When I speak of the possibility of an aesthetic turn in philosophy I speak very speculatively and for a future generation. It is very unlikely that such a thing will happen in the near run. Aesthetics is still the step-child of philosophy, as it has been going all of the way back to Plato, who shunted his main comments on the philosophy of art to the end of the Republic, and then added insult to injury by outlawing the imitative arts from the ideal society. It is unfortunate that aesthetics holds so little interest for contemporary philosophers as the domain of aesthetic value is immense and is equally large and significant to our lives to moral value, often overlapping the issues of moral value as well. Part of the neglect of aesthetics may be traced to a certain attitude contemporary philosopher have towards consciousness itself, an attitude that William James tried to overcome in his Principles of Psychology. The comments I will make here are based on material found in the selection from that book, called "The Stream of Thought," found in John J. Stuhr ed. Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.) My argument briefly is that James' attack on associationist psychology is an attack on traditional empiricism going back to Locke and Hume, that this attack is still relevant today, that those philosophers and that tradition have neglected some fundamental characteristics of thought, which, when attended to, indicate that aesthetic experience may be much more fundamental to consciousness than people ordinarily think.
James does not mention aesthetics in this selection, and only mentions art once, although in an important way. Yet I will show that his examples show an awareness of aesthetic phenomena as foundational to a study of consciousness. It is perhaps because James studied as a painter when a young man, and then later in his 20s, spent considerable time thinking about the nature of art, that his insight into consciousness has so many affinities to an aesthetic approach to philosophy. It is also not surprising that in reading these passages from the Principles of Psychology one is often reminded of Dewey's later description of "an experience" in his Art as Experience (1936). I suspect that there is a direct line of influence here. But Dewey's book does not make as clear the importance of these insights for philosophy in general.
James begins by observing that most psychology books begin with sensations "as the simplest mental facts" and then proceed to construct higher stages of thought from these. Yet "no one ever had a simple sensation by itself." Rather, consciousness is "of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations" and even what we call simple sensations "are results of discriminative attention." Instead, James believes we should start with the fact of thinking itself, where "thinking" means "every form of consciousness." My argument will be that the shifts in our understanding of consciousness brings out aesthetic features of experience that are systematically neglected by the philosophical tradition up until our own time.
James lists five characters of thought, all of which are relevant to our purpose, but only two of which I will discuss today. This is cumulative, and the relation to aesthetics might not seem evident from the first. Bear in mind that in these passages James has nothing to say about pleasure or aesthetic qualities. There is no mention of grace, beauty, ugliness, and so forth. However, James is drawing our attention to the greater complexity of experience than is found in traditional psychology, a complexity that is brought out phenomenologically by referring to a halo of experience (177), and also by a deep awareness of the ways in which an experience of, say, the speaking of a sentence, carries something of the past with it, develops over time, and projects into the future. The overall aesthetic quality that conscious experience has for James might be called "dramatic structure." The experience of a thought turns out to be much like the experience of a play in Aristotle, with its emphasis on beginning, middle and end, the whole being an organic whole in which each part represents the whole. Without this understanding of the nature of consciousness, an understanding of experience as fundamentally related to aesthetics, perhaps as fundamentally aesthetic, is lost. Ironically, although James' thought is directed against Hume's psychology, there is an affinity between James on consciousness and Hume on taste. Just as Sancho's cousins are able to engage in subtle discrimination, telling that the wine is good but for a taste of leather in one case and metal in the other (both confirmed by finding the key with the leather thong at the bottom of the barrel) so too the subtle elements of consciousness observed by James require very high levels of discrimination.
James' first point about thought, that "thought tends to personal form" seems at first little related to the point at issue. The most of value here is the possible implication that all thought is colored by the self to which it is attached, thus increasing the phenomenological complexity of thought. The mental procession in my mind is the primary datum of psychology, and it is my mental procession personified as mine and shaded by my personal selfhood.
