The
eighteenth century was a surprisingly peaceful time, but this turned
out to be the lull before the storm, since out of its orderly
classicism there developed a wild romanticism in art and literature,
and even revolution in politics. The aesthetic concept which came to
be more appreciated in this period was associated with this, namely
sublimity, which Edmund Burke theorized about in his “A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful.” The sublime was connected more with pain than pure
pleasure, according to Burke, since threats to self-preservation were
involved, as on the high seas, and lonely moors, with the devilish
humans and dramatic passions that artists and writers were about to
portray. But in these circumstances, of course, it is still
“delightful horror,” as Burke appreciated, since one is insulated
by the fictionality of the work in question from any real danger.
“Sublime”
and “beautiful” are only two amongst the many terms which may be
used to describe our aesthetic experiences. Clearly there are
“ridiculous” and “ugly,” for a start, as well. But the more
discriminating will have no difficulty also finding something maybe
“fine,” or “lovely” rather than “awful” or “hideous,”
and “exquisite” or “superb” rather than “gross” or
“foul.” Frank Sibley wrote a notable series of articles, starting
in 1959, defending a view of aesthetic concepts as a whole. He said
that they were not rule- or condition-governed, but required a
heightened form of perception, which one might call taste,
sensitivity, or judgment. His full analysis, however, contained
another aspect, since he was not only concerned with the sorts of
concepts mentioned above, but also with a set of others which had a
rather different character. For one can describe works of art, often
enough, in terms which relate primarily to the emotional and mental
life of human beings. One can call them “joyful,” “melancholy,”
“serene,” “witty,” “vulgar,” and “humble,” for
instance. These are evidently not purely aesthetic terms, because of
their further uses, but they are still very relevant to many
aesthetic experiences.
Sibley’s
claim about these concepts was that there were no sufficient
conditions for their application. For many concepts—sometimes
called “closed” concepts, as a result—both necessary and
sufficient conditions for their application can be given. To be a
bachelor, for instance, it is necessary to be male and unmarried,
though of marriageable age, and together these three conditions are
sufficient. For other concepts, however, the so-called “open”
ones, no such definitions can be given— although for aesthetic
concepts Sibley pointed out there were still some necessary
conditions, since certain facts can rule out the application of, for
example, “garish,” “gaudy,” or “flamboyant.”
The
question therefore arises: how do we make aesthetic judgments if not
by checking sufficient conditions? Sibley’s account was that, when
the concepts were not purely perceptual they were mostly metaphoric.
Thus, we call artworks “dynamic,” or “sad,” as before, by
comparison with the behaviors of humans with those qualities. Other
theorists, such as Rudolph Arnheim and Roger Scruton, have held
similar views. Scruton, in fact, discriminated eight types of
aesthetic concept, and we shall look at some of the others below.
Aesthetic
Value
We
have noted Kant’s views about the objectivity and universality of
judgments of pure beauty, and there are several ways that these
notions have been further defended. There is a famous curve, for
instance, obtained by the nineteenth century psychologist Wilhelm
Wundt, which shows how human arousal is quite generally related to
complexity of stimulus. We are bored by the simple, become sated,
even over-anxious, by the increasingly complex, while in between
there is a region of greatest pleasure. The dimension of complexity
is only one objective measure of worth which has been proposed in
this way. Thus it is now known, for instance, that judgments of
facial beauty in humans are a matter of averageness and symmetry.
Traditionally, unity was taken to be central, notably by Aristotle in
connection with Drama, and when added to complexity it formed a
general account of aesthetic value. Thus Francis Hutcheson, in the
eighteenth century, asserted that “Uniformity in variety always
makes an object beautiful.” Monroe Beardsley, more recently, has
introduced a third criterion—intensity—to produce his three
“General Canons” of objective worth. He also detailed some
“Special Canons.”
Beardsley
called the objective criteria within styles of Art “Special
Canons.” These were not a matter of something being good of its
kind and so involving perfection of a concept in the sense of Kant.
They involved defeasible “good-making” and “bad-making”
features, more in the manner Hume explained in his major essay in
this area, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757). To say a work of
art had a positive quality like humor, for instance, was to praise it
to some degree, but this could be offset by other qualities which
made the work not good as a whole. Beardsley defended all of his
canons in a much more detailed way than his eighteenth century
predecessor however: through a lengthy, fine-grained, historical
analysis of what critics have actually appealed to in the evaluation
of artworks. Also, he explicitly made the disclaimer that his canons
were the only criteria of value, by separating these “objective
reasons” from what he called “affective” and “genetic”
reasons. These two other sorts of reasons were to do with audience
response, and the originating artist and his times, respectively, and
either “The Affective Fallacy” or “The Intentional Fallacy,”
he maintained, was involved if these were considered. The
discrimination enabled Beardsley to focus on the artwork and its
representational relations, if any, to objects in the public world.
Against
Beardsley, over many years, Joseph Margolis maintained a “Robust
Relativism.” Thus he wanted to say that “aptness,”
“partiality,” and “non-cognitivism” characterize art
appreciation, rather than “truth,” “universality,” and
“knowledge.” He defended this with respect to aesthetic concepts,
critical judgments of value, and literary interpretations in
particular, saying, more generally, that works of art were
“culturally emergent entities” not directly accessible, because
of this, to any faculty resembling sense perception. The main debate
over aesthetic value, indeed, concerns social and political matters,
and the seemingly inevitable partiality of different points of view.
The central question concerns whether there is a privileged class,
namely those with aesthetic interests, or whether their set of
interests has no distinguished place, since, from a sociological
perspective, that taste is just one amongst all other tastes in the
democratic economy. The sociologist Arnold Hauser preferred a
non-relativistic point of view, and was prepared to give a ranking of
tastes. High art beat popular art, Hauser said, because of two
things: the significance of its content, and the more creative nature
of its forms. Roger Taylor, by contrast, set out very fully the
“leveller’s” point of view, declaring that "Aida" and
"The Sound of Music" have equal value for their respective
audiences. He defended this with a thorough philosophical analysis,
rejecting the idea that there is such a thing as truth corresponding
to an external reality, with the people capable of accessing that
truth having some special value. Instead, according to Taylor, there
are just different conceptual schemes, in which truth is measured
merely by coherence internal to the scheme itself. Janet Wolff looked
at this debate more disinterestedly, in particular studying the
details of the opposition between Kant and Bourdieu.
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