Jane Ellen Harrison's answer to Clive Bell on Art 1915

I have just discovered a quite extraordinary reply to Clive Bell's Art written by Jane Ellen Harrison in 1915. (Harrison, Jane Ellen. “Art and Mr. Clive Bell.” 1915. Quotidiana. Ed. Patrick Madden. 7 Mar 2007. 18 Mar 2014 .  The essay appears in her book Alpha and Omega, London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1915.)  Harrison was known to me previously as the author of a number of books on mythology written in the early part of the 20th century.  This short essay takes a very different approach to Bell than that of the standard analytic aestheticians I have been reading. Although she agrees with much of what Bell says (surprisingly much -  she even agrees with most of his taste, approving of the Romanesque architecture and disapproving of Futurist art, for example) she argues against his attack on representation and the primacy he gives to form, and she does so using what Bell calls the special aesthetic feeling (the feeling we have in response to "significant form").  Her main thesis is that representation and form are equally essential to art:  the cause of the feeling of significant form is bound up with both.

“representation, when it becomes art, is caught and fettered by form. It is not the fetters, the form, the pattern, that holds me spell-bound, that catches my breath, that sends a cold shudder down my spine; it is the spectacle of reality fettered, it is formal representation. But to take away the representation element is to empty the wine from the chalice.... 

This trance-like, spell-bound feeling [which she associates with Bell's aesthetic emotion] comes over me when I look at many of the Primitives. There is in the Acropolis Museum at Athens an archaic woman’s figure, to look at which is to me all but unbearable. The reality behind her face—I am inclined to accept Mr. Bell’s metaphysic[al hypothesis]—seems just about to break loose, utter itself, and the tension is overmuch. But I feel it even more exquisitely, perhaps because more consciously, when I look at figures treated with almost brutal realism, figures that push representation to the utmost, such as some of Degas' dancers. They are caught and held by a spell, and thereby they hold me. They are things enchanted. Now, it is form, I am sure, that casts the spell—that is, the fetters."  She further writes:

"Art, then, to me is not the creation of significant form, hollow of content, but the fettering of reality by form—a widely different thing. It may be possible to make my meaning clearer by the analogy—or is it more than reality?—of rhythm. To say that art is the creation of significant form, and that representation is irrelevant, is like saying that metre—abstract metre—is a poem. A poem is the shackling of live speech by the fetters of rhythm, and the sense of beauty arises when the fixed forms of the metre are broken, and we feel the words breaking up against the rhythm."

Harrison's spirit is very much more like Nietzsche's than like Bell's.  Bell tends to see the underlying Reality, the thing-in-itself, as something benign, somewhat like the Christian God in this respect.  Nietzsche, however, sees the relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian as a matter of tension and conflict, and the underlying reality as the realm of suffering (much like Schopenhauer, who saw it as Will):  it is not something benign. To be sure, Bell with all his talk of ecstasy, would not be happy with "cold shudder down my spine" as a description of the aesthetic emotion:  it is not optimistic enough...a bit too scary.  

Harrison concludes:   "It is not 'information' that is reprehensible in art, but information uninformed. Form, as Mr. Bell himself says, is 'the talisman.' But what use the talisman without the thing enchanted? Form without content is dead. It is the beat of the live bird’s wing within the cage that makes form 'significant.'"  

Interested in learning more?  See my book:  Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary:  The Aesthetics of Everyday Life.  Broadview Press, 2012.  Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents.  You can also buy it fro  Broadview. 

Explication of Nietzsche selection from The Birth of Tragedy

This is an attempt to explicate the selection from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy found in Goldblatt and Brown’s Aesthetics:  A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts.  A full explication of Nietzsche’s book would have to go far beyond this selection to take into account all of its aspects.

Unlike Plato, Kant, and even Hegel, Nietzsche sees humans as essentially sensuous beings, and is not critical of that aspect of ourselves.  Like Hegel, he pays particular attention to history and tends to see history in terms of dialectic, that is, in terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.  Like Hegel, he is also interested in forwarding the science of aesthetics, although it would be a stretch to think of his method as truly science-like.  Unlike any previous philosopher, he defines art in terms of a duality. Art is two things interacting with each other and achieving its highest manifestation when the two are fused into one. (However, his duality could be seen as similar to that which we have seen between the beautiful and the sublime in Burke and Kant.)  Borrowing from the ancient Greeks, whom he had studied extensively as a philologist (he was Professor of Philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland), he named the two basic elements in fine art after two Greek gods, Apollo and Dionysus (also spelled Dionysos).  He sees this duality in terms of dialectic:  the Apollonian and the Dionysiac sides alternate between conflict and reconciliation, somewhat like a typical marriage.  He understands art in terms of these symbols rather than in terms of concepts.  Like Morris Weitz, he does not think that art can be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.  Still, he does think something valuable can be said about art’s essence and about what makes great art great. 

Nietzsche speaks of Dionysus and Apollo as art-sponsoring deities.  This is not exactly the way the ancient Greeks saw them, but he realizes this, and I do not think that that matters very much.  He believes that Apollo represents the plastic arts:  i.e. painting, sculpture, and perhaps architecture.  Dionysus, by contrast, represents the art of music. (We will see later that this does not include the Apollonian musical art, which focuses on calming music and the cithara, the ancient Greek guitar.)  However, instead of seeing the Apollonian and the Dionysian in terms of the Greek gods it might be better to see them as creative tendencies or powers that are essentially physiological.  The main theme of this selection is that, although the two art tendencies were in dialectical conflict they eventually came together in Greek tragedy, which Nietzsche believed was the highest form of art in ancient times.  He also thought that the music of Wagner was the highest form of art in his own time, and that it represented a rebirth of ancient Greek tragedy. Nietzsche was a close friend of Wagner’s and was a leading figure in the Wagnerian cultural movement that was sweeping the German-speaking world at that time. 

Nietzsche goes on to understand these art tendencies as associated with dream and intoxication.  That is, he understands them in terms of something going on in our bodies.  Men first saw the gods in their dreams, and then great sculptors like Phidias, who created the sculpture of the goddess Athena for the Parthenon, presented these images to men.  Greek poets too were inspired by dreams, and they would agree with the Wagnerian character who said that poets should interpret dreams that have some truth in them. 