The second point, that "thought is in constant change" takes us however in a direction directly opposed to the Lockean theory of simple ideas. The point is deeply Heraclitean, although oddly requiring a non-Heraclitean view of the external world to do its work. He writes: "no state once gone can recur and be identical with what was before." and further "there is no proof that the same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice." (164) What is got twice rather is the same object. It is noteworthy here that the examples suddenly veer to the aesthetic realm: "We hear the same note over and over again; we see the same quality of green, or smell the same objective perfume, or experience the same species of pain." (165) We believe in the permanent existence of these realities. And it is these realities that come up again and again in thought. But it is careless to think that the ideas of them are ever the same. He alludes to a later chapter where he will observe that "our habit of not attending to sensations as subjective facts, but only as stepping stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal." (163) Attending to these sensations is the aesthetic as opposed to the practical way of perceiving. This hunch is immediately confirmed by James when he now brings up what we would today consider to be one of the main insights of the Impressionist movement in art. Bear in mind that James publishes this in 1890, that he constantly travels to Europe, and that Monet and Renoir are doing impressionist painting in 1869. So there is ample time for the ideas to pass over. Here is the quote: "The grass out of the window now looks to me of the same green in the sun as in the shade, and yet a painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown, another part bright yellow, to give its real sensational effect." He further asserts: "We take no heed, as a rule, of the different way in which the same things look and sound and smell at different distances under different circumstances." James' awareness of the phenomenological complexity of sensation, based on the notion that it is never the same, goes also to differences in sensibility based on differences in emotion about things from one age to another or in different overall moods: "What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. The bird's song is tedious, the breeze is mournful, the sky is sad." That is, things shift in their aesthetic/expressive properties. A similar thing happens to "every thought we have of a given fact": "The friends we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows; the women, once so divine, the stars, the woods, and the waters, how now so dull and common! the young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable existences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books, what was there so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight?" (166) All of this, although focused in negative aesthetic experience, is still aesthetic.
I will save discussion of the third and fourth points for later.
The last (fifth) point about thought, that "it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks" is directly related to aesthetics by James himself. What is the aesthetic approach to sensation but a matter of selecting? As James puts it: "Accentuation and Emphasis are present in every perception we have." and he takes an example from music: "a monotonous succession of sonorous strokes is broken up into rhythms, now of one sort, now of another, by the different accent which we place on different strokes." (178) Further, "what are our very senses themselves but organs of selection?" so that "out of what is in itself an undistinguishable, swariming continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of contrast, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, of picturesque light and shade." (178) He even defines things as "special groups of sensible qualities, which happen practically or aesthetically to interest us." (178)
Not only do the senses select ranges of sound, for example, to attend to, the mind also selects from among sensations to most truly represent something. For example I may take a table-top as square (and other ways it looks as matters of perspective), erecting "the attribute squareness into the table's essence, for aesthetic reasons of my own."
When he finally passes to the "aesthetic department" of thought he finds that this law is even more obvious than in other domains since the artist selects tones, colors, shapes and so forth to create unity, harmony, etc. (179)
Finally, he sees the entire activity of consciousness as art-like: it consists of selection of some possibilities and suppression of others by way of attention: "The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone." (180) It seems that the very construction of consciousness is deeply and fundamentally aesthetic.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Shusterman on Living Phllosophically
"It is something to be able to paint a particular
picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it
is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through
which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the
day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life,
even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and
critical hour." Thoreau, Walden, quoted in Thinking Through the Body (288) (This and the next two quotes
are taken from “Chapter 13: Somaesthetic
Awakening and the Art of Living:
Everyday Aesthetics in American Transcendentalism and Japanese Zen
Practice.”)
"to live philosophically means living in a waking rather than sleeping state...the discipline of awakened life can provide everyday experience with deep aesthetic enrichment and even spiritual enlightenment" Shusterman (288-9)
"We fail to see things as they really are with the rich, sensuous resplendence of their full being because we see them through eyes heavy with conventional habits of viewing them and blinded by stereotypes of meaning." Shusterman (291)
"to live philosophically means living in a waking rather than sleeping state...the discipline of awakened life can provide everyday experience with deep aesthetic enrichment and even spiritual enlightenment" Shusterman (288-9)
"We fail to see things as they really are with the rich, sensuous resplendence of their full being because we see them through eyes heavy with conventional habits of viewing them and blinded by stereotypes of meaning." Shusterman (291)
"But apart from … sublime, quasi-mystical moments of
grasping a timeless now, there is the simpler yet significant value of
attentive awareness of our mundane experience, of being fully present in what
we do and where we are so that we can more fully profit from what our
surroundings actually offer." Shusterman (299).
