Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art

Comparative Perspectives

Prabha Shankar Dwivedi, Prabha Shankar Dwivedi

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000413014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

This volume brings together the finest research on aesthetics and the philosophy of art by stalwart critics and leading scholars in the field. It discusses various themes, such as the idea of aesthetic perception, the nature of aesthetic experience, attitude theory, the relation of art to morality, representation in art, and the association of aesthetics with language studies in the Indian tradition. It deliberates over the theories and views of Aristotle, Freud, Plato, Immanuel Kant, T. S. Eliot, George Dickie, Leo Tolstoy, R. G. Collingwood, Michael H. Mitias, Monroe C. Beardsley, and Abhinavagupta, among others. The book offers a comparative perspective on Indian and Western approaches to the study of art and aesthetics and enables readers to appreciate the similarities and differences between the conceptions of aesthetics and philosophy of art on a comparative scale detailing various aspects of both.

The first of its kind, this key text will be useful for scholars and researchers of arts and aesthetics, philosophy of art, cultural studies, comparative literature, and philosophy in general. It will also appeal to general readers interested in the philosophy of art.

Section I

Aesthetics and aesthetic perception

1
Aesthetics beyond aesthetics

Regarding the contemporary relevance of the aesthetic and recharting the field of aesthetics*

Wolfgang Welsch

Introduction: Outline of the problems

The prevailing presupposition: Aesthetics as artistics

What is aesthetics? The answer given by encyclopaedias is clear. The Academic American Encyclopaedia says, “Aesthetic is the branch of philosophy that aims to establish the general principles of art and beauty”.¹ Correspondingly, the Italian Enciclopedia Filosophica declares, Estetica e la “disciplina filosophica che ha per oggetto la bellezza e l’arte”.² The French Vocabulaire d’ Esthetique defines aesthetics as “etude reflexive du beau” and “philosophi et science de l’art”, respectively.³ And the German Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie says, “Das Wort ‘Asthetik’ hat sich als Titel des Zweiges der Philosophie eingeburget, in dem sie sich den Kunsten und dem Schonen […] zuwendet”.⁴ In short, aesthetics is artistics is an exploration of the concept of art with particular attention to beauty.

What, then, could “aesthetics beyond aesthetics” – as advocated in the title of this chapter – be? In order to be meaningful, the expression “aesthetics beyond aesthetics” would have to point to something beyond this art-bound understanding of aesthetics, to something beyond artistics. But how could this – although being beyond the established sense of aesthetics – still be a kind of aesthetics? Does the term “aesthetics” lend itself to a trans-artistic meaning?

Traditionally, this clearly is the case. “Aesthetics” goes back to the Greek word class aisthesis, aisthanesthai, and aisthetos – expressions which designate sensation and perception in general, prior to any artistic meaning. Current usage is not restricted either in everyday language; we use the term “aesthetic” even more often outside than inside of the artistic sphere when speaking, for instance, of aesthetic behaviour or an aesthetic lifestyle, or of aesthetic peculiarities of media, or an increasing aestheticization of the world.

The discipline “aesthetics”, however, traditionally didn’t thematize sensation and perception. It focused on art alone – and more on conceptual than sensuous problems of art. Mainstream contemporary aesthetics still does so. The academic discipline tends to restrict itself to artistics – no matter how uncertain the notion of art itself may have become in the meantime.

Certainly, there have been exceptions and countertendencies to this dominant feature. Remember, for example, that Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, the father of aesthetics – who created the term “aesthetics” in 1735, first lectured on the subject in 1742, and published the first book bearing the title Aesthetics in 1750 – conceived of aesthetics as a primarily cognitive discipline designed to improve our sensuous capacity for cognition. Among the scope of the new science – which he defined precisely as the “science of sensuous cognition”⁵ – he didn’t even mention the arts; he certainly used examples from the arts, especially from poetry, but only to illustrate what aesthetic perfection – as the perfection of sensuous knowledge – might be.

Shortly thereafter, however, when between Kant’s Critique of Judgment of 1790, The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism around 1796 (an essay of unknown authorship), and Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800, aesthetics started an unheard of career, leading it to the top of philosophy; aesthetics was understood exclusively as being the philosophy of the arts. And for centuries, this remained the dominant understanding of aesthetics started by philosophers as different as Hegel and Heidegger or Ingarden and Adorno.

There was, to be sure, still a countertendency, reaching from Schiller’s shift from artistic at first to political and educational art and finally to the “art of life” (“Lebenskunst”) through to Marcuse’s idea of a new social sensibility or from Kierkegaard’s description of aesthetic existence and Nietzsche’s fundamentalization of aesthetic activity through to Dewey’s integration of art into life. But this countertendency didn’t actually change the design of the discipline. The artistic focus remained dominant, and to a certain extent, even these opposing tendencies shared the basic presumption of traditional aesthetics; they too understood art as being the very model of aesthetic practice and as paradigms for the shift to the trans-artistic understanding of aesthetics they advocated.