Actually, when you think about it, every individual is an artist in the sense that everyone produces dreams every night.  The remarkable thing about dreams is that their forms speak to us directly, without any mediation.  [The idea that we do not conceptualize in dreams seems contradicted by my own experience of giving entire philosophical lectures in a dream.  But then I am not clear what Nietzsche means by “without mediation.”] Still, we do tend to see them as illusions, despite their intensity.  Parallel to this, philosophers tend to see everyday reality as an illusion (as Plato did in “the Cave”) hiding true reality.   Schopenhauer, who was Nietzsche’s favorite philosopher when he wrote this book, saw the ability to see the material world as an illusion as the mark of a good philosopher.  An artist or a person who loves art looks at dream images (and at works of art) as ways to interpret life.  He sees dream-life, with all its negative and scary aspects included, as a kind of play in which he is an actor, but still with a sense that it is illusion.  He enjoys it, and sometimes he will want the dream to continue for, after all, it is only a dream.  This seems to prove that our innermost being (the underlying unconscious reality that all humans share) enjoys dreams deeply.

Apollo was also the god of making predictions and the god of light (the sun was said to be Apollo riding his chariot across the sky).  He is also a god who reigns over illusion and fantasy. [There appears to be an inconsistency here:  how can someone be a god of both clarity and illusion?]   He was also a god of healing.  Just as nature heals us during sleep, and partly through our being able to dream, so too the arts heal us through their illusions.  Insofar as they heal, they make life worth living.  But, remember, the dream image should not be seen as reality!  Only if we keep this in mind can it give us a feeling of peace.  Apollo (the Apollonian tendency) is like Schopenhauer’s man in a frail craft at sea.  Such a man relies on the principium individuationis, the principle that each individual is its own separate thing existing in its own place and time, to feel secure in the stormy waters of life.   Schopenhauer believed that this principle only applies to the world or representation, not to the thing-in-itself or Will. 

Schopenhauer also describes the awe men experience when the laws of science seem to be suspended (as in a miracle).  For Schopenhauer, an ecstatic experience happens (or can happen) when the principium individuationis is violated.   Nietzsche finds this to be the rapture obtained by followers of Dionysus during their special rituals and celebrations.  He says that this rapture is like physical intoxication.  When he speaks of intoxication he means not only the kind induced by wine, but also other forms of intoxication, as those produced by narcotics, the approach of spring, and, most importantly, religious experience (and, of course, the experience of great art).  All of these types of intoxication make you forget yourself entirely. This power drove people to engage in ecstatic dances in the Middle Ages as well as amongst the followers of Bacchus (another name for Dionysus) in Greece.  Nietzsche says that these might be thought by some as diseases characteristic of certain cultures and that some people (especially Apollonians) may criticize Dionysian ecstasy as such.  And yet their so-called sanity is really like that of a dead person:  they are “benighted” in the sense of being overcome by intellectual darkness.  The noisy party of Dionysians will pass them by.  

The Dionysiac was especially associated with certain religious rituals that involve death and rebirth.  These rites bring man back together with man.  For example, they reconcile slave and master, although only during that ritual…Nietzsche was no socialist.  They also overcome the alienation of man from nature.  This is why there are ancient images of Dionysus riding wild animals.  The Dionysian religious experience poses a universal harmony in which all men become one, and obtain a vision of the One (i.e. of the primal and god-like underlying unity of all reality). 

There is a stage of the Apollonian/Dionysian duality in which artistic urges are satisfied directly:  this is the stage of dreams and intoxication/ecstasy.  This stage does not require any artistic genius, and in fact takes no account of the individual.  It may even destroy him in mystical experience.  Nietzsche observes that the artist must seem to be an imitator of this kind of experience.  He then argues that the Greek tragic artist is both a dream and ecstasy artist.  He imagines a scene in which the artist is in Dionysiac intoxication and then, separated from the crowd, perceives his own condition of mystic oneness in a dream (thus evoking Apollo, the dream-god).  This could be the first example (in mythical form) of an experience that was both Apollonian and Dionysian.   

Nietzsche then returns to the question of the relation between Greek art and the proto-aesthetic phenomena of dreaming and intoxication, stressing the special relationship the Greek artist had to Greek dreamers and intoxicants.  Although it is difficult to determine what the dreams of Greeks were like, Nietzsche believed you can make assumptions based on looking at their colorful sculptures (Greek sculptures were painted quite colorfully, although almost all examples that exist today have lost their paint.).  He concludes that the dreaming Greek might even be seen as a Homer in the sense that the Greek were genius-like and highly creative in their dreams.  (This was wildly speculative on Nietzsche’s part!)

There was a big difference between the Greek and non-Greek followers of Dionysus.  The non-Greeks were more primitive, more like the satyr (a half-goat half-man semi-deity who followed Dionysus) than like Dionysus himself.  Their celebrations mainly involved sexual promiscuity, overcoming tribal laws, and ultimately a witches’ cauldron of lust and cruelty (i.e. sadistic pleasure). The Greeks were kept safe from these excesses through the image of Apollo.  This can be found for example in the art of the Doric temple.  (The Doric order in architecture was simple and calming compared to the two other orders, the Ionic and the Corinthian.  It was the order used in the Parthenon.)  But when such urges began to well up from the Greeks’ own unconscious minds all Apollo could do was make a peaceful gesture, one that constituted the most important event in the history of Greek religion and art.  The gesture involved a reconciliation of the two antagonists.  The Dionysiac powers were transformed so that the savagery of the non-Greek barbarian festival was replaced by rituals of “universal redemption.”  (The Christian terminology, i.e. “redemption,” is probably intentional here.  Nietzsche at this time must have seen the religion of Dionysus as very much like the more enthusiastic forms of Christianity.)  This is when the overcoming of the principle of individuality becomes something aesthetically positive.  Yet, although the combination of lust and cruelty is overcome in the Greek version of the Dionysian, there is still an ambiguity.  Even in the Greek Dionysian a certain terror or lament underlies the joy of ecstatic experience, as though nature were sad about being divided into separate individuals.  Nietzsche holds that Dionysiac music especially expressed this underlying fear, although, as mentioned above, he notes that there was actually an Apollonian music of the cithara (Greek guitar) as well.  This Apollonian form, he argues, was replaced by Dionysiac music of the aolus (Greek flute), and this change was permanent.

