Aesthetics

A Comprehensive Anthology

Steven M. Cahn, Stephanie Ross, Sandra L. Shapshay, Steven M. Cahn, Stephanie Ross, Sandra L. Shapshay

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781118952429
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Estética en filosofía

A revised second edition of the bestselling anthology on the major figures and themes in aesthetics and philosophy of art, the ideal resource for a comprehensive introduction to the study of aesthetics

Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology offers a well-rounded and thorough introduction to the evolution of modern thought on aesthetics. In a collection of over 60 readings, focused primarily on the Western tradition, this text includes works from key figures such as Plato, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Danto, and others. Broad in scope, this volume also contains contemporary works on the value of art, frequently-discussed continental texts, modern perspectives on feminist philosophy of art, and essays by authors outside of the community of academic philosophy, thereby immersing readers in an inclusive and balanced survey of aesthetics.

The new second edition has been updated with contemporary essays, expanding the volume's coverage to include the value of art, artistic worth and personal taste, questions of aesthetic experience, and contemporary debates on and new theories of art. This edition also incorporatesnew and more standard translations of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment and Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, as well as texts by Rousseau, Hegel, DuBois, Alain Locke, Budd, Robinson, Saito, Eaton and Levinson.

• Presents a comprehensive selection of introductory readings on aesthetics and philosophy of art
• Helps readers gain a deep historical understanding and clear perspective on contemporary questions in the field
• Offers new essays specifically selected to promote inclusivity and to highlight contemporary discussions
• Introduces new essays on topics such as environmental and everyday aesthetics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the connections between aesthetics and ethics

Appropriate for both beginning and advanced students of philosophical aesthetics, this selection of texts initiates readers into the study of the foundations of and central developments in aesthetic thought.

Part I
Classic Sources

1
Introduction

Paul Oskar Kristeller

Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–99) was Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.

I

The fundamental importance of the eighteenth century in the history of aesthetics and of art criticism is generally recognized. To be sure, there has been a great variety of theories and currents within the last two hundred years that cannot be easily brought under one common denominator. Yet all the changes and controversies of the more recent past presuppose certain fundamental notions which go back to that classical century of modern aesthetics. It is known that the very term “Aesthetics” was coined at that time, and, at least in the opinion of some historians, the subject matter itself, the “philosophy of art,” was invented in that comparatively recent period and can be applied to earlier phases of Western thought only with reservations. It is also generally agreed that such dominating concepts of modern aesthetics as taste and sentiment, genius, originality and creative imagination did not assume their definite modern meaning before the eighteenth century. Some scholars have rightly noticed that only the eighteenth century produced a type of literature in which the various arts were compared with each other and discussed on the basis of common principles, whereas up to that period treatises on poetics and rhetoric, on painting and architecture, and on music had represented quite distinct branches of writing and were primarily concerned with technical precepts rather than with general ideas. Finally, at least a few scholars have noticed that the term “Art,” with a capital A and in its modern sense, and the related term “Fine Arts” (Beaux Arts) originated in all probability in the eighteenth century.

In this paper, I shall take all these facts for granted, and shall concentrate instead on a much simpler and in a sense more fundamental point that is closely related to the problems so far mentioned, but does not seem to have received sufficient attention in its own right. Although the terms “Art,” “Fine Arts” or “Beaux Arts” are often identified with the visual arts alone, they are also quite commonly understood in a broader sense. In this broader meaning, the term “Art” comprises above all the five major arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry. These five constitute the irreducible nucleus of the modern system of the arts, on which all writers and thinkers seem to agree. On the other hand, certain other arts are sometimes added to the scheme, but with less regularity, depending on the different views and interests of the authors concerned: gardening, engraving and the decorative arts, the dance and the theatre, sometimes the opera, and finally eloquence and prose literature.

The basic notion that the five “major arts” constitute an area all by themselves, clearly separated by common characteristics from the crafts, the sciences and other human activities, has been taken for granted by most writers on aesthetics from Kant to the present day. It is freely employed even by those critics of art and literature who profess not to believe in “aesthetics”; and it is accepted as a matter of course by the general public of amateurs who assign to “Art” with a capital A that ever narrowing area of modern life which is not occupied by science, religion, or practical pursuits.

