Aesthetics

An Introduction

W. Charlton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138649019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317233817
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

First published in 1970. What is a work of art? What is the status of things in pictures and books? How are we to distinguish and ascertain the meaning of a literary work at various levels? This book is intended both to introduce the reader to classic philosophical accounts of art and beauty, and to bring out the significance for aesthetics of recent developments in philosophy.

1 PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS

10.4324/9781315626048-1

1. The subject-matter of aesthetics

What is aesthetics about? It is natural for anyone embarking on a study to want to know his terms of reference, but we should not insist on having them made precise at the outset, when that will prejudice the results of our enquiries. Sometimes there is no risk of this. We may say that ornithology is about birds, and we have not prejudged any issues on which ornithologists divide. What ornithology is about is not an ornithological question. But what aesthetics is about seems to be a question belonging to the subject matter of aesthetic discussion. Different aestheticians would wish to return different answers to it, and if we adopt one prematurely, we may find the line we are to take on other aesthetic issues already marked out.

There is such a subject as aesthetics because people sometimes assess and enjoy things aesthetically; and we shall avoid begging any questions if we say that aesthetics is the study of the things we assess aesthetically, and of the grounds and character of aesthetic judgement. It may then, of course, be asked: what do we mean by aesthetic assessment or enjoyment? But we can still keep our pristine freedom of manoeuvre if we reply, not with a formal definition, but with examples. Consider the following cases. You are thinking of taking a flat: you look it over, and note, among other things, that the rooms and windows are well or ill proportioned. You are driving somewhere on business, and see that the countryside has changed in character, become more sombre and severe. You are trying on clothes, and consider how they look on you and how they make you look. You are listening to a talk, and contrast the banality of what the speaker is saying with the pleasant tones and well chosen words in which he says it. You are playing a piece of music and it seems to carry you away. You are bedding out plants and try to get the spacing even or the colours well grouped. You admire the unhurried sureness of an elderly labourer's movements as he scythes or builds a dry stone wall. It strikes you that the postman has a funny face. Aesthetic judgement is exercised most formally, perhaps, in art galleries, concert halls and the like, but our lives would be very dull if it was in perpetual abeyance outside these temples dedicated to the muses.

I am suggesting that a vast and variegated throng of judgements may press forward, claiming to be aesthetic. Many theorists have felt that this cannot be allowed. They have tried to fix precise conditions for what is to count as an aesthetic judgement, and thus reduce bona fide aesthetic judgements to a homogeneous, easily managed group. One way of doing this is to argue that there is one single feature (or at most two or three such features) constituting aesthetic merit. All genuine aesthetic assessment is then assessment by the one genuinely aesthetic criterion: does the thing before us possess this feature? Clive Bell¹ took this line. He called the essential feature significant form, and held that unless a judgement is to the effect that something has or lacks significant form it is not an aesthetic judgement at all. Similarly many would say that to judge a thing aesthetically is, and can only be, to judge it as an expression of emotion.

Again, it has been thought that the mark of a genuine aesthetic judgement is that it is made in a special frame of mind: usually one of idleness, detachment, disinterestedness or passive receptivity. We suspend our natural sense of purpose and significance,² or instead of observing it and considering what qualities it has, we ‘prehend’ it and consider what ‘aspects’ ‘animate’ it.³

It has also been claimed that an aesthetic judgement is one with certain formal features which differentiate it from other sorts of judgement. Perhaps it is less conceptual in character; or it is related differently to the considerations we bring forward to support it. It in no way follows from these, and they do not function as proofs or even as reasons for accepting it, but rather as aids by which others may come to see or feel for themselves that it is right. Professor F. Sibley seems to adopt this approach. He places no restriction on the number of features which may be ascribed in a genuine aesthetic judgement; he offers an impressively rich vocabulary of expressions for them_ ‘unified, integrated, lifeless, serene, sombre, dynamic, powerful, vivid, delicate, moving, trite, sentimental, tragic, graceful, dainty, handsome, comely, elegant, garish’ etc. But all genuinely aesthetic judgements, he thinks, have this in common, that they are reached by the exercise of a peculiar sort of intuition, which he hopes to characterise by comparing and contrasting it with our ability to discriminate colours.⁴

Some writers, of course, have employed all these methods of marking off a set of pure aesthetic judgements. The best example is Kant. Kant held that a judgement, to be aesthetic, must be on one of precisely two features, beauty and sublimity, both of which he defined very narrowly; he also held that it must have a peculiar freedom and disinterestedness; and he laid down for it certain formal conditions which I shall not go into, but which, the reader may take my word for it, are extremely stringent and technical.⁵

Today the opinion is gaining ground that all these efforts are misguided: that there is no single feature which makes a situation aesthetic, no single set of criteria by which we can recognise aesthetic judgements.⁶ And that seems to be right. Certainly as soon as we have worked out our definition or laid down our limitations we shall find we have excluded cases we want to discuss—and a great many more cases which other people want to discuss, and which will not get considered if not by the aesthetician. Suppose I like adventure stories, and like them because they give me a thrill, because they carry me along and hold me in suspense. I may want to know what happens to me when I get carried along, how a story can thrill me, even, perhaps, what a story is or what it is that thrills. You simply exasperate me if you say that adventure stories and the enjoyment of them are no concern of the aesthetician: they are my concern, and I have turned to aesthetics for light on them. The aesthetician should rather go where there is work for him to do, than sit on Parnassus waiting for problems prepared to his specifications.