"Through...heightened, appreciative awareness and the
mindful movements and actions that emerge from it, one can achieve
extraordinary aesthetic experience in everyday living" Shusterman (302)
It is only in the context of deep sympathy for these quotes that I made the following interrogatory comments. Both Shusterman and I see the task of living philosophically partly in terms of Socrates. (See his Chapter 3 “Self-Knowledge and Its Discontents: From Socrates to Somaesthetics.”) This is not surprising. Socrates was one of my earliest philosophical heroes, and that is probably true for most Western philosophers. He taught that the unexamined life is not worth living, and I still believe that to be true, taking it to mean something like: to make life worth living (to enhance value in one's life) one needs to (at the very least) reflect on the key concepts that guide one's perception and action, reflect deeply, constantly questioning, constantly coming up with hypothesis to test, never accepting one of these as the final answer, recognizing that the only thing worthy of the name "wisdom" comes out of this process. But this does not, on the face of it, seem to be the same as the aesthetic life. Can the philosophical life as exemplified by Socrates and the aesthetic life work together? (Shusterman, as inventor and promoter of somaesthetics, would, of course, add that the examined life should also include examination and improvement of one’s bodily sensations.)
It is only in the context of deep sympathy for these quotes that I made the following interrogatory comments. Both Shusterman and I see the task of living philosophically partly in terms of Socrates. (See his Chapter 3 “Self-Knowledge and Its Discontents: From Socrates to Somaesthetics.”) This is not surprising. Socrates was one of my earliest philosophical heroes, and that is probably true for most Western philosophers. He taught that the unexamined life is not worth living, and I still believe that to be true, taking it to mean something like: to make life worth living (to enhance value in one's life) one needs to (at the very least) reflect on the key concepts that guide one's perception and action, reflect deeply, constantly questioning, constantly coming up with hypothesis to test, never accepting one of these as the final answer, recognizing that the only thing worthy of the name "wisdom" comes out of this process. But this does not, on the face of it, seem to be the same as the aesthetic life. Can the philosophical life as exemplified by Socrates and the aesthetic life work together? (Shusterman, as inventor and promoter of somaesthetics, would, of course, add that the examined life should also include examination and improvement of one’s bodily sensations.)
Socrates also plays a leading role in Plato's Symposium
where we get a different take on the philosophical life, one that sees it
ultimately as aesthetic. As one engages in philosophical examination one
is also in search of beauty. One travels up a ladder of love, where the
object of love is always something of beauty. The final stage is
apprehension of Beauty itself, the eternal Form of Beauty, which holds roughly
the same place in the metaphysics of the Symposium as the Form of the
Good does in The Republic.
Recognition of Beauty itself is seeing the vast sea of beauty in the world as
we experience it: it is being able to
recognize when beauty is present. I
take this to mean that close attention to the aesthetic dimension of human
existence can be one path to an awakened state of being, which, in Plato’s
account, happens when one grasps the eternal Form of Beauty or the Good.
The issue that Shusterman has raised concerning how to live
philosophically is an important one for everyday aesthetics. In response
to the question "what is the point of everyday aesthetics" his answer
would be, not to simply open up and explore a new field of inquiry in philosophy
but to help us learn how to live philosophically where living philosophically
is not just a matter of examining concepts and arguments but is also of paying
attention to the phenomena so that rich sensuous qualities are revealed. Much more is involved as
well, particularly related to somatic self-improvement. The question
remains how these two things, examining concepts and paying attention for
somatic self-improvement, can fit together. How can you both examine life
in Socrates’ sense and also live life with the intensity of perception and
orientation to somatic self-improvement required by, for instance, Zen
practice? (292). (A high point in Shusterman's book is his discussion of his aesthetic experience at a Zen monastery.)
Shusterman's Zen-influenced recommendation for living the
philosophical life of heightened awareness is simplicity, slowness, and
focusing on the here and now. Let us
first consider the issue of simplicity.
It is hard to understand what exactly simplicity means in the context of
“the examined life,” especially when we reflect on the life and activity of
Socrates. When we engage in Socratic dialogue (which is pretty much how
Socratic characters examine life under the direction of Socrates or some other
Socrates-like character, for example Parmenides in Plato's Parmenides) things become increasingly complex: simple things
are no longer so simple. We thought we knew what, for example, piety
was, and then we discover that we are ignorant (the result of Plato's Euthyphro).
Instead of one definition for a concept we have several, none of which are
fully adequate, even though the later, more complex ones, are taken as
better. So where is simplicity in all of this? A possible answer is that grasping Beauty
itself, or any Form, is not a matter of grasping a complex proposition but grasping
something that is simple, although this can only come at the end of a process
that is itself complex.
