Aesthetics

Aesthetics, as a self-conscious branch of philosophy, gets its name from Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 — though the questions are very old. Three of them recur:

1. What is beauty? A property of objects, a response of subjects, or something between?
2. What is art? A class of objects, a class of activities, an institution? Can the question be answered at all?
3. What is taste? The capacity to discriminate aesthetically. Is it cultivated or innate? Subjective or trained?

This deck is a small gallery in twelve rooms. The rooms are arranged thematically rather than chronologically. We start with the Enlightenment — Hume on the standard of taste, Kant on disinterested judgment — and end with twentieth-century arguments about formalism, expression, and definition.

Walk slowly. Each painting will keep its argument.

The first systematic Western philosophy of art is also a critique of it. In Republic Books III and X, Plato argues that imitative art (mimesis) is twice removed from reality: a couch made by a carpenter is a copy of the Form of the couch; a painted couch is a copy of the carpenter's. Worse, art appeals to the lower part of the soul and inflames the passions.

This is why poets are exiled from the ideal city in Republic X — though Plato himself was a great writer of dramatic dialogue, and his Symposium contains one of the most beautiful theories of beauty in any language.

The ladder of beauty — Symposium 210a–212a

Diotima teaches Socrates: one ascends from the love of a single beautiful body, to the love of all beautiful bodies, to the love of beautiful minds, to beautiful institutions and laws, to beautiful knowledge — and finally to beauty itself: eternal, uncreated, the cause of every other beautiful thing.

Aristotle's reply

In the Poetics (c. 335 BCE), Aristotle defends mimesis. Imitation is natural to humans; we learn through it. Tragedy effects a katharsis of pity and fear — a purging or clarification (the word is contested) — through the depiction of serious actions.

Aristotle's six elements of tragedy, in order of importance: plot, character, thought, diction, song, spectacle. The ranking would surprise a Hollywood producer.

Hume's essay starts from radical subjectivism — beauty is in the mind — and asks whether anything like a standard of taste is nonetheless possible. His answer: yes, but only by appeal to the verdicts of true judges.

Five conditions of the true judge

1. Strong sense — undiminished organs of perception.
2. Delicate sentiment — sensitivity to fine distinctions.
3. Practice — repeated exposure and comparison.
4. Comparison — wide acquaintance with other works of art.
5. Freedom from prejudice — willingness to set aside personal and cultural bias.

"Where these are united in any one, they form the true judge in the finer arts; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty."

Two unsolved difficulties Hume frankly acknowledges:

1. Different ages and temperaments will value different things even among true judges. (Hume's "innocent" preference for grave Roman comedy over light French comedy.)
2. Some moral or religious content is, for Hume, an "unavoidable blemish" — the mores of the original audience can put a barrier between us and the work.

A circle: the standard is set by true judges; true judges are recognised by their agreement with the standard. Hume thinks the circle is virtuous; many readers think it is vicious. The argument is alive.

The third Kritik, after the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, completes Kant's system. The first half ("Critique of Aesthetic Judgment") gives the most influential analysis of beauty in the modern tradition.

The four moments of the beautiful

1. Quality: a judgment of taste is disinterested — pleasure that does not depend on the existence of the object.
2. Quantity: a judgment of taste claims universal assent without a concept — when I say "this is beautiful," I speak as if for everyone.
3. Relation: the beautiful exhibits purposiveness without a purpose — it appears organised as if for an end, but no specific end determines it.
4. Modality: the judgment claims necessary connection of pleasure with the object — under appropriate conditions, all should agree.

The free play of the faculties

What grounds these claims? Not a concept — beauty is not the application of a rule. Rather, in encountering a beautiful object, the imagination and the understanding fall into a "free play," each sustaining the other without subsuming the object under any determinate concept. Kant calls this the harmony of the faculties.

The sublime

Distinguished from the beautiful. The mathematical sublime: starry skies, vast deserts — the imagination fails to comprehend the magnitude. The dynamical sublime: storms, mountains — physical power that would overwhelm us, contemplated from safety. Both reveal a power in us greater than nature: the moral idea.

Nietzsche's first book, written when he was 27 and a professor of classical philology in Basel. Greek tragedy, he argues, was born from the union of two divine principles: Apollonian form, individuation, dream — and Dionysian ecstasy, dissolution, intoxication. Tragedy lets us look into the abyss without being destroyed because Apollonian form contains Dionysian truth.

Socrates, Nietzsche argues, killed tragedy by replacing the Dionysian with rational dialectic. Euripides did the murder; Socrates wrote the warrant.

Art as the highest task of life

"Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified." (BT §5) Nietzsche means it. In the absence of metaphysical or religious justification, what redeems life is its artistic shaping — by the artist, of the work; by each of us, of ourselves.

Clive Bell — Art, 1914

The Bloomsbury critic Clive Bell proposes that the property in virtue of which something is a work of visual art is "significant form" — the disposition of lines and colours that produces a special "aesthetic emotion" in the viewer.

"Lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call 'significant form'." (Art, ch. 1)

Greenberg & modernist painting

Clement Greenberg's mid-century essays argue that each art form has its own essence — for painting, flatness — and that modernism is the progressive purification of each art toward its essential medium. Pollock, Newman, Rothko deliver the painting that is most fully and only painting.

The trouble

The aesthetic emotion is defined as that which is produced by significant form; significant form is defined as that which produces the aesthetic emotion. The Bell circle is even more brazen than Hume's. Critics from Susanne Langer onward asked, fairly, whether anything had been said.

And the formalist programme has trouble with art that depends on context, narrative, or political content. Is Goya's The Third of May a great painting because of its formal relations alone? Most viewers would not care to be told that the bullets and the kneeling figure were beside the formal point.

Anti-formalism

Reaction came from many directions. Arthur Danto's The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) used Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes to argue that art is constituted partly by its theoretical interpretation, not by appearance alone.

Aesthetics has, in our time, swelled to take in everyday life: the ethics of how we dress, how cities look, how interfaces feel. "Aesthetic capitalism" (Reckwitz, Boltanski) describes the way taste has become the engine of large parts of the economy.

Generative image models have made the question of authorship aesthetically vivid in a way the gallery-going public is meeting for the first time. Who is the author of a Midjourney image — the prompter, the model, the trainers, the photographers whose work fed the dataset? Each candidate answer is a chapter of aesthetics.

And the older questions go on. Whether beauty is in the object or the eye; whether the standard of taste is a standard or a mood; whether art is what some institution says it is, or what makes us feel a way no other thing can — these are the questions Diotima asked Socrates on a couch in a drinking party in 416 BCE.

The objects change. The questions change less than they appear to.