Art's Claim to Truth

Gianni Vattimo, Luca D'Isanto, Santiago Zabala

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780231515665
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

First collected in Italy in 1985, Art's Claim to Truth is considered by many philosophers to be one of Gianni Vattimo's most important works. Newly revised for English readers, the book begins with a challenge to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, who viewed art as a metaphysical aspect of reality rather than a futuristic anticipation of it. Following Martin Heidegger's interpretation of the history of philosophy, Vattimo outlines the existential ontological conditions of aesthetics, paying particular attention to the works of Kandinsky, which reaffirm the ontological implications of art.

Vattimo then builds on Hans-Georg Gadamer's theory of aesthetics and provides an alternative to a rationalistic-positivistic criticism of art. This is the heart of Vattimo's argument, and with it he demonstrates how hermeneutical philosophy reaffirms art's ontological status and makes clear the importance of hermeneutics for aesthetic studies. In the book's final section, Vattimo articulates the consequences of reclaiming the ontological status of aesthetics without its metaphysical implications, holding Aristotle's concept of beauty responsible for the dissolution of metaphysics itself. In its direct engagement with the works of Gadamer, Heidegger, and Luigi Pareyson, Art's Claim to Truth offers a better understanding of the work of Vattimo and a deeper knowledge of ontology, hermeneutics, and the philosophical examination of truth.

I Aesthetics

1	Beauty and Being in Ancient Aesthetics

The “Modernity” of Ancient Aesthetics

The meaning of ancient thought for the history of aesthetics is still largely debated. The interpretative views on this topic have always oscillated between general observations to the effect that the antiquity of Greece and Rome did not develop a detailed inquiry of the question of art (hence the fragmentary presentation of isolated ideas that speak of a philosophical sensibility at a very embryonic stage for the question of art in regard to the beautiful), and the attempts to discover in antiquity the more or less explicit premises of the philosophical theories of modernity. Now, it is obvious that the confrontation of historical inquiry can only occur by means of “our prejudices,” since this is the only and inexorable way in which we can “let the texts speak,” as it is generally said, addressing to them questions and drawing from them answers so that we can reconstruct a meaningful ensemble rather than a disconnected jumble, giving shape to the figure of the author or of the epoch in question.

However, not every approach is right. This is not because it does or does not correspond to the object of our inquiry. Rather, the value of working hypotheses lie in their depth and completeness, in their degree of elaboration.

Recent studies of ancient aesthetics face precisely this problem with respect to an argument that is already problematic on its own.¹ Indeed, one can start out, like Warry in Greek Aesthetic Theory, with the general exigency of studying ancient aesthetics to discover solutions for contemporary problems.² The outcome, however, is a dull and narrow-minded representation of what classical Greece—limited to Plato and Aristotle, two of its most eminent representatives—supposedly produced in regard to the beautiful and to art. The basically informative purpose of the book, which is explicitly stated in the book’s introduction, does not justify the insufficiency of the approach and the exposition of the theme, at least for the reason that it is accompanied by the claim to contribute to the solution of contemporary problems by recovering and rereading classical texts. The fact is that these supposedly contemporary problems are never clearly stated or defined. In Warry’s account we can glean a general sensibility for themes that belong to the contemporary mindset, above all psychoanalysis. Based on such a shaky approach, the author gives an exposition of Plato’s and Aristotle’s aesthetics and abundantly reconstructs their systems (especially Plato’s) through citations that are drawn here and there, and are not always employed correctly or with any sense of order.

Warry’s own interest in his uncritically grounded “modernity” prevents him from truly understanding the question of the beautiful, especially in regard to Plato. From the point of view of modern aesthetics, which places the question of art and its subjective conditions at the very center, the writings of classical authors appear fragmented into a series of isolated and unconnected statements, so that it is necessary for the interpreter to intervene in order to give it unity and systematization, as Warry explicitly states.