Although accepting the project of examining life, Shusterman rejects the
Socratic search for definition as found in the dialogues. In doing so, he seems to reject the project of the
philosophical life as a life of concept-examination. In the end, though, I think that these two
approaches to the philosophical life can be reconciled. In aesthetics, the Socratic quest for
definition is most discussed in relation to the definitions of art, beauty and
aesthetic experience. In “Somaesthetics
and the Limits of Aesthetics” Shusterman attacks the “wrapper model of theory”
(134), i.e. the belief that one should construct theory by way of a definition of X in terms of necessary and sufficient definitions, for example in trying to define are. This is largely because such a theory, with regards to art,
attempts to “conserve the conventional limits of art” (134). I agree with this
critique of contemporary attempts to define art. However, Socrates himself (or, as portrayed by
Plato) never tries to preserve the conventional limits of the concept under consideration. He questions, for example, Euthyphro’s
conventional definition of piety. In
rejecting the wrapper model, Shusterman appears to reject the Socratic quest
itself, although perhaps he wouldn’t if he accepted my analysis of the result
of that quest as grasping something that is both complex in one respect and
simple in another. I agree with Morris
Weitz that, although a “real definition” of “art” in terms of necessary and
sufficient conditions will never be found (and is impossible), the process of
seeking and coming up with what he called “honorific definitions” of art is
immensely valuable. Moreover, previous
attempts to define art, rather than simply being failures at real definition,
were unconsciously exactly that.[1] Hence, unlike Shusterman, I value the
Socratic project of trying to come up with definitions as long we do not take
seriously the idea usually (perhaps falsely, as I have suggested) attributed to
Plato that the end product of this quest is description of an eternal
unchanging object, i.e. a definition in terms of necessary and sufficient
conditions.[2]
[1] Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in
Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 1 (1956): 27-35. Weitz’s
strategy can be applied to all philosophical debates, but this need not be
argued for here.
[2] See my “The Socratic Quest in Art
and Philosophy,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 3 (1993): 399-410 for a more positive
approach to Socratic dialogue and its relevance to the quest for essences. See also my “Metaphor and Metaphysics,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity (Special
Issue on Metaphor and Philosophy) 10. no. 3 (1995): 205-222.
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Hegel's Three Stages of Art, But Nietzsche to Be Preferred
Hegel divides his “science” of aesthetics into three sections. The first concerns the idea of the beauty of art or what he calls “the Ideal.” He stresses that the idea of beauty in art is not the Idea as such, which would be studied by metaphysics and which, I suspect. would be much like a Platonic Idea. He speaks of the Idea of beauty in art rather as one which is “shaped forward into reality” and is immediately unified with this reality. Whereas the Idea itself is “absolute truth” the Idea of beauty in art is both individual reality and reality destined to embody the Idea. This implies a demand that the Idea and its configuration in reality should be adequate to each other. When the Idea is shaped in this way it is the Ideal. He urges us not to confuse the Ideal with the notion of precisely representing the Idea in a shape. This would confuse truth of the Ideal with “mere correctness,” i.e. correct expression of the meaning of the Idea in the shape. For contents can be represented adequately without having the artistic beauty of the Ideal. In comparison with such an Ideal, that (overly precise) representation may appear defective. So defectiveness in art is not just due to lack: defectiveness of form sometimes results from defectiveness of content. The Chinese, Indian and Egyptian religion and art is defective in this way: they never get their god images “beyond formlessness or a bad and untrue definiteness of form.” Their mythological ideas therefore fail to achieve true beauty. The reason is that the ideas are “indeterminate, or determined badly.” [By contrast, Kant believes that the aesthetic ideas of an artistic genius are indeterminate.] They do “not consist of the content which is absolute in itself.” In one of my favorite sentences he writes: “Works of art are all the more excellent in expressing true beauty, the deeper is the inner truth of their content and thought.” (148) It may well be that this is true regardless of his own interpretation of it. He contrasts this approach to art against that which stresses imitative accuracy, in which skill is able to imitate “natural forms as they exist.” There may even be an “abandonment and distortion of natural formations” in the art which is based on “intentional alteration” coming out of the artist’s own mind. This passage seems to foretell the possibility of modern art with all of its distortions. It follows that some art may be imperfect even though it is technically good in its “specific sphere.” It is simply defective “in comparison with the concept of art itself and the Ideal.” [This is somewhat similar to Kant’s idea of merely academic art that is not informed by genius.] In the highest art, of course, Idea and presentation are in accord with one another. The Idea also “must be determined in and through itself as a concrete totality” which would give it the principle of its being. This principle is made particular in external appearance. The Christians may represent God in human form because the Christian God [in Jesus Christ?] is known “in himself as spirit.” If the Idea is determinate/concrete then this makes particularization possible. In other cases, as in other religions, the determinacy may be imposed from outside and the shape is thus merely external to the abstract Idea. So “the truly concrete Idea [as in the Christian case] alone produces its true configuration” and thus the Ideal.