Nietzsche is probably thinking of Wagner, and before him, Beethoven, when he speaks of the “the heart-shaking power of tone, the uniform stream of melody, the incomparable resources of harmony” of Dionysiac music. He then mentions the Dionysiac dithyramb. Wikipedia describes the Dithyramb in this way:  “The dithyramb was originally an ancient Greek hymn (διθύραμβος - dithurambos) sung to the god Dionysus and was also a term used as an epithet of the god. Its wild and ecstatic character was contrasted by Plutarch with that of the paean. Dithyrambos seems to have arisen out of this song: just as paean was both a hymn to and a title of Apollo, Dithyrambos was an epithet of Dionysus as well as a song in his honor. Greeks recognized in the epithet ‘he of the miraculous birth’ and constructed an etymology to confirm this. According to Aristotle, the dithyramb was the origin of the Ancient Greek theatre, and one may recognize as a dithyramb the chorus invoking Dionysus in Euripides' The Bacchae….In Athens dithyrambs were sung by a Greek chorus of up to fifty men or boys dancing in circular formation (there is no certain evidence that they may have originally been dressed as satyrs) and probably accompanied by the aulos [the Greek flute]. They would normally relate some incident in the life of Dionysus. The leader of the chorus later became the solo protagonist, with lyrical interchanges taking place between him and the rest of the chorus. Competitions between groups singing dithyrambs were an important part of festivals such as the Dionysia and Lenaia.”[1]   The dithyramb tries to symbolically express the essence of nature.  A new set of symbols is needed for this.  This set includes symbols used by the actor in moving his body, symbols used in language, symbols used in dance, and especially the various symbolic elements of music.  Nietzsche speaks of this as a freeing of symbolic powers which expresses a freedom within the self, one that could only be understood by other followers of Dionysus.  All of this would have been surprising to the Apollonian, except when he realized that the Apollonian perspective is just a veil that covers the Dionysian aspect of reality.  [Nietzsche is not clear here whether he believes that the Dionysian aspect of reality is what he later calls the truth of Silenus, or whether he believes it is the aspect of reality that is experienced in Dionysian ecstasy.  The two are really very different!]

Although Apollo is generally seen as only one of the Olympian gods (which were worshiped by the typical Greek of the time of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle), Nietzsche believes he is actually their most complete representation.  The same drive or need that generated him generated their entire world. We should not think about this world in terms of the religion of Christianity, which emphasizes moral elevation, kindness and asceticism. Rather, the emphasis here is on triumphant existence.  [This reminds one of Nietzsche’s later emphasis on saying “yes” to life, and his attack on Christianity for saying “no” to life.] Moreover, Nietzsche stressed, the Olympian religion does not distinguish the good from the bad, or rather, as he puts it in his later writings, between good and evil.  The ancient Greeks, he argues, seem to overflow with life-affirming zest:  they see a laughing beauty everywhere.   To the modern Christian viewer and to the typical intellectuals of Nietzsche’s time, ancient Greek life seemed strangely serene.  But the reality, Nietzsche argued (and this was quite an innovation on his part) was quite different.  To make his point he tells a story about King Midas and the minor deity and follower of Dionysus, Silenus.  When captured and forced to answer the question what is best for man, Silenus replies that greatest good is to never to have been born, but, if born, to die soon.  Nietzsche’s point here is that Silenus is expressing a pessimistic side of the Greek character.  Nietzsche thought that the Greeks invented the Olympian world (and later, Plato’s world of Forms) to overcome this underlying pessimism.  (This pessimism, Nietzsche thought, paralleled the famous pessimism of Schopenhauer.) That is, their serene optimism was a cover.

The dreamer forgets the day with all its troubles.  Apollo, who is also an interpreter of dreams, may help us here. Nietzsche proposes that the dreaming part of life is really more important than the waking part it that it is more truly lived.  He was inclined to believe that the “original Oneness, the ground of Being” (something like Schopenhauer’s Will, and yet more personal and thus more like the Christian God) always suffers and is always full of contradictions.  This being needs the vision and illusion of man in order to make sense out of its own existence, to “redeem” itself. We ourselves are the illusions of such a being as we move through space and time (i.e. in what Kant called the world of experience and Schopenhauer, the world of representation.)  It we look at ourselves as His idea then our dreams (and also our works of Apollonian art) are illusions of illusions.  (This is somewhat like Plato’s idea of the painted bed being three removes from reality.  However, in this case, Nietzsche thinks that illusion is a valuable thing!)  Thus, this being takes delight in the works of such “naïve” (Apollonian) artists as Raphael who produce illusions of illusions. 

Nietzsche believed that Raphael himself illustrated this very idea of reduction of illusion to greater illusion in his painting, Transfiguration.  The lower half, showing a boy possessed by some devil or illness surrounded by scared disciples of Jesus, represents the pain of human existence, which is at the very basis of being.  This is the first illusion because it covers over, or is a mere expression of, the underlying “begetter of all things,” i.e. the irrational Will (or the primordial One).  Then there is a secondary illusion portrayed in the upper part of the painting.  This is the image of Christ being transfigured, and it is also the image of a world of pure delight, much like that of the Olympians.  The top world is that of Apollo and the bottom is that of Silenus.  And each world needs the other to exist.  [Problem:  if Raphael were truly a naïve artist who was simply Apollonian then would he have conscious knowledge of the truth of Silenus?] Apollo is the principle of individuality become god, and satisfies the need of the One to redeem itself through illusion.  In short, the world of suffering is needed to produce the vision that saves us and allows us to exist safely in that world [a somewhat paradoxical notion.]

