Philosophy of the Arts

An Introduction to Aesthetics

Gordon Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134271214
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Philosophy of the Arts presents a comprehensive and accessible introduction to those coming to aesthetics and the philosophy of art for the first time. The third edition is greatly enhanced by new sections on art and beauty, modern art, Aristotle and katharsis, and Hegel. Each chapter has been thoroughly revised with fresh material and extended discussions. As with previous editions, the book:

• is jargon-free and will appeal to students of music, art history and literature as well as philosophy
• looks at a wide range of the arts from film, painting and architecture to fiction, music and poetry
• discusses a range of philosophical theories of thinkers such as Hume, Kant, Gaender, Collingwood, Derrida, Hegel and Croce
• contains regular summaries and suggestions for further reading.

1

Art and pleasure

The most familiar question in philosophical aesthetics is this: what is art? Why is this question worth asking? The answer has to be that art matters. The question ‘what is art?’ is really the question ‘what counts as art?’ and we want an answer to it in order to know whether or not something should be accorded the status of art. In other words, a concern with what is art is not just a matter of classification, but a matter of cultural esteem. There are, then, two fundamental issues in aesthetics – the essential nature of art, and its social importance (or lack of it). Philosophical aesthetics has tended to focus on the first of these questions, almost exclusively in fact. But there is a lot to be said for tackling the second question first. Accordingly, over the course of the next few chapters we will examine four attempts to formulate a normative theory of art, which is to say, one that will explain its value.

What makes art valuable? A spontaneous answer, even to the point of being commonplace, is this: art is a source of pleasure or enjoyment. For the sake of a label we could call this view ‘aesthetic hedonism’ from hedos, the Greek word for pleasure. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the adequacy of aesthetic hedonism as a normative theory of art.

Hume on taste and tragedy

Some philosophers have thought that the value of art is necessarily connected with pleasure or enjoyment because, they argue, to say that a painting, a poem, a play or a piece of music is good is just the same as saying that it pleases us. The best-known philosopher to hold this view was the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76). In a famous essay entitled ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ Hume argues that the important thing about art is its ‘agreeableness’, the pleasure we derive from it, and that this is a matter of our sentiments, not its intrinsic nature. ‘Judgements’ about good and bad in art, according to Hume, are not really judgements at all ‘because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it’ (Hume 1963: 238). In other words, if I like a thing, I like it, irrespective of any characteristics it possesses. ‘To seek the real beauty, or the real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to seek the real sweet or real bitter’ (ibid. 239). That is to say, aesthetic preferences are expressions of the taste of the observer, not statements about the object, and Hume thinks the wide diversity of opinions about art that we find in the world is confirmation of this fact.

Here we touch upon a question that many people think is central to the philosophy of art – can there be objective judgements of aesthetic value? Hume's essay is widely taken to be the classic exposition and defence of view that they cannot be, that aesthetic opinions are essentially subjective. However, the main discussion of this issue will be postponed to a later stage (Chapter 10), because for the moment we are concerned not with the suggestion that aesthetic appraisals are subjective, but with the idea that, by their very nature, they are connected with pleasure.

As a defence of subjectivism in aesthetics, though, Hume's essay is not really very persuasive. While he observes that aesthetic opinions can differ greatly, he also recognizes that at least some artistic sentiments can be so wide of the mark as to be discountable. If aesthetic appraisal is a matter of feeling, it seems there can be aberrant feelings. The case he considers is that of a minor writer being compared with John Milton, the great poetic genius who wrote Paradise Lost. Though, says Hume, ‘there may be found persons who give the preference to the former … no one pays attention to such a taste; and we pronounce without scruple the sentiment of these pretended critics to be absurd and ridiculous’. What this implies is that, even though taste is a matter of feeling things to be agreeable or disagreeable, there is still a standard of taste, and the question is how these two ideas can be made consistent.

Hume's answer is that the standard of taste arises from the nature of human beings. Since they share a common nature, broadly speaking they like the same things. When it comes to art, he thinks, ‘[s]ome particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric [of the human mind], are calculated to please, and others to displease’ (1963: 271). There are of course strange reactions and opinions; people can prefer the oddest things. But Hume believes that the test of time will eventually tell, and that only those things which truly are aesthetically pleasing will go on calling forth approbation as the years pass.