The next stage in the argument concerns the development of the ideal into particular forms of the beauty of art. He writes that “because the Idea is in this way a concrete unity, this unity can enter the art-consciousness only through the unfolding and then the reconciliation of the particularizations of the Idea.” This development allows artistic beauty to acquire “a totality of particular stages and forms.” That is, artistic beauty evolves through the totality made up by the Symbolic, Classical and Romantic stages. These forms are different ways “of grasping the Idea as content” i.e. “different relations of meaning and shape.”
The Symbolic. Here the Idea is “in its indeterminacy and obscurity” or bad determinacy. Since it is indeterminate it does not have enough individuality for the Ideal. It is too abstract and one-sided and this means it is “defective and arbitrary.” So it is merely searching to portray the Idea and does not truly present it. It is “struggling and striving.” In the symbolic form the Idea has its shape in “natural sensuous material.” But it is imposed on perceived natural objects in an external way. They are to be interpreted as if the Idea were present in them. This kind of art, [for example, an Assyrian representation of a lion] can only give an abstract idea of, for example the lion’s strength. But since this relation is abstract we are conscious of the fact that the Idea is foreign to the natural phenomena. The Idea then “seeks itself” in them “in their unrest and extravagance.” It “exaggerates natural shapes” and “staggers round in them, it bubbles and ferments in them, does violence to them, distorts and stretches them unnaturally” and tries to elevate them by way of “diffuseness, immensity, and splendor.” There is a contrast and incompatibility between the Idea, as here indeterminate, and the natural objects as determinate. The Idea then takes a negative relation to the objective world and is taken as sublime, above all of these non-corresponding shapes. The natural phenomena are seen as incompatible with their non-mundane meanings. This is found in the pantheism of the East which either “ascribes absolute meaning to even the most worthless objects” or “violently coerces the phenomena to express its view” and then becomes “bizarre, grotesque, and tasteless.” A third alternative is that it turns the abstract freedom of the one substance or God against all phenomena “as being null and evanescent.” [Perhaps this refers to Zen.] In all of this the Idea and shape remain incompatible.
[The symbolic mode of art insofar as it is associated both with the sublime and with the indeterminate seems to be set up as an attack on Kant who understood the aesthetic ideas as indeterminate and as sublime. It is as though Hegel believed that Kant’s idea of fine art and the artist genius is stuck at the first stage of art.]
The Classical. Here, the double defect of symbolic art is “extinguished.” The defects are (1) Idea is presented as indeterminate “or determined abstractly” and (2) meaning and shape have a defective correspondence which is “purely abstract.” Classical art is “the free and adequate embodiment of the Idea in the shape peculiarly appropriate to the Idea..” Both shape and Idea are in harmony. Thus it gives us a vision of the completed Ideal actualized. This is not a purely formal correspondence between content and configuration. If it were, then “every portrayal of nature” for example of every flower or scene as content would be classical. The content of classical art is the concrete Idea in the sense of concretely spiritual. The spiritual is the inner self. So what, in nature, “belongs to the spiritual in and for itself”? “The original Concept” [i.e. God?] “invented the shape for concrete spirit.” That is, God created the world with the idea in mind of correspondence of spirit and natural shape. Now the “subjective Concept,” i.e., in this case, the spirit of art has found the shape “and made it…appropriate to free individual spirituality.” The Idea, as spiritual and individually determinate, assumes this shape, i.e. the human form. Some have seen [such] anthropomorphism as degrading the spiritual but since the goal of art is to bring the spiritual before our eyes in a sensuous manner it must anthropomorphize “since spirit appears sensuously in a satisfying way only in [this] body.” Physiology [biology] thus insists that life develops necessarily to the human form as the only one appropriate to spirit. [Maybe in his time, not in our own!] The form of the human body in this regard counts only as the natural shape of spirit. Because of this it is not affected by the “deficiency of the purely sensuous” or from the fact that our “phenomenal world” is merely contingent and finite. Spirituality as content “must be of such a kind that it can express itself completely in the natural human form” and not tower above it. So, spirit is determined here as “particular and human” and not as purely absolute and eternal, since it can only express itself in the latter sense as spirituality. But this is a defect in classical art and this defect brings about its dissolution and “transition to a higher form.”
