The Aesthetics of Care

On the Literary Treatment of Animals

Josephine Donovan

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501317217
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Literaturkritik

In this important new book from a distinguished scholar, Josephine Donovan develops a new aesthetics of care, which she establishes as the basis for a critical approach to the representation of animals in literature. The Aesthetics of Care begins with a guide to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, leading to a reconceptualization of key literary critical terms such as mimesis and catharsis, before moving on to an applied section, with interpretations of the specific treatment of animals handled by a wide range of authors, including Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, George Sand, and J.M. Coetzee. The book closes with three concluding theoretical chapters. Clear, original, and provocative, The Aesthetics of Care introduces and makes new contributions to a number of burgeoning areas of study and debate: aesthetics and ethics, critical theory, animal ethics, and ecofeminist criticism.

1

The aesthetics of modernity

The aesthetics of modernity reflects the Enlightenment intellectual milieu from which it arose. The Cartesian division between res cogitans and res extensa, mind and matter—the basis for scientific epistemology—also established the philosophical foundation of modern, Kantian aesthetics. With res cogitans postulated by Descartes as radically separate from and ontologically superior to res extensa, the groundwork was laid for an ethic and aesthetics of domination. In Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes indeed envisaged that through his new “method,” which was “based on the rules of Arithmetic,”¹ “we might … render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.”² By imposing mathematical paradigms on objectified inert matter, humans may thus bend the physical world to their will and purpose.

Other early modern scientists articulated a similarly dominative view. The English philosopher Francis Bacon, for example, wrote that “the true and ultimate end” of scientific endeavor is “dominion over natural things.” Robert Boyle, another early modern English scientist, claimed that a scientific study “teaches us in many cases to know nature, but also … in many cases to master and command her.”³ In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton codified the new cosmology in his Principia Mathematica, which laid down the governing paradigm of the Enlightenment that the physical universe is governed by a few simple mathematical laws, the keys to the mastery of matter.

The natural world thus under the new Cartesian-Newtonian view was reified as a spiritless object seen to operate mechanically according to this mathematical model. Since the natural world included animals, they too were deemed by Descartes as thoughtless mechanisms. “It is more reasonable,” he wrote, “to make earthworms, flies, caterpillars, and the rest of animals move as machines do, than to endow them with immortal souls” (letter to Henry More, 1649).⁴ Likewise is the human body but “a machine which moves of itself” (letter to the Marquis of Newcastle),⁵ “nothing else than a statue or machine of clay.”⁶ In short, as he acknowledged, “I have described the earth, and all the visible world, as if it were simply a machine.”⁷

In his conception of the material world, Descartes expunged qualities, animation, and spiritual properties, relegating the former to secondary status as sources of knowledge and the latter two to other-worldly status. In discussing, for instance, a piece of bees’ wax, his example of res extensa, Descartes dismissed the aspects of the wax known through the senses.

What then did I know so distinctly in this piece of wax? It could be nothing of all that the senses brought to my notices … [Thus] this wax was not that sweetness of honey, nor that agreeable scent of flowers, nor that particular whiteness … but simply a body … Let us … abstract from all that does not belong to the wax, let us see what remains. Certainly nothing remains except a certain extended thing [res extensa].⁸

In other words, the only reality acknowledged by Descartes is that measurable by quantitative properties; the qualitative aspects of the wax are dismissed as unreal. As Basil Willey explained in his study of seventeenth-century literature, under this new “Cartesian spirit,” “whatever cannot be clearly and distinctly (i.e. mathematically) conceived is ‘not true.’ … The criterion of truth which it set up … [meant that] the only real properties of objects were the mathematical properties.”⁹

Such a perspective required that all which did not fit into a mathematical universalizing paradigm was deemed adventitious at best, and at worst it forced to conform to a prescriptive grid (as the case in scientific experiments). This meant that anomalous particulars were either elided and rendered nonexistent or trimmed and reshaped so as to fit into the expected model. Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno note in their critique of modernity, Dialectic of Enlightenment, that in the scientific view, “everything—even the human individual, not to speak of the animal—is converted into the repeatable, replaceable process, into a mere example for the conceptual models of the system.”¹⁰ Moreover, “in the impartiality of scientific language, that which is powerless has wholly lost any means of expression” (23). Any consideration, for example, of the ethical status of the bees—themselves deemed but inanimate mechanisms—would be considered irrelevant knowledge in Descartes’s conception of the wax.

Aesthetic theorists took over the conception of nature as deanimated and spiritless material, to be used, subdued, manipulated, and “improved” by the artist in accordance with universal aesthetic rules that were analogous to the theorems of geometry. Kant’s aesthetics, reflecting the mathematizing epistemology of the Cartesian-Newtonian worldview, is prototypical. Art, like the physical universe, operates according to ideal laws that are universally knowable and are disconnected from subjective, sensuous, moral, and emotional knowledge, and from the everyday world of practical use, as well as from its historical and social context. It is indeed through the forms of art that the everyday world is redeemed, just as contingent matter is made significant by the coherent order given to it by mathematical construction in the Cartesian-Newtonian view.

Thus, the sleeve on the virgin’s dress in early modern painting becomes deemed significant because of its geometrical positioning vis-à-vis other lines in the picture, and not because of its ontic intensity or sacred being, as Erwin Panofsky pointed out in his seminal article “Die Perspektive als Symbolic Form” (1927).¹¹ The objects in such a painting take significance according to their alignment on a perspective pyramid which orders the elements of the scene. “Their being,” Panofsky observes, “is functional but not substantial” (260), and the space within which they lie is a mathematical construction, “fully rational … and homogenous” (261). Panofsky calls this the triumph of a “distancing and objectifying sense of reality” (287). The geometric “spatial perspective,” thus, “transforms being into phenomenon [and] the sacred into a mere content of human consciousness” [die Perspektive Raumanschauung hat die οὺσία zum Φαινὁμϵνον wandelt das Göttliche zu einem blossen Inhalt des menschlichen Bewusstseins] (291).