Currently, the discipline still sticks to the artistic restriction. There may be many good reasons to turn to the recognition of an aesthetics beyond artistics, but in trying to foster this tendency for some years, I have in fact found much interest and support outside the discipline – from cultural institutions or theoreticians in other fields⁶ – but predominantly resistance within the discipline itself. One still assumes it goes without saying that aesthetics has to be artistics. One is still held captive by this traditional picture. And to continue this allusion to Wittgenstein, I am inclined to say, “And we cannot get outside it, for it lies in our discipline and this repeats it to us inexorably”.⁷

Overcoming the traditional presupposition

The scope of this congress

The present congress*, however, makes an attempt to escape from the aesthetics-artistics equation. The program is quite clear on this point. It suggests bridging “the gap between academic research and phenomena of the everyday world” and analyzing “how aesthetics itself, as a discipline […], is affected by this challenge”. It further suggests that “traditional criteria and models developed to explicate art or beauty are not necessarily adequate for explicating phenomena in the real world”, and it urges the placement of aesthetics “in a larger context” and reconsideration of the disciplinary design of aesthetics with particular emphasis on “interdisciplinary approaches”.⁸ Some progress, I think, has been made towards this goal during the last days.

From aesthetics to art criticism

Let me refer just to the initial step made by Arthur Danto. I take his opening presentation to represent an attack on the core of traditional aesthetics. Certainly, his suggestion to shift from aesthetics to art criticism doesn’t question the traditional frame: we should still talk about art (and perhaps solely about art). But Danto refutes the traditional understanding as to how this frame is to be filled. Traditionally, the goal of aesthetics was to establish the proper concept of art – its universal and everlasting concept. Hence aesthetics could be – and was even supposed to be – explicated without considering individual works of art or historically different types of art. Schelling, for example, frankly expressed this when he declared that a philosophy of art had to treat only “art as such” and “in no way empirical art”⁹ – his own philosophy of art representing, as he continues, “a mere repetition” of his “system of philosophy”, this time with respect to art, just as in the next instance with respect to nature or society.¹⁰

However inappropriate this strategy may appear to us today – and mostly appeared to artists (Musil, for example, decided such aesthetics as the attempt to find the universal brick fitting each work of art and being suitable for the whole building of aesthetics¹¹) – Schelling indeed expressed a basic belief of traditional aesthetics: that there is such a thing as an essential and universal concept of art and that establishing this concept would constitute and fulfil the task of aesthetics. This was the immanent reason why aesthetics apparently didn’t have to closely consider singular works of art but make do with just some initial knowledge of some works of art,¹² taking these as a starting point for the development of aesthetics’ intuition of the concept of art in general.

Of course, this traditional strategy is untenable.¹³ The practice of art doesn’t consist of exemplifying a universal notion of art but involves the creation of new versions and concepts of art. And the new concept certainly has some aspects in common with the concepts formerly dominant but definitely differs from it in other, no less important, aspects. This is obvious in every shift from one style or paradigm to another. Hence paradigms are connected by some overlaps from one concept to the next – by “family resemblances” – but not by a universal feature applicable to all of them or constituting an essential core of all works of art. There is no such thing as an essence of art.

So the traditional approach is basically mistaken. It is based on a misunderstanding of the conceptual status of art – with this misunderstanding even constituting the very core of traditional aesthetics. In this sense, insight into the genesis of different concepts of art through art itself and into their family resemblance – instead of a supposed essential unity – reveals the fundamental flaw of traditional, globalizing aesthetics and requires the shift to a different, pluralistic type of aesthetics.

I would like to take this to be the crucial argument which refutes traditional aesthetics and which justifies and even requires, the shift from aesthetics, for example, to art criticism, as advocated by Prof. Danto.

Towards a broader design of the discipline

But the reorganization of aesthetics which we currently have to consider might reach even further. Thus far, I have only discussed the paradigm shift due within the classical frame of aesthetics, within artistics. We can’t be held captive any longer by art’s essentialistic picture. But it might be time to get rid of the traditional frame itself – to no longer be held captive by the equation of aesthetics and artistics. The inner pluralization of artistics – the shift from a mono-conceptual analysis of art to poly-conceptual art criticism – might have to be supplemented by an outer pluralization of aesthetics – by an opening up of the field of the discipline to trans-artistic questions. This is what I will advocate in this chapter.

In the first part, I will try to develop the main topics of an aesthetics beyond aesthetics. In the second part, I will try to clarify its conceptual admissibility and suggest how to rechart the territory of aesthetics...