This Apollonian move involves the idea that there needs to be limits to the individual.  Aristotle named the virtue that corresponds to these limits “sophrosyne.”  As Wikipedia puts it, “Sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη) is a Greek philosophical term etymologically meaning moral sanity and from there self control or moderation guided by true self-knowledge.”[2]  Both Apollo (at Delphi) and Socrates were associated with these two sayings: “know thyself” and “nothing too much.”  But Nietzsche does not believe that Socrates has the whole story. He only captures the Apollonian side of human experience. (Later in the book he explicitly attacks Socrates.  Like Socrates, Nietzsche wanted to deeply question human assumptions about value.  But unlike Socrates he did not believe in an afterlife or in the idea that humans should try to escape their bodies.)  In fact, the Apollonians attacked excess and pride, which they associated with the earlier pre-Olympian gods, the Titans.  Yet for Nietzsche, one of the Titans, Prometheus, the god who brought fire to humans, is truly a hero.  Nietzsche even put an image of Prometheus at the front of his book.  Perhaps he thought that he, too, was bringing something dangerous and useful to man, and that he, too, would ultimately suffer horribly because of this.

In the last part of our selection Nietzsche observes that the Greeks tended to understand the Dionysian in terms of these earlier gods, and yet he believed that the Greeks were really quite close to these gods in that their beautiful existence (which he describes as under the eyes of the most beautiful woman of ancient Greece, Helen of Troy) depended on a hidden base of knowledge of human suffering, which was only uncovered again with the Dionysian.  (Nietzsche’s rather snide reference to thin harp music is also a reference to the picture of heaven which was traditional for Christians.  See end of our selection, the preface for the book much later, in which he says that he was hiding his true negative feelings about Christianity when he wrote the book.  He didn’t hide them all that well.)   As with Hegel, he believes that the true Dionysian art tells the truth, although he ends our selection by mentioning that another response by the Greeks to the Dionysian was the Spartan approach to art, one that was severe and cruel.      

 
Interested in learning about my own philosophical views?  See my book:  Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary:  The Aesthetics of Everyday Life.  Broadview Press, 2012.  Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents.  You can also buy it fro  Broadview. 

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[1] “Dithyramb,” Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dithyramb accessed 3/4/09.

[2] Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophrosyne accessed 3/4/09

Can there be ruins in nature? And how would they be appreciated?

Robert Ginsberg in The Aesthetics of Ruins has a chapter on "Nature as Ruin."  There he argues that nature can be perceived as ruin.  Of course there is a real difference between a human ruin and a things that might be called "ruins" in nature.  We might speak of the ruins of an ecosystem or of a particular individual animal as a ruin of its former self (just as we might of a human).  But generally, to speak of something in nature as a "ruin" is a metaphor.  Ginsberg is focused on a particular kind of object in nature:  "The dead tree, broken seashell, split rock are available as aesthetic objects whose new unity differs from their intact originals..."   These are objects which we can see as aesthetically interesting even though they are hardly perfect examples of their kind or fully functioning.  Dead trees are of particular interest.  When I am walking in the woods with a camera I tend to be fascinated by dead trees.  As Ginsberg observes "the tree has been simplified, clarified, and unified."  He even argues that it has "more compact energy."  He then takes the unusual and controversial position that "the dead tree has more life, when it has ceased to be biological and turned to inanimacy.  It turns inward as complex object" one which is abstract and appealing in its abstraction.  This is correct, but it raises an interesting question.  Allen Carlson has famously argued against the Object of Art model of aesthetic appreciation of nature:  he claims that we should not appreciate nature as though it were a work of art, for example a tree as though it were a sculpture.  Ginsberg flies in the face of this idea.  He notes that in looking at the tree "the lines, masses, texture, and character of the former tree occupy our attention."  Clearly he is seeing it as though it were art, or with art-like categories.  This is not to say that the dead tree needs to be detached from its place of origin to experience it this way: "It can be enhanced by the surrounding life that cushions it upon a backdrop of greenery."  (203)   We are not seeing it as if it were in a gallery.  But still, there is a conflict here.  Ginsberg is also aware of the expressive qualities of the dead tree, how it is human like in its raising its tired arms, and, although dead, still stands:  kind of Stoic.  In addition to violating the rule against appreciating nature as though it were sculpture the dead tree can feature in appreciation of nature as though it were landscape painting.  Ginsberg observes that in London dead trees were once planted to make a scene like that found in Salvator Rosa's painting of a landscape with a dead tree.  Another experience of the dead tree is that of the roots, and certainly one of the powerful experiences of walking through the sequoia groves Calaveras Big Trees is looking at the massive roots of the uprooted trees that have fallen.  Ginsberg does not take an art-centered view of appreciation of nature.  At one point he observes that the fallen tree adds compost as it decays, that the forest feeds on its death, and so forth, all part of the ecological vision of the aesthetics of nature.  What intrigues me is that his aesthetics of the tree can include both the ecological and the art-influenced way:  a pluralist and synthesizing approach to appreciation of nature.  When discussing seashells Ginsberg notes that one can look not only for perfect examples of every species but also the individual.  But the most unique individuals are the shells that are broken and worn:  "they are interesting as forms and textures, independent of their kind."  So often the aesthetics of nature focuses only on that which is scientifically categorized:  and this directs us to the common, to the perfect example, and away from the unusual.  When Ginsberg speaks lovingly of these partial shells he sees them as handfuls of "objets trouves" and of course this is a troubling thought for the standard cognitivist view of the aesthetics of nature. 

Hegel on Art and Nature

I am just going to talk about Hegel's aesthetics as it is presented in the selection The Philosophy of Fine Art found in Aesthetics:  A Reader in Philosophy of the Art ed. Goldblatt and Brown (410-414).   (This is from the Osmaston translation of 1975).   Coming to Hegel from reading Kant last week we note certain things.  He is giving us a kind of definition of art by talking about "current conceptions of a work of art."  In doing so, he mentions three "determinations" of art.  All three are ones that Kant would disapprove of to some extent.  For example, his claim that "a work of art is no product of Nature" goes against the idea that the work of fine art is a product of genius in which nature works through the genius.  Second, whereas Hegel stresses that a work of art is in a sensuous medium, Kant has little interest in this dimension of art.  (Does he even mention the senses when talking about fine art?).  Third, Hegel stresses that art has "an end bound up with it," and here Kant's response would be, at best, ambiguous.  He would stress the importance of the imagination and its free play, and, although he would insist that each work of art must follow certain rules, he would probably restrict the notion of "end" to the mechanical arts.   Fine art must be beautiful, and hence we should focus not on its end but on its look of purposiveness.  Nonetheless, Kant would agree with Hegel that overemphasis on rules would produce "something formally regular and mechanical" (Hegel).  Kant stresses that the genius artist creates something that goes beyond such rules.