It may be thought, nevertheless, that aesthetic judgements must have something in common, since otherwise we would not call them all aesthetic. Bell's aesthetic theory starts from a similar idea: ‘Either all works of art’, he says, ‘have some common quality, or when we speak of “works of art” we gibber’.¹ This way of thinking rests on a narrow theory about the meaning of words, the theory that the same word can be used of a number of different things only if there is some definite characteristic which those things all share, some clear-cut concept under which they all fall. (Where we seem to have an exception, as with the word ‘pen’, it can be said that we really have to do not with one word but two: the word ‘pen’ which we use for what we write with comes from the Latin ‘penna’, and the word ‘pen’ which we use for what we keep sheep in comes from Old English.)

It is hard to deny that there are some words which are used in the way described; so, perhaps, ‘spherical’, ‘clove-hitch’, ‘kedge’, ‘oolite’. But there are plenty of other ways in which a word can be used without disintegrating like ‘pen’. Followers of Wittgenstein have emphasised that the application of the same word to a number of different things may be grounded on what they call a family resemblance. A family resemblance (in the technical sense) holds between several things if each of them has a reasonable number of some set of characteristics; there need be no characteristic in the set which they all have, and the set itself need not be clearly delimited: we can add further characteristics if it becomes convenient to do so. The group of things is held together by a complicated pattern of overlapping and intersecting resemblances, rather as a rope is held together by the friction of many small fibres, even though there is no single fibre running its whole length. It is often claimed that games form a group of this sort. There is no one feature which all games have in common, but each game has a certain amount in common with several others. If you consider championship chess and backroom poker by themselves, it may seem odd to use the same word ‘game’ of them both; but it becomes intelligible when we see some of the chains linking them, for instance ordinary chess—draughts—backgammon—cribbage—piquet.⁷

This account of how the same expression may come to be applied to many very heterogeneous things, seems to work well for the expression ‘aesthetic judgement’. Our attention to a shell beside us on the beach may seem very different from our attention to a performance of Bach's Matthew Passion in a cathedral, so long as we consider the two alone; but we can trace many paths between them when we look at the intervening territory, with other kinds of music, patterns of sound, paintings which involve shells, shell decorations in houses, literary allusions, mythology and so on. There is a group of judgements, attitudes, pleasures, activities, held together, not by some single thread running through them all, but by a web of limited resemblances and affinities, and these are the business of the aesthetician.

2. Aesthetics and philosophy

If aesthetics is the study of the things we assess aesthetically, and of our aesthetic assessment of them, what contribution has philosophy to make to it? The philosopher is not an art historian, or even a historian of taste. His aesthetic discriminations are no finer than those of other men. He has no special mission or eloquence to lead us to deeper or more subtle modes of aesthetic appreciation. So had he not better hold his peace?

An obvious answer is that philosophy can make the same sort of contribution here as anywhere else. Anything of which we make a special study is liable to disclose a side or throw up a problem in the face of which our specialist knowledge is useless; and the philosopher is not a man with a subject of his own, but rather a man who makes a speciality of dealing with that aspect of other people's subject matter, with which their expert knowledge does not help them to deal. It is true that cries for philosophical assistance are more often heard from some fields than from others; but aesthetics seems to be one from which they are (or philosophers may feel they should be) clear and incessant. A glance at two or three problems which will be treated more amply later will show what I mean.

Some aestheticians have held that aesthetics is primarily about art, and about products of nature such as flowers and mountains only insofar as we adopt an attitude to them like our attitude to works of art.⁸ This needs arguing, since at first it looks arbitrary, but certainly very many things we assess aesthetically are works of art, or at least made or done by men. An important question, then, for the aesthetician is: what is a work of art? And this is not, at least in one aspect, a question for the art-expert. Examples of works of art are Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the Odyssey, the Mona Lisa. Now many things we have to do with, such as our friends and relations, our dogs and slippers, are physical objects occupying places for times. Perhaps the Mona Lisa is such an object, but it is hard to say the same of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, hard to say what place the Odyssey is occupying just now. Are works of art, then, qualities or dispositions of physical objects, like my arthritis or the shape of your nose? Or are they entities of a different sort altogether, like Platonic ideas? We have got into a difficulty from which we cannot be liberated by any knowledge of the intricacies of German music or Homeric syntax. The scholar is as helpless as the layman, and both must look to the philosopher. It may be added that the philosopher need not assume that works of art are all things of the same logical type: I shall in fact discuss separately what we mean by a picture, a piece of music and a poem.