The Romantic. The romantic form cancels the unification of Idea and reality found in the classical and “reverts” in a “higher way” to the opposition of these two sides as found in symbolic art. [This is also found in Nietzsche’s later idea of the conflicted marriage of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Indeed, Nietzsche’s account is similar to Hegel’s: the Dionysian (especially the pre-Greek Dionysian) representing the symbolic, the Apollonian representing the Classical, and the tragic synthesis of the two representing a return to the Dionysian by way of the Apollonian.] Oddly, Hegel holds that it is Classical art that achieves the “pinnacle” of what art can achieve, and that whatever is defective in it is what is defective in art itself, i.e. that art takes spirit as its subject matter and yet can only give it in sensuously concrete form. In blending the spiritual and the sensuous it fails to represent the true nature of spirit which is “the infinite subjectivity of the Idea.” As “absolute inwardness,” the Idea cannot freely “shape itself outwardly” in a bodily form. The romantic form then goes beyond the classical. This content is what Christianity asserts of God as a spirit in contrast to the Greek religion exemplified in classical art. The unity of the divine nature and the human in classical art is “only immediate and implicit” and is manifested sensuously. It is because the Greek god is naively intuited that it is in human shape. Hegel contrasts the Greek god, which is individual and particular in substance and power with [the Christian] which possesses oneness “as inward subjective knowledge.” The content of Classical art is knowledge of implicit unity that can be perfectly presented in bodily shape. But once this is elevated into self-conscious knowledge we come to the tremendous, even “infinite,” difference between, for example, man and animal. Unlike the animal, man is not confined to the implicit and immediate but becomes conscious of his animal functions and lifts them into self-conscious science. Because he knows he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and knows himself as spirit. So the unity of divine and human nature “is raised from an immediate to a known unity” and the truth is no longer the spiritual in the body but “the inwardness of self-consciousness.” Christianity brings God before our imagination as “absolute in spirit” and thus no longer particular. It “retreats from the sensuousness of imagination into spiritual inwardness,” and thus, this, and not the body, is the medium of truth’s content. The unity of the divine and human is “only by spiritual knowing and in spirit.” So this new content is freed from immediate and sensuous existence which is now seen as negative. So, romantic art is “self-transcendence of art” but “in the form of art itself.”
[It is hard for me to see the advantage of this move since it is hard to know just what spiritual inwardness is. Instead of abandoning the sensuous imaginative element it might be better to simply see Hegel’s move as a stance that allows us to find a greater depth in works by, e.g. Rembrandt, than in those by the great Greek sculptors. Self-consciousness or “knowing thyself” goes back as an ideal to the Greeks, especially to Socrates. So it is nothing original. Moreover, contra Hegel, I think there is something else to Christianity of value to aesthetics, perhaps what is caught more by Tolstoy, with his emphasis on empathy and love. I don’t think we can get the inwardness of Christianity just through a Platonic-like self-consciousness connected with rejection of the sensuous. If we follow Nietzsche, instead, we have the capacity to combine the sensuous, the imaginative and “saying yes to life” as will to power. In my view Nietzsche’s philosophy overcomes the limitations of Hegel’s when it comes to aesthetics, religion, and even self-consciousness since it engages in a true dialectic. Hegel is just dressing up Plato by putting it all in a setting of historical development.]
Hegel then uses language like “free concrete spirituality” to describe the romantic. [Incidentally, his romantic stage has little to do with the period now called “the Romantic period.” This more common definition of “Romantic” is associated mainly with art of the early 19th century but sometimes with the late 19th century. Thus it is associated with Hegel’s own time. Hegel seems not to have been much interested in the art or music of the decades in which he was writing, although his closeness to Goethe is well known.]
Now, art “cannot work for sensuous intuition.” [In a sense one can say that art becomes non-aesthetic. But I think that this is neither possible nor advised.] Art must “work for the inwardness which coalesces with its objects simply as if with itself.” Words like “feeling” and “emotion” come out. This spiritual feeling “strives for freedom in itself.” Hegel also speaks of “the inner world” as the content of the romantic and of “depth of feeling.” One thinks of the ways in which works by some artists, for instance Raphael and Rembrandt, seem to represent or exhibit a deep inner world of feeling.
Let’s say that exhibiting such a world of feeling is important, that what the Classical world lost was the ways in which humans have existential angst, deep love, and other deep and conflicted feelings. Setting aside the religious idea, we seem once again to move in the direction of Nietzsche. To see this inwardness as a “triumph over the external” is to treat it like the Platonic soul that leaves the cave: but the notion of “inwardness” implies not looking to the Forms but looking to one’s private life of intense emotions. Both Hegel and Plato would agree, however, that “what is apparent to the senses …sinks into worthlessness.” And that is a problem they share.