One of the most controversial ideas in Hegel's aesthetics is the notion that landscape painting has a "higher rank" than actual landscapes.  This view would certainly be rejected by virtually all of our contemporary aestheticians of nature.  Hegel's thinking comes from the notion that art originates in the human spirit and that works of art have a certain animation which comes from their having been processed through the human spirit:  "a work of art is only truly such in so far as originating in the human spirit, it continues to belong to the soil from which it sprang."  As he also puts it, the work of art has "received the baptism of the mind and soul of man." (411)  The animation of art appears at first to be a mere show on the surface of art, with something dead (for example dead wood) beneath.  But what makes art fine art is not its merely external existence but the way it lives in the creating and in the perceiving mind.  Partly this process (by which it is processed through the mind of man) allows it to achieve greater purity and clarity.  I know of two traditions that hold a similar view today.  The Japanese believe that the Japanese garden as a work of art captures the essence of nature, purifies it.  Similarly, the Chinese philosopher Li might hold something similar, based on his humanistic Marxist perspective.  

What to make of this?  As we experience art based on nature we do discover that it is abstracted and that the intention behind it is usually (or at least quite often) to create something essential.  What is it for a human to confront nature except by way of the mediation of certain concepts?  The aestheticians of nature set up a certain idea of seeing nature as nature and appreciating it wholly in this way.  And yet we cannot escape our humanness.  If we perceive nature through scientific concepts we still perceive it through human concepts.  We cannot perceive nature as nature.  Nature, as Li observes, is humanized for us.  Great works of landscape art, such as those of Cezanne attempt to get at nature qua nature by way of exploring the phenomenology of human perception of nature.  Cezanne's paintings clearly fit the bill of what Hegel is talking about.  To go further, along these lines, the attempt to capture something essential is not a scientific attempt (in science, "essence" means something different) but existential in the sense that the essential is what animates the object for us.  Nature is then transformed into something for which there can be an I-Thou relation.  Intimacy comes from the illusion that arises from the animation of nature, that in turn coming from the special kind of abstraction of nature that is carried out by the artist (whether landscape artist or naturalist with a visionary bent, as I will discuss below.)

What we really admire in art is not mere imitation, as Hegel observes, but something more like a confrontation between the deepest parts of ourselves and the object portrayed.  Part of growth in appreciation of art is in recognizing that mere imitation of nature (pictorial realism) is not sufficient in itself to hold our admiration.  Of course the idea that fine art is the result of the processing through the human spirit and going beyond mere imitation is also closely connected with Hegel's notion that it involves a revelation of truth.  This is a truth that is not reducible to truth of science or even philosophical truth:  rather this truth is specifically tied to medium.  This is the autonomy of art, that art possesses its final aim in itself,  that it represents its own self-revelation. 

Of course we can animate natural landscapes too, as when we compose them in the way that Santayana and Allen Carlson recommend.  In the very act of perception we can bring nature alive for us.  Great naturalists like Muir and Leopold do this, and can do this for us through their nature writing.  But it is important that their nature writing is a kind of art.  So, it is not so much that landscape painting is of higher rank than actual landscapes but actual landscapes need the mediation of deeply human medium-based interaction to actualize both their essences, and this can be done through great painting or great nature writing, or through other means.    

Although this selection is structured according to the three "determinations" of art it could also be seen as discussing several possible definitions of art.  The definition of art as imitation is rejected in part by arguing that we do not need a duplicate of nature (which would be superfluous) and that if art tries to do this it must fail.  The pleasure we get from imitation is at best the kind of pleasure we would get from rather pointless refined skills like being able to throw lentils through small holes at a distance.  A more common definition of art is that it expresses personal emotion.  Hegel attacks this by arguing that personal emotions (feelings) form an undefined obscure region of spiritual life, that they are obscure because they are personal, and that they are abstract in that they do not give us any knowledge of the subject-matter.  Hegel also rejects the view that the essence of art should be to serve moral ends or to be useful in some other way.  Instead, he stresses the autonomy of art.  The essence of art is not to be found in its relation to something else.  The goal of art is not outside the realm of art.  Its function then is "to reveal truth" and specifically, to do so "under the mode of art's sensuous or material configuration."  What sort of truth?  The truth revealed is not a scientific truth in our sense of "scientific" or a historical truth in our sense of "historical" but it is scientific and historical in Hegel's sense.  Art differs from science (in our sense) in that science does not refer to its sensuous or material aspect.  Art, unlike science, involves a reconciliation of the two aspects of reality, the material and the spiritual, which themselves exist as an antithesis which is resolved in art.  So, art comes to understand itself (and hence reveal truth) when it comes to understand itself as synthesizing the spiritual and the material, as it does for example in landscape painting where the materials used by the artist take on spiritual qualities by being processed through the mind of the artist.  Art's self-revelation is just an aspect however of the self-revelation of human culture in general or, to put it more dramatically, the Absolute's coming to understand itself.  

Hegel interestingly sees philosophy as working in tandem with art on this point, philosophy of course taking priority, so that philosophy first overcomes the opposition between spirit and nature and thereby grasps its own nature, and then also the nature of nature and of art. So as the science of philosophy is reawakened in Hegel's own writings, so too the science of art (aesthetics) which indeed depends on the philosophical awakening. 

What is the point of everyday aesthetics?