Reading this book can be pleasant, even though it is not what the author intended. Take for example, the section where the story of the Symposium is told, where Alcibiades is called an Athenian playboy, and where the author devotes two pages to explain why the dialogue’s title in English should be The Cocktail Party rather than The Banquet.³ The same holds true for the psychoanalytical analysis (though it remains quite vague, even from this point of view) of Socrates’ speech in the Symposium, and a few sophisticated remarks about the hypnotic value of art:

Despite much condemnation of existing poetry, it is stated that the right ideas can best be impressed on the mind of children through poetic fiction. It should have been only a short step from here to realizing that most men are children at heart and that for better or worse they are far more susceptible to inspiration through works of fiction and poetry than through utopian political systems such as kindled the imagination of Plato himself.⁴

In spite of all this, which may be attributable to the popular character of the book, Warry puts forth an interpretation of classical aesthetics that is formulated or implicit in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. According to Warry, such an interpretation may be summed up with the identification of two levels that are distinctly present in the Greek theory of the beautiful, the history of which is constituted by virtue of their manner of composition and discordance: the level of the subconscious and that of consciousness. Plato and Aristotle are fundamentally in agreement in regard to their dichotomous view of man and of aesthetic experience.⁵

In Plato, the dichotomy takes the shape of a juxtaposition between a romantic vision of the beautiful exemplified above all by the Symposium and a formal-intellectual vision found in the Philebus but running through the entirety of Plato’s work, inasmuch as it is identical with the meaning of the beautiful as harmony, measure, and proportion. In Aristotle, the same dichotomy allows us to understand the concept of mimesis and its cognate rhythm. In fact, mimesis is not a principle that establishes art’s dependence upon nature. Warry rightly observes that the verisimilitude or necessity of what happens in tragedy is measured with respect to the spectators’ mindset rather than to nature, be it human or not, abstractly taken as an object of imitation. Mimesis is, therefore, a principle of external form, that is to say, the necessary proportion between tragedy and the spectators’ mindset; it has its correspondent principle of internal form in the proportional structure of the work.⁶

It is here that rhythm is introduced.⁷ Rhythm has the same proportional structure of tragedy, though it is considered at a rational (the event) or at an irrational level (meter, music, dance). The “form” that is proportionate to tragedy affects the spectators insofar as it is rhythm; it awakens catharsis. Catharsis is neither religious nor ritual; it does not consist in the purification of emotions: the two levels of the rational and the irrational (identical to the levels of the subconscious and of consciousness) correspond to the moral-intellectual and to the emotional levels of catharsis.⁸ Put in these terms, what the author states in the conclusion is a bit unclear: while the conscious level is the site where moral and cognitive values are located and lived through, art, the beautiful, and the ugly regard the level of the subconscious (hypnosis or semi-hypnosis is produced by art). He leaves unanswered the question whether art and the artistically beautiful are to be seen in both levels as it seemed at first glance, or whether their activity is relegated to the level of the subconscious.

Aristotle’s Dissolution of the Ontology of Beauty

The works of Grassi and Perpeet are quite different form the preceding one with respect to their approach to the problem and style of thinking. They corroborate what we already saw, demonstrated in negative fashion, in Warry’s reading: the more sharply formulated an approach in its systematic and theoretical aim, the more the texts allow us to grasp them in a more genuine manner, addressing us with an authoritativeness that can put them in dialogue with our contemporary questions.

The points of departure for Grassi and Perpeet are similar, even though in Die Theorie des Schönen Grassi formulates them more explicitly, occasionally giving in to the demands of “actuality” (his book, albeit of high value, belongs to a popular series of books). In Grassi’s view, a genuine dialogue with ancient aesthetics, which would recognize it as what it genuinely wanted to be, can only start by acknowledging that aestheticism, the end point of all modern aesthetics, has failed, not only in the realm of aesthetics but also and foremost in that of art. Much of the nineteenth-century avant-garde, which for the author boils down to the technicity of Mallarmé and Valéry, consists in the manifestation, by now unstoppable, of a dissolutive process that began with Aristotle’s theory of art as representation of the possible, that is, as a purely subjective interpretation of the world, which is entrusted to the will of the individual and to the sphere of emotions, deprived of any ontological foundation.