Similarly, material—both living and inanimate—studied from a scientific viewpoint is of significance only insofar as it provides mathematical quantifiable information. This is the “distancing and objectifying sense of reality” that governs laboratory experimentation. “Nature” thus becomes, Horkheimer and Adorno note, “that which is to be comprehended mathematically” (24).

Kant codified the early modern aesthetic in his Critique of Judgment (1790), which conceives of art as a process whereby the artist lifts matter out of its everyday context and organizes it according to ideal aesthetic principles that are essentially geometric in nature, as in the geometric perspective identified by Panofsky. The matter of art is thus seen to operate as matter does in the Cartesian physical universe—mindlessly accordingly prescribed laws and divorced from the unsymmetrical entropy of everyday life with its unpredictable anomalous particularities and eccentricities, and divorced as well from emotional, spiritual, ideological, moral, political, historical, and social interests. Stripped in short, like Descartes’s wax, of all nonquantifiable quality, art operates as a separate self-contained entity according to ideal aesthetic rules. In constructing his work of art, the artist conceives his product through an ideal aesthetic “symbolic form” which orders the elements of his creation.

An art object, as conceived by Kant, then, is that of an autonomous self-referential mechanism. “[T]he agreement of the manifold in a thing with its inner destination, its purpose, constitutes the perfection of the thing.”¹² The salient characteristic of a work of art is that it manifests “a merely formal purposiveness, i.e., a purposiveness without purpose” (397)—Kant’s celebrated Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck. The aesthetic judgment is thus confined to the inner dynamic—the telos—of the art object, its own inner—largely geometrical—relations. “[T]he teleological judgement serves as the basis and condition of the aesthetical” (423).

This judgment is a “disinterested” one. “Every interests spoils the judgment … and takes from its impartiality” (395). And like Cartesian reason it is universally shared: the “satisfaction … of taste in the Beautiful is … a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest … here forces our assent” (379). “[H]e who judges … cannot find the ground of this satisfaction in any private conditions … hence it must be regarded as grounded on what he can presuppose in every other man” (383). “The beautiful is that which pleases universally” (392).

Moreover, the aesthetic judgment “is independent of charm and emotion” (395). By charm Kant means colors or any qualitative attributes other than formal “delineation [which] is the essential thing.” “The colors which light up the sketch belong to the charm; they may … enliven the object … but they cannot make it worthy … or beautiful” (396). In short, “a pure judgment … has for its determining ground neither charm nor emotion” (397). Kant’s aesthetic is thus an impassive, impartial, formal judgment stripped of all emotional or qualitative aspects.

Kant considered that it is through the forms of art that the everyday contingent world is redeemed, just as contingent matter is redeemed by the coherence given to it by mathematical laws in the Cartesian-Newtonian view. “We entertain ourselves with [the Imagination] when experience proves too commonplace, and by it we remould experience, … so that the material which we borrow from nature … can be worked up into something different which surpasses nature” (426). The great artist lifts “nature” out of the everyday and endows it with redemptive form. “Genius is the innate mental disposition (ingenium) through which Nature gives the rule to Art” (418). “Nature” here clearly intends a Newtonian universe governed by rational laws.

As Walter Sokel suggests, Kant granted the artist “absolute sovereignty”: “He emancipates the artist from all external shackles and nonartistic considerations. Faithfulness to nature, moral purpose, empirical truth, religious faith—all are considered irrelevant to art … The work of art is a universe of its own.”¹³ Terry Eagleton proposes that Kant’s theory reflects the emergence of capitalism as the dominant economic system in the West: “The qualities of the Kantian moral [and aesthetic] law are those of the commodity form. Abstract universal and rigorously self-identical, the law of Reason is a mechanism which, like the commodity, effects formally equal exchanges between isolated individual subjects, erasing the difference of their needs and desires in its homogenizing injunctions.”¹⁴

Subsequent theorists solidified Kant’s notion of art as a separate, sanitized, dispassionate realm, from which is culled all nonconforming matters. Following the Kantian tradition, Hegel, for example, states in the Aesthetics (lectures delivered in the 1820s) that for beauty to exist, “the external shape … must be freed from every accident of external determinacy, from every dependence on nature, and from morbidity.” Art “casts aside everything in appearance which does not correspond with the Concept and only by purification does it produce the Ideal.”¹⁵

Hegel’s privileging of the intellectual ideal over the material informs his aesthetic. “[E]ven a useless notion that enters a man’s head,” he asserts, “is higher than any product of nature.”¹⁶ As with Kant, art performs a redemptive office: “Art liberates the true content of phenomena from the pure appearance and deception of this bad, transitory world, and gives them a higher actuality, born of the spirit” (9). Thus, a landscape painting “acquires a higher rank than the mere natural landscape. For everything spiritual is better than any product of nature” (29). “[A]rt lifts [one] … out of and above imprisonment in nature” (49).

In an important feminist critique of Hegel and neoclassical aesthetics, Reading in Detail (1987), Naomi Schor observes how in “the transformation of the so-called insignificant object into an art-object.”¹⁷ Hegelian idealism abnegates the contingent material world of living beings. As with Kant, for Hegel “the Ideal implies ‘the negation of everything particular’” (Aesthetics i.157, in Schor 25); it is “that which escapes the contamination of ‘chance and externality’” (Aesthetics i.155, in Schor 25).

In Woman, Nature and Psyche (1987), Patricia Jagentowicz Mills similarly notes that Hegel’s view of the transformation of nature into culture requires the subordination/...