This is a tricky question.  The different authors who have explored everyday aesthetics have different answers to it.  There are many motives for exploring the everyday.  One is environmentalist.  Some authors, for example Yuriko Saito, believe that fundamental to everyday aesthetics is recognizing that many of our consumer choices are not environmentally sustainable.  Things that give us pleasure shouldn't give us pleasure:  ultimately we should change our standard view of beauty, prettiness and so forth so that a green lawn which is not environmentally sustainable will no longer look beautiful, whereas a sustainable native plant garden will.  This is certainly a valuable project although I would hesitate to hang the significance of everyday aesthetics on this alone, and neither does Saito, by the way.  Another approach is to argue that everyday aesthetics encourages life-style changes that are good for us in that they promote happiness.  More specifically, we are encouraged to notice the little things in life.  This approach might generate a book that would go into the self-help section of the library.  The theme might be:  one ought to maximize happiness by maximizing the pleasures of life.  Do not just take a shower but see a shower as an occasion, as a possibility to pay attention to the multiple dimensions of experience, and hence to, in a sense, treat the shower experience as though it were a work of art.  This is a version of hedonism somewhat like Walter Pater's epicureanism.  It involves a kind of amalgamation of everyday aesthetics with utilitarianism, particularly of the sort that John Stuart Mill favored.  Mill stressed that the quality of the pleasure one maximizes is important.  Now Mill expressed this unfortunately by saying, contra Bentham, that pushpin is not as good as poetry.  The everyday aesthetician would insist that sometimes pushpin is as good as poetry:  life need not be a zero sum game when it comes to pushpin vs. poetry.  There are riches to popular arts, to sports, and to many other aspects of life, that need not be neglected in order to enjoy the riches of serious art.  Or at least the only zero sum aspect here is just the amount of time one has to spend on leisure pursuits.  Time spent on pushpin is time not spent on poetry.  But even then, there are times when we only have the psychic energy to indulge in pushpin, poetry be damned.  Probably the best approach to everyday aesthetics with regards to the debate between an environmentalist approach and a hedonist approach is to try to balance the two concerns/motives.

Another related issue is the ongoing question of whether one ought to base everyday aesthetics on special experiences or whether it should be based on the ordinary experiences of life.  This has been a point of contention between Dewey and myself on the one hand and Haapala, Melchionne, Saito and Naukkarinen on the other.  Let me propose a possible resolution by focusing on Saito. 

Saito in her book Everyday Aesthetics (45-53) wishes to oppose those who hold the aesthetic attitude theory even though they would certainly open up aesthetics to everyday aesthetics. (If you believe in the aesthetic attitude then you believe that anything can experienced aesthetically, although some things are much harder to so experience, and some reframing may be needed).  Saito grants that there are experiences in which there is some "dramatic break from our humdrum experience."  This might be caused by taking the aesthetic attitude, being disinterested in Kant's sense, being distanced in Bullough's sense, or having "an experience" in Dewey's sense.  She describes a couple such dramatic experiences in her own life.  She then says:  "However, I maintain that [these] views are...still too restrictive.  What is common to these theories is that the aesthetic (qua experience) is something which contrasts with the humdrum of everyday experience."  Dewey, for example, considers the humdrum the enemy of the aesthetic.  Saito goes further in her attack on this tradition (especially Dewey) arguing that in this tradition "the aesthetic experience is described as a kind of encapsulated unit that is hermetically sealed off from our ordinary engagement with daily life."  Bullough, for example, is cited as calling on us to cut our the practical side of life in having such an experience.  

I agree with Dewey that "the humdrum" experience is a deep problem and that it is the opposite of the aesthetic.  This is not however because I would want to make everyday aesthetics based only on the possibility of some very rare type of self-transcending experience that is itself sealed off from everyday life.  So how to resolve the difficulty?  This relates back to the beginning of this post.  The solution is to posit a range or continuum of possible aesthetic responses that avoids what appears to be a false dichotomy.  Instead of having to choose between focusing on unusual special experiences and the everyday as ordinary one needs to recognize a vast in-between area in this continuum.  The humdrum, on this view, falls just below the continuum of the aesthetic.  It is the vast region of everyday experiences that has nothing or every little aesthetically positive about it.   A large part of our experience is of this nature, and part of the motive of everyday aesthetics is to raise our everyday experience above the humdrum, to, in a sense, aestheticize it.  At the upper end of the continuum are certain self-transcending experiences, and these are ideals, but they need not define the field.  Dewey himself recognized many of the mid-level experiences.  He not only talked about that fine meal in a French restaurant that summed up all a meal could be but also the satisfaction a mechanic could get from doing a job well, and even the contemplative pleasure we experience in watching a fire in a fireplace.  Similarly, Bullough's idea of distance need not be tied simply to special once-in-a-lifetime experiences.  Yesterday my wife said to me as we were driving "look at the clouds:  they look like paint brush strokes."  I looked and enjoyed:  this was a low-level aesthetic experience that rose above the humdrum but certainly did not arise to the highest point in the continuum.  Metaphorical seeing can make some things just a little more special. (I have perhaps contributed to exacerbation of this debate by emphasizing the word "extraordinary" in my boo.  Ellen Dissanayake in her many books stresses the phrase "making special" which is much more mid-level or more to our purposes here.)  Moreover, a recognition of low-level and mid-level aesthetic experience allows for the kinds of activity-oriented responses that Saito stresses, for example seeing that a room is messy and cleaning it up.  However, here is where an important issues arises.  Sometimes, well usually, actually, cleaning up is humdrum.  Often, for the vast majority of workers in our world, work is tedious, boring, deadening, alienated.  So this comes back to the normative thrust I would wish to give to everyday aesthetics.  On my view it is a matter of encouraging us to attend to the aesthetic possibilities of ordinary experience in order to make it not humdrum.  Instead of sealing off certain experiences from ordinary engagement with everyday life the hope is to enhance these ordinary engagements.  