At the heart of this dissolutive process, however, there is the desire on the part of the avant-garde to recover an ontological foundation. With this observation Grassi distinguishes his position from the generic apocalyptic condemnations of modernity. In this respect, the pages Grassi devotes to the analysis of the philosophical views of nineteenth-century poetics are quite suggestive. These movements bear witness to the efforts made by contemporary art to retrieve an ontological rooting for the beautiful, a rejection of the “aesthetic sphere” as a zone of purely disinterested play and disengagement. Thus, the aim of exploring the aesthetics of antiquity—which the author no longer calls aesthetics but rather the theory of the beautiful, based on his premises—is to retrace the origin of the dissolution of the ontology of the beautiful that culminates with aestheticism to recover, possibly, the principle lines of another way of standing before the beautiful that would satisfy the ontological exigency manifested in today’s art. Grassi’s exposition—accompanied by a selection of texts⁹—unfolds along the lines outlined by his theoretical approach to the question, with a few occasional unhappy remarks on the opposition among the views of antiquity and modernity and contemporary times, though he is always sustained by a living theoretical interest and an original interpretation.

The classical origins of the beautiful are traced back to poetics and to Homer in particular. In this early stage of development, the notion of beauty still possesses vigorous religious roots: everything that belongs to a superior, even “divine” sphere of life is beautiful, and it is made manifest as luminosity and “evidence” (characteristics that will be important for its subsequent development). This is not to be confused with the evidence of logic, which refers instead to the imposition of the factually given and asserted as objectively present rather than being bound up, like conceptual evidence, with the activity of consciousness as evidence. The beautiful understood as luminosity has an implicitly transcendental character: it is the light whose manifestation lets appear whatever appears as such.

Grassi devotes a substantial analysis of his book to a few texts of Xenophone, where, outside of Plato, the doctrine of beauty developed in the poets and in the mythological-religious tradition took shape. In Xenophone, even more sharply than in Plato, the beautiful is formulated as an ontological predicate, Being’s luminous manifestation in its perfection. “The dialectic of the beautiful, as it is developed by the Phaedro and the Symposium is an ontological rather an aesthetic dialectic” (author’s emphasis).¹⁰ Plato’s insistence on Eros, too, does not refer to a fall into the sphere of emotions and of subjectivity, which would have no links with Being: “The links among Eros, Beauty, and the Being of things is not aesthetic; it is a metaphysical progression through the degrees of being, leading from the world of appearance to Being itself” (author’s emphasis).¹¹ Plato’s notion of mimesis does not imply an alternative between representation and imitation understood as copy: art represents ideas insofar as it imitates things. Needless to say, in Plato and in Xenophone the question of art in no way exhausts that of the beautiful; indeed, its constitutive element is nothing other than an aspect of it, so that whatever is said in regard to it can be understood in its distinctive meaning only when seen in the context of a general theory of the beautiful. Thus it retains a strong ontological or more generally religious intonation that, over the centuries, will have deeply shaped the Western tradition, in contrast with the latent aestheticism that comes from Aristotle’s legacy, which will eventually culminate with the technological character of contemporary art.

Aristotle is the de facto founder of aesthetics—at least in the sense that Grassi attributes to this term—which by virtue of its identification with aestheticism echoes the meaning that Kierkegaard assigned to this term. Indeed, in Aristotle we see a clearly sharp separation between the beautiful and Being, in the sense that the work of art (i.e., tragedy) can be beautiful not to the extent that it is the luminous manifestation of a perfect character of Being; rather, it is so because it represents a possibility of man. The choice and determination of this possibility is entrusted to the will of the poet, as long as he obeys the law of coherency and completeness.

Grassi reaches this conclusion—which in its general outline can be agreed upon, especially insofar as it concerns the de facto significance of Aristotle for the Western tradition, above and beyond the letter of his texts—by means of a reading that does not always follow a linear path and gives impetus to systematicity at the price of the philological completion of interpretation. As a result, his hasty reduction of all the arts to the imitation of action (which, to be sure, does hold for poetry, even though it leaves out other arts like architecture and music) leaves out the notion of art as imitation of nature. This could have forced to author to set a limit—albeit not necessarily a decisive one—upon the meaning of his “aesthetic” interpretation of Aristotle; the same holds for his exclusive focus on the category of possibility in order to determine the types of actions that tragedy should represent. The category of the necessary, of which the Poetics speaks, is liquidated in a very unconvincing manner.¹² Here, too, the author stood before a possible ontological disclosure of Aristotelian theory but failed to grasp it.

