge, London and New York.
o A series of short articles on most aspects of aesthetics,
including discussions of the individual arts.
* Gombrich, E.H. 1960, Art and Illusion, Pantheon Books, London.
o Historical survey of techniques of pictorial
representation, with philosophical commentary.
* Goodman, N. 1968, Languages of Art, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis.
o Discusses the nature of notations, and the possibility of fakes.
* Graham, G. 1997, Philosophy of the Arts; an Introduction to
Aesthetics, Routledge, London.
o Has separate chapters on Music, Painting and Film, Poetry
and Literature, and Architecture.
* Hanfling, O. (ed.) 1992, Philosophical Aesthetics, Blackwell, Oxford.
o Summary papers on the core issues in Aesthetics, prepared
for the Open University.
* Hauser, A.1982, The Sociology of Art, Chicago University Press, Chicago.
o Major historical study of Art's place in society over the ages.
* Hjort, M. and Laver, S. (eds) 1997, Emotion and the Arts, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
o Papers on various aspects of art and emotion.
* Hospers (ed) 1969, Introductory Readings in Aesthetics,
Macmillan, New York.
o Collection of major papers, including Stolnitz and Dickie
on aesthetic attitudes, Hospers on Expression, and Bell, Fry, Langer
and Beardsley about their various theories.
* Hospers, J. (ed.) 1971, Artistic Expression,
Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York.
o Large collection of historical readings on Expression.
* Kant, I. 1964, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J.C.Meredith,
Oxford University Press, Oxford.
o The original text of Kant's third critique.
* Iseminger, G. (ed.) 1992, Intention and Interpretation, Temple
University Press, Philadelphia.
o Contains papers by Hirsch, and Knapp and Michaels, amongst
others, updating the debate over Intention.
* Kelly, M. (ed.) 1998, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
o Four volumes not just on Philosophical Aesthetics, but
also on historical, sociological, and biographical aspects of Art and
Aesthetics worldwide.
* Langer, S. 1953, Feeling and Form, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
o Detailed study of the various art forms, and their
different modes of expression.
* Langer, S. 1957, Problems in Art, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
* Langer, S. 1957, Philosophy in a New Key, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA.
o Langer's more theoretical writings.
* Levinson, J. (ed.) 1998, Aesthetics and Ethics, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
o Contains papers by Carroll, and Anderson and Dean, amongst
others, updating the debate over aestheticism.
* Manns, J.W. 1998, Aesthetics, M.E.Sharpe, Armonk.
o Recent monograph covering the main topics in the subject.
* Margolis, J. (ed.) 1987, Philosophy Looks at the Arts, 3rd ed.,
Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
o Central papers in recent Aesthetics, including many of the
core readings discussed in the text.
* Mothersill, M. 1984, Beauty Restored, Clarendon, Oxford.
o Argues for a form of Aesthetic Realism, against Sibley,
and with a discussion of Hume and Kant.
* Richards, I. A. 1970, Poetries and Sciences, Routledge and Kegan
Paul, London.
o Defends a subjectivist view of Art.
* Scruton, R.1974, Art and Imagination, Methuen, London.
o A sophisticated and very detailed theory of most of the
major concepts in Aesthetics.
* Sheppard, A. D. R. 1987, Aesthetics: an Introduction to the
Philosophy of Art, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
o An introductory monograph on the whole subject.
* Taylor, R. 1981, Beyond Art, Harvester, Brighton.
o Defends the right of different classes to their own tastes.
* Tolstoi, L. 1960, What is Art? Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis.
o Tolstoi's theory of Art and Aesthetics.
* Walton, K.L. 1990, Mimesis as Make Believe, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge MA.
o A thorough view of many arts, motivated by the debate over
emotional responses to fictions.
* Wolff, J. 1993, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, 2nd ed.,
University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
o On the debate between objective aesthetic value, and
sociological relativism.
* Wollheim, R. 1980, Art and its Objects, 2nd ed. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
o A philosophical study of the nature of art objects.
* Wolterstorff, N. 1980, Works and Worlds of Art, Clarendon, Oxford.
o A very comprehensive study.
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