Saito writes about cases in which we "fail to achieve such a special experience." (46)  She speaks of these as cases "in which we form an opinion, make a decision, or engage in an action guided by aesthetic considerations without invoking any special experience."  She observes that "most of us attend to our personal appearance almost daily:  choosing what to wear and what sort of haircut to get, cleaning and ironing clothes..."  decision and actions which are guided by aesthetic considerations.  I agree:  we make these choices based on, for example, whether the aesthetic term "looks cool" applies to these clothes, etc.  However, many of these experiences of choice only rise very minimally above the humdrum.  They are hardly even aesthetic in any interesting sense of the term.  Why is this?  Well, for an answer to this we need to turn to William Morris, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.  In short, most everyday aesthetic choices are alienated, express false consciousness, are inattentive, and show a herd mentality lacking unity of style.  Certainly they do not rise to the level of a high level experience, but they also do not rise much above the lowest level.  They are shallow.  Saito and Haapala stress that we should focus on the everyday ordinarily experienced, and I agree that this should be a major focus.  But I would also suggest that what is ordinarily experience may just barely hover above the level of the non-aesthetic.  When Bullough says "we are not ordinarily aware of those aspects of things which do not touch us immediately and practically" he is calling on us to see things in a way that escapes what the Marxist critical theorists called "false consciousness."  Saito quotes Sartre with disapproval on this point, but I think he is on the mark when he describes the state of alienated consciousness so common in our society:  "There are no beginnings.  Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition." (40)  Sartre complains, through he character Roquentin, that there are no adventures or perfect moments in life like works of art.  This is a dour way to look at things, to be sure.  It asks us to exist only at the highest level of the continuum of aesthetic experience or not at all.  But Sartre's complaint about ordinary experience and his claim that in order to aestheticize the ordinary one has to relive it as a story:  this seems right. 

The Aesthetic Philosophy of Zehou Li

I have been reading Zehou Li and Jane Cauvel's Four Essays on Aesthetics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).  The points I will raise here should not be seen as a book review but simply as notes about how Li's project can be applied to the aesthetics of everyday life and related issues.  I should say that Li and I were both strongly influenced by Marx's 1844 Manuscripts when young (my introduction, by Anatole Anton at San Francisco State University around 1973).  Li uses these early works by stressing Marx's quote:  "man therefore also forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty."  However Li also tries to incorporate aspects of several other schools of thought into his own, these including psychoanalysis, gestalt psychology, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Confucius and Lao Tzu. 


As I said above, there are many affinities between my own approach to everyday aesthetics and the philosophy of Li.  (This should not be surprising since Marx Wartofsky, a Marxist humanist himself, had a profound influence on me when I was a graduate student at Boston University.)  For example, Li introduces us to the concept of Zhutixing Practice which he also refers to as "historical ontology."  Like the American pragmatist John Dewey, Li rejects dualism.  So when he refers to ontology, bentilum, he is thinking literally of the study of the root or origin (ben) and stem or body (ti) of things.  Key to this is the idea that "being cannot be separated from the existence of human beings."  Further, "questions such as the possibility of cognition, morality, and aesthetic appreciation originate from and are subordinate to the question of the possibility of humanity." (40)  And it is through "using, making, and renewing instruments that humanity forms social existence" and hence also forms cognition, morality and aesthetics.  This reminds me of Wartofsky's seminal idea of "historical epistemology." [I have written the entry for Wartofsky in the forthcoming second edition of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.]  Of course this is Marxist in its origin:  the superstructure comes from material relations of production.  I would reject the bottom-up determinism of this, but not the dynamics of the interaction.

One of Li's most intriguing ideas is his notion of beauty as the practice of freedom, or, as he puts it: "beauty is the form of freedom."  Freedom is "the power to understand universal forms (laws) by overcoming natural necessity." (57) He also says it is shaping objects "in accord with natural laws."  At first this seems a contradiction:  how can it both be in accord with natural necessity and overcome it?  Li best explains (resolves?) this paradox in terms of the Taoist story told by Zhuanzi about Cook Ding (sometimes called Cook Ting).  Cook Ding was able to cut up an ox without dulling his knife because he could adapt to the emptiness within.  In Zhuanzi's writings he says, "I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are." Following "the Way" (in the Taoist sense) is, then, freedom.  So, what is beauty but the experience of this freedom, perhaps in one's practice or perhaps in the product of a  practice that is free in this way.  (But then, this product would also have to be experienced freely for beauty to be present.)  Freedom, as I understand it, then, for Li, is knowing something so well, and knowing a skill so well, one can do it intuitively.  I do not feel as comfortable as Li does with talking about "objective universal laws": there are so few of these outside the realm of science, and very few indeed in the world of human things.  But I can understand this to mean a self-transcending moment that comes through developing a practice (for example, when one knows how to play a piano piece so well that one senses a feeling of freedom when playing it, and in playing it beautifully).

Li also says that it is "during the process of humanizing both the external and internal natures that beautiful forms and pleasurable feelings come into being."  There is isomorphism of aesthetic pleasure and "interaction between various structures of symmetry, proportion, harmony..." (51), an isomorphism that has "both historical and social qualities." (52)  For Li, the question "what is the root of beauty?" is a philosophical question distinct from asking about aesthetic qualities and aesthetic objects:  the root of beauty, for Li, is humanized nature (the idea coming from Marx).  This aesthetic theory is neither a subjectivism or an objectivism, but a synthetic unity.  A large question that looms for Li and for those who read Li is how the human can attain this primacy given our current awareness of ecology and of the multiple complex relations between man and the rest of the natural world.  Is Li guilty of anthropocentrism?  One could say that he is not guilty of this simply because we cannot escape our humanness:  i.e. we cannot escape anthropocentrism, and so there is nothing to be guilty about in being anthropocentric.  We live in a world seen through human eyes and reconstructed largely according to human needs (i.e. the biosphere on this planet).  

Li writes:  "Because human's material production brings about isomorphic structures, the properties of natural objects (growth...) and their forms (rhythm, symmetry...) enter into the realm of beauty."  So, apply this to everyday aesthetics.  In everyday experience we engage in material production, for example in the home as we tidy up, or at work as we make whatever objects we make or shape whatever processes we shape.  Human production raises natural objects and their forms to the realm of beauty.  This is quite plausible, if not proved.  After all, as Li observes, the "psychological structure of beauty" results from millions of years of human (or hominid, at least) productive practices.  (I would include appreciative practices that go back just as far.)  