It is my purpose here to show that this system of the five major arts, which underlies all modern aesthetics and is so familiar to us all, is of comparatively recent origin and did not assume definite shape before the eighteenth century, although it has many ingredients which go back to classical, medieval and Renaissance thought. I shall not try to discuss any metaphysical theories of beauty or any particular theories concerning one or more of the arts, let alone their actual history, but only the systematic grouping together of the five major arts. This question does not directly concern any specific changes or achievements in the various arts, but primarily their relations to each other and their place in the general framework of Western culture. Since the subject has been overlooked by most historians of aesthetics and of literary, musical or artistic theories, it is hoped that a brief and quite tentative study may throw light on some of the problems with which modern aesthetics and its historiography have been concerned.

II

The Greek term for Art (τέχνη) and its Latin equivalent (ars) do not specifically denote the “fine arts” in the modern sense, but were applied to all kinds of human activities which we would call crafts or sciences. Moreover, whereas modern aesthetics stresses the fact that Art cannot be learned, and thus often becomes involved in the curious endeavor to teach the unteachable, the ancients always understood by Art something that can be taught and learned. Ancient statements about Art and the arts have often been read and understood as if they were meant in the modern sense of the fine arts. This may in some cases have led to fruitful errors, but it does not do justice to the original intention of the ancient writers. When the Greek authors began to oppose Art to Nature, they thought of human activity in general. When Hippocrates contrasts Art with Life, he is thinking of medicine, and when his comparison is repeated by Goethe or Schiller with reference to poetry, this merely shows the long way of change which the term Art had traversed by 1800 from its original meaning. Plato puts art above mere routine because it proceeds by rational principles and rules, and Aristotle, who lists Art among the so‐called intellectual virtues, characterizes it as a kind of activity based on knowledge, in a definition whose influence was felt through many centuries. The Stoics also defined Art as a system of cognitions, and it was in this sense that they considered moral virtue as an art of living.

The other central concept of modern aesthetics also, beauty, does not appear in ancient thought or literature with its specific modern connotations. The Greek term καλόν and its Latin equivalent (pulchrum) were never neatly or consistently distinguished from the moral good. When Plato discusses beauty in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, he is speaking not merely of the physical beauty of human persons, but also of beautiful habits of the soul and of beautiful cognitions, whereas he fails completely to mention works of art in this connection. An incidental remark made in the Phaedrus and elaborated by Proclus was certainly not meant to express the modern triad of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. When the Stoics in one of their famous statements connected Beauty and Goodness, the context as well as Cicero’s Latin rendering suggest that they meant by “Beauty” nothing but moral goodness, and in turn understood by “good” nothing but the useful. Only in later thinkers does the speculation about “beauty” assume an increasingly “aesthetic” significance, but without ever leading to a separate system of aesthetics in the modern sense. Panaetius identifies moral beauty with decorum, a term he borrows from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and consequently likes to compare the various arts with each other and with the moral life. His doctrine is known chiefly through Cicero, but it may also have influenced Horace. Plotinus in his famous treatises on beauty is concerned primarily with metaphysical and ethical problems, but he does include in his treatment of sensuous beauty the visible beauty of works of sculpture and architecture, and the audible beauty of music. Likewise, in the speculations on beauty scattered through the works of Augustine there are references to the various arts, yet the doctrine was not primarily designed for an interpretation of the “fine arts.” Whether we can speak of aesthetics in the case of Plato, Plotinus or Augustine will depend on our definition of that term, but we should certainly realize that in the theory of beauty a consideration of the arts is quite absent in Plato and secondary in Plotinus and Augustine.

Let us now turn to the individual arts and to the manner in which they were evaluated and grouped by the ancients. Poetry was always most highly respected, and the notion that the poet is inspired by the Muses goes back to Homer and Hesiod. The Latin term (vates) also suggests an old link between poetry and religious prophecy, and Plato is hence drawing upon an early notion when in the Phaedrus he considers poetry one of the forms of divine madness. However, we should also remember that the same conception of poetry is expressed with a certain irony in the Ion and the Apology, and that even in the Phaedrus the divine madness of the poet is compared with that of the lover and of the religious prophet. There is no mention of the “fine arts” in this ...