Again, many works of art are representations, and since the time of Plato⁹ it has been recognised that our experience of representations is not easy to analyse coherently. When we look at the Mona Lisa, do we see a woman? A real woman? A woman that is really there? Or a woman that is not really there? The Odyssey describes encounters with giants and sorceresses. But no such encounters ever took place. How can one describe an encounter that never took place, or distinguish it from another encounter which also never took place?

A literary critic might dismiss these last questions as frivolous, but others are perhaps more disturbing. Critics try to expound the meaning of works of literature, but the meaning at a deep and elusive level. In one way the meaning of a piece of writing is not a matter for dispute. If you produce a correct literal translation of a French poem, you show you know the meaning of the French, and people who know both French and English will not dispute about whether your translation is correct. But if you offer a critical interpretation of a French poem, whether you have grasped its meaning in another sense will be disputable. You yourself can argue for your interpretation in a way it would be vain to argue for your translation; and though there are people considered qualified to judge, an accurate knowledge of French and English is not thought to be their sole qualification. These people are of course the critics; and they may find it awkward to say just what their qualifications are,¹⁰ or provide an exact characterisation of the kind of meaning with which they are concerned. Now the distinguishing and classifying of ways in which words and speeches can have meaning is a task for philosophers, and one to which they have in fact given much attention in recent years; I shall suggest in Chapter 5 that the results they have achieved may be used to shed light on obscure facets of the critic's activity.

That the problems just reviewed are suitable for philosophical treatment, perhaps nobody will deny; but it may be thought that they are, after all, peripheral. They all bear rather on the things we assess aesthetically than on our assessment of them, and since the eighteenth century, when people first started writing full-length books on aesthetics and the name itself was introduced (it was introduced by Baumgarten in 1750; before that, discussions like the present had no special name), it is on the grounds of aesthetic judgement and the nature of aesthetic experience that aestheticians have chiefly concentrated. The controversial question is whether philosophers have much to say on these topics. One reason for thinking not is that most philosphers who have tried their hands at them have made a disappointing showing. But it may also be feared that this poor success is inevitable, that aesthetic experience and judgement are by nature such that any prolonged philosophising about them is bound to be useless and dull.¹¹

I hope it will eventually emerge that these fears are too pessimistic. They are not, however, entirely baseless. If we take up certain positions on two or three issues which are not proper to aesthetics but belong to philosophy generally, we shall indeed find, when we come to aesthetics, that we have left ourselves very little to say. These positions were orthodox in the eighteenth century, and have been effectively questioned only recently. They were accepted by nearly all writers on aesthetics, and such dreariness as hangs over the subject may, I think, be traced directly to their acceptance. Let me try to say what they are.

The most important concerns the notion of pleasure. It was supposed that pleasures are objects of awareness distinct from, and more or less on all fours with, other objects of awareness like sounds, patches of colour, heat and cold; and feeling pleasure or being pleased is being aware of a pleasure. We may say, if we like, that according to this view ‘pleasure’ is the name of a sensation, but if we say this we must understand by a sensation something which can be felt or ‘perceived’ by the mind, so that ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘the sound of a trumpet’ are also names of sensations. If we want to know further what a pleasure is, it is no use asking for a verbal description, since the word ‘pleasure’ stands for something simple and unanalysable, a ‘simple idea’: the only way of learning what a pleasure is like, is by having one. As Locke puts it, pleasure and pain ‘like other simple ideas, cannot be described, nor their names defined: the way of knowing them is, as of the simple ideas of the senses, only by experience.’¹²

Although pleasures are thus, so to speak, independent objects of awareness, they come to us, it was held, along with other sensations. ‘The infinitely wise Author of our being’, as Locke piously expresses it, ‘has been pleased to join to several thoughts and several sensations a perception of delight’.¹³ In other words, a feeling of pleasure tends to be the accompaniment of something like tasting honey, or kissing a pretty girl, or hearing that you have won a lottery. We may say if we like that in these cases the pleasure is caused by the honey, girl or news, or by the sensations of tasting, kissing or hearing; but to say this, according to eighteenth-century theories of causality, is to say no more than that a sensation of pleasure is a normal or regular attendant of these other experiences. Hume in a famous passage defines a cause as ‘an object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all objects resembling the former are placed in a like relation of priority and contiguity to those objects that resemble the latter’,¹⁴ and this definition would be accepted as basically sound by many today. He...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS
• 2 PURE FORM
• 3 REPRESENTATION
• 4 EXPRESSION
• 5 LITERATURE
• Notes and Bibliography
• Index