On the face of it, Hume's theory seems to fit the facts. Artistic tastes do differ greatly, yet broadly speaking, most people like and admire the same great masterpieces in music, painting, literature or architecture. Still, contrary to Hume's suggestion, this shared tendency on the part of the majority of people merely reveals a common taste, it does not validate any standard of taste. The fact that a feeling is shared by many people does not make it rationally obligatory for everyone to feel the same. If an individual has extremely peculiar musical tastes, say, we can certainly regard them as odd, but if Hume is right in thinking that aesthetics is all a matter of feeling, we have no good reason to call them ‘absurd and ridiculous’; they are merely different. If we want to say that some views about art are mistaken, we cannot make the mistake rest on human feeling about art – it just is what it is – but on something about the art itself.

For present purposes, however, Hume's contention about feeling as the basis of aesthetic judgement is not the main issue, which is rather the connection he alleges between aesthetics and pleasure. Suppose it is true that people declare artworks and performances to be good or bad in accordance with the feeling those works prompt in them. It does not follow that the feeling has to be one of pleasure. Hume, along with most of his contemporaries, believed that only pleasure could explain the power of art to attract and hold us. This is why, in another famous essay entitled ‘Of Tragedy’, he finds it puzzling that people should willingly watch plays, read poems and view paintings that include events which would normally horrify them. His explanation of this phenomenon is that though the horribleness of the events would naturally repel us, it is overlaid with (or even turned into) pleasure by the artistry with which the events are depicted.

[T]his extraordinary effect proceeds from that very eloquence with which the melancholy scene is depicted. The genius required to paint objects in a lively manner, the art employed in collecting all the pathetic circumstances, the judgement displayed in disposing them; the exercise, I say, together with the force of expression and beauty of oratorial numbers, diffuse the highest satisfaction on the audience and excite the most delightful moments. By this means the uneasiness of the melancholy passions is not only overpowered and effaced by something stronger of an opposite kind, but the whole impulse of those passions is converted into pleasure.

(Hume 1963: 224)

But why is it puzzling that people are attracted by tragedy? The problem arises only because Hume assumes that people must be deriving pleasure from the depiction of horrible events. Perhaps, on the contrary, some people relish unpleasant feeling. If so, and if it is on this ground that they commend tragedies, horror films and so on, then Hume is right to think that their aesthetic appraisals reflect sentiment or feeling, but wrong to think that the feeling in question is one of pleasure.

It follows that the connection between art and pleasure is not a necessary one; to say that a work of art is good or valuable on the strength of the feelings it invokes in us, is not the same as saying that we find it enjoyable. Moreover, we might describe it in positive terms – gripping or compelling, for instance – without implying that we derive pleasure from it; the loathsome can exercise a powerful fascination.

Nevertheless, though ‘good’ does not mean ‘pleasurable’, it still makes sense to claim that art is to be valued chiefly because of the pleasure or enjoyment it gives. It is this, I think, rather than Hume's thesis, that most people who believe there is a connection between art and enjoyment mean to assert.

Collingwood on art as amusement

Is it true that art is principally valuable as a source of pleasure and enjoyment? It is worth noting that it is not always natural to speak of ‘enjoying’ art. People quite easily say this of novels, plays, films and pieces of music, but less easily of paintings, sculptures and buildings. So even if it were agreed that ‘enjoyment’ often explains the value of art, some further explanation of just what this might mean in the case of the plastic arts and architecture would be needed.

But a more important difficulty is this. To say that art is something we enjoy, tells us next to nothing. People enjoy lots of things – their work, their holidays, their food. When someone says he enjoys his work, we usually ask what it is about the work that is enjoyable, and expect his answer to tell us about what he finds of value in it. ‘Enjoyment’ does no more than signal that he values it. In a similar fashion, the initial claim that art is a source of enjoyment is not in itself informative. It simply leads on to the next question. What makes it enjoyable?

It is often assumed (as Hume assumes) that the answer is obvious; things are enjoyable because they give us pleasure. Now the concept of ‘pleasure’ also needs some clarification, because it can be used in such a general fashion that it means little more than ‘enjoyment’ in the sense just described, in which case we are no further forward. But getting clear about the concept of pleasure is not as easy as we might suppose. There is a tendency to conflate ‘pleasure’ with ‘happiness’ as though they were synonymous, when they are not, and another tendency to think of ‘pleasure’ as the psychological opposite of ‘pain’. Both these tendencies are to be found in the founders of philosophical utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–73), and since utilitarian ideas have had such a powerful influence on contemporary culture, these tendencies have become widespread.

