Aesthetics

V

Aesthetics and Art

Traditional aesthetics in the 18th and 19th centuries was dominated by the concept of art as imitation of nature. Novelists such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens in Britain and dramatists such as Carlo Goldoni in Italy and Alexandre Dumas fils (the son of Alexandre Dumas père) in France presented realistic accounts of middle-class life. Painters, whether Neo-Classical, such as Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Romantic, such as Eugène Delacroix, or Realist, such as Gustave Courbet, rendered their subjects with careful attention to lifelike detail.

In traditional aesthetics it was also frequently assumed that works of art are useful as well as beautiful. Paintings might commemorate historical events or encourage morality. Music might inspire piety or patriotism. Drama, especially in the hands of Dumas and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, might serve to criticize society and so lead to reform.

In the 19th century, however, avant-garde concepts of aesthetics began to challenge traditional views. The change was particularly evident in painting. French Impressionists, such as Claude Monet, denounced academic painters for depicting what they thought they should see rather than what they actually saw—that is, the surfaces of many colours and wavering forms caused by the distorting play of light and shadow as the Sun moves.

In the late 19th century, Post-Impressionists such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh were more concerned with the structure of a painting and with expressing their own psyches than with representing objects in the world of nature. In the early 20th century this structural interest was developed further by Cubist painters such as Pablo Picasso, and the Expressionist concern was reflected in the work of Henri Matisse and other Fauvists and by the German Expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The literary aspects of Expressionism can be seen in the plays of August Strindberg, a Swede, and Frank Wedekind, a German.

Closely connected with these relatively non-representational approaches to art was the principle of “art for art’s sake”, which was derived from Kant’s view that art has its own reason for being. The phrase was first used by the French philosopher Victor Cousin in 1818, and this doctrine, sometimes called aestheticism, was espoused in England by the critic Walter Horatio Pater, by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and by the expatriate American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In France it was the credo of such Symbolist poets as Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, the “art for art’s sake” principle underlies most of avant-garde Western art of the 20th century.

VI

Major Contemporary Influences

Four philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been the primary influences on present-day aesthetics. In France Henri Bergson defined science as the use of intelligence to create a system of symbols that supposedly describes reality but actually falsifies it. Art, however, is based on intuition, which is a direct apprehension of reality unmediated by thought. Thus, art cuts through conventional symbols and beliefs about people, life, and society and confronts one with reality itself.

In Italy the philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce also exalted intuition, but he believed that it was the immediate awareness of an object that somehow gave that object form; that is, the apprehension of things before one reflects about them. Works of art are the expression, in material form, of such intuitions; beauty and ugliness, however, are not qualities of the works of art but qualities of the spirit expressed intuitively in these works of art.

The American philosopher and poet George Santayana argued that when one takes pleasure in a thing the pleasure may be regarded as a quality of the thing itself, rather than as a subjective response to it. Just as one may characterize some human act as good in itself, instead of calling it good merely because one approves of it, so one may say that some object is beautiful, not merely that one’s aesthetic delight in its colour and form leads one to call it beautiful.

John Dewey, the American educator and philosopher, viewed human experience as disconnected, fragmentary, full of beginnings without conclusions, or as subject to forms of purely instrumental (means to end) manipulation. Those exceptional experiences that flow from their beginnings to consummations are aesthetic. Aesthetic experience is enjoyment for its own sake, is complete and self-contained, and is terminal, not merely instrumental to other purposes.

A

Marxism and Freudianism

Two powerful movements, Marxism in the fields of economics and politics and Freudianism in psychology, have rejected the art-for-art’s sake principle and reasserted art’s practical uses. Marxism treats art as an expression of the underlying economic relations in society, and proponents maintain that art is great only when it is “progressive”, that is, when it supports the cause of the oppressed classes or (in the case of Communist regimes) the values of the society in which it is created.

Sigmund Freud believed the value of art to lie in its therapeutic use: it is by this means that both the artist and the public can reveal hidden conflicts and discharge tensions. Fantasies and daydreams, as they enter into art, are thus transformed from an escape from life into ways of meeting it. In the Surrealist movement in painting and poetry, the unconscious is used as a source of material. The stream of consciousness technique of fiction, notably in the novels of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, was derived not only from Freud’s work but partly from The Principles of Psychology (1890) by the American philosopher and psychologist William James and partly from the French novel We’ll to the Woods No More (1887; trans. 1957) by Édouard Dujardin.

B

Existentialism

More recently, the French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre advocated a form of existentialism in which art is seen as an expression of the freedom of the individual to choose, and as such demonstrates the individual’s responsibility for his or her choices. Despair, as reflected in art, is not an end but a beginning, because it overcomes the pretexts, alibis, and self-evasions behind which people ordinarily shelter, thus opening the way for genuine freedom.

C

Academic Controversies

Academic controversies of the 20th century revolved around the issue of meaning in art. The British critic and semanticist I. A. Richards claimed that art is a language. He asserted that two types of language exist: the symbolic, which conveys ideas and information; and the emotive, which expresses, evokes, and excites feelings and attitudes. He regarded art as an emotive language, giving order and coherence to experience and attitudes, but containing no symbolic meaning.

Richards’s work was also important for its use of psychological techniques in studying aesthetic reactions. In Practical Criticism (1929) he described experiments revealing that even highly educated people are conditioned by their education, by handed-down opinion, and by other social and circumstantial elements in their aesthetic responses. Other writers have commented on the conditioning effects of tradition, fashion, and other social pressures, noting, for example, that in the early 18th century the plays of William Shakespeare were viewed as barbarous and Gothic art as vulgar.

Growing interest in aesthetics is revealed by the establishment of the periodicals The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, founded in the United States in 1942; Revue d’Esthétique, founded in France in 1948; and the The British Journal of Aesthetics, founded in 1960.