Let me repeat that these observations does no in any way undermine to the general meaning of Grassi’s interpretation of Aristotle, which he feels compelled to limit in some ways.¹³ True, in contrast to the ontological effusion of Plato and of the pre-Platonic tradition, Aristotle affirms a theory of art as construction that succeeds not so much because it gives access to being as because it assumes control of productions that are endowed with internal coherence, whatever their relationship to nature or history. Aristotle reaches this conclusion, as mentioned earlier, by assigning to the poet the task of imitating the possible rather than nature: praxis, of which tragedy is an imitation, is just one among the possibilities of man. Not every action or event constitutes praxis: the only condition of poetic imitation is that praxis be an action endowed with completion and internal coherence. In replacing being with the possible (hence the poet’s will, his subjective interpretation of reality) Aristotle reduces to the level of fable, of fiction, of arbitrary invention the original meaning of mythos, which instead referred to the indistinct unity of word and action.

A confirmation that Aristotle was the first thinker who separated the beautiful from the theory of being, is indirectly found in the classical theorists of antiquity (e.g., Quintillian) who concocted a didactic theory of art. Such a theory could arise only in order to find a justification for art once it had lost its original relation to being. The persistence of aesthetic theories of a didactic-pedagogical, moralistic, and engaged type throughout the Western tradition persuasively corroborates the progressive dissolution of the ontology of art, which began with Aristotle to culminate with the aestheticist and technical nature of modernity. Another, parallel phenomenon of late antiquity is the connection, increasingly stressed, between beauty and appearance, which is no longer the same appearance and self-manifestation of being as it had been up to Plato, for example, as it is exhibited in Stoicism. This degradation, too, of appearance is directly linked to the weakened meaning of imitation and fable in Aristotle. The two currents that came to light in ancient aesthetics had no mediation in antiquity whatsoever, nor at a later period; rather, they were persisted, separately, within our tradition, up to our epoch. Following these premises, the Aristotelian school did not generate aesthetic theories but poetic treatises: even the prevalence (when “ontological” aesthetics continued to live in metaphysics and theology) of poetics over the philosophical theories of the beautiful and of art in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages is due to Aristotle’s influence, as well as to the gradually technical characterization of the beautiful.

It would be possible to give a more in-depth analysis of the mediation between these two currents of ancient aesthetics—the ontological and the technical—on the condition that one made clear the meaning of ontology and of the ontological character of the beautiful that appears in Plato. I have already said that Grassi’s interpretation is a bit lacking in regard to certain aspects of Aristotelian thought, which could open the way for a possible ontological discourse in his own thought as well. Does Aristotle’s contention that poetry’s task lies in representing the possible really amount to a separation of art from every ontological source? Are not the possibilities of man, a kind of “being,” to be imitated by the poet?

The Ontology of the Beautiful as Existential Foundation

Such objection might seem captious, if it had not been raised by Perpeet in Antike Aesthetik, the last of the texts I shall examine here. For him, there is no opposition between the ontological foundation of the beautiful and the reference to man—they are one. Perpeet, too, starts with a critical attitude toward modern aesthetics, though less explicitly than Grassi, not so much because he sees in it the dissolution and fall into aestheticism; rather, he refuses to identify the question of the beautiful with that of art. Behind his attitude there is the same sensitivity for the ontological question of the beautiful, for which he seeks solutions in ancient aesthetics. Just as Grassi had marked out the theory of the beautiful from aesthetics (the last being necessarily condemned to aestheticism), so Perpeet sharply draws the line between aesthetics (i.e., the theory of the beautiful) and a theory of art. He focuses his attention only on aesthetics, thus overturning, almost therapeutically, the exclusivist focus upon art in modern aesthetics. This is why he devotes only one line to Aristotle (to the effect that he “is the founder of the theory of art, but not of aesthetics”) throughout his otherwise detailed discussion of the subject.¹⁴

The question left open by Grassi’s work—whether it is precisely in Aristotle that one should seek out the mediation between the technical and the ontological character of art—is not given an answer in Perpeet’s work. However, he does provide an indication of the path one might follow to answer this question. In fact,...