The sense of ‘pleasure’ we want to examine here is something like ‘entertainment value’. The value of art is that it offers us entertainment. This is a thesis that the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) discusses in The Principles of Art, one of the major works of aesthetics published in the twentieth century and one to which we will have occasion to return in a later chapter. Collingwood calls the belief that the value of art lies in its ability to entertain us, ‘art as amusement’. While he is partly engaged in the traditional task of philosophical aesthetics – namely defining what art is – his interest is a normative one. The purpose of his book is to arrive at a satisfactory conception of ‘art proper’ or true art, as we might say, and what he wants to show is that ‘art as amusement’ falls short of ‘art proper’. Confusing the two hides an important mistake.

Collingwood does not mean to deny that there are people for whom the arts are a form of entertainment, and it may indeed be the case that, as a matter of fact, they genuinely find amusement in plays, novels, and so on. This is an important point to stress. To claim that ‘art as amusement’ falls short of ‘art proper’ does not require us to deny that the arts have recreational value and can entertain us. Collingwood's contention is that if this is all we find there, we have missed the thing most worth finding. His analysis of the error in ‘art as amusement’ is both insightful and persuasive, but best considered in connection with his own, positive theory of art which will be examined in Chapter 3. At this point in the argument, it is sufficient to register a doubt he raises about an important assumption at work. The thesis that art is valuable for the pleasure or amusement we derive from it depends, crucially, on the truth of a factual claim – that we do indeed derive pleasure from it.

Is this actually true? What is at issue here is not a matter of language or belief, but a matter of experience. First, people readily use the language of pleasure and enjoyment in connection with the arts, but it does not follow that the thing they experience is properly called ‘pleasure’. Second, for all sorts of reasons people will claim that they enjoy major novels, great masters, the music of the concert hall, and may make this claim quite sincerely. But what they choose to do is often a more convincing test of their real opinion than what they feel constrained to say. Once we shift our attention to the choices they make, it is not at all obvious that most people find most of what we call art pleasurable in any straightforward sense.

Someone who wants to read simply for pleasure is far more likely to choose a novel by John Grisham than by William Faulkner, though the label ‘literature’ would be attached to the latter rather than the former. Romantic comedy is a more obvious choice than art film for most people going to the cinema, just for pleasure. Channel hoppers wanting an evening's entertainment at home are, by and large, more likely to stop at soap opera than Shakespeare. And who, apart from a very few, would prefer the art gallery to the restaurant if what is in view is simply pleasure?

Such preferences need not prevail universally for the general point to hold; great novels can also be diverting and amusing. But there is this further point to be emphasized. People who, for the purposes of entertainment, choose soap opera over Shakespeare or Grisham over Faulkner, are most unlikely to claim that what they have chosen is artistically more valuable or significant. Probably, they will agree that Faulkner is a far more important writer than Grisham. Even so, his novels provide a much less pleasurable way of passing the time. In the same way ‘easy listening’ is preferable to Beethoven's late Quartets, because it is easy, not because it is greater art.

The fact that personal pleasure and artistic significance can be divorced in this way lends support to Collingwood's contention that the prevalence of ‘art as amusement’ as the explanation of aesthetic value has distorted people's ability to ask honestly just how much pleasure they derive from ‘high’ art. Collingwood thinks that there is often a measure of self-deception in people's attitudes, because there is often a conventional pressure to claim to enjoy art. But if we are honest most of us will admit that the entertainment value of high art is quite low compared to other amusements.

The masses of cinema goers and magazine readers cannot be elevated by offering them … the aristocratic amusements of a past age. This is called bringing art to the people, but that is clap-trap; what is brought is still amusement, very cleverly designed by a Shakespeare or a Purcell to please an Elizabethan or a Restoration audience, but now, for all its genius, far less amusing than Mickey Mouse or jazz, except to people laboriously trained to enjoy it.

(Collingwood 1938: 103)

Collingwood's judgement ...