Hegel concludes his discussion of the Romantic by observing that, since the Romantic needs an external medium for its expression, and since spirituality has “withdrawn into itself,” the “sensuous externality of shape” comes back, as it was there in symbolic art. It is treated as “inessential and transient.” The individual, i.e. “the subjective finite spirit,” is also treated as inessential. Thus in drama, individuality of plot and character become unimportant. Instead imagination is freed to represent what is present “exactly as it is.” This is in contrast to how it distorted the world under the symbolic mode. The external medium of art now has its home “in the heart” and not in the external world. It finds “reconciliation with itself” in chance, accident, grief and even crime.” [One thinks of Dostoyevsky here, in which a path to the spiritual is found by way of a reaction to crime. Or perhaps Hegel is pointing forward to the novelistic realism of Zola. The use of the word “crime” here is a great mystery.] So, as in the symbolic, the separation of Idea and shape come back except that here the Idea is no longer deficient. Rather, it is “perfected in itself as spirit and heart.” This is why it cannot adequately be united with the external. [But I think this is exactly wrong with a painter like Rembrandt or Vermeer.] In the end, then, the Ideal is transcended “as the true Idea of beauty.
Monday, March 9, 2015
Heidegger and Everyday Aesthetics Being and Time #13
Being and Time paragraph 13 intimates a theory concerning everyday aesthetics, especially by way of the concept of fascination. Heidegger has established that Being-in-the-world is "a basic state of Dasein" where Dasein pre-eminately operates in everydayness. Heidegger here stresses the mistake of setting up a relation between a knowing subject and an independent Object, this subject/ Object distinction to be replaced by the Dasein/world distinction. Now, the concept of everyday aesthetics comes into this chapter through the concept of fascination. Fascination itself is close to an aesthetic concept, so close that perhaps it is one. We speak of being fascinated by aesthetic objects. Fascination is when we perceive something and cannot jerk ourselves away. The object is "fascinating." It perceptually holds. We think of fascination mainly as something positive, and so it is a kind of pleasure, or perhaps a delight in the sense of Edmund Burke when he speaks of the sublime as an object of delight but not pleasure. For Heidegger, "Being-in-the-world, as concern, is fascinated by the world with which it is concerned." This happens when concern "holds back from any kind of producing, manipulating and the like." Thus it is a "tarrying alongside" which lets us encounter things in the world purely in the way they look. This implies a kind of looking-at in which we dwell "alongside entities within-the -world." This "dwelling" is one in which "perception of the present-at-hand is consummated," which reminds us of Dewey's notion of the aesthetic experience as a consummation. However, here the consummation is a matter of addressing oneself to something and discussing it as such, expressing what is perceived in determinate propositions.
All of this, of course, is related to the problem of knowing. Heidegger sees this as "interpretation in the broadest sense" in which the perception is made determinate. Knowing is not the primary mode but is something based ultimately on Being-in-the-world. The question is whether fascination is an aesthetic mode upon which all other modes, including that of knowing, are ultimately based. If knowledge were simply a matter of bringing something into an internal box or cabinet then the aesthetic relation to the objects of knowledge would be unimportant. A close or caring relationship Heidegger posits with objects of knowledge implies the fascination which brings in the aesthetic dimension. So then it would seem that the aesthetic is primary and the epistemological is only secondary.
All of this, of course, is related to the problem of knowing. Heidegger sees this as "interpretation in the broadest sense" in which the perception is made determinate. Knowing is not the primary mode but is something based ultimately on Being-in-the-world. The question is whether fascination is an aesthetic mode upon which all other modes, including that of knowing, are ultimately based. If knowledge were simply a matter of bringing something into an internal box or cabinet then the aesthetic relation to the objects of knowledge would be unimportant. A close or caring relationship Heidegger posits with objects of knowledge implies the fascination which brings in the aesthetic dimension. So then it would seem that the aesthetic is primary and the epistemological is only secondary.