Kant and Imagination and aesthetic atheism too

This is not going to be an effort to enter into any of the debates between Kant scholars over the true meaning of Kant's Critique of Judgment.  I am more interested in elucidating some comments I made today in explicating a selection from Kant's great work to my Introduction to Aesthetics students.  It seems to me that the key to Kant's aesthetics and its greatness is the idea of imagination, an idea that does not play an important positive role in Plato's aesthetics, in Aristotle's theory of tragedy, or in Hume's theory of taste.  (Here, we are talking about what Kant calls the "productive imagination" and not the reproductive imagination, which merely situates things in space and time and is more like Hume's associative notion of imagination.  The productive imagination is more like what we today refer to as the creative imagination and its key mark is originality.)  Kant demands that a person of taste be disinterested because only then can imagination be allowed to play freely.  Imagination does not function importantly in what Kant calls "the agreeable" or in appreciation of the good, but it is essential to beauty.  We mean many different things by "imagination" but one thing quite imaginative in the first moment of the "Analytic of the Beautiful" is Kant's idea that we should not be concerned with the existence of the thing represented.  That is, if the palace I perceive turns out to be just an illusion, or if the idea that I have inherited this palace turns out to be false, this will not matter with respect to its beauty.  Imagination places the object in a world of its own independent of relations to myself and to other things.   Being disinterested is an example of thinking imaginatively:  it is a type of imaginative thinking.  Moreover, imagination is a matter of "giving meaning" to the representation:  "in order to say that the object is beautiful, and to show that I have taste, everything turns on the meaning which I can give to this representation."  A good judge on Kant's view is distinguished from Hume's good judge in that the only important ingredient is disinterestedness (or disinterested attention to an object's look of purpose).  Kant does talk about the need for practice and comparison (i.e. of academic training) for the artist, but delicacy of imagination in Hume's sense of the word does not play a significant role in his thinking.  Rather, he takes Hume's idea of "lack of prejudice" and expands it to involve not thinking about a host of matters, not just things that are of practical personal interest (where prejudice would be most at issue) but also not thinking of concepts, for example not thinking of the concept of "church" and what would make a good church, when appreciating the church one is perceiving.  Here, Kant is almost the opposite of Plato.  Plato would probably insist that in order to adequately perceive beauty one must perceive it under science (episteme), by which he would mean under proper understanding of the eternal Forms.  (I think there is another Plato hidden behind the dialogues who would contest this standard view of him...but no need to discuss that here.)  Plato wants to get us as far away from imagination as possible.  Allen Carlson is like Plato in that he would insist that to appreciate a flower appropriately one should have the knowledge of a botanist with respect to that flower.  (There is one important problem internal to Carlson's overall view:  if his belief that all pristine nature is beautiful [his "positive aesthetics"] implies that we should not find a diseased flower less beautiful than a healthy one then functionality would have to fall out of the picture with regards to aesthetic appreciation, and yet I don't think he wants to allow this.)  Kant, by contrast thinks that one should not focus on the actual purpose of the flower's parts or whether the flower serves its function well but rather focus on its "form of finality":  we should focus on the look of purposiveness, i.e. its look of being designed.   It is a strange operation, admittedly:  we are supposed to not think about what it may actually be designed to do but look at and attend to its design as we would at an abstract pattern in wallpaper.  Imaginatively perceiving it is a matter, I would venture, of allowing the object to immediately stimulate our thoughts by way of its designed look in such a way as to make the object an aesthetic idea, i.e. a symbol, something that seems greater than itself.  We should allow this design to work on our imaginations, giving us a sense of contemplative detachment that is also pleasurable. Why focus on the object's look of purpose?  To allow the free play of the imagination.  Although I have been critical of Carlson on this point in the past, here I do not want to take sides.  It would seem better rather to favor what Peggy Brand and Ted Gracyk have called the toggle method of aesthetic appreciation.  We should toggle between disinterested and scientific knowledge in appreciating the flower.  This would be on one level to just toggle between Carlson's and Kant's approach.  But this might be unfair to Kant, for promoting the toggle idea is perhaps what Kant was trying to do himself unwittingly when he introduced the otherwise incoherent (because inconsistent with his broader theory) notion of dependent beauty.  Dependent beauty brings in the very concepts of the object and its purpose that were supposed to be excluded from any appreciation of beauty.  But what dependent beauty really is is toggled beauty:  beauty in which we shift back and forth from pure beauty to recognition of functional adequacy, enhancing the overall beauty as we go.  Dependent beauty could not be beauty at all if it were just recognition of functional adequacy.  Dependent beauty contains pure beauty as an aspect.  We can better understand this if we realize that Kant is arbitrary in his classification of flowers and free beauties and horses as dependent beauties:  we can avoid this embarrassment by seeing both horses and flowers as perceivable in the fully disinterested fashion as free beauties and perceivable in a functional way.  They are only dependent beauties (in this revised version of Kant) if they are toggled between the functional and the pure.  Imagination frees us from the world of experience which is governed by the categories of the understanding and cognized through the laws of science. 

The existence of experiences of pure beauty itself is training however for something higher, which is the development of what Kant calls aesthetic ideas. (See my book for further discussion of this.) "Aesthetic ideas" are products of the the imagination at even a higher level in which the artist genius creates his/her own world, a world which follows its own rules.  (By the way, despite what many authors have said, and despite some sexist things he says in an early work, Kant cannot logically exclude women from the category of genius.  He is deeply committed to the idea that all humans are equal.)  The genius creates his object "by virtue of the harmony of his faculties" by which is meant specifically the faculties of the understanding and the imagination.  The products of genius are works of art and hence dependent beauties and hence approachable through toggling.  They have a pure beauty side which is allied with the imagination, and the impure side which is allied with the understanding.  In the end, Kant believes that the Critique of Judgment will provide us with a bridge from the world of experience to the supersensible realm.  The way this happens is through the aesthetic ideas.  The aesthetic ideas provide us with an intimation of a transcendent realm.  They give us unending thoughts, which is to say that, when we experience a work of art as an aesthetic idea (as a symbol in this rich sense of the word), we experience it as freeing us from ordinary experience, as a moment of self-transcendence, as a moment that is sublime in both its fearsomeness and its delight.  We feel as if totally free, and this is as good as it gets:  hence aesthetic atheism.