Hegel's Introduction to Aesthetics
Normally we think of this material with some distaste. How can we take seriously, for example, the setting up of a hierarchy of cultures, moving from the East to Greece and from there to the Christian "Romantic" era. This just seems like blatant ethnocentrism. And I am not sure that is wrong. But it is always worthwhile to try to read the great philosophers with view to how that reading can illuminate our own world. In the case of Hegel what strikes me now is his conviction that taste is not just, as Hume would have it, a matter of discriminating and evaluating small parts in order to evaluate a whole, but a matter of determining something about the relationship between form and content and something about how this plays out in history. (For Hegel, these issues are not just isolated in the world of art but have to do with the culture as a whole and in particular in the development of religious thought which happens in tandem with that of art.) This, of course, is a bit more like Kant, for whom taste was a judgment of beauty, and such judgments had moral significance, although Kant leaves out the history part. Kant thought also that works of genius gave us aesthetic ideas which themselves were intimations of a supersensible realm. So at least the concept of genius stresses content in the way that Hegel's concept does, although for Kant the content is indeterminate. One senses that, for Kant, the works of genius are the closest one is going to get to the supersensible realm, whereas for Hegel, they are simply preliminary to the death of art and its replacement by philosophy, Hegel being more like Plato in this regard.
An issue that nags or should nag a Humean in taste is how a new style can come along and seem to resolve issues left unresolved in previous styles. One can see the ancient Greek kouros maker looking at Egyptian sculptures and finding a certain dissatisfaction there, ultimately replace the Egyptian style with one that is more humanistic, also in accord with differences between Egyptian and Greek religion. One can also still sees these kinds of moves as signifying an advance in humanity. One can also see a Renaissance painter like Rembrandt looking at the great Greek models and feeling that something is lacking, responding in turn by creating works that seem to exude a deeply inner life that seems absent from the Greek models, while also capturing something of the spirit of a new age. This would be the "romantic" reaction to the "classical." One can also see these shifts as abstract models that can be repeated in history, where in a particular style there is a symbolic, classical and romantic stage, a kind of life of the style itself, where the romantic itself contains internal contradictions, although frankly I cannot see these as pointing forward to erasure of art in favor of philosophy, unless we posit a four stage, call it the "conceptual" after which there must be a reaction that brings us back to something like the symbolic stage again. (How come this reaction is never discussed, not even by Danto.) So let's consider the development of rock and roll along these lines: the symbolic being the relatively crude adaptations of African-American traditions by young Elvis, the Beetles, etc., followed by the classical period in which form and content both become more sophisticated as well as harmoniously correlated, perhaps reaching its final moment in the White Album, and then this followed in turn by a time of greater interiority, spiritual inwardness characterized by the Romantic, this followed by a spare moment of conceptual art and then the reaction of Punk music with its return to the crude symbolic level. Taste in all of this might be conflicted as many will see the next stage as resolving the contradictions of the previous stages and will project the beauty of that for all to admire, while at the same time, those who are loyal to the older style will disagree. Hume might call this an "innocent" disagreement, but where do we with that?
An issue that nags or should nag a Humean in taste is how a new style can come along and seem to resolve issues left unresolved in previous styles. One can see the ancient Greek kouros maker looking at Egyptian sculptures and finding a certain dissatisfaction there, ultimately replace the Egyptian style with one that is more humanistic, also in accord with differences between Egyptian and Greek religion. One can also still sees these kinds of moves as signifying an advance in humanity. One can also see a Renaissance painter like Rembrandt looking at the great Greek models and feeling that something is lacking, responding in turn by creating works that seem to exude a deeply inner life that seems absent from the Greek models, while also capturing something of the spirit of a new age. This would be the "romantic" reaction to the "classical." One can also see these shifts as abstract models that can be repeated in history, where in a particular style there is a symbolic, classical and romantic stage, a kind of life of the style itself, where the romantic itself contains internal contradictions, although frankly I cannot see these as pointing forward to erasure of art in favor of philosophy, unless we posit a four stage, call it the "conceptual" after which there must be a reaction that brings us back to something like the symbolic stage again. (How come this reaction is never discussed, not even by Danto.) So let's consider the development of rock and roll along these lines: the symbolic being the relatively crude adaptations of African-American traditions by young Elvis, the Beetles, etc., followed by the classical period in which form and content both become more sophisticated as well as harmoniously correlated, perhaps reaching its final moment in the White Album, and then this followed in turn by a time of greater interiority, spiritual inwardness characterized by the Romantic, this followed by a spare moment of conceptual art and then the reaction of Punk music with its return to the crude symbolic level. Taste in all of this might be conflicted as many will see the next stage as resolving the contradictions of the previous stages and will project the beauty of that for all to admire, while at the same time, those who are loyal to the older style will disagree. Hume might call this an "innocent" disagreement, but where do we with that?
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